Ecological Overshoot

[Ricter]

The Mining of Minerals and the Limits to Growth
Simon P. Michaux
January 2021

Full paper...

Abstract
Current industrialization has a foundation in the continuous supply of natural resources. The methods and processes associated with this foundation have significant momentum.This paradigm will not be undone easily.Human nature and human history make it so.Currently, our industrial systems are absolutely dependent on non-renewable natural resources for energy sources.

For the last 15 years, it has been apparent that the industrial business environment has been more challenging and volatile. This report will present the thesis that this persistent volatility is the forerunner temporal markers that show the industrial ecosystem is in the process of radically changing.

Current thinking is that European industrial businesses, will replace a complex industrial ecosystem that took more than a century to build. This system was built with the support of the highest calorifically dense source of energy the world has ever known (oil), in cheap abundant quantities, with easily available credit, and unlimited mineral resources. This task is hoped to be done at a time when there is comparatively very expensive energy, a fragile finance system saturated in debt, not enough minerals, and an unprecedented number of human populations, embedded in a deteriorating environment.

It is apparent that the goal of industrial scale transition away from fossil fuels into non-fossil fuel systems is a much larger task than current thinking allows for. To achieve this objective, among other things, an unprecedented demand for minerals will be required. Most minerals required for the renewable energy transition have not been mined in bulk quantities before. Many of the technology metals already have primary resource mining supply risks.

At its foundation, the current industrial ecosystem was and still is based around the consumption of natural resources, which were considered to be infinite. The very idea that there might be system based limits to the global extraction of resources is considered foolish by the current economic market. The volume of manufacture was influenced by the consumption demand of products. Growth and expansion with no considered limits of any kind was the underlying paradigm.

The majority of infrastructure and technology units needed to phase out fossil fuels has yet to be manufactured. Recycling cannot be done on products that have yet to be manufactured. In the current system, demand for metals of all kinds have been increasing, just as the grade of ores processed has been decreasing.

Global reserves are not large enough to supply enough metals to build the renewable non-fossil fuels industrial system or satisfy long term demand in the current system. Mineral deposit discovery has been declining for many metals.The grade of processed ore for many of the industrial metals has been decreasing over time, resulting in declining mineral processing yield.This has the implication of the increase in mining energy consumption per unit of metal.

Mining of minerals is intimately dependent on fossil fuel based energy supply.Like all other industrial activities, without energy, mining does not happen. A case can be made that the window of viability for the fossil fuel energy supply ecosystem has been closing for 5 to 10 years.

It becomes highly relevant then to examine how mining ecosystem interacts with the energy ecosystem. The IMF Metals Index and the Crude Oil Price Index correlates strongly. This suggests that the mining industrial operations to meet metal demand for the future are unlikely to go as planned. The implications are that the basic prediction of the original Limits to Growth systems study (Meadows et al. 1972) was conceptually correct. Just so, it should be considered that the industrial ecosystem and the society it supports may soon contract in size.

This implies that the current Linear Economy system is seriously unbalanced and is not remotely sustainable. The Limits to Growth conclusions suggest at some point, the global society and the global industrial ecosystem that support it will radically change form.

It is clear that society consumes more mineral resources each year. It is also clear that society does not really understand its dependency on minerals to function. Availability of minerals could be an issue in the future, where it becomes too expensive to extract metals due to decreasing grade.

This report proposes that the fundamental transformation of the global ecosystem predicted by the original Limits to Growth study, has been in progress since 2005, for the last 16 years. The industrial ecosystem is in the process of transitioning from growth based economics to contraction based economics. This will affect all sectors of the global ecosystem, all at the same time (in a 20 year window).

We are there now and should respond accordingly. If the Limits to Growth study is truly a good model for predicting the industrial ecosystem, then the current industrial practice is inappropriate. The continued development of the economic growth paradigm would become increasingly ineffective, and a waste of valuable resources.All such efforts would be pushing in the wrong direction with poor results.

The rules of industrialization and the sourcing of raw materials are changing into a new era of business model. Change is happening, whether we are ready for it or not.

A possible response to these structural changes is presented after conclusions on page 52, where it was recommended that anew resource management system should be developedafter genuinely understanding the net position of long term minerals supply. Also, it was recommended that new mining frontiers be opened, but the minerals extracted should be used differently.

