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Just weeks before the international climate summit in Dubai, one of the biggest climate agreements ever proposed between Middle Eastern countries unraveled.

For two years, Israel and Jordan had negotiated a trade of precious resources they’ll need in a hotter future: renewable energy and drinking water. Under their proposed deal, Israel would dip into its water surplus to send its neighbor billions of gallons each year. In return, Jordan would share electricity from a new 600-megawatt solar farm in its sun-soaked desert.

The plan, dubbed Project Prosperity, had the financial support of the United Arab Emirates, which seeks to lead the region in tackling climate change, and the diplomatic blessing of the United States, which said it exemplified how Israel might weave into the political and economic fabric of the Middle East. With talks picking up in mid-2023, all hoped to finalize the deal in December, at the United Nations’ 28th annual climate conference, called COP28.

The October 7 attack on Israel, in which fighters with Hamas — an organization the U.S. and others consider a terrorist group — killed an estimated 1,139 people and took some 200 hostages, changed everything.

Israel has answered with a military campaign that has so far claimed the lives of at least 38,000 Gazans. Its near-complete blockade of food and water into Gaza has aid groups warning of famine. Some United Nations experts say Israel’s conduct is approaching genocide.

The war has caused upheaval in Jordan, a country whose government is historically one of Israel’s closest partners in the Arab world but also one whose public — at least half of whom are of Palestinian heritage due to successive displacements by Israel — feels a deep kinship with the Palestinian cause. Jordan’s foreign minister has said Israel’s campaign amounts to genocide. On November 16, amid protests near the American and Israeli embassies in Amman, Jordan said it would not finalize the water-for-energy deal. It has since accelerated plans for a $3.2 billion desalination project on its own coast that could provide a volume of water comparable to what Project Prosperity would have supplied.

The developments show how the war between Israel and Hamas is shaking not just the geopolitics of the Middle East, but its climate politics as well.

Jordanians protest the government’s signing of a declaration of intent for an energy-water project with the United Arab Emirates and Israel in Amman, Jordan in November 2021. The protesters urged the government to seek other sources of water. Mohammad Abu Ghosh / Xinhua via Getty Images

Before October 7, Israel was seen as a growing hub for clean technologies like water recycling, ultra-efficient irrigation, and green hydrogen; it had planned to send 1,000 people, including representatives of 100 companies, to COP28. Project Prosperity demonstrated the Arab world’s growing willingness to collaborate with Israelis on climate solutions, and hinted at how climate change might become an area of constructive cooperation in a fractious region.

“The COP was meant to capitalize on this growing momentum of regional collaboration,” said Karim Elgendy, a climate consultant and associate fellow at Chatham House, a London think tank. “I think that world is behind us now.”

Many Palestinian and Jordanian environmentalists find nothing to mourn in that. Even before the war, most opposed engaging with Israel without a fair and just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. “Why would we collaborate with someone killing us and controlling our resources?” said one Palestinian official. “How can I collaborate with someone occupying me? Controlling me?”

But a small group of scientists, researchers, and environmentalists in the region see it the other way around. Having devoted their careers to cross-border cooperation, they say the war has only deepened their conviction that this is the kind of work that’s necessary for any lasting peace.

“We’ve done war, shooting, rockets since 1948. Guess what? It came up with no solutions. History is repeating itself,” one young Palestinian environmentalist said, referring to the year Israel was founded. He requested anonymity because he feels expressing support for cooperation, amid the trauma of war, is risky. “I’m trying to use climate change and the environment in general as a starting point for peace. The only way is to come to the same table.”

In the Holy Land, water is political in a way that most Westerners would not recognize. Competition over the Jordan River basin helped spark a war between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967. Afterward, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which are today called the Palestinian territories, and declared control of their water resources. Israel had reached the limits of its domestic water reserves before the war; these seized resources allowed it to expand in its core territory and build settlements in its newly occupied ones. (Palestinians, the U.N., and most governments deem these settlements illegal.)

In the 1990s, Israel signed treaties with Jordan and the Palestinian Liberation Organization that set new rules for dividing the water resources that intersected their lands. The division was hardly equal. Israel ended up with control over 80 percent of the natural water resources within the borders of the West Bank, leaving Palestine largely reliant on it for water. Israel was obligated to provide a share of flows in the Jordan River to Jordan but also allowed to keep diverting a large share upstream.

This became the policy foundation of the world seen today: Israel enjoys abundant water thanks to these agreements, state-of-the-art desalination plants on the Mediterranean Sea, and world-leading efficiencies in recycling. Yet Palestinians experience what Amnesty International calls a “truly staggering” water disparity. The average Israeli consumes 52 to 79 gallons a day. (Americans use roughly 80 to 100 gallons daily.) Those in the West Bank average around 24, but in particularly deprived parts, the level approaches that of disaster zones. Gazans accessed around 22 gallons a person before the war; in March the aid group Anera estimated the average across Gaza was less than half a gallon. (The World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 13 to 26 gallons per day.) 

Israel strictly controls new water infrastructure for Palestinians in the West Bank, where many residents are used to their pipes going dry even as Israelis in nearby settlements play in swimming pools. B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, has documented 234 instances between 2012 and 2022 in which Israeli authorities have seized, damaged, or destroyed structures like pipelines, reservoirs, and cisterns. The Palestinian Authority is perhaps the only government in the world that envisions different climate adaptation strategies with and without military occupation. “It is challenging to adapt to climate change and implement our plans under the limited access of water under occupation,” Hadeel Ikhmais, head of the climate change section for the Palestinian Environment Quality Authority, told Grist.

The Sorek seawater desalination plant near the Israeli city of Rishon LeZion, about 9 miles south of Tel Aviv, meets about 20 percent of municipal water demand in Israel. Gil Cohen Magen / Xinhua via Getty Images

Jordan, meanwhile, has slid from scarcity to perpetual crisis. Residential averages range from 12 to 20 gallons per person each day. The major driver, as with its neighbors, is population. Over the last 20 years, population growth and refugee arrivals, mostly from Syria, have doubled the country’s population to over 11 million. There’s been no corresponding increase in water supplies, said Suleiman Halasah, a fellow at Oxford University’s Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society.

Climate change and politics aren’t helping. Hotter days, deeper droughts, and changing rain patterns are pushing Jordan’s rivers and groundwater reserves to exhaustion. Israel continues to divert huge shares of the Jordan River upstream. Damming and overuse in Syria and Jordan have further pushed the river to its critical level today: about 10 percent of historic flows, appearing in some places as a stale brown trickle.

Unable to supply everyone at all times, Jordanian utilities ration water by area. Families get a weekly allotment — based on the local population and whatever supply Jordan could procure that year — which they store in tanks and try to make last until the next week. Anyone needing more must buy it on the open market at roughly triple the baseline rate for municipal water. This structural undersupply has prompted the Jordanian government to pursue what Halasah calls a “chase after every drop” policy — to consider every conceivable source, domestic and foreign.

For 30 years, a band of allies in Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories — all defying public sentiment in their homelands — have argued that problems like these could be alleviated through cross-border efforts. Through conflict and calm, they’ve argued that this cooperation embodied how to sidestep the region’s toxic politics to address the climate threat they all face — and, in the minds of the most optimistic, maybe even advance the cause of peace. “We share the same borders, same environment, same everything. Whatever happens here will also happen there,” said the young Palestinian environmentalist. “There should be cooperation — by all the neighbors.”

Workers with Gaza Electricity Distribution Company repair power lines that serve the desalination plant in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on July 4. The facility uses energy generated in Israel. Ashraf Amra / Anadolu via Getty Images

Clive Lipchin, an Israeli resource ecologist who has for decades worked with Arab counterparts on local water quality issues, remains passionate about the power of “people to people” programming. The morning of October 7, he said, “one of the first people that messaged me was a Palestinian friend from Ramallah who I’ve been working with for years, and the only thing he said to me was, ‘Are you OK?’ That said to me, Clive, everything you’ve done is worth it.”

In 2020 an NGO called EcoPeace Middle East proposed an idea that it called the Green Blue Deal. Inspired by the coal and steel partnerships between France and Germany after World War II, it argued that renewable energy and water could be the Middle East equivalent — a resource trade that could improve all sides’ security. EcoPeace outlined a scheme under which Israel and Gaza would bolster desalination capacity on the Mediterranean Sea. Jordan would build new solar farms. And everyone would expand their power and water interconnections, collectively making their grids greener and their water supplies more robust.

