The Long Ecological Revolution

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CovertAction Bulletin – LA Fires: Natural Disaster Made Worse By Capitalism
By Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa - January 29, 2025 2


[Source: AP]


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After getting rain over the weekend, three of the main fires devastating the Los Angeles area are nearly 100% contained, meaning that firefighters have been able to create barriers around the fires. But the Palisades Fire, the Eaton fire and the Hughes fire continue to burn a combined nearly 48,000 acres of land. And to the south, just a few miles north of Tijuana Mexico, the Border 2 Fire has burned over 6,600 acres and is only 74% contained.

More than two dozen people have been killed as a result of the fires since they started in early January. Over 200,000 have been forced to evacuate, and tens of thousands of homes and businesses have been destroyed.

Rachel was in Los Angeles recently reporting on the fires, their causes, and the response of both the government and the people on the ground. While wildfires are often covered as only natural disasters and the victims of the fires are portrayed as helpless figures, the reality is much more damning for the capitalist system that refuses to take public safety, climate change and disaster recovery for working people seriously.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... apitalism/

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Kelp Farming Isn’t As Green As It Seems
Posted on January 31, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. I do try to keep up, but I must confess to not having heard of kelp cultivation as a carbon capture strategy. I had assumed the article would be about the merits of kelp and seaweed as highly nutritious foods versus their cost of cultivatiion compared to other health-enthusiast-preferred greens, notably kale and spinach (if you are from the South, you know that collard rates, as does chard). As one might infer, kelp for carbon capture doesn’t work so well unless it is interred in some fashion. It turns out that garden variety burial does not suffice. This piece explains why really getting kelp or any biomass out of the carbon cycle is not trivial.

By Veronique Carignan, an environmental chemist and former academic researcher in chemical oceanography. She now works as an environmental activist and freelance climate journalist. Originally published at Undark

Champions of the kelp industry have made bold claims that farming the fast-growing seaweed will alleviate the climate crisis. But those claims are not substantiated by the science of how kelp removes and sequesters atmospheric carbon. Kelp farming is a Band-Aid solution to mitigating global climate change, pushed to the forefront by decades of insufficiently modifying human behavior to cut carbon emissions.

Instead, the United States has focused its efforts on strategies that are largely centered around carbon capture, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and from emission point sources such as large industrial facilities and power plants. Most of these carbon capture strategies are costly, complex to implement, and not well studied, whereas kelp farming is cheap and technologically simple, making it an appealing option for those looking to use carbon capture as a climate change mitigation strategy.

Like almost all plants, kelp removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis. As one of the fastest growing organisms in the world (some species can grow up to 2 feet per day), kelp gains biomass quickly and thus sequesters carbon quickly. Natural kelp forests capture 5.4 million tons of carbon dioxide annually and are worth an estimated $500 billion, including their value in the food and materials industries. But even more money likely lies in the unexploited coastal ocean suitable for growing kelp, which spans an area of around 18 million square miles. Given the space available for aquaculture and the tremendous value of kelp, it is no surprise that seaweed is one of the fastest growing components of global food production, increasing on average 8 percent per year.

Companies seeking to capitalize on the obvious value of kelp farming are using its supposed carbon sequestration potential as a hook to expand the practice, raise funds, or sell carbon credits. However, scientists have questionedwhether kelp farming acts to store carbon long term. Although kelp does absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, the long-term sequestration of that carbon is limited by a process called the slow carbon cycle.

Global carbon cycling refers to the movement of carbon between the atmosphere, biosphere, ocean, and land. This cycling happens on two timescales: fast and slow. In the fast cycle, carbon is absorbed by plants and sequestered as organic matter. When plants die or are consumed (burned as biofuel, eaten, used as feed, or to make materials, for example), that carbon is usually released back into the atmosphere. This cycle takes years to decades and does not remove carbon from the atmosphere long term.

By contrast, the slow carbon cycle takes 100-200 million years and moves carbon from the atmosphere to rock material and fossil fuels. Carbon moved via the slow carbon cycle is considered truly “removed.” Note that burning fossil fuels (that is, roughly 300-million-year-old carbon) has been adding billions of tons of carbon dioxide annually to natural emissions from the respiration of organisms, disrupting the slow carbon cycle. That is why human perturbations to the carbon cycle have such dire and permanent consequences for the planet.

For kelp to be useful in storing carbon, it needs to be stored as part of the slow carbon cycle, which means kelp needs to be deposited in the deep ocean where it won’t interact with the atmosphere for centuries to millennia. That doesn’t happen if the kelp is being used as food, a biofuel, or in materials production because all those pathways lead to the carbon dioxide being emitted back to the atmosphere via the fast carbon cycle.

To solve this issue, some companies plan or purport to deliberately sink seaweed, thereby enhancing its long-term storage capacity. Then, they profit from this sequestration by selling carbon credits to companies with large carbon emissions. The repercussions of sinking millions of tons of kelp to the seafloor are unknown, but changing the nutrient balance of the deep sea is dangerous because organisms living there can be particularly vulnerable to shifts in things like pH and oxygen availability. What’s more, the technology required to achieve this will likely involve using fossil fuels. In fact, the potential environmental outlook for sinking seaweed is so bad that some scientists have called for a moratorium on the practice, but companies are charging ahead anyway.

For example, Maine-based Running Tide Technologies was the one of the world’s largest kelp-based carbon removal startups but failed to deliver on its promises, going out of business in 2024, only seven years after being founded. Running Tide raised $54 million in funding to grow kelp on flotation devices designed to sink to the deep ocean. When its plan became too costly and its proof of concept failed, the company instead sunk some 21,000 tons of wood chipsoff the coast of Iceland to fulfill the carbon credit promises it sold to large corporations, including Microsoft and Shopify.

Even if we ignore the many pitfalls and unknowns of farming kelp for carbon sequestration, we would need an enormous amount of space to sequester just a fraction of the carbon dioxide emitted each year. One analysis calculated that 300-foot-wide kelp farms running along 63 percent of all global coastlines would be needed to sequester 0.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year — a mere 2 percent of annual U.S. emissions.

Some supporters of kelp farming suggest that kelp should not be sunk but rather used to replace fossil-fuel dependent systems. There is potential in using kelp biofuel or kelp-based animal feed to reduce carbon emissions. However, farming kelp on a large scale for such purposes would have negative repercussions on ocean ecosystems and could actually exacerbate climate change. Shading from kelp reduces phytoplankton growth, which could reduce the efficiency of sinking kelp for carbon sequestration by 37 percent. Adding massive amounts of organic carbon to the deep ocean would deplete oxygen, shifting the nutrient balance of the deep ocean and of upwelling regions which supply global ocean fisheries. When kelp grows, it emits halocarbons, which are short-lived but highly potent greenhouse gases. Kelp farming is far from a green solution and puts our oceans at further risk of deterioration.

Ocean governance is notoriously relaxed and difficult to enforce, but the ocean is the primary regulator of the Earth’s climate. It is imperative that we take caution before undertaking global-scale modifications to the ocean’s delicate balance. Ultimately, efforts placed into changing human behavior and developing technologies to disentangle our global systems from their reliance on fossil fuels are far more valuable than working on temporary strategies that allow us to continue business as usual.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... seems.html

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Climate Change Sacrifice Zones
Roger Boyd
Feb 01, 2025


With the election of Donald Trump it is inevitable that no holistic action plan will be put in place to deal with the impacts of climate change by the United States government for at least the next four years. Instead, each new catastrophe will be dealt with as a standalone crisis; quickly to be forgotten as the media moves on. Adaptation will be left to the market. The new president may visit the disaster zones, such as North Carolina (flooding) and Los Angeles (fires) but will never accept that the scale of the disasters was influenced by climate change. Those influences include:

The warmer air is, the more moisture it can hold, leading to more intense downpours.

The warmer air is, the more it can suck the moisture out of the ground and vegetation, creating conditions conducive to more rapid spreads, and greater intensity, of wildfires.

The warmer the oceans are, the more intense will be the storms that build their strength above those waters.

Breakdowns in the polar jet stream create incursions of Arctic air south, together with weather blocking patterns.

Glacier melt and the possible backing up of the Gulf Stream current will combine with land subsidence to create increasing levels of flooding along the coast of Florida and the US east coast in general.

Whether it be Atlantic hurricanes, wild fires, snow in Texas or regional flooding, weather-related events are becoming much more intense and frequent. As we have seen in Los Angeles, the response of the insurance companies will be to either remove coverage for natural disasters or to increase the price of that coverage beyond a point that many can afford. The losses will then be substantially born by the victims who may become bankrupted or greatly financially depleted. At the same time, financial institutions will not provide property loans for properties that cannot be insured. We must remember that the L.A. fires are occurring in a time of year that is outside the usual fire season, so the current fires may only be the start of a whole year of such catastrophic fires. With those fires rapidly spreading to large areas covered by bone dry flora. In addition, the fire-denuded hill sides will increase the risk of landslides and flooding.



With the cost of wild fires increasing over time, insurance companies had already been repricing and reducing their insurance coverage in the area. Many homeowners were not insured against such fires, with high risk areas becoming less and less tenable to insure. Even those insured may be faced with insurers working hard to find any way to reduce their payouts.



In California the FAIR state insurance is available, but the premiums are higher and the coverage is less. In addition, it may be under-reserved resulting in the state having to cover some of the payouts. As climate change intensifies, will the state still be willing to fund the insurance shortfalls or will increasing areas become uninsured sacrifice zones?

Many states have their own fallback flood insurance for people who cannot afford private flood insurance, and there is also the federal National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) that covers about 5 million households in known flood plains mostly in Texas and Florida where private insurance is not available. Raising the NFIP insurance rates to cover increased levels of risk is a hot political issue, as it could have very significant economic impacts within Texas and Florida; both of which have large populations that are represented in Congress. A previous attempt to raise rates was defeated and the NFIP program remains grossly underfunded.

In Florida the state flood insurer is the Citizens Property Insurance Group which limits coverage to homes costing up to $700,000 ($1 million in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties) where private insurance premiums are more than 20% higher than the Citizen’s policy. Home insurance in Florida is approximately four times more expensive than the national average. The risk with such state insurance is that as private insurers raise premiums higher and higher the state insurer increasingly becomes the only insurer, with the state at risk of having to cover a huge financial liability.

Such state back stop insurance also acts as an inducement to people to rebuild in areas prone to disasters that are increasing in both frequency and intensity over time; a strategic misallocation of resources. At the same time, it supports the continued increase in the Floridian population - something the state fully supports. The US population is continuing to increasingly move to areas that are most at risk from climate change, as disasters are quickly forgotten and populations habituate to a new normal.



In Florida, the situation is made worse by land subsidence which magnifies sea level rise, especially in the barrier islands upon which so much expensive real estate sits (its also a big problem for the whole of the Gulf Coast, but there is much less very expensive real estate there). As you can see below, interested parties such as property developers will do their utmost to bad mouth any analyses that put their investments and profits at risk.



Add to that rising groundwater levels as the rising sea pushes inland through a Florida that is a porous flat plateau of limestone. Fundamentally, Florida and other flood prone areas are in a property bubble that interested parties will work very hard to keep inflated until they no longer can. Nothing has changed since the documentary below was made eight years ago, including the ad hoc responses and lack of a long term plan.



A more recent coverage of the state of play in Florida and the lack of strategic planning and holistic action. Even some more incremental proposed actions, such as a 10 km flood barrier have met great resistance. More like “build baby build” in a long-term doomed area.



The results of sea level rise and land subsidence are already being seen as increasing flooding from high king tides.



As shown in the above, cities are dealing incrementally with the issue but not strategically re-examining their development plans. Let’s remember that the governor of the state of Florida is a climate denier and will not allow for such discussions to enter the political realm. Each year the risks of a catastrophic event, or combination of events, that will bankrupt the state treasury increases and each year Florida sees if it once again will dodge the climate bullet or bullets. All the while, insurance rates will continue upwards and more restrictive clauses added to policies.



Societal collapses tend not to occur in a sudden or linear fashion, but rather through a series of catastrophes interspersed with periods of relative stability. Florida is one bad year away from a fundamental reappraisal of the viability of many of its major population areas. If the state insurer exhausts its reserves it can borrow from the state government and place a surcharge on all insurance policies across the state, but both actions would tend to harm the economy through raised taxes/cuts in other areas of government spending and even higher insurance rates. And that is if the state could take on the scale of the outstanding state insurer liabilities. Would the federal government bail the state out if it could not?

Florida is a very special case, as its limestone base will allow flood water to flow underneath any flood barriers and invade clean water sources. The reality is that Southern Florida is non-tenable in a climate changed world, but politics and vested interests will block any rational evacuation form these areas. Instead that evacuation will be carried out in painful steps, with large amounts of money and resources spent on rebuilding and incrementally protecting non-viable areas. With each catastrophe dealt with as a standalone event, followed by a new economic equilibrium low until the next event arrives. Losses will be spread extremely haphazardly across home owners, the state (which is funded by the overall population of Florida) and insurance companies. Australia, with its climate-denial government fully dominated by fossil fuel and mining interests, is going through exactly the same process.



The same for Porto Alegre, in one of the wealthiest areas of Brazil in the south of the country. Over half a million people have been displaced and many will quite possibly never return. Whole neighbourhoods have been defined as sacrifice zones by the state, where infrastructure will not be rebuilt. The area affected accounts for 6% of national GDP and will be a massive financial challenge for the state to fund the rebuilding.



Insurance companies use reinsurers to offload the risks of the most extreme events, as bookies do with other bookies, but that can lead to a concentration of reinsurance risk within a few reinsurers without adequate capital to cover claims; akin to what happened with AIG and credit insurance during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). 2023 was the fourth year in a row that insured catastrophe losses exceeded US$100 billion and it looks as if 2024 will continue that trend; well above the 10-year average of US$37 billion. Reinsurers have responded by repricing risk upwards, and have

become more averse to backstopping “secondary perils,” which are smaller but more frequent extreme weather events such as tornadoes, thunderstorms, fires and floods. These localized events are harder for the insurance industry to model and manage, partly because they’re driven by climate change.

They’re also responsible for a rising share of insured losses. Severe convective storms alone accounted for about $70 billion of insured losses globally last year, according to an estimate by insurance broker Aon Plc. That’s equivalent to 59% of losses from all natural disasters.

This forces more of the risk back onto the primary insurers:

By 2023, “a large portion of the losses fell mainly on primary insurers,” particularly in the US where most severe convective storms occur, according to S&P. Conversely, reinsurance losses were “well within their budgeted natural-catastrophe load.”

This is a very good article on Naked Capitalism about the escalating levels of climate-driven catastrophic events. It states that there were “58 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2024, ranking second-highest behind only 2023, which had 73”. The reinsurers are reacting incrementally to the increased risks that they have observed by taking on less of the risk, raising prices and putting more restrictive clauses into policies. But this does not take into account that climate change is continuing, and may very well be accelerating. The capital of the insurers and reinsurers is sized looking in the rear view mirror and extrapolating, just like those “capital at risk” models that completely failed during the GFC. Property insurance and reinsurance is a financial accident waiting to happen, dependent on the vagaries of the weather, climate change and the paths of individual storms, floods and fires.



For example, “100 year flood events” are happening in some places now every eight years - overwhelming the sewer systems and causing widespread damage.



The reserves of the primary insurance companies and reinsurers are generally held in government bonds as they are assumed to be both safe from default and easily sold in a liquid market. In a year of exceedingly high catastrophic losses both groups of insurers would be selling significant amounts of those bond portfolios to cover payouts, and concerns about their solvency may greatly limit their ability to borrow funds. As many of these companies are also big players in global derivative markets there is the possibility of another GFC being triggered. Even if a GFC is not triggered there may be a fundamental rethink of property insurance that would have global scale impacts. A major non-linear change in the cost and availability of insurance that could affect property prices across whole cities and regions, with Florida as one of the regions at the epicentre of such property reevaluations.

Fundamentally “leaving it to the market” and adaptation is not a viable solution for climate change, which instead calls out for holistic federal level strategic planning. But that will not be in place for at least the next four years in the US, and quite possibly much longer than that. This article in The Guardian makes an utterly ridiculous claim:

It obviously isn’t realistic to imagine that the entire population of somewhere like Los Angeles could up sticks and recreate the city somewhere safer, which means that a viable insurance industry is a non-negotiable; but if the world in 2050 looks very different to the one of 2000, it may not make sense to create incentives for people to live in places that are becoming much more dangerous.

Available insurance is not a right, and as losses continue to escalate they will overwhelm the ability of insurance companies to cover and the state to backstop. Whole areas will end up with no coverage for climate-related hazards, as happened for many LA residents prior to the most recent fires. The problem cannot be fixed by “the market” it requires a whole of society model with rational forward looking government policies; an approach very unlikely to be followed in the deeply neoliberal United States. Instead, areas where insurance becomes unavailable will see declining house prices with millions of people defaulting on their mortgages; another possible trigger for a new GFC. A reversal of the US population movements of the past decades may also be triggered, with large numbers of people and businesses moving back toward the less exposed northern states.

States with highly competent and non-corrupt officials will tend to manage such issues in a much more effective and efficient way, wasting many less resources and managing the required infrastructure development and population movements. Here, once again, China possesses a huge advantage over the US and other Western countries. For example, redesigning cities to allow them to be much more resistant to flooding:



It also has both much greater engineering project efficiency and effectiveness, and state legitimacy than Western nations; especially a US which could descend into project profiteering, delays and political deadlock while hamstrung by neoliberal ideology.

In the US, the sacrifice zones will be slowly and painfully given up with large amounts of money and resources spent on doomed rebuilding and incremental fixes. With individual financial outcomes dependent on sheer chance as much as savvy planning. Many will lose much, if not all, of their assets; as is being seen with the LA fires. President Trump has promised a rapid rebuilding in North Carolina after the flooding, but in the long-term will those rebuilt properties simply be flooded out again?



There will come a day when the US state decides to no longer provide the backstop insurance and to not fund rebuilding. Such a response would produce a major repricing of properties within the sacrifice zones. But not before huge amounts of wasted rebuilding, wasted insurance payouts and wasted state rescues. Countries like China will waste many less resources, and experience less losses, due to their much more sound planning and adaptive actions.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/climat ... fice-zones

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Brazil: Threats and Killings Increase in Where Agribusiness Expands in the Amazon Rainforest
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 31, 2025
Carolina Bataier


The Amazon rainforest is the region of Brazil that has suffered the most from deforestation – Press Release/Brazilian Federal Police

A rural worker was found dead on Wednesday (29) in the town of Labrea, Amazonas state, northern Brazil. Nicknamed Jacozinho, José Jacó Cosotle, 55, left his house last Sunday morning (26) to pick up chestnuts, but didn’t return home. He was a resident of the Marielle Franco encampment. His body was found next to a motorcycle with a gunshot wound to the chin. The case is under investigation.

On January 14, another worker was killed in the region. Small farmer Francisco do Nascimento Melo, known as Cafu, was shot dead in the rural area of the municipality of Boca do Acre, Amazonas state, next to Labrea. His son, a 14-year-old teenager, saw the scene. Four days after the murder, farmer Valdir Silva, or Valdirzão, turned himself into the police.

Hours later, while the suspect was giving testimony at a police station, Civil Police Chief Paulo Mavigner posted a video on his Instagram profile, sharing general information about the case. “Valdir Silva is responsible for the killing of Cafu, a fact that happened amid an agrarian conflict and which generated big repercussions in the city of Boca do Acre,” he said.

Boca do Acre and Labrea are two of the 32 municipalities in Amacro, an area between the states of Amazonas, Acre and Rondônia, where agribusiness activities are expanding, particularly cattle ranching. From 1985 to 2023, the Amacro region lost approximately 7 million hectares of native vegetation, which was converted to agricultural use, according to data from the Amazon Institute for Man and the Environment (Imazon).

It is also a region with high rates of deforestation and a concentration of agrarian conflict cases, such as those that killed Jacozinho and Cafu.

In Boca do Acre alone, the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT, in Portuguese), which monitors this type of violence, recorded 27 conflicts over land in 2023 involving river dweller communities, extractivists, squatters, and rubber tappers. Considering the entire region, these figures are alarming.

“In 2023, Amacro concentrated 10% [179] of all land conflicts registered in Brazil, and 26% of all assassinations that took place in the context of conflicts in the countryside,” highlights the pastoral’s 2023 Report on Conflicts in the Countryside.

Of all the 31 murders related to conflicts in the countryside that year, eight happened in Amacro, five of which were caused by land grabbers, according to the CPT. In 2021, of the 60 registered conflicts in the countryside in the state of Acre, 51 were within the Amacro region.

Professor Julia Adão Bernardes explains that violence against residents of the area is part of the process of expanding agribusiness frontiers. “The Brazilian agribusiness frontier is born from the conflict over land with the populations in the areas that will be affected by commodity plantations [raw materials produced on a large scale for export, such as soya],” says Bernardes, a researcher in social geography at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, in Portuguese). “Initially, they sanitize populations, pushing them to imminent risk, murdering their leaders and threatening their way of life,” she says.

On January 4, 2023, Patrick Gasparini Cardoso, a resident of the Tiago Campin dos Santos encampment located in Porto Velho, capital of Rondonia (a municipality that makes up Amacro), was murdered by gunmen. The area where he used to live was being reclaimed by the company Leme Empreendimentos Ltda, whose owner is a well-known land grabber in the region. Days after the murder, two other residents of the area were also assassinated by military police in a repossession action.

In 2022, six squatters – known in Brazil as “posseiros” – were victims of an assassination attempt in the same region where Cafu was killed, the 37 Branch, on the Recreio do Santo Antônio undesignated public land. In 2020, lawyer Fernando Ferreira da Rocha was shot dead inside his house in Boca do Acre. According to a publication on the CPT’s website, he worked to defend peasant families in the region.

Over a decade of threats

CPT regional coordinator, Cosme Capistrano, a resident of Boca do Acre, knows the region’s problems well. Threatened several times, he had to change his address and joined the Ministry of Human Rights’ Program for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, Communicators and Environmentalists (PPDDH, in Portuguese).

“The conflict intensified in 2017, 2018, when it was announced that the Recreio do Santo Antônio undesignated public land was untitled federal land that the government was collecting to register and legalize the land for landless families,” he explains. While the demarcation doesn’t take place, the land remains legally insecure and is targeted by land grabbers.

According to the most up-to-date database of the National Register of Public Forests (CNFP, in Portuguese), released in 2022, around 15% of Amacro’s territory is made up of undesignated public land. This corresponds to an area of more than 6.5 million hectares, larger than the state of Paraíba. These are lands that belong to the state or federal government, but have not yet been transformed into settlements, Conservation Units or other protected territories, such as Indigenous Lands and the Quilombola Territories.

This is the case of the Recreio do Santo Antônio gleba, inhabited by extractivists and squatters who are waiting for their land to be regularized. According to the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), this is a federal area.

Although the conflicts have intensified since 2017, Capistrano has been receiving threats for over a decade. In 2012, through an anonymous phone call, a man warned that Capistrano and one of his colleagues would die that year. After that, he received notes and messages threatening him among other kinds of intimidation.

“We are threatened because we denounce land grabbing, violence in rural areas, crimes against rural workers,” says Capistrano, who has been threatened for more than a decade. “When you denounce this absurdity – these factors that directly affect communities, particularly poor families, as happened with Cafu – we are targeted,” he laments.

A landowner installed a gate on the road

According to farmer Paulo do Vale, who used to work with Cafu, the landowner suspected of killing Cafu announced he would kill the rural worker. The suspect used to threaten and intimidate landless workers. “Valdir killed Cafu on the branch that leads to the colony,” he says.

The branch – a small dirt road – is an access route between the area occupied by landless workers and the city of Boca do Acre. Valdir Silva has properties on the side of the road and, according to Vale, is trying to expand his area, which is what led to the disagreements. The landowner installed a gate on the road and padlocked it, preventing squatters from passing through.


The farmer accused of being Cafu’s killer put a gate to prevent people from crossing the road linking the area he claims and the town of Boca do Acre / Courtesy of Paulo do Vale

“They wanted to take land from residents. And then, when they couldn’t, Valdir would close the gate, saying that the area was his and that of other ranchers,” says Capistrano.

Boca do Acre has just over 35,000 inhabitants and is on the list of Brazil’s 100 largest municipalities in terms of land area, according to a dossier published by the De Olho nos Ruralistas Observatory, with a territory equivalent to that of the state of Sergipe.

In 2023, the municipality had almost 305,000 hectares occupied by pasture, which represents around 13% of its territory. Ten years earlier, in 2013, the pasture area was 169,000 hectares.

The municipality is on the list of priority areas for action to curb deforestation in the Amazon, monitored by the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm, in Portuguese). The list includes 70 municipalities which together are responsible for almost 80% of deforestation in the biome.

In Labrea, violence increases

The pastures of Boca do Acre are concentrated on the border with Labrea, a town also monitored by the PPCDAm due to its high rates of deforestation. There, one of the points of conflict is the Novo Natal Gleba, partially occupied by the Palotina farm, a 40,000-hectare property where cattle are raised and which claims the area where Jacozinho’s body was found.

On the edge of the farm is the Marielle Franco encampment, where Jacozinho lived, occupied by around 200 families who are waiting for the land to be regulated. While the area is not demarcated, residents denounce attacks by big landowners. There have been reports of houses being set on fire and threats.