 

[Ricter]

Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question
By Erik Lindberg, originally published by Transition Milwaukee
November 26, 2014


Myth #1: Liberals Are Not In Denial

“We will not apologize for our way of life” –Barack Obama

The conservative denial of the very fact of climate change looms large in the minds of many liberals. How, we ask, could people ignore so much solid and unrefuted evidence? Will they deny the existence of fire as Rome burns once again? With so much at stake, this denial is maddening, indeed. But almost never discussed is an unfortunate side-effect of this denial: it has all but insured that any national debate in America will occur in a place where most liberals are not required to challenge any of their own beliefs. The question has been reduced to a two-sided affair—is it happening or is it not—and liberals are obviously on the right side of that.

If we broadened the debate just a little bit, however, we would see that most liberals have just moved a giant boat-load of denial down-stream, and that this denial is as harmful as that of conservatives. While the various aspects of liberal denial are my main overall topic, here, and will be addressed in our following five sections, they add up to the belief that we can avoid the most catastrophic levels of climate disruption without changing our fundamental way of life. This is myth is based on errors that are as profound and basic as the conservative denial of climate change itself.

But before moving on, one more point about liberal and conservative denial: Naomi Klein has suggested that conservative denial may have its roots, it will surprise many liberals, in some pretty clear thinking. At some level, she has observed, conservatives climate deniers understand that addressing climate change will, in fact, change our way of life, a way of life which conservatives often view as sacred. This sort of change is so terrifying and unthinkable to them, she argues, that they cut the very possibility of climate change off at its knees: fighting climate change would force us to change our way of life; our way of life is sacred and cannot be questioned; ergo, climate change cannot be happening.

We have a situation, then, where one half of the population says it is not happening, and the other half says it is happening but fighting it doesn’t have to change our way of life. Like a dysfunctional and enabling married couple, the bickering and finger-pointing, and anger ensures that nothing has to change and that no one has to actually look deeply at themselves, even as the wheels are falling off the family-life they have co-created. And so do Democrats and Republicans stay together in this unhappy and unproductive place of emotional self-protection and planetary ruin.

Myth #2: Republicans are Still More to Blame

“Yes, America does face a cliff — not a fiscal cliff but a set of precipices [including a carbon cliff] we’ll tumble over because the GOP’s obsession over government’s size and spending has obscured them.” -Robert Reich

It is true that conservative politicians in the United States and Europe have been intent on blocking international climate agreements; but by focusing on these failed agreements, which only require a baby-step in the right direction, liberals obliquely side-step the actual cause of global warming—namely, burning fossil fuels. The denial of climate change isn’t responsible for the fact that we, in the United States, are responsible for about one quarter of all current emissions if you include the industrial products we consume (and an even greater percentage of all emissions over time), even though we make up only 6% of the world’s population. Our high-consumption lifestyles are responsible for this. Republicans do not emit an appreciably larger amount of carbon dioxide than Democrats.

Because pumping gasoline is our most direct connection to the burning of fossil fuels, most Americans overemphasize the significance of what sort of car we drive and many liberals might proudly point to their small economical cars or undersized SUVs. While the transportation sector is responsible for a lot of our emissions, the carbon footprint of any one individual has much more to do with his or her overall levels of consumption of all kinds—the travel (especially on airplanes), the hotels and restaurants, the size and number of homes, the computers and other electronics, the recreational equipment and gear, the food, the clothes, and all the other goods, services, and amenities that accompany an affluent life. It turns out that the best predictor of someone’s carbon footprint is income. This is true whether you are comparing yourself to other Americans or to other people around the world. Middle-class American professionals, academics, and business-people are among the world’s greatest carbon emitters and, as a group, are more responsible than any other single group for global warming, especially if we focus on discretionary consumption. Accepting the fact of climate change, but then jetting off to the tropics, adding another oversized television to the collection, or buying a new Subaru involves a tremendous amount of denial. There are no carbon offsets for ranting and raving about conservative climate-change deniers.

Myth #3: Renewable Energy Can Replace Fossil Fuels

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” –Barack Obama

This is a hugely important point. Everything else hinges on the myth that we might live a lifestyle similar to our current one powered by wind, solar, and biofuels. Like the conservative belief that climate change cannot be happening, liberals believe that renewable energy must be a suitable replacement. Neither view is particularly concerned with the evidence.

Conventional wisdom among American liberals assures us that we would be well on our way to a clean, green, low-carbon, renewable energy future were it not for the lobbying efforts of big oil companies and their Republican allies. The truth is far more inconvenient than this: it will be all but impossible for our current level of consumption to be powered by anything but fossil fuels. The liberal belief that energy sources such as wind, solar, and biofuels can replace oil, natural gas, and coal is a mirror image of the conservative denial of climate change: in both cases an overriding belief about the way the world works, or should work, is generally far stronger than any evidence one might present. Denial is the biggest game in town. Denial, as well as a misunderstanding about some fundamental features of energy, is what allows someone like Bill Gates assume that “an energy miracle” will be created with enough R & D. Unfortunately, the lessons of microprocessors do not teach us anything about replacing oil, coal, and natural gas.

