Climate change is very, very dangerous. But it's only one of *many* serious crises brought to us by capitalist greed and exploitation that threaten the collapse of everything...
________________________________________

Scientists say human activity has pushed the world into the danger zone in seven out of eight indicators of planetary safety. Under a Business As Usual scenario, biodiversity loss will accelerate, with more species surviving only in zoos.

All over the world, people are noticing nature and species disappearing in the space of a few generations.

Since 1970, some studies estimate wildlife populations have declined on average by 73%, with huge numbers lost in the decades and centuries before. Passenger pigeons, the Carolina parakeets, and Floreana giant tortoises are among the many species humans have obliterated.

“It’s shameful that our single species is driving the extinction of thousands of others,” says Tom Oliver, professor of applied ecology at the University of Reading.

Environmental breakdown is driving inequality, conflict and injustice. Dr Andrew Terry, director of conservation and policy at the Zoological Society of London, says: “Already, we have witnessed environmentally driven famine in Madagascar and mass migration. We will see increased conflict for access to dwindling resources, particularly water and food. We will see increases in major health issues, particularly due to urban heat as temperatures increase to intolerable levels and pollution rises.”

Experts warn that ecosystems are starting to approach tipping points – where they shift into a new, degraded state that further reduces their resilience. “This will see once rich, wet tropical areas become dry savannahs, or warming ocean currents completely change. This is where we will see massive functional shifts that will impact humanity,” says Terry.

“We are already locked in for significant damage, and we’re heading in a direction that will see more,” says Tom Oliver. “I really worry that negative changes could be very rapid.”
________________________________________

FULL STORY -- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/21/humanity-earth-natural-limits-biodiversity-warning-cop16-conference-scientists-academics

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #BioDiversity #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual

Although we’ve heard this same thing many times before, that doesn’t make the news any easier to accept. It’s disappointing, frustrating, maddening… and you know what else it is?

This is simply Business As Usual. It’s capitalist industry blatantly deceiving us to make money.

That’s what they do, always.
______________________________

Seventy per cent of soft plastic collected in supermarket recycling schemes and tracked after collection ended up being burned, an investigation by UK campaigners has found.

When Sainsbury’s launched its in-store soft plastic collection in 2021, it said: “The innovative recycling system allows customers to recycle polypropylene film found in several household products.”

Tesco said its customers would be able to bring back any soft plastic packaging for recycling. Soft plastic is hard to recycle and very few facilities in the UK have the ability to process it.

Alison Colclough, of Everyday Plastic, a community interest group that conducted this investigation, said: “Our trackers reveal the hard truth about soft plastic recycling schemes at supermarkets – soft plastic packaging is not going to get recycled. The takeback schemes are being presented as a solution, which is diverting attention from the main issue that can’t be overlooked: far too much unnecessary plastic packaging is being produced.”
______________________________

FULL STORY -- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/01/soft-plastic-collected-for-recycling-burned-tesco-sainsburys-campaigners

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual #Pollution

Capitalist industry and commerce continue producing more and more CO₂ every year, and now we're seeing that the land and the oceans cannot absorb that much.

Below are a few key quotes from an alarming article about the collapse of Earth's natural "carbon sinks"...
________________________________

Tim Lenton, professor of climate change and Earth system science at Exeter University, says: “We are seeing in the biosphere some surprising responses that are not what was predicted, just as we are in the climate. You have to question: to what degree can we rely on them as carbon sinks or carbon stores?”

* * *

“Overall, models agree that both land and ocean sinks are going to decrease in the future as a result of climate change. But there’s a question of how quickly that will happen. The models tend to show this happening rather slowly over the next 100 years or so,” says Prof Andrew Watson, head of Exeter University’s marine and atmospheric science group.

“This might happen a lot quicker,” he says. “Climate scientists are worried about climate change not because of the things that are in the models, but the knowledge that the models are missing certain things.”

* * *

“None of these models have factored in losses like extreme factors which have been observed, such as the wildfires in Canada last year that amounted to six months of US fossil emissions,” says Philippe Ciais, a researcher at the French Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences.

"Another process which is absent from the climate models is the basic fact that trees die from drought. This is observed, and none of the models have drought-induced mortality in their representation of the land sink,” he says. “The fact that the models are lacking these factors probably makes them too optimistic.”

* * *

“We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” says Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end.”
________________________________

FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis

'Green growth' is not the answer. A gradual transition to 'clean energy' will not save us from disaster.

Either we end capitalism or capitalism will end us...
________________________________

It is good that there is increasing talk about the looming catastrophe that threatens our societies because of climate change and deepening ecological crises. But there is a major problem with the way the issue is being examined in the mainstream.

People who focus solely on a transition toward clean renewable energy take for granted the current capitalist pattern of perpetual economic growth. This logic doesn’t question the parameters of the dominant system, but only seeks ways of ‘greening’ them so that Business As Usual can continue.

It is the idea that our societies can continue down the same path of perpetual growth that must be tackled. There is simply no ecological way of satisfying the ever-increasing energy needs of an increasingly wasteful way of life.

