Environment

As global temperatures rise, extreme weather events are becoming more intense and more frequent all around the world.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4928706

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While developed countries have used the majority of this budget, the analysis shows that China’s historical emissions reached 312GtCO2 in 2023, overtaking the EU’s 303GtCO2.

China is still far behind the 532GtCO2 emitted by the US, however, according to the analysis.

The findings by Carbonbrief come amid fraught negotiations at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, where negotiators have been invoking the “principle of historical responsibility” in their discussions over who should pay money towards a new goal for climate finance – and how much.

[...]

Historical CO2 emissions matter for climate change, because there is a finite “carbon budget” that can be released into the atmosphere before a given level of global warming is breached.

For example, in order to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, only around 2,800GtCO2 can be added to the atmosphere, counting all emissions since the pre-industrial period. (This is according to a 2023 study updating figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)

Cumulative emissions since 1850 will reach 2,607CO2 by the end of 2024, according to Carbon Brief’s new analysis, meaning that some 94% of the 1.5C budget will have been used up.

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cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4898387

While international donors and foreign investors were wary of investing in Tajikistan, Chinese companies have been willing to navigate Tajikistan's complicated political web.

An exiled Tajik opposition member who spoke to Global Voices on conditions of anonymity said that in order to do business in Tajikistan, anyone, be it a foreign or local company or businessman, needs to have some sort of “roof,” i.e. patronage from local or state officials in order to secure business. And this kind of protection is often remunerated by payments or bribes.

[...]

Beginning in 2012, Tajikistan leased around 18,000 hectares of its land to China for cotton, rice, grain, and corn cultivation for a 49-year contract. The agreement was part of a broader initiative to strengthen economic ties between the two countries.

The main problem with this agreement is that its terms and conditions have not been disclosed. It is not clear what — if any — systems have been implemented regarding inspecting and regulating the lands leased by Chinese farmers.

[...]

A regional expert [...] said that “China has a lot of expertise in turning land affected by erosion into a working land, through the ‘terracing method,’ which slows down soil erosion.” [...] However, a regional expert [...] pointed out that “the nature of agriculture in Tajikistan is based on irrigation and water brings weeds which have to be dealt with by using pesticides. Pesticides enter the soil and ultimately end up in water basins, most likely in the Amudarya River,” which flows through Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan.

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The Belt and Road Initiative

China is keen to help Chinese companies develop their work abroad within the framework of “The Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), it's massive international development plan.

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On the other hand, independent Tajik farmers have been left at a big disadvantage compared to well-financed Chinese agricultural companies. They have little to no support from the Tajik state. It is also difficult for them to get bank loans to buy modern equipment since they are exclusively offered short-term loans at high interest rates, which makes it nearly impossible for farmers to pay it back.

Fertilizers and pesticides

While China may be benefiting from its agricultural investments, they could be leaving a dangerous legacy in the host countries, namely: long-lasting pollution.

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This problem is not isolated to Tajikistan. A regional expert who is monitoring China's farming practices in Russia, who spoke to Global Voices on the condition of anonymity, says that “Chinese farmers were achieving remarkable crops in Russia, but they used pesticides and other chemicals, which ultimately made the land unusable.” A number of reports in Russian media about the harmful consequences of Chinese farming practices in Russia have corroborated this claim.

[...]

Chinese companies bring modern agricultural technology that has helped enhance productivity in Tajikistan's cotton sector. Improved methods and resources have also led to higher yields, benefiting the local economy and contributing to Tajikistan's export potential. However, the lack of transparency regarding fertilizers and pesticides poses a major environmental and social threat — one that has yet to be fully explored or understood because of Tajikistan's repressive environment toward media and civil society.

Oil company investment in renewables reached $30 billion in 2023, but that’s pocket change; it amounts to only four percent of their overall capital investment, while their fossil investments continue to skyrocket. And it turns out, some companies have outright lied about their expenditures on renewable energy; others spent a while touting fancy ventures like algae-based fuels before just folding the projects outright, presumably happy with the PR return on investment that kept real pressure off their backs for another critical decade.

That’s all it is, really: Big Oil will say whatever needs saying at any given moment in order to continue doing exactly what they have done for a century. In 2020, that meant acknowledging the need for an energy transition, contritely pointing to their pandemic-induced losses, and floating the idea of some major pivot to wind and solar power. In 2024, that means saying, more or less, “fuck you, let’s drill.”

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• In the last 125 years, bobcats have recovered significantly from extremely low numbers, with several million individuals found throughout North America today.
• Living at the interface of urban and rural environments, bobcats face many human-caused dangers, including loss of habitat to roam, automobiles, and rodent poisons.
• Bobcats help reduce the spread of diseases from animals to humans partly because they and other large mammals are poor disease vectors. Bobcats also prey on the small rodents that easily transmit pathogens.
• It’s legal to hunt bobcats in most of the United States. California, which has for five years closed the bobcat season, may reinstate hunting in 2025. Some researchers suggest that regulators should more carefully consider the role thriving wildcat populations play in protecting human communities from zoonotic diseases before expanding hunting.

[Edit typo.]

According to the European Union's climate agency, 2024 is also the first year to breach the 1.5 degree Celsius climate threshold.

What impact do such authoritarian governments have on organizers and activists in the Philippines?

When we look at how we do our work as organizers, there is the stark reality of the dangers that we sometimes face. It could be a really blatant attack on people like what we’ve seen in the past decade. I am very familiar with the assassination of Gloria Capitan, an anti-coal activist in Bataan. And I had the honor of meeting Chad Booc, who was assassinated two years ago. His work was about providing an alternative way of learning for the Lumad [Indigenous people] in Mindanao, but there were a lot of climate justice aspects to his work. That’s only just scratching the surface with all the documented cases of killings of environmental defenders. We have to raise our voices around this issue every time we go to an environmental conference or a meeting. We cannot just talk about climate without talking about justice. We cannot talk about climate justice without talking about human rights.

But there are a range of threats. A very close friend, someone who has been with Greenpeace, is being charged with cyber libel because we have been building up anti-mining resistance on Cebu island. This kind of threat is very real and it could really be very discouraging for a lot of us in the environmental movement. Because of this, many of us have decided to change our names on social media. Many of us hide behind cryptic handles on Facebook. And many of us have disengaged from social media altogether. Because we live in a digital world where a lot of connections and communication are done digitally, this can be very damaging to our effectiveness of putting our voices out there.

In the Philippines, activists have a lot of distrust in these platforms. At Greenpeace, we evaluate every kind of messaging platform that we use not because we are doing anything wrong or because all of our conversations are secret, but who you associate with can make you unsafe. For example, if your friend is red-tagged [publicly deemed a terrorist, often by the government] there is a likelihood that you’re next. Red-tagging is based on the premise that if you have radical beliefs, you don’t have the right to exist, even if you’re not doing anything illegal.

For me personally, red-tagging is one of the most tragic things in the Philippine context. I come from a family of activists and my parents were arrested, jailed and tortured in 1971 when martial law was declared under Marcos Sr. It’s quite depressing to think that now we’ve elected the dictator’s son and the majority of the electorate has chosen to forget about history. Now, when you’re someone who is raising your left fist, it’s dangerous to be doing that.

You described yourself as the “guy who attends conferences,” but you’re still very much involved in actions. Could you share some of the details of your recent action against Shell?

In January 2023, we launched a global campaign called “Stop Drilling, Start Paying,” which is part of our “Make Polluters Pay” campaign. We organized a protest on an oil and gas platform that was being transported from China to the North Sea. We were calling out Shell on their deceit and for saying how they’re complying with the Paris Agreement, but in reality, they are actually doing the opposite. So we were on board the Greenpeace vessel in the North Atlantic, and we waited for this vessel.

While we were planning this action we had some vague idea of what it looked like, but when we were there in the ocean on these small boats, it was very overwhelming to see this massive structure — around 65 yards wide, sitting on top of a much bigger vessel. It was moving very fast in very rough seas. Some of us were able to climb all the way up and occupy the vessel for 12 or 13 days, which we think is the longest occupation of a moving oil and gas platform. I tried to climb, but the vessel was doing these crazy maneuvers that they usually use for anti-piracy. We made it clear through radio that we were doing a peaceful protest, but we were being treated like pirates.

That protest then resulted in a lawsuit. Shell claims we were harassing them, which is ridiculous, because how can six activists — some of us from developing countries who are experiencing climate impacts — be the ones accused of harassing the richest companies in the world? It’s obviously a SLAPP suit, one that is meant to discourage activists from doing protests at sea. But even that brief experience was exhilarating. It gave me a big sense of pride around how we are holding a big polluter like Shell accountable.

https://youtu.be/qOplfRfSvJw?si=_BxuauL9bxGBgz7G

According to Sven Weidner, director of the Lägerdorf “Carbon2Business” project, the plant has already reduced emissions by sourcing electricity from windmills the company erected near its property, by replacing some of the fossil fuel used for heating the kiln with energy derived from burning biomass and nonrecyclable waste, and by bringing down the share of clinker in cement and replacing it with alternative materials. A German federal registry of emissions shows that the Lägerdorf plant has reduced about 20 percent of its CO2 emissions since 2010.

Still, the bulk of the plant’s emissions comes from the very process of turning limestone into clinker, which is all about extracting CO2 from the raw material itself. “The truth is that as long as we use chalk or limestone, there will be CO2,” Weidner says. To reduce those “unavoidable emissions,” he says, the plant’s carbon needs to be captured.

Starting in 2028, the Lägerdorf plant plans to collect up to 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, then compress and transport it by pipeline to a newly built “CO2 hub” in a chemical park on the banks of the Elbe River, in Brunsbüttel, about 20 miles away. From the hub, the gas could travel in two directions: One goes out to the North Sea by ship or pipeline, where the gas would be injected and stored, permanently, hundreds of feet below the seabed; the other direction involves reusing the gas.

The sequestration strategy is currently pursued by cement companies all over Europe and in the U.S. And while environmentalists warn about possible leaks, Susanne Buiter, chief scientist of the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, says that “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) can be done safely in the saltwater and limestone pores at 600 to 1,200 meters below the seabed. “It will either dissolve as carbonic acid or bind with the limestone,” she says. Injection sites in the North Sea are the German government’s main solution for so-called “unavoidable emissions,” like those from the cement and other industries.

The Inflation Reduction Act appropriated an estimated 1.2 trillion in federal dollars to fund a variety of programs, most of of which were focused on climate change. It represents the biggest investment in climate action taken by the United States to date. On top of this, [U.S. President Joe] Biden’s Justice 40 initiative aims to ensure that 40 percent of federal climate-related funding goes towards marginalized communities.

A portion of existing funds from the IRA are administered through the Environmental Protection Agency and are meant for advocacy groups, which often partner with state and local governments to help get money to the country’s neediest people. A subset of advocacy groups that receive federal funding are environmental justice groups, which advocate for climate change mitigation and increased access to a pollution-free environment for residents in low-income and BIPOC communities, which are often disproportionately located near sources of pollution.

If it followed Project 2025’s proposal, a Trump EPA would almost certainly put an end to such programs. The Heritage Foundation has previously targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in public and private institutions, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote earlier this year. (Though it’s worth noting that race is not a factor that the Justice 40 initiative considers when deciding what constitutes a disadvantaged community.)

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4332042

Australia has described the outcome of a meeting between members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources as a "backwards step".

Attendees said Russia and China vetoed all proposed measures, including one to renew existing krill management measures.

Conservationists say member countries should regroup and figure out how to tackle Russia and China ahead of the next meeting in 2025.

In a graphic at the beginning of the report, the U.N. estimates that in 2023, livestock was responsible for only 6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The number struck me as strange. Because in my previous reporting on animal agriculture, I’ve found that livestock—particularly cattle—are responsible for anywhere from 11 to 20 percent of global emissions, according to a range of peer-reviewed studies.

Seeing this, I immediately considered that industry influence could be to blame. Because like the fossil fuel industry, the animal agriculture industry has a history of pressuring the scientific community to downplay its role in the climate crisis. The industry has recently censored U.N. reports on livestock emissions; pressured the IPCC to remove recommendations to shift to “plant-based diets” from its most recent report; and sent lobbyists to COP28 to convince policymakers that meat is beneficial for the environment.

What I found, however, was more an issue of scientific choice. According to Taryn Fransen, global climate program director at the World Resources Institute and one of the report’s lead authors, the U.N. report only measures direct, or Scope 1, emissions. This includes methane from cow burps, manure, and fertilizer. It doesn’t include indirect, or Scope 2 or 3 emissions for livestock: things like deforestation, growing feed, pasture management, and slaughterhouse waste.

The report also referenced a recent survey of climate scientists conducted by the Guardian in which more than three-quarters of the 380 respondents believed humanity will miss the target set in the Paris climate agreement of limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures.

There is some encouraging evidence of such decisive action, albeit at insufficient levels so far. Expert organizations like the International Energy Agency project that based on current climate policies, the world is headed toward around 2.5°C global warming by 2100. That’s not enough to meet the Paris climate targets, and yet implementing additional climate policies and solutions in the coming years could improve that outcome even further to levels below the worried expectations of three-quarters of climate scientists.

Many black plastic kitchen items are made from recycled electronic materials that contain toxic flame retardants and other chemicals.