It is of course true that solar panels and wind turbines can create electricity, and that ethanol and bio-diesel can power many of our vehicles, and this does lend a good bit of credibility to the claim that a broader transition should be possible—if we can only muster the political will and finance the necessary research. But this view fails to take into account both the limitations of renewable energy and the very specific qualities of the fossil fuels around which we’ve built our way of life. The myth that alternative sources of energy are perfectly capable of replacing fossil fuels and thus of maintaining our current way of life receives widespread support from our President to leading public intellectuals to most mainstream journalists, and receives additional backing from our self-image as a people so ingenious that there are no limits to what we can accomplish. That fossil fuels have provided us with a one-time burst of unrepeatable energy and affluence (and ecological peril) flies in the face of nearly all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Just starting to dispel this myth requires that I go into the issue a bit more deeply and at greater length.

Because we have come to take the power and energy-concentration of fossil fuels for granted, and see our current lifestyle as normal, it is easy to ignore the way the average citizens of industrialized societies have an unprecedented amount of energy at their disposal. Consider this for a moment: a single $3 gallon of gasoline provides the equivalent of about 80 days of hard manual labor. Fill up your 15 gallon gas tank in your car, and you’ve just bought the same amount of energy that would take over three years of unremitting manual labor to reproduce. Americans use more energy in a month than most of our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime. We live at a level, today, that in previous days could have only been supported by about 150 slaves for every American—though even that understates it, because we are at the same time beneficiaries of a societal infrastructure that is also only possible to create if we have seemingly limitless quantities of lightweight, relatively stable, easily transportable, and extremely inexpensive ready-to-burn fuel like oil or coal.

A single, small, and easily portable gallon of oil is the product of nearly 100 tons of surface-forming algae (imagine 5 dump trucks full of the stuff), which first collected enormous amounts of solar radiation before it was condensed, distilled, and pressure cooked for a half-billion years—and all at no cost to the humans who have come to depend on this concentrated energy. There is no reason why we should be able to manufacture at a reasonable cost anything comparable. And when we look at the specific qualities of renewable energy with any degree of detail we quickly see that we have not. Currently only about a half of a percent of the total energy used in the United States is generated by wind, solar, biofuels, or geothermal heat. The global total is not much higher, despite the much touted efforts in Germany, Spain, and now China. In 2013, 1.1% of the world’s total energy was provided by wind and only 0.2% by solar.[ii] As these low numbers suggest, one of the major limitations of renewable energy has to do with scale, whether we see this as a limitation in renewable energy itself, or remind ourselves that the expectations that fossil fuels have helped establish are unrealistic and unsustainable.

University of California physics professor Tom Murphy has provided detailed calculations about many of the issues of energy scale in his blog, “Do the Math.” With the numbers adding up, we are no longer able to wave the magic wand of our faith in our own ingenuity and declare the solar future would be here, but for those who refuse to give in the funding it is due. Consider a few representative examples: most of us have, for instance, heard at some point the sort of figure telling us that enough sun strikes the Earth every 104 minutes to power the entire world for a year. But this only sounds good if you don’t perform any follow-up calculations. As Murphy puts it,

"As reassuring as this picture is, the photovoltaic area [required] represents more than all the paved area in the world. This troubles me. I’ve criss-crossed the country many times now, and believe me, there is a lot of pavement. The paved infrastructure reflects a tremendous investment that took decades to build. And we’re talking about asphalt and concrete here: not high-tech semiconductor. I truly have a hard time grasping the scale such a photovoltaic deployment would represent. And I’m not even addressing storage here." [iii]

In another post,[iv] Murphy calculates that a battery capable of storing this electricity in the U.S. alone (otherwise no electricity at night or during cloudy or windless spells) would require about three times as much lead as geologists estimate may exist in all reserves, most of which remain unknown. If you count only the lead that we’ve actually discovered, Murphy explains, we only have 2% of the lead available for our national battery project. The number are even more disheartening if you try to substitute lithium ion or other systems now only in the research phase. The same story holds true for just about all the sources that even well-informed people assume are ready to replace fossil fuels, and which pundits will rattle off in an impressively long list with impressive sounding numbers of kilowatt hours produced. Add them all up–even increase the efficiency to unanticipated levels and assume a limitless budget–and you will naturally have some big-sounding numbers; but then compare them to our current energy appetite, and you quickly see that we still run out of space, vital minerals and other raw materials, and in the meantime would probably have strip-mined a great deal of precious farmland, changed the earth’s wind patterns, and have affected the weather or other ecosystems in ways not yet imagined.