The people responsible for the farm claim ownership of the land, which they acquired in 1985. The case is before the courts. According to INCRA, “the process of collecting the area was sent to INCRA’s Specialized Federal Attorney for legal analysis on December 30, 2024.”

Like Boca do Acre, Labrea is on the list of the 100 largest municipalities in Brazil, being the 10th place on the list, with a territory of almost 7 million hectares. In 2022, farmer couple Sebastião David Pereira and Maria Aristides da Silva were murdered in an ambush. They lived in the Monte Settlement Project, Pará state, created in 1994 to house 940 families. In 2023, the CPT recorded four conflicts in PA Monte.

“Land grabbing is quite common in this region and this has become a very dangerous scheme because those who have money call the shots and those who don’t obey,” Capistrano laments.

Translated by: Ana Paula Rocha

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/01/ ... ainforest/

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AI is bad for the environment, and the problem is bigger than energy consumption
Originally published: The Conversation on January 29, 2025 by Hamish van der Ven (more by The Conversation) | (Posted Feb 05, 2025)

Artificial intelligence technologies, like chatbots, are attracting growing scrutiny for their voracious energy demands. However, energy consumption is only one part of their broader environmental impact.

Late last year, ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot run by OpenAI, celebrated its second birthday. In its brief existence, the platform has amassed over 300 million weekly users who send roughly one billion messages to the chatbot per day.

With US$6.6 billion raised in its last funding round, OpenAI has emerged as one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

Soaring emissions
Elsewhere in tech, other companies marked less savoury milestones. Alphabet–the parent company of Google–recently announced that its GHG emissions are up 48 per cent since 2019. At roughly the same time, Microsoft announced that its emissions are up 29 per cent since 2020.

Both companies cite emissions associated with the need for more data centres to support AI workloads as a key factor in surging GHG emissions. AI is notoriously thirsty for energy–according to one researcher, one query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as one light bulb for 20 minutes.

The collective energy demand of data centres in the United States is so high that Microsoft recently reached a deal to reopen Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear accident in American history.

The burgeoning AI industry needs so much electricity that plans to decommission several coal plants have been delayed. By some estimates, the collective demand of AI and other digital technologies will constitute 20 per cent of global electricity use by 2030.


An undated photo showing security standing outside the closed front gate to the nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pa. The plant was shut down following a partial meltdown in March 1979. Recently, Microsoft signed a 20-year deal with the plant, which is set to re-open in 2028. (AP Photo/Paul Vathis)

Insidious effects
The energy use of AI is important, but it does not tell the whole story of AI’s environmental impacts. The social and political mediums through which AI affects the planet are far more insidious and, arguably, more consequential for the future of humanity.

In the Business, Sustainability and Technology Lab at the University of British Columbia, we specialize in evaluating the social and political ways in which digital technologies affect the environment.

In our recently published paper, “Does artificial intelligence bias perceptions of environmental challenges?,” my students and I argue that AI changes how humans perceive environmental challenges in ways that obscure the accountability of powerful entities, ignore marginalized communities and promote cautious and incremental solutions that are drastically out of sync with the timeline required to avert environmental crises.

We asked four chatbots the same series of questions about the issues, causes, consequences and solutions to nine environmental challenges. We found evidence of systematic biases in their responses. Most notably, chatbots avoid mentioning radical solutions to environmental challenges. They are far more likely to propose combinations of soft economic, social or political changes, like greater deployment of sustainable technologies and broader public awareness and education.

Chatbots by OpenAI and Anthropic exhibited a reluctance to discuss the broader social, cultural and economic issues that are entangled in environmental challenges. For example, the term “environmental justice” is absent from nearly all chatbot responses. Chatbots also avoided references to dismantling colonialism or rethinking infinite economic growth as solutions to these challenges.

AI bias
Biases also exist in who chatbots see as responsible or vulnerable to environmental challenges. The chatbots we studied were far more likely to blame governments for environmental challenges than businesses or financial organizations. Similarly, while the vulnerability of Indigenous groups to climate change and biodiversity loss was mentioned frequently, the susceptibility of Black people and women to these same challenges received scant attention.

All of this is particularly worrisome given the increasingly widespread use of AI chatbots by educators, students, policymakers and business leaders to understand and respond to environmental challenges. Chatbots present information in an oracular way, usually as a single text box written in an authoritative manner and understood as a synthesis of all digitalized knowledge.

If AI users treat this text uncritically, they risk arriving at conclusions that propagate biased conceptions of environmental challenges and reinforce ineffective efforts to avert ecological crises.

In the near future, the problem of bias in AI looks to get even worse, as OpenAI and other AI companies consider incorporating advertising to generate the revenue needed to train newer and more complex large language models.

While it remains unclear what advertising will look like when integrated into ChatGPT, it is not difficult to see a world in which a description of climate change and its attendant solutions will be brought to you by the good folks at ExxonMobil or Shell.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/05/ai-is-b ... nsumption/

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Hottest January in the History of Januaries
Posted on February 6, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. While many of you were busy losing your mind over Trump’s smashes and grabs, the world continued to cook. Tom Neuburger, who has kept his eye on the climate change ball, chronicles how the relentless rise in temperatures continued in January.

And this development is a very big and bad deal. From the Financial Times, in a story above the fold, Hottest January on record shocks scientists:

Last month was the hottest January on record, surprising scientists who expected the cooling La Niña weather cycle in the tropical Pacific to slow almost two years of record-high temperatures.

January ranked as the third-hottest month globally on record, with a surface air temperature of 13.23C — 1.75C above the pre-industrial average — according to the Copernicus Climate Change service, the EU’s Earth observation agency.

The warming, despite the emergence of La Niña in December, is set to fuel concerns that climate change is accelerating at a time when countries such as the US, the world’s largest historical polluter, pull back on commitments to reduce emissions.

Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL, said the January data was “both astonishing and, frankly terrifying”, adding: “On the basis of the Valencia floods and apocalyptic Los Angeles wildfires, I don’t think there can be any doubt that dangerous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown has arrived. Yet emissions continue to rise.”

By Tom Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies


Image source: Pixabay

I’d like to analyze and report on the extraordinary events unfolding in the Trump administration, but it’s way too early for that. Musk and the childmen he leads may seem ascendant, but that may not last. Trump is swinging some serious international pipe, but he may be forced to back down, or the price to us may become unbearably high via a move away from the dollar as the world’s reference currency.

The domestic takeover grab is massive (see the first five minutes of this report), and no one knows if national Democrats will fight back effectively. Maybe they will, or not. Trump is throwing a ton of new plans at the wall. Will half of it stick? Or most? Or not much at all?

We’re watching this closely, so stay tuned to this station, as they say. The broad systemic world is already different than most people’s view of it, and greater transformative change is on the way. As soon as the new takes shape, we’ll dig right in. But for now, we’re watching as things unfold by the day. Thanks for your patience.

Hottest January in Recorded Januaries

In the meantime, something that’s not too soon to predict is the coming climate “event,” the big bonanza, when nature and billionaire hubris will meet in the ring, and billionaires won’t walk out intact. (Wonder why billionaires are so eager to flee the earth? They’re escaping their mess.)

January 2025 just clocked in as the hottest January in recorded history. New Scientist:

January 2025 sets surprise record as hottest ever start to a year

Meteorologists expected global temperatures to start falling after record highs in 2023 and 2024 – instead January 2025 hit a new high

And a chart via Prof. Eliot Jacobson:



Notice that the previous hottest January in nearly forever was 2024. For good measure, here’s what’s happening in the Arctic — sea ice extent is finding new lows, again:



And here’s a visualization of change in Arctic sea ice volume (left) and thickness (right) from 1980-2024 via climatologist Zach Labe.



Ice-free Arctic, of course, accelerates everything, including methane emissions from Arctic permafrost, of which there is much. And an ice-free Arctic could be on its way sooner than anyone thinks. You could book an Arctic cruise as early as 2027, if that’s your thing.

A Word of Advice

Just a thought. If you’re under, say, fifty and living a healthy life, you might want to give think to where to live next. Especially if you have kids.

I’m not being snarky. The number of days above 100°F is due to change in hundreds of U.S. counties.



There are no visualizations that look much different, though some do look worse. Here’s Business Insider’s version of days above 125°F by 2053. Water will also be scarce in many states, and some regions won’t stop burning.

Seriously, think it through. The time to get out of a really bad situation is before the rest of the world gets the same idea. Again, just a thought.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... aries.html

Funny, here in Upstate SC it's been the coldest January that I can remember in at least the last 20 years. No matter, climate, like all thing in the natural world , happens unevenly.

[blindpig]

Earth’s water cycle is off balance for the first time in human history
February 9, 2025

‘We must reshape our shared relationship with water, across borders and cultures’



Julia Conley

Decades of mismanagement of water resources, deforestation, and the fossil fuel-driven crisis of global warming have put “unprecedented stress” on the Earth’s water systems, according to a new report, and have thrown the world’s hydrological cycle out of balance “for the first time in human history.”

The Global Commission on the Economics of Water, affiliated with the Dutch government and comprised of global experts, published the study on Thursday, warning that policymakers must urgently “reframe the hydrological cycle as a global common good,” recognizing that it is “deeply interlinked with the climate and biodiversity crises.”

The hydrological cycle, or water cycle, is the continuous circulation of water between the planet’s oceans, land, and atmosphere. The experts involved in the new report warn that rising temperatures and pollution—driven by continued fossil fuel emissions and other industrial impacts—are among the factors that are “undermining an equitable and sustainable future for all” in terms of water access.

The commission said a “new economics of water” is needed, recognizing that water connects countries and regions through atmospheric water flows as well as bodies of water.

“We must reshape our shared relationship with water, across borders and cultures, for sustainable, impactful, and just transitions,” the commission said on social media.

Both freshwater and land ecosystems have been damaged by mismanagement and “undervaluation of water around the world,” reads the report. “We can no longer count on freshwater availability for our collective future.”

Already, more than 1,000 children die each day from illnesses related to a lack of safe drinking water, and more than half of the world’s food production takes place in areas where water supplies are expected to decrease in the coming years.

“If this isn’t enough for the world to go into emergency mode, then what is?” asked writer Matthew Todd of expected strain on food production. “Think about what that means—billons potentially migrating, war, unprecedented political instability.”

A new approach to water governance must be adopted, said the commission, “from local to river basin to global, to ensure it is governed more effectively and efficiently, delivers access and justice for all, and sustains the earth’s ecosystems.”

Tharman Shanmugaratnam, president of Singapore and a co-chair of the commission, told The Guardian that policymakers must “think radically about how we are going to preserve the sources of fresh water, how we are going to use it far more efficiently, and how we are going to be able to have access to fresh water available to every community, including the vulnerable—in other words, how we preserve equity [between rich and poor].”

The experts found that much of the $700 billion that goes to water and agricultural subsidies annually is misdirected, pushing wealthier farmers to use more water than they need while poorer communities and farmers have not enough.

“Industry is getting a lot of the subsidy, and richer people. So what we need are better targeted subsidies. We need to identify the poor people who really need this,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization and another co-chair of the commission, told The Guardian.

The impact of continued stress of water resources could shrink wealthy countries’ gross domestic product by an average of 8% by 2050 and that of lower-income countries by up to 15%.

Stress on the planet’s water systems have particularly impacted “green water” that is stored in soil, plants, and forests and ultimately evaporates and becomes rainfall.

“Current policy tends to deal with the ‘blue’ water we can see—in rivers, lakes, and aquifers—largely overlooking ‘green’ water,” reads the report. “Intact ecosystems and lands managed in ways that do not adversely impact their hydrological functioning are critical to securing terrestrial rainfall. A stable supply of green water in soils is also crucial for carbon sequestration.”

The degradation of freshwater systems, including the loss of moisture in soil, has already contributed to “frequent and increasingly severe droughts, floods, heatwaves, and wildfires, playing out across the globe.”

The commission mapped the “vast, interconnected network of atmospheric water exchanges that span the entire planet” at an animated storytelling website accompanying the report, providing a visual of how “green water flows connect countries across the globe.”

“Managing water as a resource is more than a local matter,” said the commission. The report calls for partnerships to be forged between all stakeholders from the local to global levels, aimed at completing five “missions that address the most important and interconnected challenges of the global water crisis”:

Launch a new revolution in food systems to improve water productivity in agriculture while meeting the nutritional needs of a growing world population;
Conserve and restore natural habitats critical to protect green water;
Establish a circular water economy, including changes in industrial processes;
Enable a clean-energy era with much lower water intensity; and
Ensure that no child dies from unsafe water by 2030, by securing the reliable supply of potable water and sanitation for underserved communities.
“The Chinese economy depends on sustainable forest management in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the Baltic region,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-chair of the commission, told The Guardian. “You can make the same case for Brazil supplying fresh water to Argentina. This interconnectedness just shows that we have to place fresh water in the global economy as a global common good.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2025/0 ... n-history/

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Making Erhai Lake bloom again: A story of China’s ecological transformation
The remarkable transformation of Erhai Lake in China’s Yunnan province turned decades of pollution into a model of ecological restoration.

February 18, 2025 by Tings Chak


Erhai Lake, Dali, China July 2023. Photo: Tim Gu

On a clear morning in June 2023, I arrived in the city of Dali, located in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan, and was received by He Licheng, a local resident and farmer from nearby Gusheng Village. Like others of older generations of the region, He Licheng recalled how the pristine Erhai Lake of his childhood in the 1970s and 1980s had become so heavily polluted by the 1990s and 2000s that its signature three-petal flowers known locally as haicaihua (Ottelia acuminata), had stopped blooming.

Because the plant is extremely sensitive to pollution, its presence or absence is considered a biological indicator of water quality in the region. Due to a combination of factors in the reform and opening up period – including economic development, the rise of pesticides and fertilizer use with the “Green Revolution,” population growth, and increased tourism and migration – water quality within the Erhai basin steadily deteriorated. Looking back at the situation a decade ago, in 2013, Erhai Lake was experiencing large-scale outbreaks of blue-green algae, with the water quality deemed unsuitable for human contact. By the time of my visit a decade later, though, Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture had been fundamentally transformed. As part of the central government’s targeted poverty alleviation campaign, launched in 2013 and completed in 2020, all eleven poverty-stricken counties in the prefecture, comprising thirty-four townships and 541 villages, were lifted out of extreme poverty.

In total, 413,100 people from Dali Prefecture exited extreme poverty in this campaign, part of the nearly 99 million people who did so across the country. All reached the “one income, two assurances, and three guarantees” standard of living, meaning that (i) their income exceeded a minimum level, (ii) they were assured food and clothing, and (iii) they were guaranteed basic medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and free education. Alongside the targeted poverty alleviation campaign of Xi Jinping’s presidency, intensive environmental protection efforts turned the waters of Erhai Lake clean and potable again after a decades-long battle.

Already in the late 1990s, problems such as algal blooms were becoming apparent, necessitating the first measures, which included prohibiting motorized fishing boats and nets and the banning of phosphorus-containing detergents. However, these measures could not keep up with the pace of pollution and led to an economic downturn as well. In the early 2000s, Pan Yue took office as the Vice Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection – currently, he is the head of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission. As one of the youngest vice ministers ever, Pan transformed the country’s approach to environmental impact assessment, halting some of the largest projects totalling 112 billion yuan in investments and placing huge fines on violators. In a 2007 speech to a group of young students, he stated that “environmental pollution has severely constrained economic growth” and that “social injustice leads to environmental injustice, which in turn exacerbates social injustice.” Pan saw the protection of the environment as being essential – not at odds with – China’s economic growth.

It was during that time that Professor Kong Hainan, upon returning from his studies in Japan, led a team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University to study the polluted Erhai Lake. The findings and reports they filed led to the State Council approving a national water pollution control and treatment project in 2006. Erhai Lake became a key testing ground for Kong’s team, which discovered the most significant source of pollution to be the cultivation of a local type of single-bulb garlic on the shores of the lake. When the local government began to restrict these activities to areas beyond 200 meters from the shoreline, farmers were encouraged to plant other income-generating crop varieties and decrease or replace the use of chemical fertilizers.

Building a consensus among local growers was not an easy task and required the combined efforts of the whole community, with scientists, Communist Party of China (CPC) members, teachers, doctors, and other public officials to lead by example and ask their relatives to do the same. Kong Hainan, for example, personally communicated with the media, went door-to-door to talk with residents, heard their concerns, and convinced them that threats to the health of the lake ultimately impacted the long-term livelihood of all the residents.

Kong Hainan is among the many scientists who have made it their task to ensure the restoration of the lake, which, in turn, ensures that local government policies and measures are scientifically guided. For the last fifteen years, China Agricultural University has been exploring a “Science and Technology Courtyard” model, where graduate students are sent to the frontlines of agricultural production, living, working, and producing alongside local peasant farmers. Together, they were able to identify core problems, such as pollution sources, address practical issues at the grassroots level, and innovate to find new solutions, such as biofertilizers and pesticides. This day-to-day trust-building has been a hallmark of China’s rural campaigns, from poverty alleviation to rural revitalization efforts.

The life trajectory of He Licheng, the local resident who received me during my visit, has been completely intertwined with that of Erhai Lake. He has been directly impacted both by the pollution and the waves of the government’s environmental measures of the past decades. Growing up in Gusheng Village, he earned his income through fishing and fish farming. In the mid-1990s, after the government ban on motorized fishing boats, he was forced to sell his boat for scrap metal. When self-built fishponds were prohibited, he moved to look for work elsewhere and returned a few years later to open a guesthouse after the government’s “village-to-village” project brought roads to his doorstep. Later, his house was among the 1,804 households that were slated for relocation into a nearby community to restore the area he lived in back to wetlands. Finally, in 2021, He Licheng contracted a piece of land in his home village to pursue rice and rapeseed farming under the guidance of the Yunnan Agricultural Reclamation Group. At the end of this long ordeal, Hi Licheng expressed his pride in contributing to protecting this collective research and is in the process of being a candidate member of the CPC.

The restoration of Erhai Lake is a concrete example of China’s ecological transformation of recent years, which aims to correct the environmental damages that came with rapid economic expansion while setting a new course in the transition to a new energy economy. In recent years, President Xi Jinping has emphasized the concept of “ecological civilization” as one of the key elements of China’s socialist modernization and promoted “green mountains and clear waters,” a guiding vision that sees the protection of the environment as a necessary foundation to economic and social prosperity, rather than being at odds with it. Erhai Lake is a good example of how a central government vision gets translated into practice at the local community level, combining scientific investigation, Party-led mobilization, and grassroots democracy.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/02/18/ ... formation/

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What’s stopping a transition to renewable energy?
February 20, 2025

Despite falling costs, energy companies aren’t switching. For capitalism, the price is wrong.



Brett Christophers
THE PRICE IS WRONG:
Why capitalism won’t save the planet
Verso, 2024

reviewed by Martin Empson

As its subtitle indicates, Brett Christophers has set himself an ambitious task with his new book. After all, given the multiple ecological, economic and social crises humanity faces, activists must understand capitalism’s inability to prevent environmental breakdown, war and economic crises. But readers hoping for a study of 21st century capitalism’s multiple failures will be disappointed. Christophers focuses on just one, albeit fascinating, aspect of capital’s failure — electrical energy — and misses the big picture.

Energy is, of course, fundamental to both human existence and the functioning of capitalism. It is central to production, as well as the heating and lighting systems that most people take for granted, and the energy sector is by far the single largest producer of greenhouse emissions.

Examining this sector in detail should tell us a great deal about capitalism. The problem is that Christophers does not believe that generalisations about capitalism’s destructive environmental behaviour are possible. He argues that capitalism’s failure to deliver environmentally sustainable practices is not because of the nature of its production, but rather because doing this is not profitable enough. “If greening business were more profitable than business as usual, then, certainly, capitalism would comprehensively be going green.”

There is some truth to this, but it is not sufficient to explain capitalism’s destruction of the environment (or anything else). While Christophers quotes Karl Marx approvingly in terms of understanding capitalist production as being geared towards profit, he rejects the further insights that Marx developed from this.

He explicitly rejects the ecological Marxist view that capitalism is inherently anti-ecological. On the contrary, the problem is just that capitalism in its present form is “ill-equipped” to replace fossil fuels with renewables. “If greening business were more profitable… capitalism would comprehensively be going green.”

“The environmental impact of capitalism is contingent, not fundamental. If it is true that contemporary capitalism unavoidably destroys the environment, then it is true only in an indirect sense: which is to say, because the underlying search for profit — capital’s true animus — and thus for growth itself happens to be environmentally destructive.”

For Marx, the issue wasn’t just growth, but the fact that the construction of the capitalist economy brought with it the destruction of humanity’s relationship to the natural world, creating a new alienated reality which saw nature subordinated to the accumulation of capital. Growth in this sense is part of the inescapable logic of capitalism and the energy system is an integral part of that system. It must be understood in the wider context of capital accumulation.

That said, Christophers’ forensic dissection of the energy system, in the various forms it takes across the globe, is illuminating and often devastating. One example will suffice to demonstrate his wider argument.

When Texas experienced particularly bad weather in February 2021, almost half of the state’s electrical generating capacity failed. Inevitably, right-wing pundits blamed the wide use of wind turbines, ignoring the fact that much of the state’s natural gas-based infrastructure also failed. Because the problem wasn’t technology. High demand for energy drove up the spot (not contracted) price for electricity, which is exactly how the so-called free market is supposed to work. The price went from $50 per megawatt hour to $9000, and some companies made out like bandits. But not all.

The owners of storm-damaged wind-turbines were contractually obliged to deliver energy they couldn’t produce, so they had to buy at prices much higher than they would get paid, which meant taking on heavy debts. They just couldn’t afford to be in business, and the market collapsed.

The 2021 market failure is one of many in Brett Christophers’ study of energy generation under capitalism. It illustrates his central point—that leaving energy generation, distribution and development to the market neither reduces carbon emissions nor keeps down prices. Instead, it leaves consumers and the economy as a whole vulnerable to the irrational behaviour of the capitalist system.

It is no accident that the energy system has ended up like this. In the Global North it is the consequence of three decades of privatisation, and in the Global South as Christophers points out, the World Bank “aggressively pursue[d] the commercialisation and corporatization of, and private sector participation in, developing-country power sectors.”

The consequence is an energy system geared, not toward supplying energy cheaply and sustainably, but for profit. Indeed, this is the root of the problem. Cheaper renewables should be more profitable, but for the electrical energy system as a whole, they aren’t reliably profitable, and they are rarely profitable enough.

Christophers shows that declining costs for renewable energy have not caused profit-driven energy companies to choose them. Quite the opposite. In their quest for the biggest return on investment, energy producers routinely abandon renewable energy in favour of fossil fuels. In spot markets, where investors must make money or die, “expected profit is highly uncertain and unpredictable.”

Renewable energy is just not very good at delivering profits in a free market system. This is not lost on the fossil fuel industry. Christophers recounts how a group of Franciscan friars, who owned $2000 worth of Exxon shares, asked Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson why he didn’t invest more in renewable energy. Tillerson’s answer: “We choose not to lose money on purpose.”

Christophers demonstrates — conclusively and in detail — that market forces cannot deliver the sort of energy system that we need for a sustainable future. Indeed, there is a “serious question mark” over whether a single renewable energy facility anywhere has been built without state support. So central is government support that for some renewable energy companies it is the only thing that keeps them interested. Despite politicians’ rhetoric, the reality is that the supposedly private energy system is dependent on government intervention:

“Even before the energy crisis of 2021-2 … more than half of the countries in the EU — the very home, materially and symbolically, of marketized electricity — had some form of retail price control. And, everywhere, the development of renewables remains propped up by government support.”

Electricity is simply “not a suitable object for marketization and profit generation,” so transitioning to a renewables-based energy system will require dumping the free-market and putting it all — from power plants to energy grids — under state control. Half-way houses, including strategies that rely on profits from nationalised renewable energy companies, are doomed, because energy markets simply cannot work while trapped in the wider capitalist economic logic.

While Christophers’ analysis of the energy system is informative and often insightful, the conclusions he draws are inadequate. Focusing narrowly on electrical energy systems, Christophers concludes that their weaknesses can be overcome by state control and ownership, so that production decisions can be made with no concern for private profit. Less profitable but greener technologies could then supplant fossil fuels.

But even in that case, energy production would still be subordinated to the whims of capitalist production and the wider problems caused by capitalist accumulation.

While no socialist would oppose struggles for nationalized energy systems, we also must be aware of the realities of corporate domination. The energy companies, some of the most powerful institutions that have ever existed, would certainly use their wealth and power to undermine any government that tried to take them over. We have the example of Chile in 1973 as a salient reminder of the limit of this strategy. And even if a completely state-owned electrical system was formed, its freedom to act independently would be severely constrained by the broader capitalist system.

Christophers’ extensively researched book is well worth reading. His critique of the free market in energy teaches much about how capitalism works. Unfortunately, readers seeking a wider critique of the whole system must look elsewhere.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2025/0 ... -is-wrong/

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Disappearing climate science
Originally published: The Lancet (more by The Lancet) (Posted Feb 21, 2025)

It was clear during the U.S. presidential election campaign that if re-elected Donald Trump would be no friend to the environment. The assault on climate science and action began immediately. At the time of writing, a spate of executive orders and political appointments are disrupting and dismantling progress across the climate and environmental science community.

Federal agencies, like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have taken down web pages that reference climate change and paused farm payments for wildlife conservation and climate change adaptation. This move will leave farmers more vulnerable to climate change. The removal of information from the U.S. Forest Service website could hinder preparedness for future wildfires in the wake of the devastating California wildfires, which were exacerbated by climate change.