The continuous increase of our energy use will demand the constant expansion of renewables, whose production is not without its own environmental and social cost. Wind turbines, solar panels, etc. are all made using rare minerals and materials that have to be extracted from the earth, with considerable ecological imprint. For a society based on extreme consumerist lifestyles there will never be enough energy, there will always be a need for more.

A more holistic way to approach the issue is to advocate simultaneously for renewables replacing dirty fossil fuels, while also resisting the dominant capitalist paradigm and advancing an alternative project that seeks to degrow the economy and reduce unnecessary consumption. It is only in this way that we can avert the looming ecological catastrophe.
________________________________

FULL ESSAY -- https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/10/10/clean-energy-cant-save-us/

#Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #Degrowth

Excerpts from an opinion piece in Current Affairs that does not mince words...
_______________________________

Hurricanes have occurred throughout living memory, and every hurricane season is going to have deadly storms, but warming oceans make the storms worse, causing higher wind speeds, heavier rainfall, and more severe storm surge. The warming itself is, of course, caused mostly by the burning of fossil fuels.

This really is not complicated. We have to stop using fossil fuels as rapidly as possible, because they’re causing a massive global calamity that is not just bringing us worse storms, but drawing us closer to irreversible tipping points that will escalate the speed of changes and cause human suffering on an unprecedented level. Scientists who study planetary “vital signs” say we are imperiling the very fabric of life on our planet and causing an “abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardizes life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen.”

You would think, then, that because of the serious harm being done, our political leaders would be treating the situation as an emergency and acting accordingly. Not so. In fact, there is an astonishing amount of denial, and it’s bipartisan.

On the right, Republicans just outright deny climate science, which J.D. Vance calls “weird science” and Donald Trump thinks is a Chinese hoax. Even Florida politicians like Marco Rubio downplay the problem despite its immense harmful impacts on the state. The state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has stripped mentions of climate change from state laws, perhaps in the hope that by pretending the problem doesn’t exist, we can make it go away.

The right’s denialism is atrocious. They seem to want to march us straight into the abyss.

But let’s be honest: Democrats haven’t been much better.

Democrats have shifted in the way they discuss climate change. Instead of emphasizing the seriousness of the problem and the need to pivot away from fossil fuels, they boast about record levels of oil and gas production. The issue can be awkward for Democrats, and recently the White House was seeking to avoid the fact that President Biden, who has called for a transition away from fossil fuels, has overseen the biggest oil and gas boom in United States history.

The Wall Street Journal, in a remarkable recent report, says Big Oil is trying to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t gut the Democrats’ signature “climate law,” the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s not because fossil fuel companies want to save the planet, but because the law actually contains huge handouts to them!

The failure by our political class to deal with this completely solvable issue is staggering and shameful. Many of them have children and grandchildren. Presumably they would like their descendants to inherit a world worth living in. And they could make that happen. Unfortunately, it would require challenging the power and profits of some of America’s most influential corporations.

Those corporations have lobbyists crawling all over U.N. climate summits to make sure any global action is watered down to the point of uselessness — which they do with the support and collaboration of Democrats who supposedly care about the crisis and think it’s real!
_______________________________

FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/you-should-be-furious-at-the-political-class-for-enabling-this-climate-catastrophe

#Politics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis

Excerpts here from a short article in the New York Times [with an archived link to avoid their site] about one of my favorite subjects -- #degrowth!
_____________________________

There’s long been one mantra in mainstream economics: Growth is good.

Gross domestic product — the monetary value of a country’s goods and services — is used to measure the economic health of a country or region, and a line that slants upward and to the right is typically what national leaders want to see.

But recently, an alternative term has begun taking root in popular culture and policy: “degrowth.”

Degrowth challenges the capitalist pursuit of growth at all costs and “focuses on what is necessary to fulfill everyone’s basic needs,” says Kohei Saito, author of “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.”

The idea, he notes, applies mostly to the Global North, where production and consumption have come to exceed basic needs in ways that harm the environment. Societies should be striving to create “a different kind of abundance,” he says, offering free education, medical care, and transportation instead of continuously making more goods for consumption.

In recent years, “degrowth” has come up in science, environmental, law, and economics journals, and in a slew of mainstream publications, including The New York Times, Bloomberg, the BBC, and the Guardian. And there are numerous degrowth websites, books, documentaries, chat forums, conferences, and journals.

Mr. Saito believes part of the reason degrowth has increasing appeal is because “younger generations are not enjoying the fruits of economic growth” and are suffering from stagnating wages, unstable employment, rising rents, and climate change.

The idea is not entirely new — but it took off in the new millennium, shifting from academic circles to the mainstream as people became more concerned about consumption’s toll on the environment, said Tilman Hartley, a researcher at the University of Cologne. He noted that some people now talk about “post-growth,” and last year, members of the European Parliament held a conference called “Beyond Growth.”

Whatever the name, the underlying concept is likely to gain acceptance, degrowth proponents say. “It’s almost certain that growth will come to an end in the future,” Mr. Hartley said. “The idea is to plan for it.”
_____________________________

ARCHIVE -- https://archive.ph/zLZhF
ORIGINAL -- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/business/degrowth-climate-gdp.html

#History #Economics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange