Climate Change / Global Warming Discussion

[mspohr]

Big polluters given almost €100bn in free carbon permits by EU

Free allowances ‘in direct contradiction with the polluter pays principle’, WWF report says

www.theguardian.com

Big polluting industries have been given almost €100bn (£86bn) in free carbon permits by the EU in the last nine years, according to an analysis by the WWF. The free allowances are “in direct contradiction with the polluter pays principle”, the group said. Free pollution permits worth €98.5bn were given to energy-intensive sectors including steel, cement, chemicals and aviation from 2013-21. This is more than the €88.5bn that the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) charged polluters, mostly coal and gas power stations, for their CO2 emissions.

 

[mspohr]

From the Amazon to Australia, why is your money funding Earth’s destruction? | George Monbiot

The world’s most destructive industries are fiercely protected by governments. The three sectors that appear to be most responsible for the collapse of ecosystems and erasure of wildlife are fossil fuels, fisheries and farming. In 2021, governments directly subsidised oil and gas production to the tune of $64bn (£53bn), and spent a further $531bn (£443bn) on keeping fossil fuel prices low. The latest figures for fisheries, from 2018, suggest that global subsidies for the sector amount to $35bn a year, over 80% of which go to large-scale industrial fishing. Most are paid to “enhance capacity”: in other words to help the industry, as marine ecosystems collapse, catch more fish. Every year, governments spend $500bn on farm subsidies, the great majority of which pay no regard to environmental protection. Even the payments that claim to do so often inflict more harm than good. For example, many of the European Union’s pillar two “green” subsidies sustain livestock farming on land that would be better used for ecological restoration. Over half the European farm budget is spent on propping up animal farming, which is arguably the world’s most ecologically destructive industry.

I have to second the problem with farming.
I just finished driving across the country and was impressed by the amount of forest which has been cleared (most of it). Most of the landscape is cleared fields with little carbon storage (and runoff, chemical problems, etc.). The small patches of forest which remain show the rich carbon storage which has been destroyed. 70% of the cleared land is used to raise animals for food (either as pasture or raising animal feed). If this was returned to forest, it would capture most of the CO2 that we have released in the Anthropocene.

We are rightly upset at the clearing of the Amazon jungle. We should also recognize the damage we have done to our own forests over the past few hundred years. (There is an interesting theory that the "little ice age" was caused by the decimation of the European population by the plague - 60% and the North American native population - 90%. The significant reduction in population allowed forests to recover, cooling the earth.)

 

[mspohr]

Canada accused of putting its timber trade ahead of global environment

Weeks before the United Nations biodiversity conference, Cop15 in Montreal, the host nation sent a letter to the European Commission asking for a reconsideration of “burdensome traceability requirements” within a proposed EU scheme that aims to eradicate unsustainably sourced wood products from the world’s biggest market. The letter from the Canadian ambassador to the EU, Ailish Campbell, also called for a “phased” approach that would slow down implementation, and a review of plans to include “degraded” forests among the areas considered at risk. Green MPs and conservation groups said the lobbying effort showed the government of Justin Trudeau placed more of a priority on its paper, timber and wood products industry than the international commitment it made at last year’s Glasgow climate conference to “halt and reverse” forest loss and land degradation by 2030.

 

[mspohr]

Stop burning trees to make energy, say 650 scientists before Cop15 biodiversity summit

More than 650 scientists are urging world leaders to stop burning trees to make energy because it destroys valuable habitats for wildlife.

In the buildup to Cop15, the UN biodiversity summit, they say countries urgently need to stop using forest bioenergy to create heat and electricity as it undermines international climate and nature targets. Instead, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar should be used, they say.

Bioenergy has “wrongly been deemed ‘carbon neutral’” and many countries are increasingly relying on forest biomass to meet net zero goals, according to the letter, addressed to world leaders including Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. “The best thing for the climate and biodiversity is to leave forests standing – and biomass energy does the opposite,” it says.

 

[eevee-fan]

Global warming is about to be resolved with population collapse?

 

[mspohr]

Global warming is about to be resolved with population collapse?

Well, there is plenty of energy and food for everyone. The problem is that the rich are hoarding it.
The richest 1% consume twice as much energy as all of the poorest third.
We could easily feed everyone on earth if the rich weren't hoarding.

 

[eevee-fan]

Desert Sun: One solution to the Salton Sea crisis: Build an underground tunnel to the Pacific Ocean.
One solution to the Salton Sea crisis: Build an underground tunnel to the Pacific Ocean

If we did this for Salton Sea but especially Death Valley (280 ft below sea level) and create an inland sea, this would actually help produce power for the SW and also restore snow/rain on the Colorado mountain (water supply to the SW). Here's some history of California to illustrate the anticipated effect.