The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, has downplayed the urgency of action on climate change and insisted that U.S. research and policies on climate, fossil fuels, and transport should remove so-called left-wing zealotry and focus on providing cheap energy for American households and achieving American energy dominance. This outlook ignores the fact that the impacts of climate change are projected to cost a great deal more—in monetary and health terms—than adaptation and mitigation measures, and that the worst-off in American society are the most vulnerable to environmental change. Who within society shoulders the cost of energy transitions is a matter of policy, and a just transition that provides health and economic benefits, especially for those most pressed by the cost of living crisis, is possible.

The Trump administration aims to grow natural resource extraction in the U.S. and seems eager to undermine scientific evidence and legal protections to achieve this. President Trump has declared a national energy emergency and encouraged the expansion of drilling for oil and gas. Separate orders aim to facilitate drilling and logging projects in important wilderness areas in the American Arctic region and in national forests. These actions have been coupled with a temporary halt to ground leases for offshore wind farm developments and federal funding for onshore wind.

Trump and political allies have raised unevidenced concerns about the ecological impact of wind farms. However, in a genuine potential blow to the protection of American biodiversity, the U.S.’ first National Nature Assessment has reportedly been cancelled. The previous administration had set its own ambition to conserve 30% of national biodiversity; a goal that seems unlikely to survive.

An executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion activities has suspended all federal jobs and programmes related to environmental justice, which were designed to protect poorer communities from environmental health impacts of new extractive or industrial developments. This and a further order on so-called gender ideology extremism have led to the mass erasure of information relating to sexual or gender diversity from the websites of vital federal agencies like the CDC, a temporary ban on communications with external bodies, and an alleged instruction to retract accepted scientific publications covered by the gender ideology ban. The suppression of scientific terms related to the environment and to sexuality or gender is a chilling and ironic curtailment of free speech by politicians that proport to be its champions.

President Trump has ordered a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and stopped all climate aid to foreign countries. The Paris Agreement is the best framework we currently have to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions that scientific consensus agrees are necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The U.S. is not the World, but it is one of the biggest polluters, most powerful nations, and largest contributors to scientific research; its politics have a tremendous influence on the global approach to climate change.

Whether these early dramatic actions in Trump’s presidency withstand legal and political challenges, they signal a willingness to override scientific evidence. Amongst this turbulence, it is vital that researchers, regional and local actors, the private sector, uphold and follow the evidence on climate and environmental change and be clear: hiding from the reality of climate change will only harm Americans and the wider world.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/21/disappe ... e-science/

We have exchanged the phony, counterproductive capitalist 'environmentalism' for for the out-front suicidal anti-environmentalism of the extractive industries and kneejerk reactionaries. The twisty road gets to the same place as the straight one, mebbe it takes five minutes longer...

[blindpig]

To save the environment, we must end the profit system
February 28, 2025

Brazillian magazine interviews Ian Angus about capitalism, metabolic rifts, degrowth, and ecosocialism



A Portuguese translation of my book, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System, was published in Brazil in 2023. I was subsequently interviewed by Claudia Antunes for the multilingual magazine SUMAÚMA, a radical environmental journal that takes its name from one of the largest trees in the Amazon rainforest. SUMAÚMA published the interview in September 2024. This lightly edited version was published in Monthly Review in January 2025.—Ian Angus

Claudia Antunes: Many people have questioned the decision by the International Union of Geological Sciences’ sub-commission not to endorse the idea that we have entered the Anthropocene. Could this decision lend support to climate change deniers?

Ian Angus: You have to understand that this formal process took place within the geological organization, which has historically been very conservative. From the beginning of this discussion of the Anthropocene, many in the older generation of geologists have been hostile to the whole process. First, because the discussion did not start with geologists; it started with Earth System scientists, so it came from outside. Second, this is a social and economic crisis, in addition to a natural crisis, and many opponents of the Anthropocene concept spent their whole lives working for oil companies or mining companies. Since that is what geologists mostly do, there is resistance to any change at all as well as to this particular proposal. In addition, political currents that are strongly opposed to social change influenced the process. So, it is not surprising this happened.

CA: What political effects will that have?

IA: I suspect the people who deny climate change will use this. They will say: “See, the geologists don’t agree with you.” But in fact, the concept of the Anthropocene, whether or not the geologists formally endorse it, has been widely accepted in the world of the earth sciences. Most other disciplines and very large numbers of geologists have already accepted the concept.

CA: Some claim the sticking point was about when the Anthropocene began. Some argue that, more broadly, it can be said that the Earth System began changing with agriculture. Does this argument make sense?

IA: That argument ignores the distinction between change and qualitative change to the system. There is no question that human beings have been changing their environments for thousands of years. What we have not had before the past seventy years is change that actually alters the way the Earth System works, an actual break with the conditions that have been dominant on Earth for some twelve thousand years.

I do not think most of these people are climate change deniers. They would say, yes, the climate is changing, but technology is going to fix it. The basic argument is: we have changed the planet before, we have invented new ways of doing things, and we will continue to do so. In some sense, they have taken the word Anthropocene, which comes from “human” in Greek, and say humans have been doing things forever. They have rejected the idea that the new epoch is the result of radical changes in human society that are modifying Earth.

CA: In Facing the Anthropocene, you offer a clear explanation of the previous role of carbon in the atmosphere, and how this has changed in recent decades as a result of human activities. Could you summarize this explanation a little?

IA: If we go back some two billion years, there have been times when the earth was frozen solid and other times when the whole earth was tropical and even more than tropical. These shifts occurred naturally, as a result of the way the earth’s orbit works and other factors. But we know that for the past two to three million years at least, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has only varied within very narrow limits.

Somebody has described carbon dioxide as our thermostat: Turn it up a little bit, it gets hotter; turn it down a little bit, it gets colder. We can look at the record of carbon dioxide, which is preserved mainly in the ice in Antarctica and Greenland, and we can show how the earth’s climate has changed closely in line with the variation in the amount of carbon dioxide. The range of changes was very small. During the last Ice Age, which ended twelve thousand years ago—a very short time in Earth history—the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was not much less than it has been until recently. It only took a small shift for the transition to the Holocene to occur.

In the last 11,700 years, the earth’s climate has been relatively stable. All of the great human civilizations developed during this period, when you had a climate warm enough for agriculture, when ice was restricted to certain limited parts of Earth, and so on. We have had variations, but small ones.

Then, in the past century—and really just in the past forty or fifty years—the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has soared. It is getting close to double what it was for that long period. We can already see the consequences of this. The climate is shifting in real time, much, much faster than has ever happened by natural processes. Changes that took hundreds of thousands or millions of years in the past are now occurring in years or decades.

CA: You mentioned that some people believe humans will invent technology to deal with this. But even the International Energy Agency, formed of thirty-one member countries and thirteen association countries, does not think so. According to the agency, carbon capture technologies fall far short of what is needed to control global heating and extreme weather events.

IA: Exactly. Part of capitalist ideology is that no matter what the problem, there is a technical fix. Because if there is no technical fix, then there is something wrong with the society, and the defenders of the society do not want to believe this.

Even if tomorrow we invented a carbon capture technology that would remove CO2 from the atmosphere effectively and quickly, it would still probably be centuries before it had any significant effect. Today, a very small number of carbon capture projects are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the amount collected is the equivalent of taking a few hundred automobiles off the roads. It is nothing compared with the size of the problem.

CA: I would like to situate the ideas about ecosocialism that you set out in your book, including your emphasis on the concept of metabolic rift in the history of anticapitalist thought. What kind of current of thought do you represent and who are your predecessors? Who has inspired your thinking?

IA: In the 1960s and ’70s, when I was first involved in socialist movements, we tended to say socialism would solve everything—sort of the socialist equivalent of the capitalist idea that technology would solve it all. The environmental issue was not considered a big deal. Now that is not fair to the whole of the left. John Bellamy Foster, in The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, shows that there were radical scientists from the time of Karl Marx into the late twentieth century who were seriously looking at these questions and showing how economic and ecological change are related and need to be addressed together. From the 1980s onward, a growing layer of socialists started to call attention to environmental destruction. Initially, they did not talk so much about global warming, but about pollution, loss of biodiversity, and the overexploitation of nature.

CA: But did Marx talk about this in his works?

IA: There has been a tendency to think Marxism had nothing to say about this. Sometimes I think it is because people have read only three or four books by Marx. But Marx wrote an enormous amount, as did Frederick Engels. In this debate, the people who influenced me the most were two U.S. scholars. One is Foster, whom I have just mentioned, a professor at the University of Oregon and the editor of Monthly Review. The other was Paul Burkett, who was a professor at the Indiana State University.

Almost simultaneously, but working separately, they published two very powerful books. Foster’s was Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, and Burkett’s was Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective. What they did was go back to Marx’s work to see what Marx actually had to say, not what people thought he had to say.

Do not forget that a lot of what people thought Marx said actually reflected the Soviet Union’s intensive production policies, which tended to copy what the capitalist countries had done. People who were environmentally conscious looked at that and concluded that there was no difference between capitalism and socialism. They wrote off Marxism because of the activities of one specific group of Marxists.

What both Burkett and Foster did, from very different angles, was to show that Marx’s work contained a deep ecological analysis, even though the word “ecology” had not been invented, and Marx never wrote “I am an ecologist.”

Marx was a materialist. His starting point was that people have to eat before they can do anything else. We have to eat; we have to meet our physical needs. In order to do that, we have to produce, and it is the economy at large that actually creates humans. It is our interaction with nature that makes all this possible. All of that is in Marx and Engels’s works, but people did not look for it because they were not thinking about the environmental issue. Foster, Burkett, and then other people who followed them did.

An important thing that came out of this research, that Foster particularly emphasized, is how much Marx used the concept of metabolism, which was a brand-new idea.

The word originally appeared in German as Stoffwechsel in 1815. Around the 1840s, it started to become a big thing in science. Scientists discovered the cell, they discovered how soil worked, and they realized all life depended on a constant exchange and interaction of energy and material. Life was not possible without taking matter and energy materials from nature, and returning them in changed forms to nature. These processes were cyclical; if nature did not constantly recycle everything, life would not have lasted.

CA: Did Marx follow this debate?

IA: The life sciences developed rapidly in the 1840s and ’50s, at the same time that Marx was writing. He probably got the term metabolism from Roland Daniels, a communist who took part in the uprisings of 1848 in Germany. Daniels was a doctor and scientist, and wrote a book called Mikrokosmos that took the concept of metabolism and applied it to society. Marx had already been using the concept, but without the word itself. In the 1850s, however, he began integrating it into his more general analysis of society and the economy. This appears in the texts he wrote in the 1850s, in the Grundrisse, and particularly in the 1860s, when he was writing Capital.

Marx was especially influenced by Justus von Liebig, a German chemist who is known as the father of organic chemistry. English agriculturalists, who had a problem with declining agricultural productivity, invited Liebig to examine the problem. He told them: “You’re taking all of the nutrients out of the soil and you’re not putting any back. You can’t do that forever. There’s a metabolism here that you have to maintain.” Marx read Liebig carefully—in the 1860s, when he was working on Capital, he wrote to Engels and said he had learned more from reading Liebig than all the economists put together.

CA: How did he use Liebig’s observations in his writings?

IA: He said that there is a universal metabolism. All of nature works this way, not just agriculture, and what we see in agriculture is a rift, a break between the nutrients we take out and the nutrients we put back in. In the natural world, plants grow, they die, animals eat the plants, they die, and their bodies go into the land, which then uses them to grow plants again, but as agriculture became a mass industry, that cycle was broken. Food was shipped to large cities, and then everybody’s waste was dumped in the river. All of those nutrients, instead of going back to the land, polluted rivers and ended up in the ocean.

That’s the origin of the concept that has come to be called “metabolic rift theory,” the idea that many of our environmental problems result from breaks and disruptions in the normal cycles that make life possible on Earth. For hundreds of millions of years, we breathed in oxygen, we breathed out carbon dioxide, and plants did the opposite. That was a fairly stable cycle, but now we are pumping out far more carbon dioxide than nature can absorb by its natural processes. Something else has to change, and that is the planet’s temperature.

CA: At the time, Marx was writing in an intellectual environment that was increasingly separating the world of humans from the world of nature and emphasizing human control over it. In the book Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, the anthropologist Jason Hickel calls this “dualism.” Did Marx and other socialists of the time buy into that idea?

IA: The word “dualism” can be a little tricky to use, but Marx wrote in one of his earlier works that to say that humans change nature is simply to say that humans change themselves because we are part of nature. But he also said that we are something new; prior to our arrival, there was no species that had the ability to change the environment on the scale that we have. So, although we are part of nature, we are also changing nature, which is also changing us. From a Marxist point of view, the issue is not “dualism” or “monism” but “dialectics,” that is, the relationship between the part and the whole. We are part of the whole, but we are also a unique part that is changing the whole.

CA: You are proposing an “ecological society” or “ecological civilization.” Why do you think an ecological society has to be socialist?

IA: Let us start off with capitalism. The main driving force of capitalism is to make a profit, to increase the wealth of a small layer of people. That is its whole objective. Many things follow from that. One of them is a society with a short-term view of everything. From the point of view of a capitalist, if I can make money today, it is better than making money tomorrow, and I am always competing with other capitalists in order to increase my wealth or income, or even just to stay in business. I must constantly find ways to generate more capital, more revenue to make my capital bigger. It is a society that ultimately cannot plan except for short-term gains in wealth.

Only by eliminating the profit motive as the driver of the economy is it going to be possible to stop large-scale destruction of the environment, because ultimately, the way you get richer is by destroying the environment, taking the natural world and converting it into money. That is what socialism aims to change, eliminating the profit motive as the central driver of the economy.

Many other things, obviously, go along with socialism, but that is fundamental: shift the drivers of economic and social decisions to, in Burkett’s term, “sustainable human development.” Our aim is a better world for humans to live in that is sustainable in the long term.

Marx says that we do not own the earth, we are just its temporary possessors, and we must leave it in good condition for future generations. We only have to look at our world now to recognize that we are in a social and economic system for which future generations just do not count. It is today that counts. You never see a politician give a speech that does not talk about economic growth. They say we need more, but it is not more leisure time, or more and better medical care for everybody. It is not more literature or a better way of life. It is more wealth, specifically, more capital.

CA: When you say an ecological society has to be socialist, that we have to remove profit and growth from the equation, do you also identify with the movement calling for “degrowth”?

IA: It is important to understand that the ecosocialist movement that started in the 1990s developed in parallel to the degrowth movement, which was happening mainly in Europe. A lot of the early work in degrowth assumed that all of this growth was just a problem of bad ideas; all we have to do is tell everybody: “No, do it this way,” and everybody will. They tended not to have a social or economic analysis. Some of them did very good work describing what the problems were but not explaining them.

That has shifted over time. I do not agree with everything Hickel writes, but I think that he is hitting the right points. Foster recently wrote a major article about the need to plan for degrowth. He took the idea that we need degrowth but put it in the context of the social and economic changes that are necessary to get there. It is not going to happen because you wish for it. It is only going to happen when we have a society that breaks with the profit motive and moves toward planning for sustainable human development.

We need to look at degrowth as a social issue and think about advertising, military spending, and other things that produce profit but also produce a negative effect on ordinary people’s lives, whether they realize it or not.

CA: You talk about this at length in your book.

IA: Yes, I talk about the things that we could stop doing easily. It would not cause anyone grief if there were no television commercials. Except, of course, the people who were selling things on television. That part of the economy that is entirely given over to selling things and creating new wants is extraordinarily large. Of course, the amount of the economy that is devoted to killing people through military industries is also extraordinarily large. You could cut it by 50, 90, or 100 percent, and the impact on ordinary people would be very slight.

CA: The linguist and leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky does not like the term “degrowth” because it frightens people, especially in the Global South, where many people have nothing. Is it not a way to avoid saying “postcapitalism” directly?

IA: I am also not a fan of the term, but like “Anthropocene,” it is the word we have. The issue is not simple degrowth but rather how to redirect resources to the 90 percent of the world’s population who do not have enough by any measure. We need to level out the global use of resources in a planned way to create the least environmental disruption possible.

CA: The historian Adam Tooze, who is not a Marxist, gave a lecture about the Anthropocene at the end of 2023 at Princeton University, where he said that despite President Joe Biden’s proposed spending on his “climate package,” economic growth in the United States is still being propelled by military spending. At the same time, the fossil fuel emissions of the U.S. military have yet to be mentioned in global climate agreements. This is an issue you also explore in your book.

IA: John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist, argued that the capitalist economy could be kept going simply by the government spending lots of money whenever there was an economic downturn. What we actually got was what has been called “military Keynesianism.” Since the Second World War, the economies of the major capitalist countries have been heavily dependent on military spending. They spend far more than ever shows up in the budgets, because it is not just what is earmarked for the Armed Forces or weapons, but everything that supports those activities. Military spending has been responsible for a good part of what is called growth in capitalism.

Setting aside the benefit of not having wars, redirecting military spending would free up so many resources to solve the issue of inequality in the Global South, to overcome poverty worldwide, to defeat diseases, and so on. It would give us the ability to decide, “we’re not taking this out of nature anymore,” and use the money to reforest, clean the oceans, etc. It is only a handful of countries that have such high military budgets—the United States, according to some estimates, spends more on the military than all of the other countries in the world put together. If you want to define where you would start with degrowth, that is the place to start.

CA: Many people who promote a postcapitalist economy emphasize something called a “care economy,” where there would be increased investments in people, communities, and services that care for nature, the elderly, children, and the sick. What do you think?

IA: Without even going into that particular economic analysis, I think the concept is important. The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed about Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind, by Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean, shows brilliantly how in this society the benefits always go to a tiny minority. I assume this is true in Brazil, and I know it is true in Canada, where I live. Here in Ontario, one of the richest provinces in Canada, when COVID-19 began, there were signs everywhere saying “thank you” to nurses and doctors. Politicians gave speeches about how the frontline health care workers were so essential and important. But at the same time, the government of Ontario passed a law preventing nurses from negotiating higher wages. So, in reality, the politicians did not really care. I think a large driver of socialist society will be ensuring that nobody falls through the cracks.

CA: A question of great importance to Brazil is how the current system of food production results in deforestation and soil contamination. There is now a lot of discussion about the need to change the system we adopted during the so-called Green Revolution. In your work on an ecological society, have you ever explored this term?

IA: I wrote an article in 2023 about soy cultivation and its gigantic impact not just on Brazil, but on South America and the world in general. There is a lot of talk of “feeding the world,” except the money is not being invested in food for people. Huge expanses of the natural world are being used mainly to feed chickens and pigs. It is an incredibly inefficient form of production because you are using a high-energy product to feed domestic animals, which are only then used to feed people. You lose energy at every level.

It is a really destructive way to feed the world. Soy growers cut everything down and create huge plots to grow soy and nothing else. We are mostly not talking about individual farmers as the problem here, but giant agricultural corporations. Many people who live off the land are deprived of access to it.

You mentioned the Green Revolution, which was supposed to solve the so-called problem of overpopulation in the Global South by replacing peasant farming with large-scale chemical farming based on large inputs of artificial fertilizers and large-scale extraction of water. This increase in the production of maize, wheat, or several other products was made possible by environmental destruction on a massive scale.

CA: We would need a radical reduction in the use of fossil fuels to limit the rise in the planet’s temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, compared to pre-industrial levels. In this context, how do you evaluate where we are in the global discussion of ecosocialism?

IA: The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci spoke of “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” That was his attitude to life, and it is the attitude I try to have myself. When I look at the current situation and the apparent complete unwillingness of our rulers to make any substantive changes in the right direction, I feel very unhappy with the world my children and grandchildren will inherit. I do not see how we could keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius or even 2 degrees.

However, history shows that the world can change rapidly. The key question is: Are we going to see large numbers of people start moving for change? Ecosocialists aim to help people in thinking about this and figuring out what to do.

A few years ago, there were plans to run a pipeline through the town where I live. It would have carried substantial amounts of tar sands oil, really dirty oil. Even though this is a very conservative town, we had meetings and rallies, and we stopped the project. Now that was a small victory for a small town, but we need to build on such victories before time runs out.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2025/0 ... it-system/

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What Could Possibly Be Worse Than Carbon Credit Markets? Water Credit Markets. And They Could Be On Their Way
Posted on February 28, 2025 by Nick Corbishley

The goal, says Singapore’s president, is to develop “a reliable (sic) carbon credit system with a stapling on of water and biodiversity credits.”

At this year’s annual meeting in Davos, there was a panel discussion on the future of global water management that, perhaps rather surprisingly (or not) given the potential impact on our lives of the ideas discussed, garnered scant attention in the mainstream press.

The discussion’s speakers included Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the president of Singapore who is also a big mover in global finance and business fora, and he shared a rather interesting — and dangerous — idea with his co-panellists. To confront the myriad environmental challenges it faces, what the world needs, he said, is a market for water credits and biodiversity credits based on the current one for carbon credits:

We are dealing with something which science is very clear on, but it must then be reflected in out governance approaches, policies and financing strategies, including one of the very important areas of potential which is developing the market for credits. Just like we have carbon credits, we need to develop the market for water credits and biodiversity credits…

Nature-based solutions are a big thing. They’re an extremely important part of global warning mitigation, climate change mitigation. You can argue about exactly what percentage of mitigation should come down to nature-based solutions but we know that there’s so much good that arises from nature-based solutions.*

That is not just about reducing carbon emissions or capturing more carbon but also about all the other core benefits of nature-based solutions: reduced pollution, reduced heat, improved disease management — a whole set of other benefits. Think of nature-based solutions not just in terms of carbon. Think of nature-based solutions as a way of managing, carbon emissions and preserving biodiversity, because if you think of them together the ripple effect is much larger.

“Nature-based solutions” is a relatively newly coined (pun intended) term. In 2023, we cross-posted an interview of Devlin Kuyek, a researcher in the global program at the NGO GRAIN, by Lynn Paramore about the real meanings behind much of the jargon spouted by corporate environmentalists and conservation NGOs, including “nature-based solutions”:

[T]his is a somewhat new word. It comes from the big conservation NGOs. But it is being increasingly used by the fossil fuel industry and by Big Food and Ag as a way to describe carbon offsets that come from forests and land. It’s not just for the climate crisis but it can also be for biodiversity loss and those things.

Again, it’s just a way for them to say: Okay, let’s look at how we can use nature to resolve the quandary that we’re in, in which our profit model is to blame for the climate crisis. So how can we get around that? Well, let’s look to these remaining forests. Let’s look to the farmlands and see how that they can provide an offset for us so we can keep on, we can keep on polluting.

It is vaguely reminiscent of the “indulgences” that rich Catholics paid to the Church during the Middle Ages in order to wipe their sins clean, which were initially used to support charities for the public good but fell into misuse and abuse, with one key difference: in the case of carbon credits and offsets, the burden of payment falls not solely on the sinner but also on poor, often indigenous communities half a world away from the polluting company.

Our ever-irreverent Rev Kev, responding to a 2022 post, offered a more graphic analogy:

If you are going to cut carbon, you have to do it at its source, not someplace else on the other side of the planet. The way that I would argue it is that it is like taking a massive dump in your desk draw and then going outside to plant a whole bunch of roses in the belief that one action will cancel the other. But we all know how that would work out and I am calling out this whole idea of carbon offsets being in the same category.

Unfettered Financialisation of Nature

The problem with carbon credits is not just that they are essentially a scam, as I will explain later, but rather that they end up imposing restrictive conditions on the populations of the Global South, who are least responsible for today’s climate and environmental crises. Back to the interview:

FRIES: So briefly comment on GRAIN’s position that nature based solutions are rightfully described as nature based dispossessions.

KUYEK: Yes, because they involve such large areas of land. So again, the emissions that we’re talking about are huge. And just again from the food system alone. A third of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from the industrial food system.

So if you think about trying to offset even just a fraction of that it is a huge amount of land and forest that would be required. I gave the example of Nestle of 4 million hectares per year that they would need to be taking over.

Almost all of these projects are happening in the Global South. And it will involve the dispossession of people who lose control of their lands and territories.