But the most significant limitation of fossil fuel’s alleged clean, green replacements has to do with the laws of physics and the way energy, itself, works. A brief review of the way energy does what we want it to do will also help us see why it takes so many solar panels or wind turbines to do the work that a pickup truck full of coal or a small tank of crude oil can currently accomplish without breaking a sweat. When someone tells us of the fantastic amounts of solar radiation that beats down on the Earth each day, we are being given a meaningless fact. Energy doesn’t do work; only concentrated energy does work, and only while it is going from its concentrated state to a diffuse state—sort of like when you let go of a balloon and it flies around the room until its pressurized (or concentrated) air has joined the remaining more diffuse air in the room.

When we build wind turbines and solar panels, or grow plants that can be used for biofuels, we are “manually” concentrating the diffuse energy of the sun or in the wind—a task, not incidentally, that requires a good deal of energy. The reason why these efforts, as impressive as they are, pale in relationship to fossil fuels has to do simply with the fact that we are attempting to do by way of a some clever engineering and manufacturing (and a considerable amount of energy) what the geology of the Earth did for free, but, of course, over a period of half a billion years with the immense pressures of the planet’s shifting tectonic plates or a hundred million years of sedimentation helping us out. The “normal” society all of us have grown up with is a product of this one-time burst of a pre-concentrated, ready-to-burn fuel source. It has provided us with countless wonders; but used without limits, it is threatening all life as we know it.

Myth 4: The Coming “Knowledge Economy” Will be a Low-Energy Economy

The rest, if you're still interested...

 

[Ricter]

November 1, 2018
Catabolism: Capitalism’s Frightening Future
by Craig Collins
“Out of the frying pan, into the fire” is an apt description of our current place in history. No matter what you think of globalization, I believe we’ll soon discover that capitalism without it is much, much worse.

No one needs to convince establishment economists, politicians and pundits that the absence of globalization and growth spells trouble. They’ve pushed globalization as the Viagra of economic growth for years. But globalization has never been popular with everyone. Capitalism’s critics recognize that it generates tremendous wealth and power for a tiny fraction of the Earth’s seven billion people, makes room for some in the middle class, but keeps most of humanity destitute and desperate, while trashing the planet and jeopardizing human survival for generations to come.

Around the world, social movements believe “Another World Is Possible!” when neoliberal globalization is replaced by a more democratic, equitable, Earth-friendly society. They assume that any future without globalization is bound to be an improvement. But now it appears that this assumption may be wrong. In fact, future generations may someday look back on capitalism’s growth phase as the dynamic days of industrial civilization, a naïve time before anyone realized that the worst was yet to come.

The Return of Scarce Oil and Peak Debt

Today, rising energy prices and ballooning debt are poised to strangle the global economy once again. These suffocating conditions brought the economy to its knees in 2008. Afterward, fracking helped increase the supply and lower the price of oil and gas temporarily. Meanwhile, debt-dependent cash infusions in the form of bailouts, low interest rates, corporate tax cuts and leveraged stock buy-backs were injected into the economy to prop up stock prices and profit margins. [1]

But now, despite emergency infusions of hydrocarbons and cash, debilitating debt and rising energy prices are returning with a vengeance. Governments have used every trick at their disposal to keep growth alive and profits high. But debt-driven trickery cannot overcome the underlying reality: growth cannot survive without cheap, abundant energy. Fueling growth with debt instead of real energy is a disaster in the making.

Economists and politicians refuse to admit it, but Age of Fossil Fuels has reached its apex. The rapacious flight to the top was powered by the Earth’s dwindling hydrocarbon reserves. From these lofty heights, the drastic drop-off ahead appears perilous. As fossil fuel extraction fails to meet global demand, economic contraction and downward mobility will become the new normal and growth will fade into memory. But this new growth-less future may bear no resemblance to the equitable Green economy activists have been calling for.

Can Capitalism Survive Without Growth?

Article continues...

 

[Ricter]

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...passed-safe-limit-for-humanity-say-scientists

Chemical pollution has passed safe limit for humanity, say scientists
Study calls for cap on production and release as pollution threatens global ecosystems upon which life depends

Damian Carrington Environment editor
@dpcarrington
Tue 18 Jan 2022 08.00 GMT


The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.

Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.

The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.

Chemical pollution threatens Earth’s systems by damaging the biological and physical processes that underpin all life. For example, pesticides wipe out many non-target insects, which are fundamental to all ecosystems and, therefore, to the provision of clean air, water and food.

“There has been a fiftyfold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950 and this is projected to triple again by 2050,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) who was part of the study team. “The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.”

Dr Sarah Cornell, an associate professor and principal researcher at SRC, said: “For a long time, people have known that chemical pollution is a bad thing. But they haven’t been thinking about it at the global level. This work brings chemical pollution, especially plastics, into the story of how people are changing the planet.”

Some threats have been tackled to a larger extent, the scientists said, such as the CFC chemicals that destroy the ozone layer and its protection from damaging ultraviolet rays.

Determining whether chemical pollution has crossed a planetary boundary is complex because there is no pre-human baseline, unlike with the climate crisis and the pre-industrial level of CO2 in the atmosphere. There are also a huge number of chemical compounds registered for use – about 350,000 – and only a tiny fraction of these have been assessed for safety.

So the research used a combination of measurements to assess the situation. These included the rate of production of chemicals, which is rising rapidly, and their release into the environment, which is happening much faster than the ability of authorities to track or investigate the impacts.

The well-known negative effects of some chemicals, from the extraction of fossil fuels to produce them to their leaking into the environment, were also part of the assessment. The scientists acknowledged the data was limited in many areas, but said the weight of evidence pointed to a breach of the planetary boundary.

“There’s evidence that things are pointing in the wrong direction every step of the way,” said Prof Bethanie Carney Almroth at the University of Gothenburg who was part of the team. “For example, the total mass of plastics now exceeds the total mass of all living mammals. That to me is a pretty clear indication that we’ve crossed a boundary. We’re in trouble, but there are things we can do to reverse some of this.”

Villarrubia-Gómez said: “Shifting to a circular economy is really important. That means changing materials and products so they can be reused, not wasted.”

The researchers said stronger regulation was needed and in the future a fixed cap on chemical production and release, in the same way carbon targets aim to end greenhouse gas emissions. Their study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology

There are growing calls for international action on chemicals and plastics, including the establishment of a global scientific body for chemical pollution akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Prof Sir Ian Boyd at the University of St Andrews, who was not part of the study, said: “The rise of the chemical burden in the environment is diffuse and insidious. Even if the toxic effects of individual chemicals can be hard to detect, this does not mean that the aggregate effect is likely to be insignificant.

“Regulation is not designed to detect or understand these effects. We are relatively blind to what is going on as a result. In this situation, where we have a low level of scientific certainty about effects, there is a need for a much more precautionary approach to new chemicals and to the amount being emitted to the environment.”

Boyd, a former UK government chief scientific adviser, warned in 2017 that assumption by regulators around the world that it was safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes was false.

The chemical pollution planetary boundary is the fifth of nine that scientists say have been crossed, with the others being global heating, the destruction of wild habitats, loss of biodiversity and excessive nitrogen and phosphorus pollution.

 

[Ricter]

Thanks, Baron.

 

[Ricter]

 

[Ricter]

https://wir2022.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2021/12/WorldInequalityReport2022_Full_Report.pdf

 

[Ricter]

Carbon offsetting is not warding off environmental collapse – it’s accelerating it
George Monbiot
Wed, 26 Jan 2022.

Wealthy companies are using the facade of ‘nature-based solutions’ to enact a great carbon land grab

‘Last year, forests being used as corporate offsets were incinerated by the wildfires raging across North America.’ Photograph: Noah Berger/EPA

There is nothing that cannot be corrupted, nothing good that cannot be transformed into something bad. And there is no clearer example than the great climate land grab.

We now know that it’s not enough to leave fossil fuels in the ground and decarbonise our economies. We’ve left it too late. To prevent no more than 1.5C of heating, we also need to draw down some of the carbon already in the atmosphere.

By far the most effective means are “nature-based solutions”: using the restoration of living systems such as forests, salt marshes, peat bogs and the seafloor to extract carbon dioxide from the air and lock it up, mostly in trees or waterlogged soil and mud. Three years ago, a small group of us launched the Natural Climate Solutions campaign to draw attention to the vast potential for stalling climate breakdown and a sixth mass extinction through the mass revival of ecosystems.

While it is hard to see either climate or ecological catastrophe being prevented without such large-scale rewilding, we warned that it should not be used as a substitute for decarbonising economic life, or to allow corporations to offset greenhouse gases that shouldn’t be produced in the first place. We found ourselves having to shed a large number of partner organisations because of their deals with offset companies.

But our warnings, and those of many others, went unheeded. Something that should be a great force for good has turned into a corporate gold rush, trading in carbon credits. A carbon credit represents one tonne of greenhouse gases, deemed to have been avoided or removed from the atmosphere. Over the past few months, the market for these credits has boomed.

There are two legitimate uses of nature-based solutions: removing historic carbon from the air, and counteracting a small residue of unavoidable emissions once we have decarbonised the rest of the economy. Instead, they are being widely used as an alternative for effective action. Rather than committing to leave fossil fuels in the ground, oil and gas firms continue to prospect for new reserves while claiming that the credits they buy have turned them “carbon neutral”.

For example, Shell’s Drive Carbon Neutral scheme tells businesses that by buying fuel on its loyalty card, the “unavoidable” emissions from their fleets of vehicles can be offset “through Shell’s global portfolio of nature-based solutions projects”. It assures customers that, by joining the programme, “you don’t even have to change the way you work”. Similar claims by Shell in the Netherlands were struck down by the country’s advertising watchdog.

The French company Total is hoping to develop new oilfields in the Republic of the Congo and off the coast of Suriname. It has sought to justify these projects with nature-based solutions: in Suriname by providing money to the government for protecting existing forests, and in Congo by planting an area of savannah with fast-growing trees.

This project is extremely controversial. If the drilling goes ahead it will help to break open a region of extremely rich forests and wetlands that sits on top of the biggest peat deposit in the tropics, potentially threatening a huge natural carbon store. The rare savannah habitat the company wants to convert into plantations to produce timber and biomass has scarcely been explored by ecologists. It’s likely to harbour a far greater range of life than the exotic trees the oil company wants to plant. It is also likely to belong to local people though their customary rights, which are unrecognised in Congolese law, were not mentioned in Total’s press release about the deal. In other words, the offset project, far from compensating for the damage caused by oil drilling, could compound it.

These are not the only issues. In all such cases, an extremely stable bank of carbon – the fossil fuels buried below geological strata – is being swapped for less secure stores: habitats on the Earth’s surface. Last year, forests being used as corporate offsets were incinerated by the wildfires raging across North America. It’s also hard in some cases to prove that offset money has made a real difference. For example, two of Shell’s projects have been criticised on the grounds that the forests they claim to defend may not be at risk. These schemes often rely on untestable counterfactuals: what would have happened if this money had not been spent?

While there are international standards for how carbon should be counted, there is no accounting for the moral hazard of carbon offsets: the false assurance that persuades us we need not change the way we live. There is no accounting for the way companies use these projects to justify business as usual. There is no accounting for how they use this greenwashing to persuade governments not to regulate them. Nature-based solutions should help us to avoid systemic environmental collapse. Instead, they are helping to accelerate it.

And then there’s a small issue of land. There is simply not enough land on Earth to soak up corporate greenhouse gas emissions. Oxfam estimates that the land required to meet carbon removal plans by businesses could amount to five times the size of India – more than the entire area of farmland on the planet. And much of it rightfully belongs to indigenous and other local people, who in many cases have not given their consent. This process has a name: carbon colonialism.

During the Cop26 climate summit in November last year, the government of the Malaysian state of Sabah announced a carbon credits deal with foreign corporations covering an astonishing 2m hectares (5m acres) of forest. Indigenous people say they knew nothing about it.

In Scotland, Shell is spending £5m extending the Glengarry forest. While Scotland needs more trees, it also needs a much better distribution of land. As big corporations and financiers pile into this market, land prices are rising so fast that local people, some of whom would like to run their own rewilding and reforestation projects, are being shut out.

A better strategy would be to spend money on strengthening the land rights of indigenous people, who tend to be the most effective guardians of ecosystems and the carbon they contain. Where communities don’t own land, they should be funded to buy it back and restore its missing habitats. But none of these projects should be counted against the fossil fuels we should leave in the ground.

Yes, we need to restore life on Earth. Yes, we need to draw down as much carbon as we can. But we cannot let this crucial tool be turned against us.

 

[Ricter]

Did We Miss Biden’s Most Important Remark About Russia?
Jan. 25, 2022

Credit...Ivan Nikiforov/Associated Press
By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

Pretty much every crucial line in President Biden’s recent marathon news conference has been dissected by now — except one, the one that may turn out to be the most prescient. You had to be listening closely because it went by fast. It was when Biden told President Vladimir Putin that Russia has something much more important to worry about than whether Ukraine looks East or West — namely, “a burning tundra that will not freeze again naturally.”

My translation: Yo, Vladimir, while you’ve been busy putting your “little green men” into Ukraine — all those masked Russian soldiers in green uniforms without insignia — little green shoots have been popping up in your warming tundra. Siberia had a totally freakish, hyper-extreme weather event — a forest fire that firefighters had to stomp out with their boots because the local water sources were all frozen.

I’m pretty sure this was the first time a U.S. president ever tried to persuade a Russian leader to get out of his neighbor’s front yard and focus instead on saving his own backyard — because as Siberia is affected by climate change, it will threaten Russia’s stability a lot more than anything that happens in Ukraine.

Alas, Putin is part of a generation of world leaders who know how to build their popularity only on the strength of their resistance to enemies abroad and at home. But we are now at the start of a transition, I predict, where more and more leaders will try to build — or need to build — their stature by generating resilience for their people and neighbors in a warming and water-stressed world.

This excerpt from a Moscow Times story in November explains why — and what Biden was referring to. It’s dystopian:

“An unseasonably rare forest fire has engulfed the Russian tundra as the country faces significant changes from climate change, Interfax reported.” Some 900 acres “are burning despite below-zero temperatures in the Magadan region some 10,000 kilometers east of Moscow. ‘The tundra is usually covered with snow at this time of year, so such fires occur extremely rarely,’ Interfax quoted an unnamed source as saying. Firefighters’ efforts to extinguish the flames are hampered by frozen water reservoirs, Interfax reported. Video posted online shows firefighters working to stamp out the fire with their feet and with tree branches.”

And no wonder: Russia’s territory is warming 2.5 times as fast as the planet on average, and the situation there is going to get only worse. On June 20, 2020, the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, about 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle, hit 100.4 degrees — the highest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle.

I have zero illusions that Putin noticed Biden suggesting Russia is much more vulnerable to climate change expansion than NATO expansion — or would be deterred if he did. He doesn’t strike me as a guy much interested in the climate. But the climate is interested in him.

Putin may choose to ignore that. His successor won’t have that option.

“Roughly 65 percent of Russia’s territory is covered in permafrost,” The Moscow Times explained in another report. “As air temperatures have risen in recent decades, this soil that has been frozen for millennia has begun to thaw.” If this melting accelerates, it is “expected to cause significant damage to human settlements and key energy and transportation infrastructure.And as permafrost melts, it releases long-stored greenhouse gases like methane, triggering an accelerating feedback loop of warming.”

Sure, one day some of this tundra may become rich farmland. But getting from here to there — watch out: “As earth’s climate zones shift from the Equator to the poles, previously forested lands are turning into deserts,” The Moscow Times added. The republic of Dagestan, some 930 miles south of Moscow, is near Russia’s agricultural heartland, “and experts worry that desertification could spread to these regions and impact the country’s food supply.”

These very same pressures around climate and drought are already spurring some of the new generation of Middle East leaders to subtly shift the basis of their authority from resistance to resilience.

Consider another big story that also did not get the attention it deserved — the energy-water deal that Israel, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates tried to finalize in November.

The essence of the deal was this: The U.A.E. — whose leader, Mohammed bin Zayed, is the most prominent Arab ruler working to build his stature by delivering resilience — would finance the construction by an Emirati firm of a huge solar power plant in Jordan that would generate cheap electricity for Israel, which would build a desalination plant on the Mediterranean and send water to an increasingly parched Jordan.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the signing, Axios first reported. Saudi Arabia came in from nowhere at the 11th hour and tried to pressure the U.A.E. into scrapping the deal. It was not because the Saudis were opposed to the concept. Just the opposite. It was reportedly because the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the U.A.E.’s more powerful neighbor,wanted himself to be seen as the region’s dominant player in green energy deals, not the U.A.E. and Jordan — so he could be seen as more of a resilience figure than a resistance figure. As a result, the deal was softened to a memorandum of understanding.

M.B.S., as the crown prince is known, has been trying to diversify and green the Saudi economy, to shift it away from its dependence on petrochemicals. But this has been overshadowed by Saudi Arabia’s continued involvement in the bloody tribal civil war in Yemen — where resistance-focused leadership is still the only game in town.

Nevertheless, just as Biden’s news conference was probably the first time a U.S. president had tried to deter a Russian leader by invoking Mother Nature over missiles, this may have been the first Arab-Arab diplomatic row over which leader would be seen as generating more resilience than resistance on climate.

But it gets better. Now this struggle between resistance leaders and resilience leaders is moving inside countries as well.

EcoPeace Middle East is an alliance of Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmentalists that has been pushing for a regional strategy called a Green Blue Deal. It would build on the Jordan-Israel-U.A.E. accord but also include the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza and extend to both fresh water and electricity. Two EcoPeace leaders, Gidon Bromberg from Israel and Nada Majdalani from the Palestinian Authority, were invited last week to present their ideas to the U.N. Security Council.

Unfortunately, the Palestinian U.N. representative showed little interest in their proposal in his own remarks to the Security Council. And the Israeli U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan — a right-wing holdover from former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s era — used his time to score points with right-wingers at home, by bashing the Palestinian Authority for being unresponsive to Israeli overtures to collaborate on the environment.

This prompted Israel’s current environmental protection minister, Tamar Zandberg, to issue a public rebuke of Erdan for putting out information “incompatible with the truth and in a style that does not represent the minister’s position.”

Zandberg said she and her Palestinian counterpart have already launched joint projects in the fields of “environment and waste” and their “work is progressing well in a different atmosphere than before … based on the understanding that climate change has no borders and that the two peoples will benefit from this collaboration.”

This is just the beginning of a whole new kind of power struggle within and between countries based on who is leading with resistance and who is leading with resilience.

Let the games begin.

 

[Ricter]

How China's food demand will shape our future

27 January 2022
At close to 1.5 billion people, China is the world’s most populous nation, as well as a major and growing economy, with important environmental implications. A new study shows that without sustainable policy interventions, China’s rapidly increasing food demand, especially for animal products, will lead to significant climate emissions and habitat loss.

The paper, published in Nature Sustainability, states,

“Satisfying China’s food demand without harming the environment is one of the greatest sustainability challenges for the coming decades.”

The environmental cost of food
Agriculture, especially livestock rearing, is a primary driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, as well as water shortage and pollution. Many recent authoritative reports have pointed out the urgent need to transform our destructive food systems, including a global shift to more plant-heavy diets. This is especially important in light of continuing human population growth. A major 2019 study by the EAT-Lancet Commission highlighted how feeding the world sustainably would become ever more difficult and eventually impossible with ever more people.

Despite growing adoption of vegetarianism and veganism in many parts of the world, the demand for meat and dairy is rapidly increasing as our population expands and people become wealthier. In Asia alone, meat and seafood consumption is expected to rise by 78% by 2050. African nations still have the lowest per person meat consumption in the world, but with the continent's population expected to almost double by mid-century, and as more Africans (hopefully) escape poverty, Africa's demand for animal products is yet to begin its surge, which makes it all the more important for the biggets meat eaters (including North America and Europe) to drastically cut back.

Fortunately, China’s population growth rate has now reached a 60-year low and is expected to stop growing by 2030, at which point India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country.

But food and especially meat consumption per person in China is much higher and growing faster than in India. Chinese diets are particularly heavy in pork which requires a lot of imported grain. According to the study, China’s soybean imports already account for more than a third of the global soybean trade, and are projected to account for close to half by 2050. A previous study found that 43% of 2017 deforestation emissions from soybean cultivation in Brazil can be attributed to imports into China.

China's growing appetite
The authors looked at a business-as-usual scenario which follows recent trends in consumption and technological developments to determine the impact of China’s increasing food demand on land use and greenhouse gas emissions. They also examined two other scenarios, with slower and faster economic development, respectively.

The findings show that China’s total food demand will likely increase by 16-30% by 2050, with the per person demand for animal products increasing three times as fast as that for plant-based calories. The demand for ruminant meat and dairy products is projected to almost double by 2050. Pork and poultry dominate the demand for animal products but are expected to level off and begin declining again after 2040 because of saturated appetites and China’s projected population decrease. Demand for pork and poultry will likely still be significantly higher by mid-century than today, however.

The authors estimate that meeting this demand will require up to 12 Mha (12,000 km2) of additional agricultural land within China and up to 175 Mha (175,000 km2) outside of China based on projected reliance on imports. Further conversion of land to agriculture is incompatible with the goal of ending biodiversity loss and would result in up to 16% growth in domestic agricultural emissions and up to 226 MtCO2-equivalent imported emissions per year. Together, these food-related impacts account for the biggest share of China’s global environmental footprint.

The authors point out the need for domestic policies that would make food production more sustainable, including a shift to less meat-intensive diets and better farming practices. They also call for the development of more sustainable international trade, prioritising less emission-intensive deals.

The neglected population and diet factors
While meeting China’s food demand sustainably will indeed be challenging, this would become impossible if its population were not headed for contraction. We would also be in much worse trouble if rapidly growing India were not predominantly vegetarian. The impact of demographics and diets on global challenges is critical yet often overlooked – for example, all recent pandemics, including COVID-19, are rooted in the exploitation of animals and unsustainable human population dynamics.

The global trend towards smaller family size makes all challenges more surmountable, yet it is not happening fast enough, and absurdly, continues to be fought by politicians around the world intent on boosting economic growth. Some governments (including China) are increasingly resorting to harmful reproductive rights restrictions as part of attempts to increase birth rates – a dangerous development that must be stopped for the sake of people and planet.

https://populationmatters.org/news/2022/01/how-chinas-food-demand-will-shape-our-future