 

[eevee-fan]

... and, just looked, Lake mead is 150 ft above Dead Pool, so Salton Sea (200 ft) below sea level can be maintained as a 50 ft deep sea and Death Valley (280 ft deep) can be maintained as a100 ft deep sea. Being hydro electric dam, it is a controllable energy source. Being water, evaporation is faster in the summer so need more sea water import, so more energy generated.

 

[mspohr]

Humanity has become ‘weapon of mass extinction’, UN head tells Cop15 launch

We are out of harmony with nature. In fact, we are playing an entirely different song. Around the world, for hundreds of years, we have conducted a cacophony of chaos, played with instruments of destruction. Deforestation and desertification are creating wastelands of once-thriving ecosystems,” he said. “Our land, water and air are poisoned by chemicals and pesticides, and choked with plastics … The most important lesson we impart to children is to take responsibility for their actions. What example are we setting when we ourselves are failing this basic test?

At the ceremony, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, urged countries to agree a target to conserve 30% of Earth for nature in the final agreement. “We have not chosen that 30% number at random. It is the critical threshold according to the greatest scientists to avoid the risk of extinction and also to ensure our food and economic security. Thirty percent, that is quite feasible,”A”

Ahead of formal negotiations for the agreement at Cop15, which begin tomorrow, talks received a significant boost from the EU as the bloc agreed a ban on all products judged to have contributed to deforestation. The world’s second-largest importer of agricultural product made the rules, which will affect the trade in cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soya and wood products, all linked to the loss of tropical forests.

 

[mspohr]

The food emissions ‘solutions’ alarming experts after Cop27

Scientists are clear that the interconnected climate, environmental and food crises require bold transformative action to drastically reduce greenhouse gases and improve resilience. Food systems produce a third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Cattle ranching is the main driver of Amazon rainforest loss, while industrialized food production is the biggest threat to 86% of the world’s species at risk of extinction.

But at Cop27, as in the debate more broadly, corporate interests dominated. Campaigners and NGOs say the food industry’s fingerprints were all over the solutions being touted, including an array of technologies and incentives that they say will do little to cut big food’s huge climate footprint, reduce diet-related diseases or increase food security and climate resilience in the long term. “From treating cow burps to robotic weeders, none of the false solutions on offer at Cop27 come close to stopping the industrial food production from being an engine of planetary destruction,” said Raj Patel, food justice scholar and author of Stuffed and Starved. “Agribusiness and governments offered a series of patented patches designed not to transform the food system, but to keep it the same.”

 

[eevee-fan]

... and, just looked, Lake mead is 150 ft above Dead Pool, so Salton Sea (200 ft) below sea level can be maintained as a 50 ft deep sea and Death Valley (280 ft deep) can be maintained as a100 ft deep sea. Being hydro electric dam, it is a controllable energy source. Being water, evaporation is faster in the summer so need more sea water import, so more energy generated.

Oops, Hoover Dam is 40 ft, so I guess Salton Sea may be a no go - or maybe produce less power, but Death Valley becoming a 50 ft deep ocean may work.

Hoover Dam - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[mspohr]

‘Fate of the living world’ will be decided at Cop15, say scientists

Leading researchers say the UN biodiversity summit is ‘vastly more important’ than the recent Cop27 climate meeting

www.theguardian.com

The current rapid loss of wildlife and natural places is seen as the start of a sixth mass extinction by many scientists and is destroying the life-support systems on which humanity depends for clean air, water and food. Protection of the natural world, such as rainforests, is also vital in ending the climate emergency.

The “fate of the entire living world” will be determined at the Cop15 UN biodiversity summit, according to leading scientists. They said the gathering of the world’s nations, which began on Wednesday in Montreal, is “vastly more important than Cop27”, the recent high-profile UN climate meeting. “We say this because of the many dimensions of anthropogenic global change … the most critical, complex and challenging is that of biodiversity loss,” the researchers said.

 

[mspohr]

The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse | George Monbiot

Thanks to such failures of care over many years, we now approach multiple drastic decision points, at which governments must either implement changes in months that should have happened over decades, or watch crucial components of civic life collapse, including the most important component of all: a habitable planet. In either case, it’s a cliff edge.

These themes are a reworking of long-established tropes. The notion that farming represents a “rooted” and “authentic” national identity that must be defended from “cosmopolitan” and “alien” forces was a mainstay of European fascist thought in the first half of the 20th century. Never mind that nitrogen fertilisers are now imported from Russia and livestock feed from the US and Brazil, never mind that the model of intensive livestock farming is the same all over the world: Dutch meat, eggs and milk are promoted as “local” and sometimes even “sovereign”, and said to be threatened by the forces of “globalism”.

As we rush towards these precipices, we are likely to see an ever more violent refusal to care. For example, if we in the rich nations are to meet our twin duties of care and responsibility, we must be prepared to accept many more refugees, who will be driven from their homes by the climate and ecological breakdown caused disproportionately by our economies. But as this displacement crisis (that could be greater than any dispossession the world has ever seen) looms, it could trigger a new wave of reactive, far-right politics, furiously rejecting the obligations accumulated by our previous failures to act. In turn, a resurgence of far-right politics would cut off meaningful environmental action. In other words, we face the threat of a self-perpetuating escalation of collapse.

 

[eevee-fan]

Desert Sun: One solution to the Salton Sea crisis: Build an underground tunnel to the Pacific Ocean.
One solution to the Salton Sea crisis: Build an underground tunnel to the Pacific Ocean

If we did this for Salton Sea but especially Death Valley (280 ft below sea level) and create an inland sea, this would actually help produce power for the SW and also restore snow/rain on the Colorado mountain (water supply to the SW). Here's some history of California to illustrate the anticipated effect.

As Dead Sea in America?

 

[mspohr]

Can Cop15 protect ocean biodiversity from the big fish of the ‘blue economy’? | Guy Standing

State ownership allows governments to hand exploitation of ocean resources to private companies. The UK and other countries have sold or granted private property rights in the sea with abandon. The result has been rampant profiteering that has ravaged the ocean environment, depleting fish populations, pumping sewage, chemicals and plastics into the sea, and destroying wetlands, mangroves and other coastal ecosystems for aquaculture and tourism development.

In this context, negotiators and civil society organisations should focus on measures that would stop further damage and improve ecosystems. They should seek progress on the following proposals. Countries should commit to scrapping the subsidies given to industrial fisheries, £22bn of which contributes to overfishing and illegal fishing, devastating fish populations and marine food chains. They should also end subsidies to offshore oil and gas, which pose a direct pollution threat as well as fuelling the climate crisis.

 

[eevee-fan]

One has to wonder why those desert regions do not have the political will to force the mining companies desalinate the water (brine to the drying pools then selling fresh water) of the dead sea. In a desert region, I would think fresh water would be valuable.

 

[mspohr]

One has to wonder why those desert regions do not have the political will to force the mining companies desalinate the water (brine to the drying pools then selling fresh water) of the dead sea. In a desert region, I would think fresh water would be valuable.

You need to consider how politics and money work together.

 

[cpa]

You need to consider how politics and money work together.

Isn't that sort of how we got to where we are today?

Also, to pipe ocean water across hundreds, if not thousands of miles (see Utah's idea of piping Pacific Ocean water to the Great Salt Lake because that lake is shrinking fast and kicking up a lot of toxic dust and sand) will take an enormous capital investment. It will also disrupt the marine environment and transport species that can exist in an ocean into a much different setting with less oxygen in the water and much higher temperatures and shallower water.

I just recall that '70s commercial for some sort of oleomargarine. The actress is dressed in a spring frock with a garland of flowers ringing her hair. She says, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

 

[mspohr]

Can Cop15 protect ocean biodiversity from the big fish of the ‘blue economy’? | Guy Standing

State ownership allows governments to hand exploitation of ocean resources to private companies. The UK and other countries have sold or granted private property rights in the sea with abandon. The result has been rampant profiteering that has ravaged the ocean environment, depleting fish populations, pumping sewage, chemicals and plastics into the sea, and destroying wetlands, mangroves and other coastal ecosystems for aquaculture and tourism development.

In this context, negotiators and civil society organisations should focus on measures that would stop further damage and improve ecosystems. They should seek progress on the following proposals. Countries should commit to scrapping the subsidies given to industrial fisheries, £22bn of which contributes to overfishing and illegal fishing, devastating fish populations and marine food chains. They should also end subsidies to offshore oil and gas, which pose a direct pollution threat as well as fuelling the climate crisis.

 

[mspohr]

The Climate Impact of Your Neighborhood, Mapped The Climate Impact of Your Neighborhood, Mapped

Households in denser neighborhoods close to city centers tend to be responsible for fewer planet-warming greenhouse gases, on average, than households in the rest of the country. Residents in these areas typically drive less because jobs and stores are nearby and they can more easily walk, bike or take public transit. And they’re more likely to live in smaller homes or apartments that require less energy to heat and cool. Moving further from city centers, average emissions per household typically increase as homes get bigger and residents tend to drive longer distances. But density isn’t the only thing that matters. Wealth does, too. Higher-income households generate more greenhouse gases, on average, because wealthy Americans tend to buy more stuff — appliances, cars, furnishings, electronic gadgets — and travel more by car and plane, all of which come with related emissions.