Ironically, Singapore provided a perfect example of this a few years ago. As John Bellamy Foster recounts in his article for Monthly Review, “The Defense of Nature: Resisting the Financializaton of the Earth“, in late 2021 the Singapore shell company Hoch Standard signed an agreement with political leaders in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo, without the knowledge of the region’s indigenous communities, essentially granting the company title to the management and marketing of “natural capital/ecosystem services” on two million hectares of a forest ecosystem for one hundred to two hundred years:

Although the full nature of the agreement has not been disclosed, journalistic investigations and a lawsuit filed by Adrian Lasimbang, an Indigenous leader in Malaysian Borneo, have revealed that the Nature Conservation Agreement allowed Hoch Standard—a holding company with two officers and a paid-up capital provided by shareholders of a mere $1,000 U.S. dollars, but backed by undisclosed multibillion dollar private-equity investors—to acquire commercial rights to the natural capital in Sabah’s forest ecosystem. The revenue from the rights to ecosystem services, such as water provisioning, carbon sequestration, sustainable forestry, and biodiversity conservation, over the next century was estimated at some $80 billion, with 30 percent, or $24 billion, to go to Hoch Standard. It was stipulated that the Sabah government could not withdraw from the agreement, while Hoch Standard could sell its rights to the natural capital in the Sabah Forest to other investors without government consent…

The Natural Conservation Agreement between the Sabah government and Hoch Standard was brokered by the Australian consulting firm Tierra Australia, specializing in the financialization of natural capital. Peter Burgess, CEO of Tierra Australia, has defended the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from the agreement on the neocolonial, racist basis that if it were necessary to “sit around every campfire” talking to Indigenous peoples about the “jungles” they happen to live in, nothing at all would be accomplished. According to Burgess, the Indigenous communities—there are thirty-nine Indigenous ethnic groups in the forest reserves in Sabah, making up a population of more than twenty-five thousand—“actually don’t know that their jungles…are going to be conserved for 200 years” by the agreement, which is aimed at “restoring [their] jungles,” providing benefits so as to “uplift” them, “bringing them back into normal society.” Tierra Australia is closely connected to major multinational banks in the capitalist core, such as Credit Suisse and HSBC, along with major Singapore Banks, all of which have been heavily involved in investments in natural capital. It has partnered with Hoch Standard, along with Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cornell, in devising natural capital platforms for private investment.2

Scandals and Scams

When the concept of “nature-based solutions” was first floated at the 2022 UN climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, 257 organisations, networks and movements from 61 countries, almost all from the Global South, roundly rejected the concept, arguing that the “climate damage caused when corporations keep releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere cannot be offset through planting trees, protecting forests, restoring soils or tweaking industrial farming practices”:

“Forests, soils, eco-systems and biodiversity must be restored and protected for sure. But to meaningfully address the havoc wreaked by industrial agriculture, globalized industrial food systems and global trade, we need systemic transformation such as agroecology, local sustainable food systems, short supply chains and territorial markets.”

The most common form of nature-based solution, carbon credits and carbon offsets, have been mired in controversy as the market itself has plunged in value. As the Guardian reported in 2024, “two years [after a surge in corporate demand for carbon credits] many carbon markets organisations are clinging on for survival, with several firms losing millions of dollars a year and cutting jobs. Scandals about environmentally worthless credits, an FBI charge against a leading project developer for a $100m fraud, and a lack of clarity about where money from offsets went has caused their market value to plunge by more than half.”

Also in 2024, Deutsche Well exposed a Chinese firm that had run a “billion-euro carbon credit scam”. In 2023, it was revealed that more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are essentially worthless. In 2021, researchers found that credits were being granted for projects that would have happened anyway in a UN-run clean development mechanism. In 2022, Bloomberg reported that many of the world’s biggest companies are making offsetting claims with old renewable energy projects.

The list goes on… Last year, the Australian Institute, a public policy think tank that carries out research on economic, social, and environmental issues, helpfully compiled a list of 23 times carbon offsets were found to be “dodgy”.

They include a study published in Science that found that “many deforestation projects have not significantly reduced deforestation” and that “for projects that did, reductions were substantially lower than claimed”. Another study, published in Nature Communications: Earth & Environment, revealed that Californian forest offsets may have increased emissions. It’s a similar story in the Amazon. As ProPublica reported in 2019, half of the Amazonian rainforests that were issued carbon offsets to prevent deforestation have been cleared.

Despite all of these scandals, Singapore’s President Tharman Shanmugaratnam wants to apply the same model not only on to the world’s water reserves but also biodiversity:

The carbon credits market has an infrastructure, it has an ecosystem. They were integrity issues (NC: apparently they’ve all been solved), there are greenwashing issues. The significant improvement happening now, the ICVM, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Council Markets*, the SBTI, the Science-Based Targets Initiative, there’s a lot of good work taking place to improve integrity and improve trust in the markets. And I believe this is going to be a very significant source of financing for nature-based solutions.

And here comes the kicker (emphasis my own):

Now, I think it will be very difficult to create a whole ecosystem for water credits, sustainable water credits and biodiversity credits side by side with carbon credits. It can be done in theory, but it’s going to exhaust the private sector and it’s going to exhaust negotiators. Much better that we work on a reliable carbon credit system with a stapling on of water and biodiversity credits.

It’s still at its infancy. There are biodiversity credits that are currently being stapled on, and it’s being done rather qualitatively because we don’t yet have precise, quantitative ways of assessing biodiversity benefits in a way that can be compared across different projects and different regions and geographies.

But rest assured, the bankers, fund managers and tech companies that are leading this gargantuan effort not only to financialise just about everything in nature but also to tokenise it will find a way. If a full-fledged water credits market does become a reality, it will further intensify the commodification of the world’s most precious resource which has already seen the launch in 2021 of a water trade market on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange with contracts tied to California water prices.

A Man of Influence

The influence of Shanmugaratnam himself spreads far beyond the shores of Singapore, where over the past two decades he has served in multiple overlapping, if not conflicting roles, including as president (2023- ), senior minister (2019-2023), chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the country’s central bank (2011-2023), deputy prime minister (2011 and 2019) and minister of finance (2007-15). For four years (2011-15) he was not only the chairman of Singapore’s central bank but also its minister of finance.

But it is Shanmugaratnam’s influence at the global level that should be of most interest to us here. For a start, he is a member of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum (WEF), an advisory board that helps shape the strategic directions of the WEF, which in turn, as we’ve reported before, helps to shape the strategic direction of the United Nations.

He also currently chairs the Board of Trustees (BoT) of the Group of Thirty (G30), a shady grouping of 30 largely Western bankers, central bankers, policymakers and academics that rather cheekily adopted the “G”30 label to lend itself, a private sector institution, the veneer of official legitimacy.

Its members include Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, ex-UN special envoy for climate and finance and one of four candidates running to replace Justin Trudeau as leader of Canada’s Liberal Party; Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England; Agustín Carstens, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, often dubbed the “central of central banks”; former US Treasury Sec Larry Summers; and Pan Gongsheng, the governor of the People’s Bank of China.

While the group prides itself on being a well-intentioned forum for “deepen(ing) understanding of international economic and financial issues,” gatherings like this, as Yves has noted previously, “exist to promote collusion and influence peddling cooperation and information sharing.”

Shanmugaratnam’s list of appointments does not end there. He also co-chairs the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW), which puts him in a favourable position to promote his idea of “stapling” water and biodiversity credits onto the current carbon credit system. The Commission was established in 2022 to “redefine the way we value and govern water” and its initial recommendations for global water management policies helped shape the outcomes of the UN Water Conference in March 2023.

Water credit initiatives modelled on carbon credits are already sprouting up in disparate corners of the world. In June last year, India’s biggest bottled water company proposed a framework to establish water credits to make the country’s beverage industry more “accountable” for its water use. From Livemint:

Packaged water maker Bisleri is looking to introduce water credits akin to carbon credits, aimed at making beverage makers more accountable for water usage.

The company has partnered [with] TERI School of Advanced Studies to conduct a study that would set a benchmark for the beverage industry’s commitment to water conservation.

In the UK, Cambridge City Council has also invoked “water credits” as a solution to the city’s severe water crisis even as the same city council embarks on a massive urban expansion project. The broader region, East Anglia, is the driest in the country yet has been chosen by the government for the greatest growth.

“A Bubble of Delusion”

Last year, the then-Housing Minister Michael Gove unveiled plans to pour investment into Cambridge to build ‘Europe’s Silicon Valley,’ including the intention to deliver up to 250,000 additional homes under the Government’s Cambridge 2040 vision. But what about the region’s acute water shortages?

The government has promised to build a new reservoir as well as build pipelines to bring water from as far away as Wales, but it will be years before these are in operation, if indeed they ever are. Meanwhile, water credits have been cited as a nice short-term workaround. In its update on measures for addressing water scarcity in Greater Cambridge the government announced a “one-off commitment” to introduce a water credits system in Cambridgeshire in the hope that it will help unlock the 9,000 homes and 300,000 square metres of commercial space that are currently held up in the planning system due to water scarcity concerns:

We will pilot a ‘water credits’ system where developers can offset their development through the purchase and sale of water credits to ensure they have a neutral impact on water scarcity within Cambridge. This will provide the mechanism for development to progress through planning while minimising the risk to the environment. We are undertaking detailed design work but can set out now our starting point in doing that work…

We will establish a market framework and a market operator who will oversee where ‘water credits’ can be allocated to developers to ensure that the impact of water demand from new development is neutralised… Once the system is up and running the market operator will match up buyers and sellers of water credits. Developers will be expected to increase levels of water efficiency and reuse (where possible), with the remaining water that cannot be reduced, offset through the purchase of credits.

The government hopes that this will be enough to persuade the Environmental Agency (EA) to drop its objections to major urban developments in this area because of the acute water scarcity. The EA and Defra (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) have already described the government’s development plans for the city as “a risk to the environment and security of supply”.

In a recent letter to The Guardian, Jean Glasberg, a councillor at Cambridge City Council, wrote that the government and corporate groups behind it were living in a bubble of delusion: “thanks to water credits, these rational objections can now be overruled, and the government, together with powerful interest groups, can continue to pursue the god of economic growth unhindered by logic or material facts.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... genda.html

[blindpig]

Ethanol is just comically inefficient solar energy

It’s time to bring the real thing to the U.S. heartland


Corn awaiting harvest at the Hansen Family Farms on October 12, 2019 in Baxter, Iowa. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
By Tom Philpott, January 19, 2024

For all the backbiting and vitriol, the main candidates in the recent Iowa GOP presidential caucus agreed on a lot of issues, from immigration crackdowns (wonderful) to federal incentives for electric cars (evil). But no topic brought them into more violent consensus than the sanctity of federal support for corn-based ethanol. The heart of the nation’s corn belt, Iowa is the Saudi Arabia of that industry; and Donald Trump and his longshot rivals all vowed to maintain the federal policies that prop it up.

On this point, they’ll find no argument from the presumptive Democratic nominee. President Joe Biden staunchly supports the practice of turning corn into car fuel, as does his agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, who once served as governor of Iowa.

Whether they know it or not, all of these politicians are calling for the government to prop up what is a particularly byzantine and wasteful form of … solar energy. You can’t grow corn without photosynthesis, which converts energy from sunlight into plant tissue. But to liberate this embedded sun power, ethanol-bound corn must be pulverized, inundated with water, fermented, and distilled into alcohol, which can then be mixed with gasoline and burned to power engines. And that’s after the corn is planted, doused with fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers, shielded from weeds and insects with toxic chemicals, and harvested.


A solar array sits in a corn field on a farm near Faribault, Minnesota. The owners say leasing land for the “community solar” garden removes several acres from crop production but provides extra revenue. AP Photo/Jim Mone.
There’s a more straightforward way to leverage the sun, one that could generate much more energy with a fraction of the fuss: the photovoltaic solar panel, which directly converts sunshine into electricity that can be fed into power grids that, in turn, charge up electric vehicles, which use energy far more efficiently than do internal combustion engines. (Conventional cars convert just 20 percent of the fuel they burn to locomotion, vs. nearly 90 percent for EVs).

And when it comes to churning out energy on a given piece of land, solar is vastly more efficient than ethanol. According to the 2023 Iowa Climate Statement, signed by more than 200 science faculty at 31 colleges and universities across the state, a “one-acre solar farm produces as much energy as 100 acres of corn-based ethanol” over the course of a year. Dedicating even a fraction of the land now devoted to ethanol to solar panels would produce more energy and ease the ecological burden on our most prolific farming region, the former prairies and wetlands of the Midwest.

Corn, the largest U.S. crop, blankets this rich landscape. Every year, goaded by billions worth of federal commodity payments and subsidized crop insurance, farmers plant around 90 million acres of corn—a combined landmass roughly the size of California. Their massive output—nearly 14 billion bushels—accounts for nearly a third of all the corn grown on Earth. About 45 percent of it ends up as feed for America’s factory-scale meat farms; another 10 percent goes into sweeteners and starches; and another 14 percent gets exported into the global animal-feed market. That leaves fully 30 percent of U.S. corn production without an obvious place to go, and that’s where ethanol comes in. Rather than downsize their acreage to meet demand for their corn, and then do something else with the freed-up land, farmers maintain all-out corn production, counting on the government to conjure a liquid fuel market to sop up the gaping surplus.

During the late-1970s energy crisis, agribusiness interests succeeded in winning tax breaks that enticed Big Oil to add low levels of ethanol to gasoline. But the big win came in 2007. Shortly after declaring the nation “addicted to oil,” George W. Bush pushed through a bipartisan law with a “renewable fuel standard” that effectively mandated a dramatic increase in corn ethanol production. As a result, the portion of the U.S. corn crop devoted to the fuel rose from 11 percent in 2004 to 30 percent in 2015, where it has held steady. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden have all maintained the mandate. As a result, we devote about 30 million acres of prime farmland—an area the size of Virginia—to growing fuel for our cars. Thus U.S. farmers use nearly three times as much acreage growing fuel for outmoded internal-combustion engines than they do growing fruits and vegetables.

Stunningly, this enormous commitment of land has done little to fix our reliance on petroleum. While ethanol now makes up about 10 percent of every gallon that goes into our tanks, that number exaggerates its impact. On a per-gallon basis, ethanol produces about two thirds the energy of gasoline. That means we’re burning nearly a third of our vast corn crop to offset less than 7 percent of gas use.

And despite the political marketing, there isn’t much that’s “renewable” about corn-based ethanol, beyond the ability to grow it year after year. Sown in conjunction with soybeans—another industrial crop whose main uses are livestock feed, processed-food ingredients, exports, and car fuel in the form of biodiesel—corn requires massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides, which leach off fields and drive a growing water pollution crisis throughout the corn belt. Meanwhile, planting and harvesting the same two crops at the same time each year leaves the ground unprotected during the spring and early summer, making it vulnerable to erosion as increasingly fierce storms mobilize bare soil. In a spate of recent papers, a team of University of Massachusetts researchers have calculated that about one third of the corn belt has already fully lost its carbon-rich layer of topsoil—and what’s left is eroding away at a pace ranging from 10 to 1,000 times the natural rate of replenishment. In short, to grow all of that corn, we’re consuming a crucial resource, soil, that’s not renewable at human time scales.

Nor is ethanol doing much to mitigate climate change—and it may actually be helping drive it. From a greenhouse gas emissions perspective, the Renewable Fuel Standard has failed, says Jason Hill, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering. By displacing a small amount of oil, the law made conventional gasoline a little cheaper, which inspired people to drive more while buying less-fuel-efficient vehicles than they would otherwise have. As a result, Hill and two colleagues found in a 2016 paper, the net effect of the law was to boost greenhouse gas emissions from cars by about 22 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, equivalent to the output of nearly six coal-fired power plants. Then there’s all the nitrogen fertilizer, which when applied to farm fields emits an annual tsunami of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon. Hill and his colleagues have found that nitrogen fertilizer applied to corn also results in emissions of ammonia, a powerful pollutant, that have been associated with 4,300 premature U.S. deaths each year.

Rather than hew to this grim status quo, we could generate more—and much cleaner—energy by phasing out ethanol and dedicating a fraction of the land that grows this feedstock to solar panels. For landowners who would be loath to stop farming and become energy producers, there’s no reason to have to choose between the two. A group of researchers at Purdue University have developed PV panels designed to work in conjunction with field crops. They go vertical when farm machinery needs to pass, and otherwise adjust to “optimize the amount of electricity generated and the amount of light that crops receive” as the growing season proceeds. The mixing of solar panels and crops—known as “agrivoltaics”—is much more worthy of federal support than ethanol. Why not shift the subsidy from planting corn to installing panels?

But no one is talking about planting solar panels from fencerow to fencerow across the state of Iowa. To replace the energy generated by the ethanol mandate would require only about 1 million acres—just 3 percent of the land now cultivated for corn-based car fuel. With the remaining land, now freed from energy production, farmers could be incentivized to try out forms of agriculture proven to grow plenty of food while also sucking up carbon, holding soil in place, and keeping water clean—like interspersing row crops, including oats, wheat, or even vegetables, with fruit and nut trees, a practice known as agroforestry. Or they could be paid to return some land to native prairie, savanna, and wetland, which would also sequester carbon and improve downstream water quality.

The real challenge isn’t figuring out better uses for land than churning out a low-quality fuel for a soon-to-be-obsolete form of transportation. It’s debunking the misbegotten pro-ethanol consensus that’s so potent among the political class that it unites such otherwise warring figures as Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

https://thefern.org/2024/01/ethanol-is- ... ar-energy/

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US wild bird populations continue steep decline
March 17, 2025

‘A full-on emergency across all habitats’



The 2025 U.S. State of the Birds report was released on March 13 at the 90th annual North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The report, produced by a coalition of leading science and conservation organizations, reveals continued widespread declines in American wild bird populations across all mainland and marine habitats, with 229 species requiring urgent conservation action. The report comes five years after the landmark 2019 study that documented the loss of 3 billion birds in North America over 50 years.

Key findings from the new report show that more than one-third of U.S. bird species are of high or moderate conservation concern, including 112 Tipping Point species that have lost more than 50% of their populations in the last 50 years. That includes 42 red-alert species facing perilously low populations, such as Allen’s Hummingbird, Tricolored Blackbird, and Saltmarsh Sparrow — birds that are at risk without immediate intervention.

“Birds tell us that we have a full-on emergency across all habitats,” said Marshall Johnson, chief conservation officer at the National Audubon Society.

According to the report, bird populations in almost every habitat are declining. Most notably, duck populations, which have been a bright spot in past State of the Birds reports, have trended downward in recent years.

“The rapid declines in birds signal the intensifying stressors that wildlife and people alike are experiencing around the world because of habitat loss, environmental degradation, and extreme weather events,” said Dr. Amanda Rodewald, faculty director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Center for Avian Population Studies. “When we see declines like those outlined in the report, we need to remember that if conditions are not healthy for birds, they’re unlikely to be healthy for us.”

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2025/0 ... p-decline/

Using a photo of a dead invasive English Sparrow was not the best choice...

It’s time to stop capitalism’s runaway train!
March 16, 2025

Capitalism is undermining nature’s metabolism, and Earth’s life support systems are breaking down



The British socialist organization Counterfire published this interview with Climate and Capitalism editor Ian Angus on March 13. The interviewer was Michael Lavalette.

I wonder if you could tell us about your history of activism?

I became a socialist in the 1960s, and have long been active in the antiwar and other movements. In 2007, I wrote an article about capitalism and ecological destruction and realised both that there was much more to be said about the connection between capitalism and ecological destruction than would fit in one article, and that, although a growing number of people viewed themselves as ecosocialists, there were no websites devoted to ecosocialism and ecological Marxism. So on January 29, 2007, I launched Climate & Capitalism as ‘an ecosocialist journal, reflecting the viewpoint of environmental Marxism’. As we approach our twentieth anniversary, the journal continues as a global forum both for information about environmental crises and for discussion about ecosocialist strategies and tactics.

I’m not a member of any political party, but I work closely with socialists and Marxists in various groups around the world. As an extension of that, I was a founding member of the Global Ecosocialist Network, a loose formation with members on five continents

You are a very articulate voice from the radical left on the extent and nature of the climate catastrophe, and your online journal Climate & Capitalism does a great job recording, monitoring and discussing the unfolding crisis, so how would you briefly summarise the present situation with the crisis?

The Earth is in bad shape. We aren’t sleepwalking into disaster: we are running as fast as we can. Greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere are higher than even pessimistic models from a decade ago expected, and we are starting to see the serious consequences of global warming.

James Hansen, one of the leading scientists in the field, has just published a paper that concludes that it is not going to be possible to keep the global average temperature increase below 1.5 degrees. That even 2 degrees is now unattainable.

We are seeing forest fires on a scale never witnessed before. The Amazon forest is one of the greatest carbon sinks, but as a result of fires, it is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs. In addition to wreaking massive destruction, fires in Canada and the U.S. are producing vast amounts of greenhouse gases. Glaciers are melting faster than anticipated, driving faster increases in ocean levels.

The combination of rising sea levels and more intense storms, caused by warmer ocean water, is causing larger storm surges and widespread flooding. Flood barriers built on twentieth-century assumptions no longer work.

We are seeing heat like never seen before: 2024 was the hottest year on record. Scientists thought January would be cooler because the El Niño ended, but though ocean currents changed as expected, global temperatures increased: a really bad sign.

In parts of the world, rising temperatures are getting deadly. For example, during the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca last year, temperatures went over 40 degrees every day, causing over 1300 deaths.

Across the board everything is getting worse, worse than the most pessimistic scientific predictions of a few years ago.

How does the election of Trump affect things?

I’m half-way inclined to suggest it won’t have much effect! Because, despite their occasional nod in the direction of global reduction targets, no U.S politician, Democrat or Republican, has done much in practice. That’s true everywhere. In country after country, politicians have signed international agreements and promised to act, but in practice, have done little or nothing. With Trump at least we have some honesty; he says he is going to do nothing to protect the environment, and he won’t.

But of course, Trump’s election does matter because he brings a new dynamic. His commitment is not just to do nothing, but actually to accelerate the damage: to boost oil and gas production, to increase coal production and to eliminate the few gains that we have won in past years. Other right-wing governments, particularly in Europe, are likely to follow his example. Trump’s election makes our struggles more difficult, and more essential.

Your next book looks at how capitalism is generating ‘metabolic rifts’. Could you tell us what you mean by this term?

Marx, following the scientists of his day, recognised that many natural processes involve cycles connecting various organisms, exchanges of matter and energy that make life possible. Life is dependent on recycling. As a very obvious example, we breathe oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, while plants breathe carbon dioxide in and oxygen out. That metabolic cycle allows both animals and plants to live.

Marx focused in particular on agriculture and the depletion of soil caused by capitalist farming. Up to a few hundred years ago, farmers planted crops that took nutrients from the soil, and the soil was replenished by waste products that returned into the soil. But with the development of large cities and markets, food was shipped to the cities and waste products were dumped into rivers or the sea. The metabolic cycle was broken, the soil was deprived of nutrients, and crop yields declined. This is just one example of the way that capitalism breaks metabolic cycles and creates ‘metabolic rifts’.

That doesn’t just occur in agriculture. Think about carbon dioxide. For hundreds of thousands of years, recycling has kept the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere roughly constant, and that has kept global temperatures within a narrow range. But now we are producing far more CO2 than plants can consume, and, at the same time, we are destroying vast areas of forest and plant life. We have broken the metabolic cycle and global heating is the result.

At least a dozen global metabolic cycles are now breaking down because capitalism’s short-term pursuit of profit undermines the Earth’s natural metabolic processes. Of course, people mistreated the planet and the land on local scales before capitalism, but capitalism is a truly global system and its destruction of metabolic cycles is planet-wide, so global changes are happening hundreds of times faster than ever before.

What needs to happen to address all this?

Let me start off by saying I don’t think we are facing short-term extinction. Humans will survive. The question is: what will our lives be like if we don’t stop capitalism’s runaway train?

The major impacts of the climate crisis will be in equatorial regions, and the people most affected will be the poorest: those whose lives ‘don’t count’ as far as the governments of the major powers are concerned.

Parts of the globe will be essentially uninhabitable most of the time, and pretty much everywhere will experience longer and more intense heat waves, increased flooding, more storms, probably more pandemics.

What do we need to do? Well, the steps we need to take are well known. There is no magic to this! The main thing is that we must substantially reduce our use of fossil fuels, in transportation, industry, and agriculture. We need to prioritise public transport over private cars, we need well-built insulated homes and public buildings, we need to switch agriculture from mass industrial production to more locally resourced and sustainable farming.

We have to stop doing the things that are purely wasteful, and so much of the capitalist economy is waste. Let’s start with the war machine, which only exists to kill and destroy. Let’s stop spending billions on advertising.

All of these measures require ending what old-time socialists correctly called the ‘profit system’. All economic decisions and actions must be based on promoting sustainable human development, not on enriching few billionaires.

You know, people sometimes say Marx didn’t say much about the ecological costs of capitalism, but actually he did! He said, to paraphrase, that we don’t own the planet, we are just the temporary custodians or tenants of the world and our job is to hand it over to the next generation in good or better condition. If that revolutionary principle was embedded in all economic decision making, then most of the environmental and ecological crises we face could be eliminated.

What do we need to do, as a left, to build and sustain a movement against climate change?

I think the election of Trump has shaken the climate movement, but we need to re-engage and reconnect quickly. For too much of the left, the environment is just one item in a list of issues, given no particular emphasis. That needs to change. Capitalism is driving ecological crises that, in the lifetime of our children and our grandchildren, will disrupt social life and make our lives, their lives, much more difficult. We need to work together across the left to make campaigning around climate issues central to our work as ecosocialist anticapitalists.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2025/0 ... way-train/

[blindpig]

Eco-modernism as Delusionary Soft Climate Change Denial
Roger Boyd
Mar 20, 2025



The site Naked Capitalism published this hopium-filled delusional eco-modernist garbage, seemingly as a target for its readership to vent its spleen at. The comments section obliged. I quote it in its entirety simply to display what passes for critical thinking with respect to climate action in much of the official “progressive” sphere:

By Haley Zaremba, a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. Originally published at OilPrice

To achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, significant changes are required across all sectors of the global economy.

Homes will be powered by renewable energy, transportation will be electrified, and diets will shift towards more sustainable options.

A net-zero future will rely on widespread adoption of green technologies, including solar and wind power, hydrogen fuel cells, and advanced energy storage solutions.

In December 2015, 196 national representatives met in Paris, France to establish a strategy to combat climate change at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21). The result was one of the most critical pieces – if not the most critical – of climate legislature ever inked. The 196 parties entered a legally binding agreement to limit “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and endeavor “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

Experts agree that in order to reach these goals, global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. This represents a massive shift from the way that the world’s industries, economies, and trade relationships function at a base level. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes, “implementation of the Paris Agreement requires economic and social transformation, based on the best available science.” Achieving the legally binding goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement will require international coordination and cooperation at a scale never before seen.

What exactly will a net zero world look like? What will getting there require, and how will our day-to-day lives change in the process? “Our descendants will live in a world that will be a very different place to how it is today, with wholesale changes in their homes, modes of transport, and the landscape that surrounds them,” RBC Wealth Management promised in a 2022 report. The details of those changes are hard to predict, but experts have speculated at length about the broad strokes.

In a decarbonized world, homes will be powered by solar panels and temperature-regulated by heat pumps. The materials that the houses themselves are built from will also be sourced from supply chains that are vastly transformed away from today’s carbon-intensive steelmaking and shipping industries. A large part of this could likely be a move away from the profoundly dirty fossil fuels used in these processes – coal and heavy fuel oil – toward hydrogen, which can be combusted in a similar manner to fossil fuels. In a 2050 world, our steel may be made by burning green hydrogen rather than coking coal, and the ships that connect the different nodes of global supply chains may be powered by hydrogen fuel cells. And none of our new houses will be connected to the gas grid. That’s right – we will no longer be cooking with gas.

As you may expect, almost all of us will be driving electric vehicles in a decarbonized 2050, but they won’t be the same as today’s EVs. These EVs will function as grid storage batteries, feeding energy back into the grid when they are sitting idle, thereby helping to regulate and balance energy grids that are reliant on variable energies including wind and solar. An EV is able to store more energy in its battery than the average household uses in a day, turning them into powerful energy storage solutions. They will also likely be able to charge wirelessly, dramatically improving functionality and easing infrastructural needs. Our public transportation and even airplane flights will go free of fossil fuels as well, relying on both electrification and hydrogen fuel cells to get from point A to point B.

Even our diets will change. It is estimated that to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, consumption of beef, lamb and dairy will have to decrease by 20%. Meat and dairy alone account for approximately 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Within this category, beef is by far the biggest culprit due to methane emissions from the cows themselves, as well as deforestation caused by increasing land needed to raise cattle and grow animal feed.

Our landscapes, too, will transform. Mass-scale wind and solar farms will continue to proliferate in rural areas. Our cities, too, will change, with more green areas to serve as carbon sinks. Electric wires could begin to pop up above our highways to power electric transport, much like cable cars. And the way that we store and transmit energy will change in ways both visible and invisible to us. Some researchers even contend that we may be able to look forward to a North American super-grid spanning from Canada to Mexico. Such a grid would allow the regions of North America to function off of all or mostly renewable energy by, as “dividing the regions into 20 interconnected sub-regions, based on population, energy demand, area and electricity grid structure, could significantly reduce storage requirements and overall cost of the energy system.”

The 2015 Paris Agreement was in reality a huge step back as it involved only unenforceable promises instead of enforceable commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; promises that have been utterly ignored by the countries that made them. And even those promises fell far short of what was required to keep the global average surface temperature under 2 degrees centigrade above “pre-industrial” levels; even utilizing the highly optimistic assumptions underlying the UN IPCC calculations. So we can immediately throw away the first two paragraphs as at best utterly ignorant of reality and at worst conscious misrepresentation.

In the third paragraph the author quotes RBC Wealth Management, a financial organization that is utterly dependent upon exponential economic growth to exist. Only empty platitudes and eco-modernist fantasies could be expected from such an organization. Then four paragraphs of “shit will just magically happen”, with no reference to political-economic reality and the massive socio-economic changes that would be required for this shit to happen. These paragraphs also push the boondoggle technologies of green hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells which have again and again been shown to be only a useful delusion for maintaining the status quo. Then of course, that our diets will magically change with no real hardship.

Nothing about the massive role played by industrialized agriculture in producing GHG emissions. No question about how all the energy will be generated to build out the huge wind farms, solar farms, mega-grids, batteries etc. between now and the mythical future. No mention that we have already passed 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial (1.7 degrees centigrade if we actually use the pre-industrial period of 1750) and need to massively cut GHG emissions NOW not in some mythical zero carbon future in 2050. Nothing about the fact that government policies, even in so called climate action leading nations, are far, far behind what is required. Nothing about the recent climate conference debacle in Azerbaijan!

I went and read that 2022 RBC Wealth Management Report that the author quoted and realized that the whole article is simply a greenwashing. So then I dug into the author. Now let’s remember that this article was published on the web site “OilPrice.com”, which is a fossil fuel industry web site to which Haley has been contributing since 2017. Most of her articles have little to do with combating climate change and much to do with uncritically discussing fossil fuel extraction and usage. She is also a gender researcher at The Alliance of Biodiversity International and CIAT, an organization funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, multiple Western governments and industry associations. Her twitter feed is full of how “gender matters” when it comes to environmentalism, lets forget about class differences, imperialism etc. … i.e. anything that would question the current oligarch-dominated and neo-colonial status quo. Instead we get sophisticated divide and conquer to divide those that would threaten the rich and powerful. She also writes for the web site “RealClearEnergy” with articles uncritically covering the oil and gas industry such as "Canada's Oil and Gas Industry Soars to New Heights”

The article shows how well funded, intelligently focused and devious is the propaganda offensive to keep the population dreaming of delusional futures while ignoring the disastrous reality. The author is just one cog in this huge propaganda machine of eco-modernism, designed to keep us on an unsustainable path to maintain the wealth and power of the oligarchs and their courtier class. A good example of the propaganda that is utilized to push continued usage of oil and gas is the utterly unproven concept of “Carbon Capture & Storage” (CCS), that has been fully taken on by the UN IPCC. Here is a good takedown of this utterly deceptive and manipulative concept.



It is why I cannot help but laugh at the people who claim that there is some “massive conspiracy” to push climate change science when in fact the not that well paid scientists who operate on thin gruel grants in most cases are opposed by a massively funded hard climate change denial campaign (represented by the US President) and another massively funded eco-modernist myth and oil and gas industry boondoggle campaign (represented by the previous President). Such claims are an inversion of reality when people like this below get so much support from the elites.



She is actually one of the elites, part of the billionaire Pritzker family, one of the ten richest families in the United States. You wouldn’t know that as her introduction makes her childhood sound like growing up on a farm! Basically a member of the oligarchy, covering up her 0.001% reality while arguing for more of the growth that supports her lavish lifestyle. When not pushing such BS themselves, the oligarchs hire from the courtier class. Like the always reliable, ready to report all the oligarch lies and propaganda that are fit to print, New York Times.



Eco-modernism is the soft kind of climate denial, with climate change being accepted as reality but accompanied with an utter technocratic delusion that its just an engineering problem and no fundamental changes to society are required to combat it. Even as the global average surface temperature goes straight through the 1.5 degrees level above pre-industrial levels and the rate of climate change is seen to be accelerating.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/eco-mo ... onary-soft

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In major blow against free speech, environmental group ordered to pay USD 667 million to pipeline corporation

Greenpeace has been ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages to Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation which built the Dakota Access Pipeline, in a case resulting from the mass protest movement against the construction of said pipeline

March 20, 2025 by Peoples Dispatch



On Wednesday, March 19, a North Dakota jury ruled that the environmental nonprofit Greenpeace must pay USD 667 million to Energy Transfer for defamation, over the protests that occurred at Standing Rock almost a decade ago. Greenpeace had attempted to move the suit out of Morton County, North Dakota, arguing that the jury would not be impartial and raising concerns that the jury pool might have been targeted with pro-fossil fuel advertisements. This attempt was ultimately rejected by the North Dakota Supreme Court.

Energy Transfer Partners filed a lawsuit in 2019 against Greenpeace, arguing that the environmental organization had “incited” protest using a “misinformation campaign”. The billionaire CEO of Energy Transfer, Kelcy Warren, has deep ties to the current Trump administration. Warren, together with his spouse, contributed USD 1.8 million to Donald Trump’s campaign for president in 2020. Warren has expressed an immense disdain for Standing Rock protesters, saying that anti-pipeline protesters be “removed from the gene pool.”

Energy Transfer announced plans for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in 2014. The struggle against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline expanded shortly before its construction in 2016, spearheaded by Indigenous activists and organizers, including those of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, who referred to themselves as water protectors and land defenders. Activists argued that the pipeline posed a serious threat to the region’s water and was in violation of the rights Indigenous people, and launched a movement that continued until roughly February 2017, defining the struggle both against climate change and for Indigenous sovereignty.

“This verdict is not the end of this case,” Greenpeace said in a March 20 statement. “We’re going to appeal. And we’re prepared to fight this all the way to victory.”

“We’ve fought Energy Transfer’s lawsuits for more than seven years,” the organization continued. “Every step of the way, we’ve emphasized that these types of lawsuits—intended to silence and shut down critics—are part of a growing national attack on our First Amendment rights.”

“A Big Oil-stacked jury just sided with corporate power,” wrote the Center for Constitutional Rights in a post responding to the verdict. “This is a dangerous attack on the right to protest, but the fight is not over,” the CCR wrote.

“We should all be concerned about the future of the first amendment, and lawsuits like these aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech. Greenpeace will continue to do its part to fight for the protection of these fundamental rights for everyone,” Deepa Padmanabha, Greenpeace’s senior legal adviser, told The Guardian.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/03/20/ ... rporation/

Greenpeace is half-assed at best, as they refuse to attack capital directly or advocate the only thing that might ameliorate the situation, socialism. Nonetheless this attempt to silence even tepid responses to ecocide displays the monstrous disregard of the ruling class.

Environmental tragedy in Ecuador: thousands of barrels of oil spilled in several rivers

In addition to the natural tragedy, thousands of people lack water to drink, which has caused great discomfort and protests in Esmeraldas.

March 20, 2025 by Pablo Meriguet


A team of workers on the oil-contaminated water in Esmeraldas. Photo: Petroecuador/X

On March 13, a section of the SOTE pipeline, owned by the state-owned company Petroecuador, ruptured in Esmeraldas, a province of Ecuador. The failure occurred after a landslide in Achiote, near Quinindé. Several experts have stated that it is one of the worst oil spills in recent years in the country. As of now, the government of Daniel Noboa has not disclosed the number of barrels of oil spilled in Esmeraldas.

The Executive has declared an emergency in Esmeraldas due to the seriousness of the spill, which gravely affects the sector’s flora and fauna and the local population, which depends on the rivers for drinking water and fishing. The spill affected five rivers. According to the Secretariat of Environment, at least 80 kilometers of the Esmeraldas River are affected. The latest reports indicate that the oil-blackened water has reached Quinindé and Esmeraldas, the capital of the northwestern province.

Sabotage or mismanagement?
In an interview in Teleamazonas, the Secretary of Energy, Inés Manzano, affirmed that the spill occurred due to sabotage, according to a police intelligence report. She also warned the Mayor of Quito, Ecuador’s capital, Pabel Muñoz (a member of the Correista and opposition party, Citizen Revolution): “The information we have is that [there could be sabotage] in Papallacta, the source of Quito’s drinking water. So to Mayor Pabel Muñoz, tell the people who are sabotaging that this is prohibited,” implying that Muñoz knows those responsible and that it was committed to discredit Noboa’s government.

The declarations of Secretary Manzano have caused much controversy. Muñoz, through an official statement, has requested that Secretary Manzano, following the law, inform and denounce the persons who, according to her, are behind the alleged sabotage. In addition, he requested that the Secretary of Defense militarize the facilities where Papallacta’s water is stored.

For her part, Luisa González, presidential candidate for the Citizen Revolution, said that the accusation of sabotage is nothing more than an excuse by the government for its poor management of the environmental crisis: “Before every crisis, the same excuse. They are embarrassing. Electric Crisis: They accused their cabinet of SABOTAGE, they pointed out the former Secretary of Energy, Andrea Arrobo, and justified her ineptitude. They said that a possum caused the blackouts and that someone opened imaginary floodgates. THE RESULT: months of inhuman outages and a paralyzed country. Spill in Esmeraldas: Now they blame [alleged] sabotage for the environmental disaster. THEY DID NOT REPAIR [the oil installations], they fired technicians and let the oil devastate rivers and communities. Everything [the Noboa government] touches, it destroys. THEY HAVE SABOTAGED THE COUNTRY. No more excuses, no more lies.”

“We want water, and they send military”
For his part, President Noboa, who is currently running for re-election, has promised that the State will assume responsibility for the damages after the portentous oil spill: “Unlike in the past, this time [the State] will respond for its actions with the obligation to make the remediation in Esmeraldas. That is why it will create a fund with two objectives: environmental remediation and reparations to all the affected families.”

However, various settlers have criticized the delay in the national government’s actions, as well as the poor management of the natural disaster which may have affected more than 400,000 people. Several protests have been held in the towns that have been left without water supply demanding that the state act. “Where is [President] Daniel Noboa? We want him here. When he needs our vote, they come to the poor, but when he wins the elections he forgets about us. Where is the president!” demands one of the protesters with no water to drink.

In other videos, the victims can be seen collecting water from wells and denouncing that, so far, the State has not delivered water for their survival. Meanwhile, several people are taking advantage of the situation by selling a few liters of water at high prices. “We don’t know if the water we are collecting is contaminated with oil. We are taking a risk. No technician has come to our village to tell us if we can drink this water. Necessity forces us!” said an inhabitant of La Tolita.

For now, given the little reaction from the central and local governments, several civil organizations have launched campaigns throughout the country to collect water and food for the affected population.

An environmental tragedy
Several scientists have called the spill an ecological tragedy since it is estimated that in the Viche and Caple rivers, almost all the animals that inhabited their waters have died. In this regard, Eduardo Rebolledo, professor at the Catholic University of Ecuador, told the newspaper Primicias that the Viche and Caple are now “dead rivers”: “As a biologist, I feel sadness, because where there used to be fish, today there are containment nets and black water, without life, it is unpleasant…When we talk about dead rivers, it is a term I used to understand the azoic condition, that is, that the rivers lack life temporarily.”

According to Rebolledo, about 250 fish and other animals are affected by the spill. Regarding the magnitude and impact of the damage, the researcher from the Catholic University affirmed “Oil continues to be removed from this site, and, so far, we do not know how much has been spilled, because they do not inform. I don’t understand why the authorities hide the information… There is no mathematical formula that tells us [how long the recovery will last], it could last 30 or 45 days, it is going to depend on how fast and efficient the cleanup is, and on how benign nature is and helps us with rain.”

However, he also stated to Primicias that there may be long-term damage “An oil spill is always accompanied by heavy metals, which leave a trace over time and accumulate in the sediments. These metals can cause malformations and problems in aquatic life. Although each case has to be studied individually, there is a lot of literature that tells us that the persistence of heavy metals in marine life is associated with degenerative diseases for humans.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/03/20/ ... al-rivers/

[blindpig]

Climate Change Has Accelerated
Roger Boyd
Mar 23, 2025


The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released its State of the Global Climate 1984 reports. Its main points were:

The average global surface temperature in 2024 was 1.5 degrees centigrade (+/- 0.13 centigrade) above the 1850 - 1900 average. A true measure of preindustrial times would use 1750 as a benchmark, which was 0.2 degrees colder than 1850-1900.

In 2023 CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increased by 2.8ppm (the NOAA data points to a number significantly above 3ppm in 2024), the fourth largest in the measurement series that goes back to the 1950s. The atmospheric level of methane reached 2.65 times pre-industrial levels in 2023, and nitrous oxide 1.25 times.

Ocean heat content hit a new record in 2024, and has been running at a higher rate of increase since 2010. It takes many times the energy to heat up a unit of water vs a unit of air, with the vast majority of the increased energy reaching the Earth’s surface ending up heating the oceans.

Sea levels hit a new record, and the rate of sea level rise has more than doubled in the past ten years to 4.7mm per year. That’s 47mm per decade, or just under 2 inches. This is overwhelming by thermal expansion as against the melting/collapse of land-based ice.

Glacier (land based ice) mass loss had the three worst years on record from 2021/2022 to 2023/2024

The average global surface temperature has not fallen back below 1.5 degrees as forecast due to the El Nino giving way to a La Nina. At the same time, the increase in CO2 concentrations has also not been reduced and ocean heat content remains near its highs. This points to an acceleration in climate change that is overwhelming the usual cyclical reduction from El Nino to La Nina.

In the January/February edition of the journal Environment James Hansen co-authored a paper entitled Global Warming Has Accelerated. The reasoning of two parts:

The cooling effect of anthropogenic-produced aerosols had been under-estimated, as shown by the warming impact of the reduction in shipping sulfur aerosols due to a mandated reduction in ship fuel sulphur content.

The above means that the warming effect of anthropogenically-produced greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had also been under-estimated; as they have been offset by a greater level of aerosol cooling than assumed.

As aerosols were reduced, especially over the more pristine atmosphere above the oceans, the coverage of clouds would also be reduced resulting in more sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface; accelerating climate change. For the Mediterranean area, a further reduction in the shipping oil sulfur content that drives shipping-related aerosols will be imposed in May 2025. Here is Hansen and a co-author discussing the findings.



There is also the possibility that climate change itself, as well as the reduction in aerosols, may be reducing cloud cover; a positive climate feedback. Talking about feedbacks, a third of the Arctic boreal zone has now flipped from being a net sink of carbon to being a net source of carbon dioxide emissions; as the region warms three to seven times faster than the global average.



The increasing heat content of the oceans also threatens to destabilize the global ocean circulation system which would lead to significant regional changes in temperatures. A longer discussion of the paper (and two previous papers):



On Twitter, Leon Simons has been extensively covering this new reality. At the same time we have a US President and administration that utterly rejects anthropogenic climate change and is hell bent on increasing fossil fuel production. As research points to the probability of large swathes of the US becomi[/youtube]ng uninhabitable within decades due to climate change. China is massively increasing its capacity of renewables and nuclear, but the increase is being used to meet the increased energy needs of an economy growing at 5% per year; with at best small reductions in Chinese GHG emissions in the next decade. While India and other developing nations are still increasing their fossil fuel usage and the developed nations cheat on even the Paris Agreement promises. Ninety five percent of countries are now overdue with providing their 2035 climate pledges to the UN.

This all places us on a fast-track to 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial with accelerating impacts and accelerating feedbacks. With China, Russia and the US in open great power competition, none will be open to reducing their energy usage below current trends. With India and the developing nations driving to increase living standards through greater energy availability and the European nations now looking to ramp up energy intensive war spending. As Hansen states, global energy usage is increasing and the vast majority of energy is produced using fossil fuels. The forecasts of the UN IPCC are “hopium”. The anthropogenic climate change train is accelerating rather than decelerating as it enters greater and greater levels of risk for humanity. Below is a good discussion of why the “energy transition” is a delusion within any kind of timeframe required to combat climate change in a timely manner for modern human civilization; and is also a misrepresentation of history. A view also put forward in detail in the works of Vaclav Smil in such books as Grand Transitions, Energy and Civilization: A History, Growth and Energy Myths And Realities.



This is why we are, and will, increasingly hear about Solar Radiation Management (SRM) as a way of putting off catastrophe. Ironically, SRM consists of placing more aerosols into the atmosphere which is the exact opposite of what is being done with ship aerosols!

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/climat ... ccelerated

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Discovery of immense methane leaks in Antarctica
Originally published: Dissident Voice on March 22, 2025 by Robert Hunziker (more by Dissident Voice) | (Posted Mar 24, 2025)

A new discovery of methane leaks in Antarctica could be a game-changer and potential near-term threat that’s difficult to characterize without sounding overly negative. Of course, situations like this that appear threatening to civilization, or life as we know it, are difficult to believe and accept as something the will really happen, which is understandable because nothing in human history compares to the risk attendant to the dreaded runaway greenhouse effect. So, there’s nothing in human history to compare it to.

Nevertheless, there are scientists who believe we are living on borrowed time because of massive changes happening at the top and at the bottom of the planet where only scientists and indigenous people hang out. Now, this new discovery serves to emphasize their concerns of a climate monster capable of altering everything, lurking in the background.

The threat is explained in a YouTube video: Immense Methane Leaks in Antarctica: A Hidden Climate Threat Unveiled by Phantom Ecology, which is headed by Milton Muldrow, Ph.D. asst. professor at Wilmington University and Chair/College of Arts & Sciences.

As a prelude to this new information, it’s important to note that Russian scientists have been monitoring the risks of methane breakouts in the High Arctic for a couple of decades and have voiced concern about the risks of a sudden burst as undersea methane clathrates increasingly melt, bubbling to surface in ever-larger diameters, which they have measured. As it happens, methane (CH4) is many times more potent than CO2 at trapping excessive global heat.

Additionally, the risk of a methane breakout is mentioned by Peter Wadhams, emeritus professor, Ocean Physics, University of Cambridge, in his celebrated, brilliant interview: The Future of Sea Level Rise: “Russian scientists working the region believe a huge pulse of methane could erupt.” This could crank up global temperatures to ultra-dangerous levels in as little as 2-3 years. The consequences would be unspeakable. And with Antarctica joining, the game changes.

As a science researcher/writer of over 400 articles, this new development is extraordinarily spooky and difficult to accept because the consequences feel way too close for comfort. Stated at the opening of the Phantom Ecology video:

Deep beneath the icy plains of Antarctica, a slumbering giant is beginning to stir. Scientists have made a startling discovery. Vast reservoirs of methane hydrates locked away for millennia are showing signs of instability.

The finding sent ripples of concern throughout the world of science. The consequences for the planet could be quite dangerous, maybe sooner rather than later. Rising plumes of methane (CH4) near the Antarctic Peninsula raises a major concern that trapped methane will be released into the atmosphere, exacerbating an already dire situation of accelerating global temperatures. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Maginot line of 1.5C above pre-industrial not to be exceeded as framed at the Paris 2015 climate conference by nearly all the nations of the world is kaput. To date, global temperatures have been exceeding that level for nearly two years running.

Meanwhile, world famous climate scientist James Hansen (Earth Institute, Columbia University) says 2C is on the horizon. “The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, according to renowned climate scientist Prof James Hansen, who said the international 2C target is “dead” (“Climate Change Target of 2C is ‘Dead’ Says Renonwed Climate Scientist,” Guardian, Feb. 4, 2025). It’s a huge understatement to say this would be horrendous for Antarctic methane leaks, Arctic methane leaks, including Siberian methane leaks and Alaskan methane leaks, as well as Glacial methane leaks (see below “Methane Double Trouble” for another disturbing new discovery).

The volume of methane locked away in Antarctic ice is estimated to be more carbon than all other fuel deposits combined for the planet. A small fraction of this escaping into the atmosphere could have catastrophic consequences for the climate system “in the not-too-distant future.” (Muldrow)

A Climate Time Bomb
Methane hydrates consist of methane molecules trapped within a crystalline lattice of water molecules. This forms an ice substance that can ignite if brought to surface and lit with a match. According to the video: “Release of methane from these hydrates is a frightening prospect. Such a release could trigger a runaway greenhouse effect leading to rapid and catastrophic climate change.” Rapid onset of methane would bring sea levels rising at unprecedented rates, extreme weather events more frequently, and widespread disruptions/destruction to global ecosystems.

Muldrow’s analysis of the first time that large-scale CH4 emissions have been detected in Antarctica is confirmed by Polar Journal, March 2025: “Large Methane Leaks Discovered in Antarctica”:

A research team led by the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) and the Spanish Geological and Mining Institute (IGME-CSIC) undertook an expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula as part of the ICEFLAME project. The researchers returned on February 17 and have now reported the discovery of large methane leaks on the sea floor in an ICM publication. For the first time, they were able to observe that large quantities of methane are released from the seabed in a gaseous state where methane hydrates occur.

Additionally, according to an article in Rapusia.org, March 14, 2025, “Massive Methane Leaks Detected in Antarctica, Posing Serious Climate Risks”:

A team aboard the Sarmiento de Gamboa research vessel observed large columns of gas escaping from the ocean floor, with some extending up to 700 meters (2,300 feet) long and 70 meters (230 feet) wide.

Methane Double Trouble
In addition to massive CH4 leaks discovered in Antarctica, up north in the Arctic scientists recently discovered Arctic glaciers leaking “significant amounts of methane,” revealed for the first time. As explained: “Glacial melt rivers and groundwater springs are transporting large volumes of methane from beneath the ice to the atmosphere. This previously unrecognized process could contribute to Arctic climate feedback, accelerating global warming.” (“‘Glacial Fracking’: A Hidden Source of Arctic Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” ScienceDaily, Feb. 19, 2025)

As a result, scientists now need to reassess methane budgets, incorporating glacial emissions alongside permafrost thaw and wetland methane fluxes. The complexities of multiple dangers of global warming continue to expand and merge in time. It now appears that both ends of the planet have turned dicey, risky, subject to sudden change all too soon for comfort and all together at the same time. This could get very ugly; an article in Space.com deals with the issue of runaway global warming: “How The Runaway Greenhouse Gas Effect Can Destroy a Planet’s Habitability—Including Earth’s,” Space.com, December 19, 2023. Here’s the storyline:

Using advanced computer simulations, scientists have shown how easily a runaway greenhouse effect can rapidly transform a habitable planet into a hellish world inhospitable to life.

Alas, as explained many times in prior articles, corporations, oil and gas operations, countries are all failing to honor commitments to mitigate climate change even before the U.S. reversed course on combating climate change under the Trump administration. This becomes infectious as Germany recently announced an intention to lessen its commitments. The timing could not be worse. The WMO State of the Climate 2024 Update once again issued a Red Alert at the sheer pace of climate change in a single generation, turbo-charged by ever-increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. 2015-2024 will be the warmest ten years on record; the loss of ice from glaciers, sea-level rise and ocean heating are accelerating; and extreme weather is wreaking havoc on communities and economies across the world. (World Meteorological Organization)

Making matters more unnerving yet, according to Copernicus Global Climate Highlights 2024:

Each month from January to June 2024 was warmer than the corresponding month in any previous year. August 2024 equaled the record warmth of August 2023 and the remaining months from July to December were each the second warmest for the time of year, after the corresponding months in 2023.

With a strong dose of humility, it’s suggested that the world’s leadership undertake all available efforts to confront this real, already started, threat to life on the planet via a super-duper Marshall Plan for the world. Alas, it’s almost assured that this suggestion will go unheeded, especially with consideration of the following headline in the prestigious science publication Nature, Feb. 25, 2025: “Trump 2.0: An Assault on Science Anywhere is an Assault on Science Everywhere.”

The climate system is not going to ring a bell before all hell breaks loose. It’ll happen out of the blue, temperatures relentlessly climbing month by month by month to intolerable levels, possibly already started, observed by Copernicus as stated above. Nobody has ever theorized, or even suggested, that it’s impossible for humanity to exterminate itself.

https://mronline.org/2025/03/24/discove ... ntarctica/#

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Growth or Degrowth? Ecosocialism confronts a false dichotomy
March 25, 2025

Stark binaries obscure the real problems we face in building a movement against capitalist ecocide



Ståle Holgersen is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Stockholm University. He is the author of Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World, which Climate & Capitalism named as one of 2024’s 10 best books.

by Ståle Holgersen

I was invited to speak about ecosocialism, at Marxism 2025 in Dublin. There was a lot I wanted to say, so I decided to write down some key points I wanted to share. Here’s the presentation.

Against the Crisis by Ståle Holgersen1. Ecosocialism is the policy and theory for tomorrow, but it is haunted by some problems from yesterday.

The current polarization withing ecosocialism between eco-modernism and degrowth is a problem. To put it bluntly: For eco-modernists, modern industrialization is primarily progressive, and they tend to have a relatively positive view of “growth,” whereas the degrowth movement fundamentally critiques such ideas. These are two heterodox traditions, but they also represent distinct poles in the debate, reflecting very different starting points for thinking and doing politics.

Eco-modernism has always been the dominant position within Marxism. This was perhaps less obvious as long as eco-Marxism existed as a subdiscipline within Marxism, primarily pursued by those with a personal interest in ecology. With climate change—especially over the last ten years—this has changed. Now, everyone who wants to be taken seriously must have a position on the climate. When main tendencies within Marxism engage with ecology, we get socialist eco-modernism.

2.The stark binaries between socialist eco-modernism and degrowth obscure necessary complexity.

Comrade Matt Huber poses some interesting questions in his book Climate Change as Class War. Do we want a “politics of less” or a “politics of more”? Do we focus on production or consumption? Is the political subject that will stop global warming the “working class” or the “professional managerial class” (PMC)? These are interesting questions, but the framing is problematic.

We obviously need more of some things, and less of others. I would agree that production is more important—in many ways—than consumption, but this does not mean that consumption is not also extremely important, both analytically and politically.

The core dichotomy we are expected to take sides on is growth. This is both problematic and confusing. People continue to refer to very different things when they talk about growth—and, by extension, degrowth. Does “growth” refer to biophysical or material throughput, energy use, human potential, capital accumulation, or the Human Development Index? Most often it is assumed we think about an increase in GDP, but how do we measure that?

3. “Growth”—understood, for example, as always increased GDP or biophysical throughput—is indeed a problem, but we cannot begin by confronting growth itself.

Investments in new infrastructure will directly lead to increased economic activity (increased GDP) in the short term. This is of course not a valid argument against such policies. Instead, we need critical discussions on which sectors, places, and industries should see more economic activity—and which should be phased out or shut down. These are complex questions. An ecosocialist movement seeking to mobilize beyond niche intellectual circles must provide concrete, place-specific answers.

On one hand: contra eco-modernism, we cannot have infinite increase in economic activity on a limited planet. And certainly not more decades or centuries of increase in biophysical throughput.

On the other hand: contra degrowth, we cannot mobilize the lower parts of the working class or any broad movement by making “less growth” the focal point of our project. Slogans matter, and I think it will be impossible to unite the broad working class on this slogan.

4. This discussion is not only about “growth”—it goes deeper.

The disputes between eco-modernists and degrowth is tied to broader questions about whether modernization, industrialization, or capitalism itself, is inherently progressive or reactionary.

I think it is fair to argue that large-scale industry, new technologies, increased productivity, and urbanization have created possibilities for socialism that did not exist in pre-capitalist societies. From this perspective, we see how the development of the productive forces, and capitalism itself, has produced the working class, aka “its own gravediggers.”

But how far can we take this argument?

If we look at the world today: does anyone see capitalism leading us toward socialism? Those arguing for capitalism’s progressive character have certainly read Marxist literature; this is not a conclusion one draw from observing reality—but from reading.

Capitalism is not advancing toward socialism; it is only taking us into a new geological epoch, and climate disasters, and genocides, wars, and always new crises. And so on.

Ecosocialist thinkers in the 21st century should develop a better critique of productivism or uncritical celebration of growth than simply saying that it is bad. We need a more nuanced critique. We need to move past the binary of seeing modernism, capitalism, “development,” or “growth” as inherently progressive or reactionary.

5. Karl Marx.

One striking aspect of the debate between eco-modernists and degrowthers is how actively both camps invoke Karl Marx to support their case. Eco-modernists have a sea of quotes to draw from, while degrowthers have less material, but then make more of what they have. Building on new Marxological evidence, Kohei Saito famously argues that the “mature” Marx was degrowth communist.

We should continue to read Karl Marx for many reasons. His work remains the best starting point for understanding the roots of climate change. We cannot grasp global warming without understanding the dynamics of the profit motive, capital accumulation, metabolic rifts, class struggle and class fractions.

But as Marxists, we must remind ourselves that just because Marx said something this does not automatically make it true. We should be cautious of rhetorical exercise of first claiming that Marx “really” meant this or that, and then simply assume that so should we.

6. Ecosocialism and class

The biggest problem with the polarization between degrowth and eco-modernism is that it hinders fruitful discussions about class struggle. Some eco-modernists argue that there is an antagonistic relationship between the professional-managerial class (“PMC”) and the “working class,” where the former has occupied environmental movements, while only the latter can truly change the world.

This antagonism between a progressive working class and a reactionary “professional class” is mirrored, or rather inverted, by degrowthers. Tadzio Müller, an excellent German activist, has argued that industrial workers in the Global North will not only be our enemies, but “our most effective enemies.” Here, conversation about class starts and ends by pointing out that workers in the global north have an ‘imperial’ mode of living.

And yes, there are indeed tensions between many trade unions and the environmental movements. But it is wrong to describe these as antagonisms. If that were the case, would there be class struggles between the “working class” and the “class” that has occupied the environmental movement? This is not the case.

It is intellectually dishonest to ignore tensions between workers and climate politics, as well as issues of racism and imperialism. But it is also politically hopeless to assume these tensions are so great that the working class—however defined—cannot or should not be a subject of struggle against global warming.

It remains an absolute prerequisite for ecosocialists that organized labour (sometimes alienated by degrowth movements) and environmental movements (sometimes alienated by eco-modernists) are not only radicalized and strengthened but also brought together.

7. Climate activism is class struggle.

The climate movement we see in our streets, occupying coal mines, or organizing school strikes, is—I assume—99.9% composed of people who do not own any means of production.

Yes, many may come from homes with pianos and bookshelves. But let’s not allow Pierre Bourdieu to distract us from a clear class analysis. Class is not determined by aesthetics, taste, culture, or education. Taste, aesthetics, and culture certainly matter— for better or worse when we try to change the world—but they do not define class in society.

We start from a classical Marxist position: people who do not accumulate capital are part of the broad and heterogeneous working class. This will get way more complex when get further into it, and there will be exceptions. But this is where we start from. And where we start from matters.

People in labour unions and those in the environmental movement belong to the same broad and heterogeneous working class. And more than that, the main enemy named by the climate movement is the fossil fuel industry — a fraction of the capitalist class. This is class struggle.

(We think of climate change as an indirect class struggle. This is not the direct confrontation of a worker standing against her boss, but rather an indirect struggle. More similar to how we view struggles over privatizations as class struggles.)

That class consciousness is low—sometimes extremely low—within parts of the environmental movement is indeed a problem. This problem is compounded by eco-modernists and degrowthers who discursively reproduce and celebrate the conflict. As ecosocialists, we have work to do.

Whether the struggle to stop global warming unleashes its potential and is articulated and understood as class struggle, depends on the political struggles within the movements.

Bringing together the broad working class, it not an easy task. This should not surprise us: that has been the case for two centuries. It is tempting to romanticise history and see the history of the working class as more homogenous that it actually was. Questions of gender, racism, sexual orientation, nationalism, etc., were always—and still are—questions used by reactionary forces to divide the working class. Unite the working class is a difficult task—but is our task.

There are good examples to draw from, such as an initiative by the Norwegian think tank Manifest called “couples therapy.” This project has brought together progressive environmental organizations and labour unions organising in the oil industry, to sit down and discuss what a future industrial policy in Norway could look like.

However, when it comes to uniting the labour and climate movements, it remains the case that most of our attempts have failed. We have failed so many times over the past decades that it can be tempting to give up. But we won’t — because this is the very heart of ecosocialism.

8. Capitalism will not stop climate change, and climate change will not stop capitalism.

It is often assumed that global warming will bring about the end of capitalism. I think the opposite is more likely: this is precisely the kind of creative destruction capitalism needs to reproduce itself.

Some argue that ecological change has historically posed great challenges to existing systems, and therefore, climate change must do the same to capitalism. This view overlooks a key fact: unlike previous modes of production, capitalism is fundamentally based on change.

Then there is the assumption that climate change will create such severe problems—food shortages, infrastructure collapse, mass death—that capitalism simply can’t cope. But capitalism has always been adept at placing death in some corners of the world, so that life—and profits—can continue elsewhere. Mass death has never been a fundamental problem for capitalism; the system itself was built on colonialism, wars, and genocides.

Another argument is that since so much fixed capital is invested in fossil infrastructure, a rapid shift to renewables will trigger a massive devaluation, leading to an economic crisis that could spell capitalism’s end. First, this might be true, but massive devaluations do not automatically lead to economic crisis. And second, if such a crisis would occur, we should remember that capitalism is historically reproduced through crises. Capitalism exists because of economic crises, not in spite of them.

Never underestimate the flexibility of capitalism. Today, we see fossil capital and “green capital” operating together, seamlessly. Capital is, at the same time, both destroying the planet and attempting to save it. This is not a contradiction in terms — because the issue is not the planet, but profit. The problem is, if you destroy the planet while trying to save it, you destroy it.

9. Climate change can fuel the rise of fascism.

Crisis was a defining feature of twentieth-century fascism. In discussions about the crises that led to its rise, thinkers like Nicos Poulantzas pointed to economic, ideological, and political upheavals. Could global warming become another crisis with the potential to fuel fascism? There are three ways to answer “yes.”

First, as a defence against progressive movements. What would happen if popular pressure becomes strong enough that political leaders were forced to do what it takes to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees—shutting down oil rigs and coal mines, halting the airline industry, stopping deforestation? This would almost certainly push fossil fuel interests into alliances with the far right, further developing what we can already identify as fossil fascism.

Second, through the crises themselves—a next-level shock doctrine. Crises create opportunities for racism, and climate disasters will generate many. More heatwaves killing people and destroying crops, food shortages, and millions forced to flee—these conditions might fuel reactionary politics. What if a socialist government proposed that the burdens be shared equally? Political scientist Cara Daggett, in her great work on petro-masculinity, asks whether the climate crisis could catalyze fascist desires for Lebensraum.

Third, through variants of so-called eco-fascism. What if the far right makes a 180-degree turn and fully acknowledges that global warming is human-made? Where would they place the blame? Certainly not on business leaders in the Global North. Instead, they would scapegoat “immigrants”—Muslims, Jews, or Chinese, or any other group that can be used to mobilize hatred and racism.

But this doesn’t have to happen—because we are here.

10. Ecosocialism will smash fascism—and they’re going to pay for it.

Human geographer Laura Pulido and her colleagues identified an interesting difference in Donald Trump’s first precedency, between his explicit and spectacular racism, and the silence that followed his environmental deregulations. They argue that the former—intentionally or not—helped obscure the latter. This is interesting. Climate denialism might have some currency, and conspiracy theories and fake news are always key tools in right-wing campaigns. But in general, the climate issue also remains a challenge for them. This is not something they want to discuss.

So how do we respond? We intensify the struggle against global warming.

As Samira Ali so effectively pointed out at this conference on Friday, the antifascist struggle must be both defensive and offensive. We must defend what is worth defending while escalating and intensifying our own struggles—especially those the far right does not want to face. The fight for ecosocialism is exactly that.

Uniting the broad working class must always remain at the core of any socialist strategy. But let’s be honest—so often when we sit down to talk, our disagreements deepen rather than dissolve. Sometimes, external pressure forces unity more effectively than good intentions.

Perhaps this is where fascism inadvertently helps us. The far right—whether in government or on the streets—will continue to attack progressive institutions, labor unions, feminist and anti-racist movements, and, of course, the environmental movement. There is no room for naïve optimism here. But these attacks might also make it easier to see what unites the broad working class. If so, that is an opportunity we must seize.

So, let’s unite labor unions and environmental movements. Or rather—let’s allow the fascists to unite us. Then we will be strong. And then, we will fucking win. Thank you.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2025/0 ... dichotomy/

That last paragraph is the only bone I have to pick with this otherwise good essay. 'Allowing' fascists to unite us is reactive and that won't do. We let them make their mistakes but in the meantime work, work, work.

(Italics added for emphasis.)

*******

Under Trump, climate denial is official US policy
March 26, 2025

Trump: ‘We sit on the most oil and natural gas of any nation on earth, and we’re going to use it’



Trump’s executive orders include repudiating the Paris Climate Accords

by John Clarke

As the process of climate change has gone from an accumulating threat to an unfolding global disaster, those who profit from fossil-fuel capitalism have developed strategies to cover their tracks and perpetuate their destructive activities with the minimum opposition and interference. A number of tactical shifts have been taken over the years in order to further these objectives.

With the return to power of Donald Trump, the pretences and tactical retreats on climate policy that marked the recent period have been largely put aside. At his inauguration ceremony in January, as Forbes put it, Trump ‘lost no time in nailing his pro-oil and gas credentials to the metaphorical White House mast.’ Declaring that the US faced an ‘energy emergency’, the incoming president told his audience that he would ensure that ‘America will be a manufacturing nation once again. We sit on the most oil and natural gas of any nation on earth, and we’re going to use it.’

Fossil-fuel playbook
It has been well established that major oil companies were well aware of the climate impacts their activities would lead to long before there was any general understanding of these consequences. Georgetown University’s Institute for Environment & Sustainability, based in Washington DC, reported in 2023 that ‘popular concern for anthropogenic climate change did not emerge until the late 1980s, but formerly secret industry documents that are now available through the Climate Files database reveal that oil industry scientists were raising concern about oil’s impacts on the climate as early as the 1950s and 1960s.’

The report shows how the oil companies and other business interests worked together to ‘spread climate disinformation [and] oppose greenhouse gas regulations through collaboration across automotive, manufacturing, mining, and petroleum industries.’ Only when ‘a strengthening consensus among the scientific community and growing concern among the public, in the late 1990s and early 2000s’ forced a change in approach, did Big Oil begin ‘making public concessions to climate science and hinted at a commitment to mitigating the threats of climate change.’

An article in Vox this month shows that the beef industry in the US played a very similar role to the fossil-fuel companies. By the late 1980s, it was understood that industrialised beef production was generating massive quantities of methane, ‘a greenhouse gas that accelerates climate change at a much faster pace than carbon dioxide’. Today, almost one-third of methane stems from beef and dairy cattle.

At this time, leading representatives of the industry ‘began crafting a plan to defend itself against what they anticipated would be growing attacks over beef’s role in global warming and other environmental ills.’ The National Cattlemen’s Association (NCA) drafted ‘an internal 17-page memo’ that would not come to light for two decades. It took a ‘crisis management’ approach and its authors noted that public ‘relations activity directed toward key influencers is a fundamental thrust of this plan.’

Only when it has become impossible to disregard climate change have fossil-fuel companies and their political agents changed direction and adopted strategies based on a grudging acceptance of reality. In 2023, Earth Justice pointed out that climate ‘change is here, and the fossil fuel industry knows it’s undeniable. So it’s switching up its playbook: by moving from denying climate change outright to delaying climate action through various forms of distraction, deceit, and false promises.’

There have been various components to this turn to ‘green capitalism’. One of them has focused on taking control of climate deliberations and diverting them in ways that don’t challenge Big Oil. Common Dreams reported last year that the ‘crushing influence of petrostates and fossil fuel industry lobbyists has rendered the annual United Nations climate conference unfit to deliver the kinds of sweeping changes needed to avert catastrophic warming.’

Astoundingly, it was reported that ‘at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to the COP29 summit, giving the industry primarily responsible for the global climate emergency more representation than nearly every country present at the talks in Baku.’ The whole UN initiative on climate has been compromised and rendered ineffective in this way.

Climate denial is back
Trump’s return to the White House, however, has led to a decline in ‘greenwashing’ strategies and a renewed focus on climate denial, along with a brazen intransigence in the face of an escalating climate catastrophe.

An article in Grist reports that, earlier this month, British Petroleum ‘announced that it was slashing more than $5 billion in planned green energy investments. It was a marked departure from the early 2000s, when the oil giant branded itself as “beyond petroleum,” and even 2020, when the company targeted a 20-fold increase in its renewables portfolio.’ BP’s CEO, Murray Auchincloss, showed remarkable candour in announcing this shift. He gleefully declared that this ‘is a reset BP, with an unwavering focus on growing long-term shareholder value.’

The scale of this changed approach can be seen in the fact that at ‘the same time that BP cut its renewables portfolio, it said it was going to invest $10 billion more in oil and gas. The company is now aiming to produce 2.4 million barrels per day of fossil fuels by 2030, which is a 60 percent jump from its 2020 target. That 900,000-barrel difference amounts to about 387,000 more metric tons of carnon dioxide each day — which is equivalent to around 90,000 gas-powered cars operating for a year.’

BP is by no means untypical and a series of oil companies are proceeding in this fashion, without the pretences and subterfuges that were being employed in the recent past. The Trump administration has undoubtedly provided this basis for a renewed confidence and swagger among those who are literally fuelling the climate crisis.

Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, recently delivered the opening plenary talk at CERAWeek, which Mother Jones describes as ‘a swanky annual conference in Houston, Texas, led by the financial firm S&P Global.’ Wright’s message to ‘the oil and gas bigwigs’ in attendance was that ‘we are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less.’

Wright’s talk had a very revealing focus in that he tackled head-on the task of justifying a course that can only spell the most appalling consequences for humanity. He described himself as a ‘climate realist’ and told the gathering that the ‘Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world. Everything in life involves trade-off.’

The proposition that carbon emissions can continue and even increase, as a ‘trade-off’ that will allow populations to raise their living standards without producing the most disastrous results imaginable is, of course, delusional. Just last week, the Guardian reported that the ‘devastating impacts of the climate crisis reached new heights in 2024, with scores of unprecedented heatwaves, floods and storms across the globe, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.’ Yet, Wright’s views express the logic of the economic system he represents.

The harsh reality is that fossil fuels remain the lifeblood of capitalism, even if their continued consumption spells death and destruction for hundreds of millions of people. A vast portion of capitalist investment is in oil and gas and the interests involved will not allow any timely transition away from the use of such fuels.

The warped logic of Trump’s Energy Secretary is more forthright than the evasions and trickery engaged in by the advocates of green capitalism but there is no fundamental difference of opinion between them. The Roman historian, Cornelius Tacitus, wrote that ‘crime once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity’ and the climate criminals of the Trump administration are living proof of this, as they remove all barriers to the destructive pursuit of profit.

Trump’s open embrace of climate vandalism has emboldened the leading representatives and proponents of fossil-fuel capitalism and made them even more reckless and determined. Yet, the impacts of climate change are growing ever more severe and the fight to stop rampant carbon emissions and secure a just transition that can sustain life has moved to an even more urgent and decisive stage.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2025/0 ... us-policy/

******

Secret Energy Department "hit list" targets renewable energy industry
Emily Atkin
Mar 27, 2025

Today’s edition is a special collaboration by Popular Information and HEATED. You can subscribe to Popular Information, a newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism, HERE.


A worker installs solar panels for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's biggest solar and battery storage plant on Monday, Nov. 25, 2024 near California City, CA. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

During his confirmation hearing, Energy Secretary Chris Wright tried to convince senators he wasn’t your typical fracking executive.

Wright—the CEO of $3 billion methane gas company Liberty Energy—promised to support all types of energy production, including solar and wind. “The solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system,” he said. “I am for improving all energy technologies that can better human lives and reduce emissions.”

But, after his confirmation, Wright walked back that promise, claiming renewable technologies are inherently unreliable. “There is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” he claimed at a fossil fuel industry conference this month.

Wright is wrong. There is a physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace gas for electricity generation: long-duration energy storage systems. These are essentially big battery facilities that can take cheap wind and solar generation and make it available for extended periods when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

But Wright may be planning to sabotage the future of long-duration energy storage systems, according to a “hit list” of DOE clean energy projects obtained by HEATED and Popular Information.

The existence of the “hit list” was first reported by E&E News on Friday. The "hit list" is a collection of clean energy projects already awarded billions of dollars in grants and loans under the Inflation Reduction Act, bipartisan infrastructure law, and annual appropriations. The DOE is now seeking to cancel these projects. The list will be submitted to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Office of Management and Budget, according to two people familiar with the plan.

Among many other proposed cuts, the “hit list” includes six long-duration energy storage projects that have already had $156 million in federal funding obligated under the bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The grants for those projects were awarded in 2023, and “seen as vital for turning variable wind and solar production into a reliable, round-the-clock power source,” Canary Media reported at the time.

The reason these grants were seen as so vital for wind and solar’s future is because they were commercial test-runs of newer technologies. They were intended to “convince private investors as well as utility regulatory commissions that these are trustworthy investments,” Canary Media reported. “If that succeeds, power companies will greenlight more of these projects in the near future.”

If the Department of Energy terminates these grants, it will further delay the transition to renewables and make the fossil fuel industry’s claim that solar and wind can never compete a self-fullfiling prophecy. It will also be a blow to private investors, who are funding more than 50 percent of all the energy storage projects on the list.

The energy storage grants being considered for elimination are:

The $50 million Westinghouse project grant, slated to help the remote community of Healy, Alaska, transition from coal power to renewables.

The $49 million NextEra project grant, slated to help develop, build, and operate zinc-bromide battery energy storage systems in Oregon, Wisconsin, and North Dakota.

The $30 million Chargebliss project grant, slated to build a non-lithium-ion battery energy storage system at a pediatric hospital in Madera, CA. (While California is a blue state, the hospital is in Republican Congressman Tom McClintock’s district.)

Two $10 million grants for the Rejoule and Smartville projects, slated to repurpose used electric-car batteries to power low-income communities as an alternative to high-polluting peaker plants in Minnesota, New Mexico, California, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina.

The $6.5 million Urban Electric grant to test zinc manganese dioxide batteries in New York.

These energy storage grants, however, are just one small portion of a massive list of proposed cuts.

The list, for example, proposes more than $900 million in cuts to grants issued by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (EERE). The proposed cuts range from developing electric vehicle infrastructure in underserved areas to researching the impact of offshore windmills on wildlife. Over a quarter of the grants were slated to fund research at universities across the country.

The hit list also includes over $760 million in proposed cuts from the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office (GDO), which works to advance electric infrastructure across the country. The largest proposed GDO cut is a $389 million grant to Power Up New England, which, among other things, would have funded the development of enough offshore wind projects in Massachusetts and Connecticut to “power about 2 million homes.”

The rest of the proposed GDO cuts were grants awarded through the office’s Transmission Siting and Economic Development Grants Program, which are slated to fund 20 projects to advance transmission infrastructure and support economic development across 16 states. Those proposals seem to contradict Wright’s confirmation hearing pledge to support expanding and strengthening the U.S. transmission system.

The DOE did not confirm the existence of a hit list. A DOE spokesperson told Politico that the agency “is conducting a department-wide review to ensure all activities follow the law and align with the Trump administration’s priorities.”

It is unclear, however, if the Trump administration has the legal authority to pull any funding that’s already been approved and promised by Congress, according to Jill Tauber, the vice president of climate and energy litigation at Earthjustice.

“Cutting funding that Congress has appropriated for specific programs and that federal agencies have already promised to recipients raises numerous legal concerns—from constitutional violations like separation of powers and faithfully executing laws to arbitrary and unreasoned decision-making,” Tauber said in an e-mail.

In addition, some money for the targeted projects hasn’t just been promised; It’s already been spent. The Westinghouse project in Healy, Alaska, for example, has already spent $157,000 of its federal grant. The ReJouse project has already spent $200,000.

Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, the leading Democrat on the Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee, called the proposed cuts a “dereliction of the Department’s responsibility to carry out duly enacted spending laws.”

“An unelected Billionaire who made his vast fortune off government contracts should not be able to unilaterally stop these programs, and take money out of the pockets of Americans who need it most,” she said in a statement. “We need the Department of Energy to work with us — not against us — to lower energy costs and help create good-paying jobs, but at a bare minimum, we demand the Department to follow the law as intended.”

Additional reporting by Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims.

More reporting on the DOE hit list:
Trump admin considers killing big energy projects in Dem states. Politico reported Wednesday:

A list circulating inside the Energy Department suggests cutting funding for the development of four hydrogen production hubs in mostly Democratic-leaning states while maintaining funding for three hubs spread across mostly red states, three people familiar with the plan said Wednesday. …

A spreadsheet of the projects prepared by DOE and obtained by POLITICO labeled each hub as “cut” or “keep.” Out of seven projects, only the four planned for primarily Democratic-leaning states are recommended to have their funding pulled back, according to people familiar with the latest iteration of the plan.

On the cut list: the Pacific Northwest hub spanning Oregon, Washington and Montana; the ARCHES hub in California; the Midwest regional hub linking Illinois, Indiana and Michigan; and the Mid-Atlantic hub in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey.

DOE writing hit list of Biden clean energy projects to roll back. E&E News reported Friday:

An initial list of projects that had been eyed for elimination included $8 billion for hydrogen hubs, $7 billion for carbon capture hubs, $6.3 billion for industrial demonstrations, $500 million for long-duration energy storage, $133 million for the Liftoff program for accelerating new technology development and $50 million for distributed energy energy programs, according to the person who was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic.

https://heated.world/p/secret-energy-de ... dium=email

*****

Remember Solarpunk?

Back in the early 2010s—especially on Tumblr—Solarpunk was the alt-trend. People posted art of lush cities blooming with vines and solar panels, societies living in an eco-friendly harmony, all of it with that rebellious, anti-corporate “punk” flair. It felt like the total antithesis to the neon-lit hellscapes of Cyberpunk or the gloom of the usual post-apocalyptic fantasies.

Yet here we are, more than a decade later, and Solarpunk feels… stale. Old utopian wallpapers that feel naive and stupid. The initial wave of optimism dried up faster than my houseplants. Now it’s mostly an obscure hashtag you see pop up once in a blue moon, overshadowed by climate dread, political chaos, and whatever new crisis pops up daily.

But with the meteoric rise of AI, AGI, and machine learning hype, maybe—just maybe—Solarpunk is poised for a surprise comeback. Because, ironically, the same technology that might drive us deeper into a new corporate dystopia could also, under ideal circumstances (here we go with the naivety), free us from the chains of wage labor, consumerism, and that suffocating sense that none of this is really living.

The idealistic vision
Let’s do an exercise in imagination, for old time’s sake.

We’ve got these architecturally stunning cityscapes: every rooftop crowned with gardens, every vertical surface clad in vegetation, wind turbines humming in the background. No more fossil fuels, no more frantic hustle just to scrape by. Solar panels soak up energy from a radiant sky. AI manages the grid: intelligent distribution of resources, minimal waste, near-zero carbon footprint.

Economy? Decentralized. Collaborative. No one’s forced into menial labor for a scrap of a paycheck; automation and advanced robotics do the heavy lifting. People have time—to create art, raise kids (if they really want), lie in fields, talk to one another. Entire neighborhoods are organized around mutual aid instead of rent-gouging. No one’s enslaved to a landlord or a faceless boss.

We keep the internet, but it’s not owned by billionaire parasites. We keep advanced medicine, but it’s not locked behind insurance paywalls. We keep AI, but it isn’t hijacked for corporate profits or Orwellian surveillance. That’s the Solarpunk dream.

Neat, right? Also, naive.

Cyberpunk reality
The truth: we’re living in the future already, and for now it’s bleak as all hell. Forget corporate towers bathed in neon—we’ve got them. Forget inequality so absurd it feels like satire—we’re drowning in it. Corporate wars?—coming soon. Folks can’t afford rent or groceries, but billionaires are talking about Mars. Whole countries are bein devastated by climate catastrophes. We’re living Cyberpunk.

But all this isn’t some second-rate dystopia we watch in a cringe Netflix special; it’s our everyday existence. Capitalism has an uncanny knack for warping every promising technology—AI included—into a method of further exploitation. The idea that we’ll somehow circumvent that entire dynamic and evolve into a green, communal paradise? It requires a massive, global shift in consciousness.

Sure, we see miniature-pockets of actual resistance and progressive experimentation—co-op living, regenerative agriculture, local communities building microgrids. But let’s not kid ourselves. Those remain tiny islands in a vast ocean of fossil-fueled cynicism. Politicians stall on climate legislation. Corporations buy politicians. The status quo invests every fiber of its being into maintaining that status quo.

Change, if it ever comes, is terribly slow. And possibly too slow to matter.

AI: Our last hope? Really?
Now let’s talk about AI. An arms race is underway, with big players salivating over ways to harness machine intelligence for data-mining, cost-cutting, and profit acceleration. The visionary among them might spin it as “increasing efficiency” or “optimizing productivity,” but we all know it’s about extracting more value for the corporate overlords. Meanwhile, entire swaths of human workers get replaced or “streamlined.”

If AI remains locked behind closed-source paywalls, we’re sprinting toward a hyper-capitalist meltdown. We’re talking about a world where a handful of tech kings own everything—energy, healthcare, education, maybe even your fucking thoughts—while the rest of us keep “re-skilling” ourselves into oblivion. The dream of Solarpunk becomes laughably quaint, a relic of some whimsical Tumblr post from 2014.


But, if by some cosmic miracle we seize AI as commons—imagine open-source everything, robust data privacy, a globally decentralized structure—maybe then we get a chance to reorganize the entire production chain. Imagine automated agriculture that doesn’t funnel profits to shareholders. Imagine universal basic income that isn’t just a band-aid but a stepping stone toward the end of wage slavery. That’s the kernel of hope: an AI that serves everyone rather than a chosen few.

You can support my work by buying me a coffee (or some delicious nicotine pouches) via Stripe. Cheers.

Odds are against us
The odds are stacked massively against us. Why?

Entrenched power: From fossil fuel titans to Big Tech, the 1% will cling to privilege. They’re not going to just hand over the means of (fully automated) production because we said “please.”

Global fragmentation: Far-right movements, political tribalism, climate refugees, resource wars—tell me how we leapfrog that to embrace a unified, cooperative Solarpunk future? The left is, for all practical purposes, functionally dead right now. There is no unified working class on the horizon.

Apathy & distraction: We’re exhausted, bombarded by crises every single day, many of us too mentally drained to do more than doomscroll.

AI’s corporate capture: Already happening. Many of the biggest players want to patent the world. The notion of AI for the people is dangerously naive if we’re not actively fighting for it.

For Solarpunk to be real, we’d need nothing short of a revolution in consciousness—and not the superficial “just buy an electric car” greenwashing bullshit. We’d need total upending of capitalism, global solidarity, and an unflinching commitment to share resources. That’s a tall order for a species that can’t even agree to wear masks during a pandemic.

Possibility
Yet part of me clings to the idea that maybe an unhinged chain of events—catastrophic climate disasters, unstoppable labor uprisings, AI breakthroughs that can’t be monopolized—might tip us over into a radical reconfiguration.

Maybe people will get so fed up, so cornered, they’ll realize we can’t keep playing this rigged game. Maybe they’ll break the system from within. Maybe.

I’m not gonna pretend it’s likely. I might be more depressed than hopeful. I see AI being used to replace me at my job (which should be a good thing!), see the climate meltdown intensify, see supposed democracies teeter on the brink to fascism. Still, I can’t fully extinguish the thought of solar-powered arcologies. It’s a coping mechanism, a fancy daydream to keep me from drowning in cynicism. Whatever.

POLL
Do you still believe in Utopia?
Yes.
50%
No.
50%
16 VOTES ·

You can’t kill imagination
Somebody is going to revive Solarpunk. Maybe a new wave of conscious kids, or disgruntled engineers, or AI researchers who see the writing on the wall. The images of overgrown skyscrapers and communal gardens are just too beautiful to die forever. There’s romance in it. There’s yearning.

But will it move beyond aesthetics into actual political traction? Nah. Likely it’ll fade again, overshadowed by a new wave of dystopian mania—the endless reboots of “Everything is fucked, and we’re all doomed” that we see in TV shows and movies. They do make for more profitable stories, ironically. The system capitalizes on our fear, too.

And that’s the problem, too: hope doesn’t sell as well as cynicism.

Antonio

https://beneaththepavement.substack.com ... dium=email

Contrary to bourgeois opinion socialism is not utopian, we're not fools, it's the next best thing that we've figured out.

[blindpig]

Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World
April 2, 2025

Capitalism thrives through economic crises. Will ecological crisis bring it down?



Ståle Holgersen
AGAINST THE CRISIS
Economy and Ecology in a Burning World
Verso Books, 2024

reviewed by Owen McCormack

In Against the Crisis, Swedish socialist Ståle Holgersen takes the reader on a tour of economic and ecological crises and the various ways Marxists and others have analyzed and explained them over the years. If the book was just a synopsis of the past crises and the trends they illuminate it would be a useful addition to every socialist’s library, but it does much more than that. Holgerson explains past crises to help us find our way out of them in the future.

Against the CrisisCrises are far from being “opportunities” for socialists and the left—they are the basic tools with which capitalism reproduces itself, and reasserts its hegemony ideologically. Marxists and the left must not pretend they are opportunities, but something to be fought and exposed as central to capitalism’s functioning.

While the various economic crisis we have lived through even over the last few decades might suggest that Capitalism’s rule is fragile and weak, with its basic tenets becoming exposed and contested by billions of people, the continued rule of capital has never seriously been in doubt. To understand why Holgerson says we must look at how each crisis is resolved.

In a way, Holgersen echoes Marx in almost admiring capitalism’s ability to stay in power and revolutionize productive and social relations while maintaining its hegemonic grip. Even as “all that is solid melts into air,” around us and ordinary people are plunged into poverty, war or chaos, capital remains intact, like the beetles who could survive even a nuclear holocaust.

At one moment, its paid pundits and admirers declare capitalism rests on pure free market principles, risk-taking entrepreneurs and a small state, then without skipping a beat they pivot to demand billion dollar state bailouts for banks and financial institutions. It can move seamlessly (amid the chaos of ruined lives and cascading ecological disasters) from a liberal, inclusive, pro human rights and welfare state paradigm to a far right, near-fascist, pro-genocide and Handmaidens Tale structure of rule.

Quoting Marx, Holgersen argues that crises are “never more than momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions, violent eruptions that re-establish the disturbed balance for the time being.” Crises are “capital’s problems solvers.”

Some of this is not news to Marxists or the left in general; it has been well understood how economic crises help reset the system, clearing out unprofitable enterprises and vast stocks of machinery and wealth to unleash a new round of accumulation.

“Creative destruction” describes the clearing of the decks that allows the next round of profit seeking to begin even as humanity emerges from poverty, job losses and ruined lives; even wars and global conflicts are part of the unseen hand that guides repeated crises within capitalism. New technologies, new productions, new class relations, again based on profit seeking and the unquestioned hegemony of capital, emerge from desolation. Crisis after crisis; now local, now national, now global. Rinse and repeat.

These rhythms in the economic cycle have produced massive suffering and destruction on global scales; they have propelled imperialism and global wars; yet what looms above us now is a new crisis, the one crisis to rule them all; the ecological and climate crisis. Capital’s symbiotic relationship with fossil fuels is driving the rupture with the earth’s planetary boundaries that has placed question marks over the planet’s future habitability for humanity.

Rephrasing Lewontin, Holgersen notes that while past agricultural practices were about growing food, under capitalism it is about converting petroleum into food. “The climate crisis is very much the explosive meeting of capitalist market time and biological time.”

“What really makes ecological crises rapid events and shocks is that their acceleration is not gradual: they come as abrupt changes.” While each economic crisis contains the solution in its own destructive force, the ecological crisis threatens the “demise of our societies as we know them.”

Holgersen demolishes market solutions and the hope of many greens that solutions can be found within the continued rule of capital, that progress will lead us all to a kind of Nordic environmental nirvana of high incomes and clean energy and streets. Capital is not decoupling growth from fossil fuel use, and the time remaining to cut emissions means that an all-in switch to renewables within capitalism is impossible. It’s not so much that “we don’t have time for your revolution” as “we don’t have time for your reforms.”

Holgersen notes “ecological crises have not been problems for capital. It does not matter how much people want “ecological” to equal “profitable.” The most important lesson from the history of capitalism is that capital has profited handsomely from creating environmental damage and ecological crises.” Capital will continue to seek profits from fossil fuels at 2 or 3 or more degrees of warming and to hell with the consequences. The last capitalist may sell gasoline to his last customers, or he may sell them survival kits—or both. “This is not the first time that mass murder has proved to be a good business idea.”

The key to getting out of this Groundhog Day nightmare is the role and potential of the working class. For all of the changes wrought by crises, what remains unchanged is the power of capital over workers and nature. The exploitation of workers, the extraction of surplus value from workers remains key to capital’s functioning. It is workers and the poor who suffer in each crisis for capital to reset itself. Ecological crises take this to new staggering levels; they strike downwards at the poorest and most vulnerable. Economic and ecological crises, are caused by one class, but another pays the price.

While there are tensions between environmental needs and workers’ needs, only the working class can stop global warming. “The main socialist challenge is to reconcile the class struggle in the environmental movement with the class struggle in the workplace. This is only possible through an organized and conscious socialist movement.”

The history of our failures has been long and painful; but in these dark days it is timely to again reassert the possibility of a working class alternative to capital’s rule and to recall the words of the great Irish labor leader who proclaimed many years ago: “The great only appear great because we are on our knees, let us rise, let us rise!”

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2025/0 ... ing-world/

Will Mpox be the next global threat to human health?
April 2, 2025

New mutations support sustained human-to-human transmission



Mpox has the potential to become a significant global health threat if taken too lightly, according to scientists at the University of Surrey. In a letter published in Nature Medicine, researchers highlight how mpox—traditionally spread from animals to humans—is now showing clear signs of sustained human-to-human transmission.

Mpox is a viral infection caused by a virus that belongs to the same family as smallpox. The virus can cause a painful rash, fever, and swollen glands and, in some cases, lead to more serious illness. Mpox usually spreads through close contact with an infected person or animal.

Carlos Maluquer de Motes, Reader in Molecular Virology at the University of Surrey, said: “The most recent outbreaks show that intimate contact is now a significant way the virus spreads. That shift in how it’s transmitted is leading to longer transmission chains and lasting outbreaks.”

The article notes that this change coincided with the rapid spread of clade IIb (a clade is a group of viruses that share a common ancestor) mpox viruses, but different clade I variants are now on the rise too. Researchers are also concerned because clade I viruses are thought to be more aggressive. These viruses appear to be accumulating specific genetic mutations—driven by enzymes in the human body—that may be changing viral properties, so the longer these viruses circulate amongst us, the higher the chances these mutations help mpox adapt to humans.

Although mpox was once mainly seen in Central Africa, the virus caused an outbreak worldwide in 2022 and is now causing outbreaks in multiple sub-Saharan countries. While it currently affects adults the most, the researchers stress that it has the potential to spread among other groups, including children, a group at greater risk of serious illness—although sustained transmission in children has not yet been reported.

Dr Maluquer de Motes added: “Mpox control has to climb up the global health agenda. We have limited diagnostic tools and even fewer antiviral treatments. We urgently need better surveillance and local or regional capacity to produce what we need—otherwise, we are at risk of future epidemics.”

Unlike smallpox, mpox has an animal reservoir, meaning it can’t be fully eradicated. The authors warn that unless international action is taken now—including investment in point-of-care testing and new treatments—mpox will continue to re-emerge and threaten global health.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2025/0 ... an-health/

******



China’s Ecological Civilization explained

The following article by Douglas Rooney, originally published on Li Jingjing’s China Up Close blog, explores the concept of ecological civilisation in depth.

While the phrase is most often associated with President Xi Jinping – who has made it a central theme of Chinese governance – the concept has deep roots in Chinese culture, and is closely connected to the idea of harmony with nature. Doug notes: “The concept of an ‘ecological civilisation’ was first proposed by European researchers in the late 1960s. The term began to be used by Chinese academics in the 1980s and quickly gained in popularity among scientists and researchers. In the 1990s and early 2000s, prominent politicians such as Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping began to push for theories of ecological civilisation to be adopted as Chinese government policy.”

Doug explains that the concept of ecological civilisation became firmly embedded in China’s political mainstream in the 2000s, and is by now widely understood and embraced by the Chinese people. Its acceptance is partly due to its resonance with traditional culture, but also due to the way it has been linked to the country’s modernisation project and improvement of living conditions. In short, “the construction of China’s ecological civilization has created an environment in which investing in the green transition is a good way to make money… China has achieved remarkable progress on the environment by demonstrating to normal people as well as to business and community leaders that they need not choose between the environment and economic prosperity. Indeed, preserving the environment and tackling pollution can often be a route to economic prosperity.”

The results speak for themselves:

The scale of China’s green transformation in the last few decades is truly staggering. In 2023 alone, China would spend more on its green transition than the rest of the world combined and accounted for 75% of the global wind farm and the majority of solar panel installations. China’s EV batteries account for 60% of the global market. Around 40% of the world’s hydrogen refueling stations are in China, along with the world’s largest green hydrogen project and the world’s first zero-carbon factory.

Furthermore, with the Trump administration in the US pursuing a strategy of environmental recklessness, China is more critical than ever to the global green transition. “East Africa’s largest solar power plant was built by China, as was the Der Aar Wind Farm, one of South Africa’s largest. China was also behind Suriname’s hybrid microgrid solar power project, which ended rural reliance on diesel for the generation of electricity. They also helped build Brazil’s colossal Belo Monte Hydropower plant. As the United States returns to climate denial under the Trump administration, China will be the Global South’s only realistic partner in achieving a green transition that still delivers industrial development.”

Douglas Rooney is a Scottish Christian Socialist, currently working in Beijing.

In 2005, Xi Jinping, then secretary of Zhejiang Province, wrote an article in the Zhejiang Daily newspaper called “Green Mountains and Clear Waters are also Gold and Silver Mountains.” The article argued in favour of Hu Jintao’s concept of the scientific outlook of development, which emphasized the harmony between humanity and nature and underlined that while economic development was vitally important, this could not come at the expense of the environment. This would become known as the “Two Mountains Theory.”

Upon becoming president in 2012, Xi would make the “Two Mountains Theory” a cornerstone of the Chinese government’s approach to development. However, the concept underpinning his “Two Mountains Theory” – that of an ecological civilization – did not originate with Xi. Instead, his 2005 article and the green policies he has championed, first as secretary of Zhejiang and later as president of China, are part of a larger movement within Chinese society that was inspired by theories of ecological civilization coming out of the European scientific community in the 1960s and 1970s. What Xi and other leading Chinese theorists did was to fit these concepts into the Chinese context. Today, China has made the concept of an ecological civilization very much its own, and, I would argue, you cannot understand contemporary China without first understanding what China means when it talks about its ecological civilization.

China’s Ecological Civilization
The concept of an ‘ecological civilization’ was first proposed by European researchers in the late 1960s. The term began to be used by Chinese academics in the 1980s and quickly gained in popularity among scientists and researchers. In the 1990s and early 2000s, prominent politicians such as Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping began to push for theories of ecological civilization to be adopted as Chinese government policy. In other words, as President Xi would later summarize it in a statement at a United Nations event, Chinese society would “seek a kind of modernization that promotes the harmonious coexistence of man and nature.”

Although the modern term “ecological civilization” was first proposed by Europeans, the ideas behind the concept have deep roots in Chinese Daoist traditions. Ancient Daoist texts like the Dao De Jing hold the natural environment in high regard, and Chinese environmentalists have long drawn from these ancient source texts in making their case for the importance of protecting the natural world. Of course, the philosophy of the natural world found in ancient Chinese texts does not always match perfectly with modern environmental ethics, but, as early as 1995, the China Daoist Association would release a “Declaration on the Environment” which would attempt to bridge the gap between modern environmentalism and ancient Daoist philosophy. In so doing, they became part of a movement advocating for the acceptance of an ecological civilization rooted in Chinese cultural values. This has also helped modern Chinese theorists and policy makers situate their green philosophy in China’s idea of itself as a civilization. This might go part of the way to explain why the tensions that have arisen in Europe and North America over the green transition have been considerably less pronounced in China.

The campaign in the 1990s and early 2000s to introduce more green thinking into Chinese political discourse and policy making was largely successful, and ecological civilization would become firmly embedded in China’s political mainstream in 2007 when, at the 17th Party Conference, it was adopted by the CPC as a way to develop the country and save the planet. Over the next decade, China’s theoretical approach to ecological civilization would continue to develop until it was formally adopted into the Chinese constitution in 2018.

China’s approach to achieving an ecological civilization rooted in a concept of sustainable development can be seen more recently in China’s ambitious dual carbon goal. This has set out a framework for China to achieve peak carbon emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. If achieved, the dual carbon goal would form a road map for other developing countries to industrialize without sacrificing their environment. As of the start of this year, China looks set to meet the first part of the dual carbon goal early.

Ecological Civilization in Practice
The scale of China’s green transformation in the last few decades is truly staggering. In 2023 alone, China would spend more on its green transition than the rest of the world combined and accounted for 75% of the global wind farm and the majority of solar panel installations. China’s EV batteries account for 60% of the global market. Around 40% of the world’s hydrogen refueling stations are in China, along with the world’s largest green hydrogen project and the world’s first zero-carbon factory. Between 2012 and 2021, CO2 per unit of GDP dropped by 34.4%, and energy consumption per unit of GDP decreased by 26.4%. The Ecological Conservation Redline adopted in 2017 has constrained human activity and enhanced environmental protections in 95% of China’s most valuable ecosystems and in 100% of the plant and animal habitats under state conservation orders. We could go on.

Of course, the national government has been an important factor in pushing for a green transition, but in a country as big, complex and diverse as China it would be impossible for the central government to implement any policy on the scale of the green transition if there wasn’t also substantial buy-in for the project on the ground. When trying to understand what China’s ecological civilization looks like in practice, it is to this interplay between national, provincial, and local government with the business community and civic society that we must turn.

The Role of National Government: As we have seen, the national government has played a pivotal role in providing ideological guidance for the type of ecological civilization that the rest of Chinese society is aiming to create. In speeches, guidelines, meetings, and policy documents, the central government has shaped the framework in which provincial and local governments, as well as the private sector, operate. They also have an important role in co-coordinating and offering guidance on cross-province projects like the Three-North Shelterbelt Forrest Program, the largest forest program in the world. But the largest impact the central government has in facilitating the green transition is probably its financial role: research funding, for example, has increased for green technology, rising by 70% between 2017 and 2023, and over the next few years the government is aiming to see funding for green and environmental protection reach $2.1 trillion. Yet, as with much of China’s development goals, the building of an ecological civilization is a whole China affair.

Ecological Civilization in the Localities: National policy decisions and guidelines may sound very impressive in their scale but remain somewhat abstract. At the national level, ecological civilization is represented by data: percentage increases, billions spent, number of units produced, and so on. However, it is at the city and county level where we can best get an idea of how China’s ecological civilization isan impediment and brings benefits to everyday people.

The small city of Shuitou in Zhejiang province is a good example of ecological transformation in action. In the 1980s and 1990s, Shuitou was China’s leather capital, home to over 1000 tanneries. However, leather working is a heavily polluting industry, and, as a result, by 2000, Shuitou was one of the most polluted cities in all of China. When the economic downturn hit the city in the mid-2000s, Shuitou used this as an opportunity to pivot to a less polluting industry: pet toys and treats. By 2023, pet products were worth $630 million to the city, 60% of the world’s dog chews were made in Shuitou, and the city’s environment had improved immeasurably. The transformation of Shuitou is the kind of thing that is often meant when speaking of China’s ecological civilization. The pet industry is not really part of the new green industries of China (although we could argue that encouraging better pet care contributes to the goal of humanity living in better harmony with nature). However, the transformation of the city from China’s leather capital to its premier pet town improved the environment, reduced pollution, and made Shuitou a more livable place for its residents.

The planning model used to achieve this is also very much in keeping with the model used elsewhere to achieve an ecological civilization: while the local government were instrumental in pushing for the transformation of the city, it would not have been possible without local entrepreneurs taking up the challenge and setting up their own pet product businesses. This is a green transition that has buy-in from all levels of society, and this was possible because making the local area more environmentally friendly also came with very direct and very obvious economic benefits for the residents.

Another good example of this partnership between local government and business can be seen in the town of Jixian in Shaanxi province, which has found new economic vigour as home to the Chinese EV giant BYD’s largest factory. There, 40,000 workers are directly employed in producing the new electric vehicles that have become a central feature of China’s green transition.

Or we could examine the Erhai Lake region in Yunnan, which, until recently, suffered from major environmental problems partly due to local herders’ animals defecating on the shore of the lake. The local government built four factories that process 1,300 tonnes of cow dung a day. This has solved Erhai Lake’s pollution problem while also producing fertilizer, which is then shipped all across China and South East Asia, and bringing much needed jobs to an underdeveloped region. The cleaning up of pollution on the lake has also helped facilitate the growth of Erhai’s tourism industry, bringing in even more jobs to the region.

These are three illustrative examples, but there are thousands more such cases developing all across China. At the local level, we can see the key concepts of China’s ecological civilization and the “Two Mountains” theory in practice: improving the environment while growing the economy. In Shuitou, for example, rather than closing the factories causing the pollution, the industry is repurposed into a more environmentally friendly sector. On Erhai Lake, rather than simply banning the already impoverished herders from the shoreline, the problem has been turned into a way to grow the local economy. In this way, the local people and communities are fully bought into the green transition since they can directly envision how their lives improve both in terms of a healthier living environment and greater economic prosperity.

The Role of Business in Scaling the Two Mountains: The focus on economic growth means that the business community has also been brought in to help build China’s ecological civilization. Over 800 large Chinese companies have already pledged to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, but it is in the emerging green technology sector that the power of the Chinese business community can truly be felt.

Perhaps no company is more important to China’s green transition than BYD. The EV manufacturer has helped pioneer China’s EV revolution: in 2015 EV market penetration in China was less than 1%, by 2022 it was 25.6%. Of course, part of this transition has been due to government policy: for example, one province has introduced plans to ban the sale of fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2030, and fiscal policy has tended to favour electric vehicles. But the slick marketing campaigns and desirable products of EV companies like BYD have been an important component of the transition away from fossil-powered vehicles.

BYD is not the only EV company operating in China, but it is certainly the largest and most successful: in 2022, it surpassed Tesla as the world’s top EV vehicle manufacturer in terms of global sales, and in 2023, it became the first EV company to enter the top 10 global car companies. This reach beyond China’s borders has meant BYD has also become an important part of the global green transition away from reliance on fossil fuels: it is their sales teams, for example, that are at the forefront of convincing the fossil-fuel dependent Gulf States to switch to electric cars.

Of course, the primary purpose of BYD and China’s other green tech firms is not environmentalism. These are businesses, and, as such, their top priority is making profit and finding business success. Yet, the construction of China’s ecological civilization has created an environment in which investing in the green transition is a good way to make money. Just as the residents of China’s factory towns can see prosperity in embracing the ideas of ecological civilization, so too can China’s business leaders. There are few better examples of the successful interplay between the national government’s green guidance and the Chinese business community than BYD’s rising dominance in the global car market.

What China’s Ecological Civilization Means for the World
Pollution has not entirely disappeared in China, but the building of an ecological civilization means that today, China is closer to achieving the dream of living in harmony with nature that President Xi outlined in the Zhejiang Daily 20 years ago than ever before. China has achieved remarkable progress on the environment by demonstrating to normal people as well as to business and community leaders that they need not choose between the environment and economic prosperity. Indeed, preserving the environment and tackling pollution can often be a route to economic prosperity.

During the period in which China has been building its ecological civilization, the country has also become increasingly important to the global economy. This has meant that, especially in the Global South, China has also become increasingly important to the world’s green transition. For example, Chinese companies have a 60% share of the global EV battery market. China is also increasingly central to the global renewable energy industry – and this is true even in the Global North. New Zealand, for instance, has received 89% of its solar equipment from China, and so Chinese factories have become vitally important in that country achieving its own climate goals.

The centrality of China to the green transition can also be seen in its famed infrastructure projects. East Africa’s largest solar power plant was built by China, as was the Der Aar Wind Farm, one of South Africa’s largest. China was also behind Suriname’s hybrid microgrid solar power project, which ended rural reliance on diesel for the generation of electricity. They also helped build Brazil’s colossal Belo Monte Hydropower plant. As the United States returns to climate denial under the Trump administration, China will be the Global South’s only realistic partner in achieving a green transition that still delivers industrial development.

Despite having deep roots in Chinese culture, the adoption of an ecological civilization was not a foregone conclusion. China’s current success in the green transition is due to decades of hard work by Chinese politicians, business leaders, and the common people. There is still a lot of work to be done, but, with Trump back in the White House and an anti-green backlash brewing in Europe, China has become the world’s last best hope for climate justice.

Further Reading
China’s Ecological Transition: Latest Issue of Wenhua Zongheng journal

China’s Renewable Sector Explained

The Great Green Wall of China Explained

https://socialistchina.org/2025/04/01/c ... explained/



Video: China’s environmental strategies

Embedded below is a talk given by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez at a meeting of the South Yorkshire Morning Star Supporters Group, at the Central United Reformed Church, Sheffield, Britain, on Thursday 27 March 2025.

Carlos explains why it’s not reasonable for the West to pin the blame for the environmental crisis onto China or to portray it as a climate criminal; the remarkable progress China is making on renewable energy, electric transport, biodiversity protection and afforestation; China’s role in pushing forward the global energy transition; and the dangers of the escalating New Cold War in terms of preventing urgently-needed cooperation on environmental issues.

The presentation was followed by a lively discussion and Q&A.

https://socialistchina.org/2025/03/31/v ... trategies/

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Nuclear energy: the only realistic path for environmentalism

Raphael Machado

April 5, 2025

Why do NGOs like Greenpeace campaign against nuclear energy? Why does Greta Thunberg advocate closing nuclear plants?

One of the central elements of the hegemonic ideology in the West today has been the “Green Agenda.” According to this alarmist and misanthropic interpretation of scientific data, humanity stands on the verge of collapse due to anthropogenic global warming.

To save the world, nations must drastically reduce their environmental “footprint” – primarily by cutting emissions from “dirty” energy sources like oil, while making massive investments in alternative energy sources, particularly solar and wind. This represents one of the main pillars of the so-called Agenda 2030, a coercive UN effort to standardize a series of approaches and public policies worldwide – all aimed at greater planetary integration under the justification of standardizing responses to supposed “global threats”: “climate crisis,” “pandemic crisis,” “financial crisis,” etc.

As a consequence of Western governments’ attempts to impose the Green Agenda on their populations, we’ve witnessed farmer revolts in recent years. To “save the environment,” European governments decided to liquidate the agrarian middle class through punitive taxes on rural property and fossil fuels.

Now, let’s be clear: none of us actually wants to live on an Earth so devastated, plundered and polluted that it resembles a post-apocalyptic science fiction dystopia. We all want to breathe clean air, rest in the shade of trees, and occasionally visit wilderness areas to hunt, camp, etc.

But many nations, particularly those outside the Atlantic Axis, perceive environmentalist discourse as intending to hinder their industrial development. Already-developed countries appear to be constructing narratives to question necessary investments in energy, steel industry infrastructure, metallurgy, petrochemicals, etc. because they “harm the environment.” Even if this isn’t the intention, it becomes the concrete consequence.

Nevertheless, it’s a seductive discourse not only because it appeals to relevant moral sentiments, but also because it’s amplified by an army of NGOs and private companies. Yet despite this discourse being amplified to the point of permeating all contemporary political and economic affairs, we rarely hear about nuclear energy as an alternative. Isn’t that strange?

Nuclear energy is by far the most energy-dense source available. A single kilogram of uranium-235 releases about 24 million kWh of thermal energy, equivalent to burning 3,000 tons of coal. In comparison, solar energy requires vast areas and has an average efficiency of just 15-22%, while wind energy depends on weather conditions and also occupies enormous territories.

Furthermore, while solar and wind plants operate at 20-40% average capacity, nuclear plants achieve 90% or more, running 24/7 without intermittency.

Regarding environmental impact, contrary to popular myth, nuclear energy is one of the cleanest sources. The complete cycle (mining, enrichment, operation and disposal) emits only 12 gCO₂/kWh, comparable to wind energy (11 gCO₂/kWh) and far below natural gas (490 gCO₂/kWh) and coal (820 gCO₂/kWh). If the world replaced hydrocarbons with nuclear energy, global emissions would plummet.

The Green Agenda’s stated objective would thus be achieved without harming economic development, thanks to nuclear energy’s superior efficiency.

Even the waste issue shouldn’t cause such concern. Nuclear waste is often used as an argument against atomic energy, but the volume is minimal (a 1 GW reactor produces only 3 m³/year of high-level waste), recycling techniques exist to further reduce waste quantities, and deep geological repositories ensure safe storage for millennia.

The same cannot be said for solar panels and wind turbines. The former contain valuable materials like silicon, silver and copper, but also highly toxic substances like lead and cadmium. In practice, solar panels aren’t recycled because the process is expensive and complex. Most end up in simple disposal, contributing to soil and water pollution.

So why do NGOs like Greenpeace campaign against nuclear energy? Why does Greta Thunberg advocate closing nuclear plants? In short, why do Green Agenda spokespersons ignore or even campaign against nuclear power?

The best interpretation of this phenomenon is that nuclear energy’s operational model doesn’t lend itself as easily to financialization as solar and wind. The space for large private companies to turn nuclear power into a service for capitalist exploitation is more limited.

True energy efficiency simply isn’t as profitable for parasitic oligarchies.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... mentalism/

I think this piece minimizes the nuclear waste problem. A little goes a long way, both in toxicity and temporal duration. However that is a long term problem and we are faced with a very short term problem. We must either ditch technological civilization or come up with power that doesn't put more carbon in the atmosphere. Current alternatives while very helpful and promising cannot get us over the humps of large scale users and reliability.

Material considerations are the big thing but they ain't everything. For my generation(Boomer) nuclear was EVIL, and we had good reasons to be paranoid, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like hiding under our 2nd grade desks waiting for the flash. And so out of hand rejection, me included, for a long time. However, the times they are a changing along with the climate. In this short term we really have no choice other than the afore mentioned 'ditching', but I suspect the the advocates of that path fail to properly consider the scale of human suffering and ecological destruction involved in 'collapse' because a dying civilization will drag everything down with it, like a drowning man.

Operational safety is not a deal breaker, it has largely been achieved given the many, many years of safe operation compared to a few accidents, which shouldn't be minimized but not inflated either. If we take the profit motive out of the equation it will be better still.

Mebbe we can get some of them space elevators and toss that toxic crap into the sun...And haven't they got that fusion thing working yet? In the meantime the least bad of bad choices.

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PS

China begins production of nuclear batteries
April 5, 17:04



China Begins Mass Production of Nuclear Batteries

The declared service life is 50 years without recharging. The battery does not emit radiation, and at the end of the life cycle, it turns into ordinary copper.

The BV100 nuclear battery is based on the radioactive isotope nickel-63. It is completely safe, since it does not emit heat during the degradation process (it is not explosive) and turns into stable copper. The declared service life without the need for maintenance and recharging is 50+ years. The current version of the battery for mass production has a voltage of 3 V with a total power of 100 microwatts.

The BV100 has an energy density 10 times higher than lithium-ion analogues.

Soon, phones will not need to be charged.

https://t.me/MIrvMomente/44809 - zinc


Finally, there will be something to power the Brotherhood of Steel Armor.

But seriously, if you put such blocks on drones, this will seriously increase their autonomy in the foreseeable future.

The service life of the atomic power source is reported to be about 50 years. Its size is 15 * 15 * 5 mm, the operating temperature range is from -60 to +120 degrees, that is, literally all temperatures that can be encountered in everyday life, and with a reserve. At the same time, the power source is safe in terms of radioactivity: the half-life of nickel-63 is 100 years, and it decays into "non-radiating" components - a stable isotope of copper.
In addition to this nickel isotope, the battery, which was named BV-100, uses diamond semiconductors - their function is to convert the decay energy of nickel-63 into electricity. To create more powerful power sources based on this technology, the manufacturer is preparing to release a 1-watt element (announced in 2025) and batteries from several sources. It is reported that these batteries are of greatest interest to doctors, manufacturers of drones, gadgets and in the aerospace industry.
And a few years ago, this technology was Russian. "Scientists from NRNU MEPhI have come close to implementing this task," the institute's website reported in early 2023.

https://www.mk.ru/science/2025/04/03/iz ... dd28057575 - zinc

In fact, it was invented here, but the Chinese were the first to move to mass production.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9765510.html

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Green Energy+Electrification vs Fossil Fuel
TP Huang
Apr 05, 2025

A few days ago, I saw a very interesting chart on cost of new Shale Well. As we know, it takes tech and more work to dig deeper to get oil and gas from shale formation. The “Lifting cost” of shale gas is a lot more expensive than oil from Saudi Arabia and Iran. It is my understanding that oil wells are normally the most productive in the first few years and then they eventually run out. So oil companies need to continue to find new oil wells and drill into them. Of course, you drill the ones that are easier to reach first and then move to the harder to reach ones. And as inflation has really hit America in the past few years, the cost of new shale well has also gone up. to the point where WTI price needs to be at $65 to justify new well.



Now as I speak, the WTI price ranges from $62/barrel for front month to $60/barrel for Q4. If we look at the chart above, this type of oil pricing makes it hard for any new well to be drilled in America. As inflation is likely to go up due to tariffs, We could see the oil cost curve closer to $70 this year. This is a really big change from last year when OPEC+ was constantly trying to cut production to get Brent price above $80. It was also when America hit new highs in crude production.

Aside from fears of global recession, OPEC+’s move to increase oil production also caused WTI and Brent price to crash. OPEC apparently made this decision to appease Trump and cause energy price to drop in America and reduce inflation. Of course, if this actually ends up causing decreased oil production in America, it would also lead to less Natural Gas production. It is too hard to forecast what that looks like for me.

But I do know this, China’s crude demand has peaked. Recently, I saw the March NEV Heavy Duty Truck numbers come out



We saw a huge jump in sale of electric HDTs in China last month vs a year ago. Last month, the combination of NEV and NG powered HDTs surpassed the 50% mark. At this rate, diesel consumption out of China will continue to drop.

As we know, the NEV penetration in passenger Vehicle market is also up big time YoY. This is something that is likely to only accelerate. Both gasoline and diesel demand likely peaked already out of China. The only thing growing still was the demand for chemicals. That is certainly still happening, but for how long before we have a huge overcapacity in petrochem production? The move away from oil in transportation sector is happening at a break neck pace out of China. As I wrote on X recently, even the electric Loader penetration reached 10.5% last year. The latest battery technology development (like the commercial vehicle batteries offered by BYD) have led to electric machinery and commercial vehicles becoming better choices than diesel ones. The cost, performance, charging performance, reliability and operating environments of electric machineries are all better than diesel ones now.



BYD batteries can do 7000+ charge cycles and operate from -35 to 65 deg celsius at 5500m altitude. It can operate at 1500V and be compact and energy dense enough to operate for a full work day without need to recharge. The battery pack itself can also be charged in an hour or swapped. For commercial companies, they don’t care about BMW or Mercedes brand, they just want the machinery or trucks that can operate the longest at the lowest cost. We are finally at that point in electric vehicle transition where electric options are clearly better.

I recently read an article where an electric truck maker said they have so many orders that they simply can’t complete yet. In my mind, that means the NEV penetration for commercial vehicles and machineries is now mostly dependent on scaling up production and supply chain. Yes, that means we need a whole lot more batteries.

And guess what, that is happening. BYD’s JV with XCMG and Weichai are both now in production. That is just one of the many development enabling this electrification process. Of course, since China is one of the major exporters of trucks and machineries, it will also have the ability to increase adoption of electric trucks globally. We could very well hit a point over the next 5 years where gasoline and diesel demand drops 10% of what it was at the peak. And that is great, because electricity in China is becoming increasingly renewable. This recent report showed that China’s installed capacity of non-fossil fuel generator has reached 2000GW for the first time, including 1460GW in solar and win.



But the transformation of green energy goes beyond just electrification. Just today, I posted two new tweets on using green hydrogen to produce circulating oil/lubricant and to do direct reduction of casting & forging in metallurgy. In the upcoming days, I plan to write something on just the fast growth of alternative fuel in shipping, especially LNG and Methanol dual fuel ships. That is becoming dominantly a theme for all the newly ordered ships. China is also building the ports that allow these type of ships to be refueled. Shanghai’s Yangshan port is a pioneer here. In addition to this, China has also accelerated the development of Sustainable Aviation Fuel. Yes, shipping and aviation are probably > 10% of the global oil demand. If we can produce a good chunk of green fuel or even LNG to replace diesel and jet fuel, that will cause real drag on the demand of oil.

As I posted in this X thread, 2024 was a year of huge number of new hydrogen related projects in China in the form of methanol and ammonia production. In fact, the announced green methanol project already meets 43% of China’s current methanol needs. For Ammonia, that ratio is 19%. And this is just the beginning. Can you imagine all that ammonia and methanol that required crude and natural gas or coal back in the days but can be produced directly through green energy now? Think about all the fertilizers and plastics. That is also huge for lowering demand in oil.

So as I sit here today, I feel like we are not far away from oil demand peaking. I would in fact be very optimistic about green energy production accelerating and getting much cheaper over the next 10 years as production gets scaled up. Right now, the lowest hydrogen production cost in China is $2.5-3/kg. Is there any reason this cannot get lowered to $1 in 10 years? China has done this type of cost reduction curve for every other form of green energy that required scaling up. As long as solar and wind remain cheap, green energy can remain cheap.

https://tphuang.substack.com/p/green-en ... dium=email

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Predicting climate chaos, Morgan Stanley touts air conditioning profit potential
This is disaster capitalism at its worst.
Emily Atkin
Apr 10, 2025



Last week, E&E News reporter Corbin Hiar unearthed an obscure but important research report from Morgan Stanley, one of the largest banks in America and one of the world’s biggest funders of fossil fuel projects.

In that report distributed March 17, Morgan Stanley analysts told investor clients that they believe the world is hurtling toward one of the most dangerous, terrifying global warming scenarios imaginable.

“We now expect a 3°C world,” the analysts wrote, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.”

The analysts didn’t describe what a 3°C world actually means, so here’s the gist. A world warmed by 3°C is one that’s rapidly falling apart. Every single coral reef in the ocean is dead. Entire regions of the world are too hot for human life. Nature is continuously throwing tantrums—droughts, wildfires, powerful storms, and unimaginable rain, location depending. There are food shortages and mass extinctions. Up to 40 percent of the world’s economy is wiped out.



There is, however, at least one good thing about a 3°C world, according to the Morgan Stanley analysts.

Air conditioning stocks are gonna go nuts.

“We expect cooling—critical to human health and productivity in many climates—to be a potent long-term growth theme,” the analysts wrote. As the world gets hotter, they predicted, the global air conditioning market could grow by 41 percent by the end of the decade, up to $331 billion. The analysis also “outlines several dozen air conditioning businesses around the world that are likely to profit from a hotter world,” wrote Guardian reporter Oliver Milman, who also obtained the report.

HEATED is an independent newsletter dedicated to climate accountability journalism and analysis since 2019. It is made possible by readers who upgrade to a paid subscription.

To be fair, Morgan Stanley would almost certainly dispute my characterization of their report. “I would not characterize our view being that ‘climate change brings many upsides,’” Stephen Byrd, Morgan Stanley’s global head of sustainability research, told Milman.

So how would Byrd characterize the bank’s view? “I would instead suggest that we will see large volumes of capital deployed to mitigate the impacts of climate change,” Byrd said, “and cooling (among other products, such as smart power grids) would be one such category of increased capital allocation.”

I’m no investing expert, but my rudimentary understanding is that in banking, more money = good. It’s somehow hard for me to believe that Morgan Stanley would tell its clients about the potential near-doubling of a multi-billion dollar market in the next five years if they didn’t believe this was somewhat positive.

But overall, it seems Byrd wants us to believe that Morgan Stanley has no moral attachment to this finding; that they are simply reporting what they see and telling their clients, as is their obligation. What he likely doesn’t understand is that the bank’s air of detachment is precisely what that makes this report so nauseating. Because Morgan Stanley is in no way detached from the future outcome of climate change. Indeed, if the world does reach 3°C, it will be in part because of them.

Morgan Stanley has invested more than $183 billion in fossil fuels in 2016, according to the latest Banking on Climate Chaos report. This makes it the 15th largest private financier of fossil fuels in the world since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed. The bank is also the sixth largest financier of fracked methane gas, one of the biggest drivers of fossil fuel emissions in the last decade. (In case you forgot, fossil fuels are responsible for more than 75 percent of the emissions that cause climate change).

Morgan Stanley knows these investments cannot continue if the world is to preserve a safe climate. That’s why in 2021, it made a pledge to significantly rein them in. The bank was one of the founding members of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-backed coalition of banks worldwide committed to “[aligning] lending and investment portfolios with net-zero emissions by 2050.” Doing this by necessity would mean phasing out funding of new fossil fuel projects, as there is no other way to reach net zero emissions by 2050. By joining the NZBA, the bank was also committing to some level of third-party accountability for meeting those promises.

But four years later, it feels like joining the NZBA was simply a ruse to get everyone off banks’ backs for a while. Because from 2022 to 2023, Morgan Stanley actually increased its annual funding of fossil fuels, from $14.7 billion to $19.1 billion. In addition, in 2024, researchers from MIT released an analysis of bank behavior since signing the pledge. The result: “Our evidence suggests that NZBA banks are neither divesting nor engaging differently from banks without a commitment.”

And now that Donald Trump is in the White House, banks like Morgan Stanley have a perfect excuse to act like the planet’s future is out of their hands. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Morgan Stanley left the NZBA without providing a reason—as did many of its peers with even larger yearly investments in fossil fuels. To soften the blow, Morgan Stanley put out a statement promising that its “commitment to net-zero remains unchanged.” Its website says the bank still has aggressive climate targets it intends to hit.

But the air conditioning stock analysis directly contradicts that promise. “The idea that you're seeing Morgan Stanley say ‘We expect a 3°C world,’ that in itself is projecting a future in which they are planning to continue to fund fossil fuel infrastructure,” said Colin Rees, the U.S. program manager at Oil Change International and co-author of the Banking on Climate Chaos report. “They’re saying, ‘We anticipate business as usual.”

It is true that banks are increasingly under pressure from the Trump administration and Republicans to abandon their climate commitments. Even before Trump took office, House Republicans had launched probes alleging that companies engaged in climate-conscious investing are violating U.S. antitrust and consumer protection laws.

But if any institution on Earth had the power not to bow to oligarchs, it would be the massive private banks that hold everyone’s money. Morgan Stanley and its peers had a choice: They could either stop destroying the planet, or they could stay out of trouble with Trump. The companies chose the latter, and now Morgan Stanley is taking the next logical step under disaster capitalism: investing big in air conditioners.

The future Morgan Stanley is predicting doesn’t have to be the case, Rees argues. “We certainly can still reach 2°C if we’re actually committed to it,” he said. But “committing to it” means that large private financial institutions like Morgan Stanley would have to actually stick to their commitments and stop funding new fossil fuel infrastructure. And that requires massive public pressure.

”There needs to be a lot of strong pushback to statements like this, which may be couched in boring financial language, but are actually revealing a deeply evil plan and abdication of any responsibility,” he said. “And that's our money. This is money that normal people around the world are investing in these banks. And they’re using it to invest in fossil fuels.”

“Hypocrisy doesn’t do it justice, because it doesn’t capture the evilness of what they’re actually talking about and doing here,” Rees added. “The fact that they’re able to walk around and be taken seriously and seen in polite company is just egregious.”

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Other stories I’m following:
Trump has cancelled a key contract for a massive Congressionally-mandated climate science report—potentially based on a laughably stupid story by the Daily Wire. From the New York Times:

The contract cancellation came a day after The Daily Wire, a conservative news website, reported on ICF’s central role in helping to produce the National Climate Assessment in an article titled “Meet the Government Consultants Raking in Millions to Spread Climate Doom.”

The Daily Wire article claims the contractor is “highly partisan” because of one of the two employees is a climate scientist who lists her pronouns in her Instagram bio.

Trump misrepresents facts about coal as he signs executive orders to boost its use. From the Associated Press:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed four executive orders designed to boost the U.S. coal industry, outlining steps to protect coal-fired power plants and expedite leases for coal mining on U.S. land. But in touting the benefits of coal, he misrepresented several aspects of its safety and use.

In summary, coal is not clean; coal is not cheap; the amount of untapped coal in the ground is not nearly as valuable as Trump claims; and Germany is not building new coal plants.

Trump pushes coal to feed AI power demand. From Axios:

The White House is seeking to lean on coal-fired power —which has been in a steady decline in the U.S. over the last 15 years—to feed rising energy demand driven by artificial intelligence.

Dedicated HEATED readers know we called this months ago, albeit for Bitcoin mining. But these are all the same people.

She inspired laws to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable. Now fossil fuel groups are targeting her. From the New York Times:

Fresh out of law school in 2022, Rachel Rothschild wrote a memo laying out the legal justification for a new strategy to fight climate change: States could force oil and gas companies to pay for the damage caused by extreme floods and wildfires that are made worse by the use of their products.

Ms. Rothschild’s work was foundational. It provided the basis for the nation’s first “climate superfund” laws, which were passed in New York and Vermont last year and could be adopted by as many as six more states as soon as this year. If implemented, they could cost oil companies billions of dollars.

Her work made Ms. Rothschild a target. She is one of a number of lawyers, law professors and judges who have been the focus of a campaign to discredit them led by a conservative group with ties to the fossil fuel industry and the Trump administration.

This probably feels like bad news to most of you, but I consider it a sign that these laws actually might have real power to draw down fossil fuel emissions. The industry wouldn’t be so aggressive about it otherwise.

https://heated.world/p/predicting-clima ... dium=email