EcoPeace, which was founded in 1994 and today has co-directors in Amman, Jordan; Ramallah in the West Bank; and Tel Aviv, Israel, has argued that such projects build trust between people who wouldn’t normally meet, forming social ties that bolster the overall cause of peace. In 2022, for example, the U.S. State Department gave EcoPeace a $3.3 million grant to finance collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian scientists working to address water issues and educational partnerships between Israeli and Palestinian teachers. (EcoPeace did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Every country in the Middle East is basically an energy island. That’s not how you move forward to decarbonize the grid and your economy,” Alon Tal, an Israeli politician who’s called for cross-border coordination on electricity, water, and pesticide policies, told Grist. “If we could figure out a way to work together, that’s the real significance of Project Prosperity — its ability to really show that it’s win-win.”

In 2021, after Israeli elections brought in a new, technocratically-minded government, the Green Blue Deal became the basis for policy discussions between Israel and Jordan — but, notably, not the Palestinians — that led to Project Prosperity.

It wasn’t the first time a major resource trade had been suggested, or even the biggest such proposal. What gave this one more purchase with Israeli and Jordanian officials was the mutual leverage it implied, said Galit Cohen, a former director general of the Israeli environment ministry. Historically, any water trade had been defined by imbalance; Israel had plenty, and Jordan needed it desperately. This arrangement had greater parity: Israel, which gets 90 percent of its electricity from coal and natural gas, lacked renewable energy, which Jordan’s sprawling deserts positioned it to provide. “There isn’t one party who’s giving and one party who’s taking,” Cohen said. “Both sides are in an equal position.”

Shams Al Mafraq, a solar project north of Amman, Jordan, is part of the government’s strategy to bring renewable energy’s contribution to the country’s overall energy mix to 10 percent. Mohammad Abu Ghosh / Xinhua via Getty Images

It was, for a significant wing of the Israeli environmental movement, exactly the kind of thing they wanted to see their government pursue. Tal, EcoPeace, and others have long argued that while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tends to poison Israel’s relations with Arab countries, working on shared environmental problems has sometimes offered a calmer, more pragmatic forum in which to deliver projects that benefit people and nature.

This idea is far more divisive in Jordan and the Palestinian territories, where plenty of officials and environmentalists reject it either as “normalization” — granting Israel the privilege of normal engagement at the expense of Palestinians’ human rights — or to avoid community criticism. Existing resource trades, such as Jordan buying natural gas from Israel, and the West Bank getting almost all of its electricity from Israel — are described resentfully. Nonetheless, several successful cross-border projects since the 1990s prove some willingness to collaborate. These include efforts to reduce pesticide use in Jordan Valley farms, clean up the Jordan River, and help off-grid Palestinian villages manage wastewater.

The Wala Dam, built in 2002 about 25 miles south of Amman, can store more than 7,200 acre-feet of water but faces diminished supplies amid an ongoing drought. Contigo / Getty Images

As a scientific and technical matter, the case for cooperation is straightforward. The geographic area of Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories is roughly that of Ohio. This means their air, water, and land are intimately linked and that they face similar projected changes in climate. The countries at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, already a hot and water-scarce place, are heating at twice the global average. Forecasts suggest average temperatures will likely jump around 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 — and up to 7.2 degrees F in the Jordanian summer — and total precipitation could drop 10 to 30 percent by century’s end. The combination of heat and diminished rain represent a double-whammy for natural water sources; more water will cook off into the air and replenish at lower rates.

There’s also logic to sharing electricity. Pooling power over large geographic areas makes it easier to add renewables to the mix. While the Israeli and Palestinian grids are well intertwined, their connections to neighboring states are effectively nil. Modeling by Oxford University shows that if Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories worked together to build interconnections and renewable energy, they could decarbonize their grids by 2050 for $11 billion less than if each went solo.

What technocratic arguments fail to do, say Palestinian and Jordanian critics, is address the underlying political order that created these vast inequalities. Inès Abdel Razek, an advocate for Palestinian rights who is now executive director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, has argued that Israel’s water surplus is built on dispossession of Palestinian water. She said initiatives like Project Prosperity entrench this control under the color of helping the environment.

“It’s basically here to promote UAE investments and Israeli investments and interests and completely erase Palestinians from the picture,” she said in 2022. “We see that the Palestinians will either receive or be sold some water by the Israelis, the very water that Israel stole from them, or they will be completely erased from the equation so far.”

“You cannot justify this project from climate change; this is a normalization project,” Omar Sushan, head of Jordan’s Environmental Union, told Al Jazeera in 2021, the year the initiative became public.

Tal, the Israeli politician, said his country’s water surplus offers a chance to change from the zero-sum thinking of the past — and start using the water to help Palestinians and Jordanians who are suffering today. “Let’s just change, let’s do things a little differently. Israel too,” he said.

A Palestinian man argues with an Israeli border guard as the Israeli army destroys a water reservoir used by Palestinian farmers in Hebron in June 2011. Hazem Bader / AFP via Getty Images

Project Prosperity found new momentum after the Trump administration helped Israel forge a series of diplomatic agreements, known as the Abraham Accords, with Arab governments in 2020. A flurry of deals between Israeli clean-tech companies and Arab partners ensued, including a green hydrogen project in Morocco and a sale in the UAE of mobile units that extract water from air.

Palestinian commentators have blasted the accords as selling out their hopes of an independent state. Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian diplomat who died in 2020, once called the Emirati-Israeli entente “an Arab dagger — a poisonous dagger — in my back.” Historically, most Arab countries refused to even recognize Israel diplomatically unless it reached a political settlement with the Palestinians. The Abraham Accords signaled a mood shift toward dealmaking. Elgendy, of Chatham House, sensed a “buzz around the idea of environmental peace-building … a positive atmosphere in which there was going to be collaboration against all the odds.”

Joining this cooperative spirit, in November 2021, Israel, Jordan, the UAE, and the U.S. declared interest in the water-for-energy trade that became Project Prosperity. Their four flags were printed at the top of the announcement; the Palestinian flag was absent. A Jordanian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said his country approached the Palestinian Authority but it opted out due to tensions with Israel at the time. “We thought we’ll go ahead with the project and include them later,” he said. A spokeswoman for the Palestinian Water Authority did not respond to requests for comment.

The announcement sparked protests in Jordan. Thousands marched in downtown Amman to decry what they called an “agreement of shame” that would benefit Jordanians, in their view, at Palestinians’ expense. Some Jordanian parliament members staged a walkout to protest not being looped into the decision.

A Palestinian man checks water tanks at a makeshift plant nursery he built alongside the rubble of his home in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP via Getty Photos

Jordanian leaders held firm. This was not out of love for Israel, the Jordanian official said, but a fiduciary responsibility to secure water supplies, which the government considers a matter of national security. Each year, Jordan’s water supply falls 325,000 to 405,000 acre-feet short of demand, enough to supply almost a million U.S. homes for a year. Project Prosperity would have roughly halved that deficit.  

By 2022, the parties had reaffirmed their commitment in a memorandum of understanding. Minister-level meetings in mid-2023 had officials confident they could finalize the deal at COP28 in Dubai. All that remained was signing purchase agreements, wrote Gidon Bromberg, an EcoPeace co-director.

In a March statement, a spokeswoman for Israel’s energy ministry said it plans to “continue and promote” cooperative projects in the region. Jordanian officials have been more cagey, saying they can’t conceivably sign the deal while Israel inflicts mass civilian casualties in Gaza. “Today under the existing conditions, it’s quite inconceivable for any Jordanian minister to just sit on a podium and have that type of interaction and transaction with an Israeli counterpart,” Prime Minister Bisher Khasawneh, commenting on the water-for-energy deal, said in January.

That said, the project could revive quickly — possibly by the middle of next year — should the war end soon, said the anonymous Jordanian official. The technical and policy agreements made before the war have not been made public, sources said, but policymakers could presumably pick them up if politics allow. For now, Jordan is refocusing on its next best alternative. King Abdullah II has ordered the government to accelerate development of a $3.2 billion desalination and distribution project proposed for Aqaba, a Red Sea port city. It would generate 243,000 acre-feet of water a year, enough to supply 4 to 5 million people. But this would have to be pumped hundreds of miles, uphill, to reach Amman and other population centers. Water from Israel would travel less than half the distance, suggesting that it would be cheaper. 

Despite the cost, there are those who think a domestic project is better for Jordan’s peace of mind. “If [Israel] can cut the water in Gaza, they can do it to Jordan,” said Dureid Mahasneh, who in the 1990s co-chaired the joint Israeli-Jordanian committee managing transboundary water resources. Mahasneh, now chairman of EDAMA, a Jordanian environmental nonprofit, said Israel’s increasingly extreme politics make it an unreliable partner — and that a domestic project would generate thousands of jobs. “We have this Jordanian national option,” he said, “and I would go for it.”

A man inspects severed power lines that serve Palestinian villages near Tuba on October 31. The human rights group B’Tselem said Israeli settlers destroyed homes and olive trees, blocked roads, and cut off electricity and water. Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In Amman, red stickers that depict bullets falling from a faucet like droplets, with the slogan “The water of the enemy is occupation,” have appeared on lampposts. Stars of David have been spray-painted onto sidewalks for pedestrians to trample. A roiling antinormalization movement, which opposes diplomatic relations with Israel, has called for Jordan to annul its peace treaty with Israel. Some campaigners have labeled EcoPeace a “normalization organization par excellence” and called to terminate the water-for-energy option.

Arabs who have collaborated with Israelis before are laying low, to avoid the epithet of “normalizer.” Many joint projects have been paused or dissolved. Some are proceeding but avoid attention. Even around family or friends, to speak of environmental issues, much less cooperation, can be taken as tone-deaf or insulting as each day of war reveals fresh horrors.

Ghassan Hammad, a Palestinian entrepreneur developing a circular-economy startup, says he’s been grieving the deaths of both Israeli friends and Gazan family since October 7. Having moved between both worlds his whole life, he feels deep empathy for both sides — but can see in the anguished eyes of his Palestinian family that now is not the time to argue that point.

“Romance is what keeps me going,” he said. “Romanticization of that idea that peace is possible. It doesn’t matter if it’s realistic or not. I know it’s not realistic right now, but maybe … if a lot of people make small changes, maybe the net positive impact of that might be great.”

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At the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, an educational center and think tank in southern Israel where Israelis, Palestinians, and others from abroad live, eat, and study together, students decided early in the war to complete the semester in each other’s company. They held weekly, private dialogues in which they shared their innermost, rawest feelings about life since October 7. Tareq Abu Hamed, the institute’s executive director, marveled at the vulnerability, honesty, and love they’ve shown. “This is the Middle East that I want to see,” he said. “This is the light that we all want to see in the middle of this darkness.”

But enrollment fell by half the next semester, and with no students from the Palestinian territories or Jordan. 

Naomi Geri Naslavsky, a 22-year-old Israeli who remained at Arava for much of the war, said she remains as committed as ever to working across borders to address the climate crisis. She’s increasingly persuaded that leaders in her country and elsewhere are the ones sowing division.

“There are people on both sides who care about this issue, who want peace, who still want to work together,” she said. “How to make that happen, I’m not sure. I think it has to be a bottom-up process. I think this is where we start.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Israel’s war on Gaza unraveled a landmark Mideast climate deal on Jul 24, 2024.

Siri Lawson and her husband live on a stamp of wooded, hilly land in Warren County, Pennsylvania, nestled in the state’s rural northwest corner. During the summer heat, cars traveling on the county’s dirt roads cast plumes of dust in their wake. Winter’s chill can cause a hazardous film of ice to spawn on paved roads. To protect motorists from both slippery ice and vision-impairing dust, communities across Pennsylvania coat these roads with large, cheap volumes of de-icing and dust-suppressing fluids. In Lawson’s case, her township had been using oil and gas wastewater as a dust suppressant, believing the material was effective.

But researchers have found it is no better at controlling dust than rainwater. It can also contain toxic chemicals and have radioactive concentrations several hundred times the acceptable federal limit in drinking water. Given the risks it poses to human health and the environment, Pennsylvania lawmakers and the state’s environmental agency disallowed this practice more than seven years ago. 

But oil and gas companies have continued to spread their wastewater practically unchecked across the state, thanks to a loophole in state regulations. A Grist review of records from 2019 to 2023 found that oil and gas producers submitted more than 3,000 reports of wastewater dumping to the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP. In total, they reported spraying nearly 2.4 million gallons of wastewater on Pennsylvania roads. This number is likely a vast undercount: About 86 percent of Pennsylvania’s smaller oil and gas drillers did not report how they disposed of their waste in 2023. 

Wastewater dumping is an open secret on Pennsylvania roads. At a legislative hearing this spring, state senators Katie Muth and Carolyn Comitta, both Democrats, said they witnessed companies spreading wastewater last fall during a tour of new fracking wells. Lawson, who has become a public face of opposition to wastewater dumping, experiences sinus pains and believes her symptoms are connected to living near roads coated with wastewater. Sometimes the pain has been so intense she’s had to leave her home “to get different air.” She’s submitted multiple complaints to DEP over the years, but she says it has done little to drag the agency off the sidelines. 

“I am told [by DEP] to catch the truck,” Lawson said. “I’m told to be my own cop.” 

A road near Siri Lawson’s home photographed in March 2024 coated with what she suspects is oil and gas wastewater. Siri Lawson

Neil Shader, a spokesperson for DEP, told Grist that the department “is committed to responding to all brine/roadspreading complaints that are received from the general public” and that it investigates all complaints. “If/when a responsible party is identified, appropriate enforcement action is taken,” he said. 

Lawmakers first banned the use of wastewater from fracking wells as a dust suppressant in 2016. Two years later, the DEP issued a moratorium on the use of wastewater from traditional drilling methods as well. But conventional oil and gas companies have found a loophole that allows them to skirt these rules with impunity. The DEP requires permits for wastewater disposal, but the agency grants an exception if the wastewater can be reused for a “beneficial” purpose. Any waste that is no more injurious to the environment and human health than a commercial alternative may be classified as a “coproduct,” a designation that receives less DEP oversight.

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Under Pennsylvania law, companies can grant their wastewater coproduct status by conducting in-house analyses to determine whether their waste is harmful to human health or the environment. These tests do not have to include a radiation analysis, even though studies have shown radium from oil and gas wastewater — which often contains 300 to 560 times the acceptable levels of radioactive substances in drinking water — has made its way into roadside vegetation, fresh water, and up the food chain. A company is only required to submit its justification for using the coproduct status if asked by the DEP to do so. 

The agency rarely asks. In 2021, the DEP requested justification for claiming coproduct status from 16 companies. Only 10 responded. The DEP told them that the materials they submitted were “inadequate.”

Any conventional driller who is audited and “roadspreads” in the absence of an approved coproduct determination from the DEP — and without updating or submitting a new coproduct determination — is technically violating the agency’s moratorium, putting them in murky legal territory. But without agency enforcement, these companies face no consequences.

“As far as I am aware, there have been zero notices of violations, compliance orders, fines, and penalties for anything dealing with rogue dumping of wastewater,” said David Hess, a former DEP secretary. “No one is enforcing the moratorium.” 

Shader, the DEP spokesperson, told Grist that the coproduct term will no longer appear in waste reports because oil and gas companies “have been using the product type incorrectly,” likely misunderstanding the term’s purpose. The agency “investigates reports of unauthorized roadspreading of brine and will take enforcement action as appropriate,” he said. “DEP encourages members of the public who observe potentially unauthorized roadspreading of brine to report the activity to DEP.”

The agency’s decision to drop the classification can largely be traced to the work of Karen Feridun. Feridun is the co-founder of the environmental organization Better Path Coalition, and in 2019 she noticed that the DEP had newly listed “coproduct” as a waste type in its oil and gas reports, implying to her that the agency had tacitly issued a blanket approval of wastewater dumping on roads. She then filed a public records request, which led the DEP to request a meeting with her. During the discussion, agency representatives told her that its oil and gas division had added the term to its waste reports after an “oral request” from Pennfield Energy LLC, a conventional driller in Pennsylvania. The agency told her it had no paper trail of the communication. 

Feridun was outraged. “I am convinced they knew exactly what drillers were going to do,” she said. To her, the agency had all but confirmed it had endorsed wastewater dumping.

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The DEP has denied Feridun’s interpretation of its decision. The agency was attempting to “readily identify” which companies had already conducted waste toxicity assessments as a precursor to dumping their wastewater, Shader said. “The addition of this product type code was in no way intended to imply that the requirements [for safety and efficacy] did not need to be satisfied.” 

The incident also appeared to indicate miscommunication within the agency. State waste codes are generated by the DEP’s Bureau of Waste Management, but oilfield oversight largely rests with the agency’s oil and gas division. Feridun wondered whether the oil and gas division had informed the waste management department of its decision to include a novel term in its records. Since the department told Feridun it had no paper trail, she said it could not give her an answer.

When asked whether the DEP’s oil and gas division communicated its waste report change to the bureau of waste management in 2019, Shader said that the divisions communicate “on a regular basis to discuss activities regulated by both programs.”

Lawson’s experiences, new research, and the findings from Feridun’s records request have thrust oil and gas companies’ behavior back into the state’s political spotlight. At a state senate hearing in April, Bill Burgos, a professor of environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University, told lawmakers “there is no more research that needs to be done” to determine whether oil and gas wastewater is safe and effective for treating roads. Burgos has published several studies on oil and gas wastewater, including one recently that found the fluid is ineffective as a dust suppressant. 

In early May, Feridun and a group of other activists delivered a letter to Governor Josh Shapiro and members of the legislature asking them to ban companies from spraying roads with wastewater. Two lawmakers have since introduced dueling bills on the issue. Representative Martin Causer, a Republican serving a swath of northern Pennsylvania, proposed to legalize the practice while Representative Greg Vitali, a Democrat representing a region east of Philadelphia, moved to ban it.

Some of the public pressure appears to have paid off. In April, the DEP proposed amending coproduct criteria to mandate an assessment of a material’s efficacy, but it is unclear if this would include radiation testing, which would give the DEP — and the public — a fuller picture of oil and gas waste’s toxicity.

Earlier this month, the agency went a step further: At a legislative hearing in front of the state house’s Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, the DEP said it supported Vitali’s bill banning oil and gas companies from spreading their wastewater on roads and preventing the fluid from being treated as a coproduct by the department. The bill advanced out of the committee with support split along party lines, but it faces a steep climb to the governor’s desk, given that Republicans control the state senate. 

Until something changes, people like Lawson continue to live near roads doused with toxic wastewater. She said the dumping has been more frequent lately. If the DEP is going to more aggressively regulate oil and gas companies, it needs to be better funded, said Hess. 

“As long as [companies] can get away with it, they will,” he said. “That has been the history of their entire existence.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Roadspreading’ returns: How Pennsylvania’s oil industry quietly dumped waste across the state on Jul 24, 2024.

Another brutal summer is shattering temperature records, broiling over a third of Americans under extended heat advisories. As smoke from wildfires begins to choke skies and death counts tick upwards, affected states say they need more help from the federal government. 

During most climate-driven emergencies, such as hurricanes or floods, local governments can rely on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fund relief efforts. But heat waves and wildfire smoke aren’t explicitly listed as “major disasters” under the law that empowers FEMA to administer emergency aid and don’t fit neatly within the disaster-declaration process — leaving affected communities without a clear pathway to access funds. Recently, in response, states and advocacy groups have been pressuring FEMA to treat heat waves and wildfire smoke as the major disasters they are. 

Part of the problem comes down to semantics, and how climate-impacted events are addressed — or, more precisely, not addressed — in a 1988 law called the Stafford Act, which authorizes FEMA to administer a wide range of assistance to local and state governments following a major disaster declaration from the president. Despite listing 16 specific disasters that qualify for this declaration and the funding it unlocks, neither heat waves nor wildfire smoke are mentioned in the text of the law.

FEMA says that dangerous heat and smoke from wildfires could still qualify for major disaster declarations under what the Stafford Act refers to broadly as “any natural catastrophe.” But only three major disaster-declaration requests for heat have ever been made — all of which were rejected. Still, the agency insists heat waves and wildfire smoke are given the same level of consideration as any other disaster.

“We take every severe weather event on a case-by-case basis to understand what the impacts are to the community and what they might need from the federal government,” said FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell in an interview with Grist. But, she added, states need to demonstrate that they’re unable to shoulder the costs on their own before FEMA will step in. 

Clearing that bar hasn’t been easy, as states may struggle to make use of the funds they already have. Last summer, for example, the governor of Arizona declared a state of emergency following a statewide extreme heat event, freeing up $200,000 through the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs to help reimburse local governments for their expenses. In the end, less than 1 percent of that money was spent, due to difficulty documenting costs associated with heat, complicated rules, and poor timing. 

“Our disaster framework is really geared toward protecting property and counting up damages to property,” said Juanita Constible, a senior climate and health advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. She said that because of the diffuse way heat harms human health, it’s tough to put a price tag on the toll on a community, and the death count isn’t always clear until the worst of the summer is over. Unlike the calculable wreckage of hurricanes or floods, proving financial losses from heat with health data is “much more challenging,” she said.

“There’s no quick way of tallying up the damages and demonstrating, ‘This was way too hard for us, we need your help stat,’” Constible said. She added that FEMA requires clear and specific data that documents expenses incurred during a heat wave or smoke event, which is difficult for states to provide using existing tools meant to track impacts from heat or smoke.

Tourists find shade from the sun at a cooling station, which blows cold air-conditioning and sells water, at the Hoover Dam in Boulder City, Nevada, during a heat wave in June. Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images

Another roadblock to accessing federal aid in the wake of a heat wave or wildfire smoke is determining exactly when an event begins and ends. Whereas some disasters happen in a single powerful event, like an earthquake or a tornado, high temperatures and smoky skies can drag on for weeks. Because of this, said Constible, heat does not “fit nicely” within a typical disaster declaration process. 

As climate change fuels more intense, prolonged heat waves that kill more people than any other kind of weather event, cities like Phoenix could end up losing billions of dollars per year from infrastructure damage and the loss of life and workforce productivity. Last year, over 600 people died from heat in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, and by mid-July this year, dozens more residents had suffered the same fate. 

Pressure for FEMA to make a change to how it approves disaster aid is mounting. Last month, a multistate coalition of environmental, labor, and health organizations filed a petition to the agency, asking for amended rules that explicitly recognize extreme heat and wildfire smoke as major disasters and clear the way for getting funding requests approved. It also detailed how funding from a major disaster declaration could be used to mitigate the harmful effects of heat and wildfire smoke. 

That initiative was followed last week by a July 16 letter from attorneys general in 13 states and Washington, D.C., in support of the petition. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, who signed the letter, said in a statement to Grist: “We need the federal government to keep up with the realities Oregonians face, and we need FEMA to have the jurisdiction to assist when we ask for help.” 

Earlier this month, lawmakers Dina Titus of Arizona and Greg Stanton of Nevada — U.S. representatives from two of the hottest and hardest-hit states — introduced a bill that expands how FEMA can respond to these events.

Read Next FEMA to overhaul its disaster aid system after decades of criticism Jake Bittle

“This is truly a crisis and yet we don’t see leadership from any agency or local government or state in dealing with it comprehensively,” said Jean Su, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, which spearheaded the June petition. 

In addition to emergency response measures like cooling tents and evacuation services, Su said unlocking major disaster funding would allow states to mitigate the harm from heat and smoke by investing in a myriad of long-term solutions, including air conditioners in homes and air-filtration systems in schools. The coalition said that with the support from a major disaster declaration, these solutions have the potential to save billions of dollars and many lives.

On the other hand, Criswell said that even without major disaster declarations, FEMA provides funding for mitigation efforts and that states are knowledgeable about these programs. In 2020, for example, the agency began the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which helps states upgrade infrastructure to withstand disasters, including heat. “A lot of what they were stating are really things that we’re already doing,” she told Grist in reference to the petition.

But as climate change causes more calamities, FEMA may not have the disaster funding to spare. A report in May found that if this year’s Atlantic hurricanes are as intense as predicted — and with this month’s history-making Hurricane Beryl, that seems to be the case — the agency could be $6.8 billion over budget by September.

Correction: This article originally misidentified the Natural Resources Defense Council.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What defines a heat wave? The answer could decide where disaster dollars go. on Jul 24, 2024.

The global steel industry is turning away from polluting coal-fired blast furnaces and toward cleaner electric arc furnaces, which now account for roughly half of all planned steelmaking capacity, according to a new report.

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Sunday was an unprecedented day, and not just because President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race so close to the election. July 21 was the hottest day on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, with a global average temperature of 62.76 degrees Fahrenheit, slightly beating out the previous record set on July 6 of last year. 

For 13 straight months now, the planet has been notching record temperatures, from hottest year (2023) to hottest month (last July). And what was a daily temperature record eight years ago has now become worryingly commonplace. “What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus service, in a statement. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”  

The territory may be uncharted, but the causes of this heat are abundantly clear. For one, there’s the steady rise of global temperatures due to carbon emissions. Since 1850, the Earth’s temperature has risen by 0.11 degrees F per decade on average, but that rate of warming since 1982 has jumped to 0.36 degrees per decade. Last year was already the hottest year on record by far, while 10 of the warmest years have all happened in the last decade. Copernicus also notes that before July 2023, the daily global average temperature record was 62.24 degrees F, on August 13, 2016. But since July 3, 2023, 57 days have exceeded that mark. Uncharted territory, indeed.

The world may also be feeling the lingering aftereffects of El Niño this summer. That’s the band of warm Pacific Ocean water off the coast of South America, which sends additional heat into the atmosphere that raises temperatures and influences weather patterns. The most recent El Niño peaked around the new year, then faded through this spring. “The atmosphere knows no boundaries,” said Shang-Ping Xie, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “We’re still under the influence of El Niño. Not to mention that North Atlantic warming is one of the reasons that this Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be very active.”

So while July 21 might have been sweltering for landlubbers, the parts of the Atlantic Ocean where hurricanes form are also extremely hot. Those warm waters are what fuel cyclones like Hurricane Beryl, which slammed into Texas earlier this month and left hunger in its wake. Scientists have forecasted five major hurricanes and 21 named storms this season, thanks in part to those high ocean temperatures.

There might also be some natural variability thrown into the mix this summer: Some years are just hotter than others even in the absence of human-caused warming. And this time of year is when global average temperatures naturally peak, as the Northern Hemisphere summer starts to mature. (More landmasses in the North absorb and emit the sun’s energy, versus all that ocean area in the South that helps cool things down. 

“It just so happened that we had a spike on top of what is typically the warmest climatological week of the entire year,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, which does its own climate analyses. “This is the warmest day on record, but also July is now — at least in my analysis — almost certain to not be the warmest July on record.” That is, the 13-month streak of records may well come to an end. Last July was so hot, it set a very high bar for future Julys to beat.

At the same time, by Hausfather’s calculations, there’s a 95 percent chance that 2024 will edge out 2023 as the hottest year ever. “It’s just been so warm in the first six months of the year that even if we don’t set new records for the second six months, we’re still very likely going to end up above 2023,” Hausfather said. “We’ve just built up that much of a lead already.”

Back in the Pacific Ocean, though, relief may be on the way: With El Niño gone, its cold-water counterpart, La Niña, could form in the coming months. That may help bring down global temperatures in 2025, and maybe even beyond. “The last La Niña was a three-year event,” Xie said. “That is of course very rare, but has extraordinary effects on the climate.”

Regardless of El Niño and La Niña, though, the past year has been exceptionally hot — an ominous sign that the planet hasn’t just entered uncharted territory, but an increasingly perilous one. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Earth just sweltered through the hottest day ever recorded on Jul 23, 2024.

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O desenvolvimento tecnológico é frequentemente considerado como um produto natural da engenhosidade humana que nunca deve ser interrompido ou controlado. Mas a inovação também pode agravar os impactos sociais e ambientais. Poderá o decrescimento redirecionar a tecnologia para uma transformação inclusiva e ambientalmente consciente?

A ideia de que a inovação é a chave para o crescimento económico está profundamente enraizada na nossa sociedade. O número de patentes anuais que um país produz é frequentemente considerado como refletindo sua riqueza. Espera-se, no entanto, que as empresas de sucesso promovam uma cultura de inovação constante para sobreviver num mercado altamente competitivo. A inovação também está associada a uma série de qualidades positivas: criatividade, autonomia, flexibilidade, adaptabilidade e resiliência. 

Mas este enquadramento exclusivamente positivo da tecnologia ignora que a inovação, para além de melhorar a qualidade de vida, pode reforçar as estruturas de poder e opressão existentes e agravar os danos ambientais. Novas narrativas são necessárias para alargar o alcance do conceito de inovação. Deve ser entendido não apenas como uma questão de desenvolvimento das novas tecnologias, mas como um processo que envolve mudanças culturais e institucionais, bem como uma transformação da vida e da ordem social. 

A ciência e a mudança técnica já existiram em sociedades que não buscaram o crescimento económico e continuarão a existir em futuras sociedades sem crescimento.

Consenso de crescimento

O argumento de que a procura da prosperidade implica um crescimento económico infinito remonta à era pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial. O desenvolvimento sem precedentes da ciência e da tecnologia gerou um fluxo constante de novos produtos e serviços, materiais e processos, lançando as bases da sociedade de consumo moderna. A sensação de que o progresso tecnológico estava em constante aceleração alimentou a imaginação coletiva ao ponto de, na década de 1950, muitos acreditarem que os humanos em breve caminhariam em Marte ou construiriam bases na Lua. 

Os movimentos ambientalistas na década de 1960 começaram a expressar preocupações sobre os riscos associados ao uso excessivo da ciência e da tecnologia para aumentar a produtividade industrial e agrícola. Exemplo disso é o livro Silent Spring (1962), de Rachel Carson, que alertava para o crescente uso de pesticidas e fertilizantes químicos na agricultura moderna. No entanto, quando o histórico relatório Limites do Crescimento foi publicado em 1972 – o primeiro documento deste género a alertar para o perigo, entre outros, da industrialização excessiva e da utilização de recursos – a maioria dos economistas tentou desacreditá-lo. O consenso era que a ciência e a tecnologia nos permitiriam ultrapassar quaisquer restrições ao crescimento económico decorrentes dos limites biofísicos do planeta – posição que ainda hoje prevalece. 

Nas últimas décadas, a visão dominante da economia de que a inovação deve continuar sem restrições foi complementada por uma ênfase na criação de redes e interações entre instituições públicas e privadas para promover a inovação. Os governos nacionais e regionais competem para conceber programas cada vez mais atrativos para impulsionar as capacidades de inovação, enquanto o programa de investigação Horizonte 2020 da União Europeia dedica uma parte considerável do seu orçamento à promoção da inovação entre os seus membros. 

Estas iniciativas baseiam-se na crença de que os danos causados ​​pela inovação e pela mudança tecnológica são compensados ​​pelos benefícios sociais; que a inovação cria um maior número de empregos melhores e mais satisfatórios; que permite uma maior mobilidade social e uma melhor distribuição da riqueza; que mais inovação significa mais crescimento económico; e que a inovação é necessária para enfrentar os grandes desafios que a humanidade enfrenta, como as alterações climáticas, a pobreza ou as crises sanitárias globais. 

Ilusões de determinismo technológico 

Mas estas suposições baseiam-se em noções de determinismo tecnológico e produtivismo. O determinismo tecnológico é a ideia de que as inovações tecnológicas emergem espontaneamente dadas as “condições certas”: concorrência de mercado, valores e cultura empresarial, leis rigorosas de propriedade intelectual e democracia liberal. Além disso, o determinismo interpreta o desenvolvimento tecnológico como uma evolução linear de artefatos e sistemas mais simples para outros cada vez mais complexos. 

No entanto, estudos de ciência, tecnologia e sociedade (CTS) têm mostrado que esta interpretação linear é problemática. A mudança técnica, longe de ser um processo neutro e autónomo, reflete os valores, as ideologias e as visões do mundo da sociedade em que se desenvolve. O progresso tecnológico é historicamente determinado, mas não determinístico. Isto significa que não existe uma trajetória previsível que a tecnologia deva seguir na sua evolução. Em vez disso, a tecnologia avança através de uma série de avanços e períodos de estagnação. Os estudos CTS mostram que, muitas vezes, coexistem múltiplos caminhos de mudança tecnológica. No entanto, alguns destes caminhos podem tornar-se hegemónicos devido a dinâmicas políticas, culturais e socioeconómicas complexas. 

Uma vez que isto acontece, inicia-se um processo de naturalização, em que um determinado caminho de desenvolvimento tecnológico é percebido como o progresso inevitável da engenhosidade humana. Mas o que parece “natural” é, muitas vezes, o resultado de interesses convergentes, de relações de poder assimétricas e, em muitos casos, de sistemas de dominação e violência. É por isso que os discursos sobre a inevitabilidade da mudança tecnológica e a superioridade da tecnologia ocidental são por vezes utilizados instrumentalmente para impor mudanças nos sistemas de produção das (ex) colónias de uma forma que beneficia apenas as potências coloniais. 

Paradoxos do produtivismo

A segunda suposição problemática relacionada com a inovação é que esta conduz sempre à prosperidade económica – criando novos empregos e produtos e serviços mais eficientes – e deve, portanto, ser considerada boa em si mesma. No entanto, embora a inovação tenha trazido inúmeros benefícios à sociedade contemporânea, também gerou uma série de paradoxos e tensões. 

Por exemplo, a inovação é vista como uma fonte de crescimento económico e competitividade, mas também pode conduzir à precariedade laboral e à desigualdade social. As novas tecnologias e a automatização podem conduzir à perda de postos de trabalho em determinados setores, criando novas oportunidades noutros. Isto pode resultar em uma incompatibilidade entre as competências exigidas pelos novos empregos e as possuídas pelos trabalhadores despedidos. Além disso, os benefícios da inovação nem sempre são distribuídos uniformemente. Por um lado, plataformas como Uber ou Airbnb concedem independência a usuários e trabalhadores, enquanto, por outro, corroem os direitos dos trabalhadores, impulsionam a gentrificação nas cidades e aumentam as desigualdades. 

Outro paradoxo é que, embora a inovação seja frequentemente vista como uma solução para os problemas ambientais, também pode contribuir para a degradação ambiental através do consumo de recursos e da geração de resíduos. Exemplos incluem projetos de “gigafarms” eólicas e solares na Europa, que podem perturbar a paisagem natural e ameaçar a vida selvagem. 

Além disso, a ênfase na inovação contínua e no crescimento económico pode criar uma cultura de consumo excessivo, onde a procura constante de produtos novos e melhores leva a níveis insustentáveis ​​de utilização de recursos e de geração de resíduos. As consequências dramáticas disto são visíveis no bairro de Acra, no Gana, onde grandes quantidades de lixo eletrónico proveniente da Europa aguardam para serem processados ​​por crianças e outros grupos vulneráveis. 

Por último, embora a inovação seja frequentemente vista como uma fonte de capacitação e autonomia, também pode conduzir a um maior controlo e vigilância. Por exemplo, o desenvolvimento de novas tecnologias, como megadados e inteligência artificial, pode permitir aos Estados e às organizações privadas monitorizar e controlar o comportamento dos indivíduos de formas sem precedentes. Isto pode levar a um aumento da vigilância e do controlo, minando a autonomia e a privacidade individuais. Por exemplo, o software de IA “Lavender”, utilizado pelo exército de Israel para identificar e eliminar automaticamente suspeitos de terrorismo, resultou em inúmeras vítimas civis durante o genocídio em curso em Gaza.  

Inovação para além do crescimento

O determinismo tecnológico e o produtivismo são visões que impedem a compreensão da inovação como um processo construído pela sociedade, pela cultura e pela política. O determinismo tecnológico nega a pluralidade inerente a qualquer processo de inovação e aos seus múltiplos e diversos resultados potenciais, enquanto a posição produtivista ignora as questões políticas que o rodeiam. Por exemplo, quem decide o que é bom ou mau? Quem ganha e quem perde quando é introduzida uma inovação e através de que mecanismos de poder? 

A inovação não é um processo inerentemente benéfico – produz vencedores e perdedores. 

Na década de 1970, surgiu a visão de que o desenvolvimento tecnológico deveria ser reorientado para longe do crescimento económico, em direção à justiça social, liberdade e equilíbrio ecológico. Entre os defensores disto estava o filósofo Ivan Illich, cujo livro Tools for Conviviality (1973) analisou explicitamente a ameaça da expansão económica descontrolada alimentada pelos avanços tecnológicos. A visão refletiu-se também na noção de “tecnologias apropriadas” do economista Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, no livro Ecology as Politics (1978) do filósofo André Gorz e na ideia de “tecnologia libertadora” de Murray Bookchin. 

Illich defende em Tools for Conviviality que o crescimento tecnológico pode chegar a um ponto em que se torna incompatível com a sustentabilidade planetária. Aponta as ameaças do crescimento excessivo, incluindo a degradação biológica, o monopólio radical, a polarização e a obsolescência. Para combater estas ameaças, Illich defende a “tecnologia de convívio”, que se refere a tecnologias que preservam ou melhoram os ecossistemas, “permitem a autonomia e o controlo dos utilizadores, interompem relações de poder desiguais e são robustas e duráveis”. 

Abandonar as inovações pró-crescimento em favor de tecnologias de convívio orientadas para objetivos não significa “regressar às cavernas” ou assumir posições tecnofóbicas. Pelo contrário, implica repensar o que a ciência e a tecnologia devem ser: não motores de crescimento material sem fim, mas instrumentos para melhorar o nosso bem-estar. Um exemplo concreto desta visão alternativa da tecnologia é o Plano Lucas. Em meados da década de 1970, milhares de postos de trabalho na Lucas Aerospace, um fabricante de aviões britânico, estavam programados para serem cortados, em grande parte porque as mudanças tecnológicas na indústria estavam a tornar redundantes as competências dos trabalhadores. Em resposta, os trabalhadores liderados por delegados sindicais do Sindicato dos Trabalhadores dos Transportes e do Sindicato dos Trabalhadores da Engenharia elaboraram um plano corporativo alternativo centrado em produtos socialmente úteis e ambientalmente sustentáveis. 

O plano incluía inovações como turbinas eólicas, carros híbridos e dispositivos médicos concebidos para atender os mercados locais e regionais. Apresentou um dos primeiros exemplos de iniciativas lideradas pelos trabalhadores voltadas para democracia industrial e a uma economia verde. Apesar do seu engenho e do apoio generalizado que obteve entre os grupos laborais e ambientais, o plano acabou por ser rejeitado tanto pela administração da empresa como pelo governo do Reino Unido. Meio século depois, o Plano Lucas ainda permanece como um monumento a um modo alternativo de inovação e organização da produção que poderia ser replicado a vários níveis na UE. 

Criatividade, cuidado e reparação

O período que decorre desde o boom pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial é a prova de que a inovação não é um processo inerentemente benéfico – produz vencedores e perdedores. E há mais de 70 anos que a tecnologia e a inovação estão ao serviço do capitalismo expansionista nas sociedades industriais. 

No entanto, esta não é a única, nem a mais desejável, forma de compreender a tecnologia e o seu papel na sociedade. Na verdade, é possível que a inovação alcance resultados socialmente úteis sem estar subordinada ao imperativo do crescimento económico. Para isto, é necessário abandonar o determinismo tecnológico e o produtivismo e imaginar novas formas de inovação não suportadas pela necessidade de valorização. Hoje, investigadores, profissionais e ativistas dentro do movimento emergente pós-crescimento estão a esforçar-se por imaginar uma cultura de inovação enraizada na criatividade, cuidado, reparação e manutenção. 

Aquellas personas que se encuentran en una situación precaria y de inestabilidad económica son las que pueden inspirar la descarbonización de la industria y la creación de empleos que sean respetuosos con el medioambiente. Contamos con una historia sólida de iniciativas obreras que han superado despidos, así como una serie de colaboraciones recientes entre activistas, sindicatos y trabajadores, que sirven de ejemplos concretos de transición empoderada.

En el año 2023, una ola de calor sin precedentes que recibió el nombre de Cerbero (el sabueso tricéfalo de Hades) arrasó toda Europa, lo que llevó a la clase trabajadora a organizarse para exigir medidas de protección contra el calor extremo. En Atenas, el personal empleado en la Acrópolis y otros enclaves históricos se declaró en huelga durante cuatro horas al día. En Roma, el servicio de recogida de basuras amenazó con ir a la huelga si se les obligaba a trabajar durante las horas de mayor calor. En otros lugares de Italia, los empleados del transporte público exigieron vehículos con aire acondicionado y la plantilla de una fábrica de baterías en los Abruzos amenazó con ir a la huelga en protesta por la obligación de trabajar bajo un “calor asfixiante”.

Casi se podría decir que los antiguos griegos vaticinaron la crisis climática actual cuando denominaron a Hades, el dios de los muertos, con el eufemismo de “Plutón”, el dador de riqueza. Su nombre es una alusión a los materiales (la plata en su época, los combustibles fósiles y los minerales indispensables en la nuestra) que, una vez extraídos del inframundo, acaban llenando los bolsillos de los plutócratas.

La estructura plutocrática de la sociedad moderna explica la pasmosa lentitud de la respuesta al colapso climático. La tan anunciada transición ecológica apenas avanza, al menos en lo que respecta a la concentración atmosférica de gases de efecto invernadero. Estos no sólo siguen aumentando, sino que lo hacen incluso de forma acelerada, y lo mismo ocurre con el ritmo del calentamiento global. La transición sigue dependiendo de instituciones poderosas y acaudaladas que, aun dejando de lado la avaricia o la codicia de estatus, están obligadas por el sistema a anteponer la acumulación de capital a la habitabilidad del planeta.

En este contexto, la política de la transición implica una lucha de clases que va más allá de la lucha de la clase obrera en defensa de sí misma y de sus comunidades frente a las emergencias meteorológicas. Obviamente, eso también forma parte del paisaje, pero la lucha de clases se manifiesta de manera más evidente cuando el poder intenta transferir los costes de la transición a las masas. Así es como surge, inevitablemente, la resistencia. La pregunta es: ¿qué forma adoptará?

En algunos casos esta resistencia adopta la forma de una reacción antiecologista, instigada o dominada por fuerzas conservadoras y de extrema derecha. Aunque se autoproclaman aliados de las “familias trabajadoras”, estas fuerzas denigran la necesidad más básica de todo trabajador: un planeta habitable. En otras ocasiones adopta una forma progresista, como es el caso emblemático de los llamados “chalecos amarillos” en Francia. Cuando el Gobierno de Macron subió los “impuestos ecológicos” sobre los combustibles fósiles como incentivo para que el consumidor comprara coches más eficientes, las clases media-baja y trabajadora de las zonas rurales, incapaces de permitirse ese cambio, se enfundaron unos chalecos amarillos de seguridad y se movilizaron. Aunque el sector radical del movimiento obrero francés se unió a la causa, no consiguió aglutinarse en una fuerza política capaz de ofrecer otras soluciones a la crisis social y medioambiental.

Los peligros climáticos ya se han integrado en las luchas obreras de todo el mundo, sentando así nuevas bases de movilización

El análisis de las formas de lucha, los movimientos y las acciones de la clase obrera en relación con el cambio climático nos permite entrever cómo se podría reorientar la transición ecológica siguiendo una línea social liderada por la clase trabajadora. En este contexto, el término “lucha de clases” se emplea en un sentido general para abarcar cuestiones como la ecología, la reproducción social, la sexualidad, la identidad, el racismo, etc., todas ellas relacionadas con la calidad de vida y tan relevantes para la “mano de obra” como el salario y las condiciones laborales.

Mazzocchi, el líder sindical estadounidense que acuñó el término “transición justa”, criticó el contrato social de posguerra por el que los dirigentes sindicales renunciaban a participar en las decisiones sobre el proceso de producción a cambio de mejoras salariales. Su radicalismo rojiverde brotó de la convicción de que era necesario transformar la totalidad de la vida laboral y social para lograr la salud y el bienestar de la clase trabajadora.

Resistencia obrera

El colapso climático está dejando una huella cada vez más honda en las diferentes formas de lucha de clases. Los peligros climáticos ya se han integrado en las luchas obreras de todo el mundo, sentando así nuevas bases de movilización. Además, la preparación ante situaciones de emergencia ha ido escalando posiciones en cuanto a prioridades en las agendas de los comités de seguridad de los sindicatos.

La investigación de Freya Newman y Elizabeth Humphrys sobre los trabajadores del sector de la construcción en Sidney explora la percepción que tienen los obreros del estrés térmico como una cuestión de clase. “Cuando hace un calor infernal, nuestros jefes no salen nunca de sus oficinas con aire acondicionado”, se quejaba uno de los entrevistados, “y eso que nos hacen trabajar en unos sitios espantosos a unas temperaturas demenciales”. Según los investigadores, en los lugares donde la conciencia de clase es mayor y los sindicatos han conservado cierta importancia (a pesar de la tendencia general a debilitarse durante la era neoliberal), la presión de la clase trabajadora ha logrado las mejoras más notables en materia de salud y seguridad en el marco de la crisis climática.

Las movilizaciones por una mayor protección frente a los riesgos meteorológicos, como las que tuvieron lugar en Atenas, Roma y la región de los Abruzos, evidencian la estrecha relación que existe entre las luchas obreras y la degradación del clima y el colapso ecológico. Otra de las reacciones es la resistencia contra las repercusiones “indirectas”, un concepto muy amplio que incluye las revueltas revolucionarias que se produjeron en los años 2010-12 en Oriente Próximo y el Norte de África, donde la inestabilidad meteorológica provocó un ascenso vertiginoso del precio de los alimentos, y, más recientemente, las protestas de los agricultores en la India.

Los despidos “rojos” se visten de “verde”

Teniendo en cuenta que los vehículos eléctricos, las energías renovables y el transporte público son piezas clave para la transición ecológica, ¿qué ocurre con aquellas personas que trabajan en los sectores más contaminantes?

Algunas de las historias más inspiradoras sobre la transición nos llegan del sector del automóvil y de la industria armamentística. A principios de los años 70, los movimientos obreros y sindicales de todo el mundo se volcaron en la defensa del medio ambiente. Así fue como los “rojos” y los “verdes” adoptaron una lengua común. En Estados Unidos, por ejemplo, el líder del sindicato United Automobile Workers, Walter Reuther declaró que “la crisis medioambiental ha alcanzado unas proporciones tan catastróficas que el movimiento obrero se ve ahora obligado a llevar esta cuestión a la mesa de negociación de cualquier industria que contribuya de forma cuantificable al deterioro del medio ambiente en el que vivimos”.

Pues bien, eso es precisamente lo que hicieron los trabajadores de Lucas Aerospace, un fabricante británico de armas con sede en Gran Bretaña. La dirección de la empresa empezó a despedir a su personal amparándose en la automatización y en la disminución de los pedidos por parte del Gobierno. Ante esta situación, los trabajadores crearon un sindicato no oficial con el nombre de Combine en representación de los empleados que trabajaban en las 17 fábricas de la empresa. Su principal objetivo era frenar la hemorragia de despidos presionando al Gobierno laborista para que invirtiera en maquinaria para la vida y no para la muerte.

En el año 1974 redactaron un documento de 1.200 páginas en el que detallaban diversas propuestas para reorientar sus habilidades y maquinaria hacia una actividad productiva que fuera útil para la sociedad como, por ejemplo, máquinas de hemodiálisis, turbinas eólicas, paneles solares, motores para vehículos híbridos y trenes ligeros, es decir, tecnologías de descarbonización que eran prácticamente desconocidas en aquella época. El plan fue rechazado por el Gobierno laborista de entonces y por la dirección de la empresa, que descalificó a sus creadores como “la brigada del pan integral y las sandalias”. Sin embargo, la historia de Combine sigue vigente.

En el año 2021, Melrose Industries compró GKN, una de las principales empresas de la industria automovilística, y anunció el cierre de sus fábricas de componentes para transmisiones de automóviles ubicadas en las ciudades de Florencia y Birmingham. Por un lado, más de 500 trabajadores de la fábrica británica respondieron con un voto a favor de la huelga, exigiendo que la fábrica se convirtiera en una planta de producción de componentes de vehículos eléctricos. Frank Duffy, el coordinador sindical de Unite, explicó: “Nos dimos cuenta de que, si queríamos lograr un futuro ecológico para la industria automovilística británica y salvar nuestros puestos de trabajo cualificados, no podíamos dejar el asunto en manos de nuestros jefes. Teníamos que tomar cartas en el asunto nosotros mismos”. Además, haciéndose eco del Plan Lucas de forma deliberada, añadió: “Hemos elaborado un plan alternativo de 90 páginas en el que se detalla la manera en que podemos reorganizar la producción” para así asegurar los puestos de trabajo y acelerar la transición al transporte impulsado por motores eléctricos.

En la factoría hermana de Campi Bisenzio, en Italia, la transición desde abajo llegó mucho más lejos. Los trabajadores de la planta ya partían con ventaja tras haberse organizado en un comité industrial democrático (collettivo di fabbrica). Ocuparon las instalaciones y expulsaron a los guardias de seguridad, que habían recibido órdenes de intervenir. De esta forma, y en colaboración con académicos y activistas por la justicia climática, los trabajadores trazaron un plan de reconversión del transporte público sostenible y reivindicaron su implementación.

Decenas de miles de personas tomaron las calles una y otra vez en movilizaciones constantes, respaldadas por sindicatos y comunidades locales, así como por grupos ecologistas como Extinction Rebellion (XR) y FFF. La ocupación de Campi Bisenzio, que ha cumplido ya su tercer año, es la más larga de la historia de Italia. Después de que sus esfuerzos por obligar a Melrose a cancelar el cierre de la planta fracasaran, los trabajadores cambiaron de táctica y formaron una cooperativa que actualmente produce bicicletas de carga. Gracias a este cambio de rumbo, han conseguido mantener un empleo seguro para una parte de la plantilla original, ofreciendo así un ejemplo sobre la manera en que podrían dar comienzo los programas de descarbonización impulsados por los propios trabajadores.

Sin alternativa viable

En estos ejemplos que hemos ofrecido sobre la industria automovilística, el proceso de transición parece sencillo, al menos desde el punto de vista material. Así, una fábrica de componentes para automóviles con motor de combustión interna puede reconvertirse en una fábrica de vehículos eléctricos, transporte público o bicicletas. Pero, ¿qué ocurre con otras industrias para la que no existen unas tecnologías alternativas viables? ¿Cómo han de responder los trabajadores de estas industrias ante esta situación?

Las luchas de clases que se libren a lo largo de este siglo decidirán la habitabilidad de la Tierra durante los próximos milenios.

Algunas propuestas, modestas pero audaces, surgieron en Gran Bretaña en plena crisis del covid-19. Magowan y el equipo de Green New Deal para Gatwick proyectaron las múltiples formas en que las distintas categorías de competencias de los trabajadores de Gatwick se podían adaptar a otros puestos de trabajo en sectores en vías de descarbonización. Gracias al respaldo del Sindicato de Servicios Públicos y Comerciales (PCS), encontraron apoyo en la plantilla de trabajadores, entre los que se encuentra un piloto que supo sintetizar de maravilla todo lo que está en juego:

Volar ha sido el sueño de mi vida. Nos asusta mucho enfrentarnos a la posibilidad de perder esta parte tan importante de nuestras vidas, ya que perder nuestro trabajo es como perder una parte de nosotros mismos. Ahora bien, como pilotos, nos valemos de nuestras habilidades para identificar esta amenaza existencial para el mundo natural y para nuestras vidas. Si esto fuera una emergencia en pleno vuelo, hace ya tiempo que nos habríamos desviado a un destino seguro. No podemos volar a ciegas rumbo al destino previsto mientras la cabina de vuelo se llena de humo. El impacto de nuestra industria a nivel de emisiones globales es irrefutable. Las supuestas soluciones para “ecologizar” la industria en su escala actual se encuentran a décadas de distancia y no son ni global ni ecológicamente justas. Dado el aumento de la conciencia medioambiental, el sector de la aviación está abocado a contraerse, ya sea por medio de una “transición justa” para los trabajadores, o como consecuencia de una catástrofe. Debemos encontrar la manera de posicionar a los trabajadores a la cabeza de la revolución verde y así garantizar la posibilidad de reencauzarnos hacia los empleos ecológicos del futuro.

La revolución verde de Gatwick no logró despegar en su primer intento. Sin embargo, fue capaz de generar una atmósfera de posibilidad. Durante la fase de “emergencia” de la pandemia, cuando la intervención gubernamental estaba a la orden del día, el GND de Gatwick estableció vínculos con otras iniciativas lideradas por trabajadores para sustituir la aviación de corta distancia por alternativas de transporte terrestre. Esta unión permitió despejar el horizonte para una transición radical impulsada por los trabajadores y recordarnos lo que está en peligro.

El ecologismo de lucha de clases

Las luchas de clases que se libren a lo largo de este siglo decidirán la habitabilidad de la Tierra durante los próximos milenios. Podemos inspirarnos en las reivindicaciones que unen a los activistas por el clima y a los sindicatos. También podemos inspirarnos en las huelgas escolares contra el cambio climático, que han introducido el concepto de la huelga entre las nuevas generaciones.

No obstante, también deberíamos tener en cuenta que los ejemplos más destacados de militancia rojiverde se produjeron hace medio siglo. Y no es casualidad. Los años sesenta y principios de los setenta fueron testigos de una coyuntura revolucionaria mundial, en la que surgieron la militancia obrera y los movimientos sociales que desafiaban la opresión, la injusticia y la guerra. Este fue el terreno fértil en el que pudo germinar la alianza entre el ecologismo y el radicalismo obrero, una unión que quedó plasmada en el plan Lucas y en el activismo ecosocialista de Mazzocchi, así como en otras iniciativas pioneras como las prohibiciones ecológicas, donde se luchaba por los objetivos medioambientales a través de la huelga.

Cabe esperar que la crisis climática y la transición justa cobren protagonismo de varias formas en cualquier nueva oleada de lucha de clases que se produzca. Entre estas formas habrá retrocesos reaccionarios, pero también movimientos progresistas, ya que los grupos de trabajadores dejarán de percibir la política climática como el patio de recreo de las élites distantes para convertirse en un campo en el que su intervención colectiva puede ser decisiva.

The U.K.-based InfluenceMap recently released a report that fossil fuel industry trade groups “used a playbook of narratives and arguments to systematically oppose, weaken, and delay the transition to renewables and electric vehicles (EVs) since at least 1967. Analysis of historical data on engagement with climate advocacy from three of the most powerful oil and gas industry associations in […]

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After President Joe Biden announced his decision to withdraw from the U.S. Presidential race, Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen issued the following statement: “President Biden was the right president at the right time, and we cannot overstate the impact of his historic presidency. His transformative leadership catalyzed an oftentimes gridlocked Congress to take decisive climate action, and his […]

The post Earthjustice praises President Biden for his historic climate Presidency appeared first on Red, Green, and Blue.

Federal officials are set to launch an effort to save the threatened northern spotted owl by killing thousands of invasive barred owls in the Pacific Northwest. The initiative is supported by mainstream conservation organizations but opposed by animal welfare groups.

Read more on E360 →

Růst globálního zábavního průmyslu poškodil jak blahobyt jednotlivců, tak zdraví planety. Je závislost na okamžitém uspokojení z online zábavy nevyhnutelná, nebo můžeme upřednostnit hlubší prožívání přirozeného času a tělesných zkušeností?

Herní a hračkářský průmysl od pandemie setrvale roste. První v tomto roce očekává tržby ve výši 416,2 miliardy eur, druhý 118 miliard eur, což představuje roční nárůst o osm procent, respektive 2,5 procenta.

Nejsou to jediná odvětví, která zaznamenala výrazný růst: celosvětový průmysl kasin, sportovních sázek a hazardních her dosáhl v roce 2023 hodnoty 472 miliard eur, a to zejména v důsledku rostoucí obliby online hazardních her. Také příjmy globálního zábavního a mediálního průmyslu, který zahrnuje všechny typy televizního a rozhlasového vysílání a vydavatelskou činnost, i přes nedávné zpomalení nadále dosahují bilionů dolarů. Růst příjmů je obecným trendem, který lze pozorovat na všech kontinentech.

Částečně k tomuto trendu vedla — jak u dospělých, tak u dětí — potřeba rozptýlení a aktivity během lockdownů. Online a digitální hry, stejně jako různé formy médií nebo sázení, nahradily přímější a tělesnější formy socializace.

Důsledky této změny jsou dvojího druhu: na jedné straně umožňuje online a digitální transformace globalizovanější způsob vytváření společenství a podporuje kulturní výměnu. Na druhé straně sebou nese zvýšené riziko izolace, nadměrného trávení času u obrazovky a trvalých kognitivních změn — zejména u mladých lidí.

Třetím aspektem je dopad takovéto digitální transformace na životní prostředí — vyžaduje totiž velké množství přírodních zdrojů. Četné jsou i potenciální politické a sociální důsledky celospolečenské závislosti na obrazovkách a neustálém rozptýlení.

Nebezpečná zábava

Ekologické náklady a vykořisťovatelské praktiky hračkářského průmyslu jsou dnes všeobecně známé. Investigace v čínských továrnách na hračky odhalily realitu nízkých mezd, přepracování a sexuálního obtěžování. Ve městě I-wu, kde se vyrábí více než polovina všech vánočních ozdob a doplňků na světě, jsou dělníci běžně vystaveni toxickým chemikáliím včetně olovnatých barev.

Portréty dělníků, které v čínských továrnách na hračky pořídil v roce 2004 německý fotograf Michael Wolf, jsou znepokojivou vizuální ilustrací tamějšího každodenního života. Mnozí z dělníků byli přistěhovalci z venkova, kteří trávili celé dny tím, že na panenkách kroutili nohy, ruce a hlavy s jemnými tvářičkami, mrkajícími řasami a dětskými poloúsměvy.

Součástí projektu nazvaného „Skutečný příběh hraček“ byla také celosvětová série výstav, na nichž se vystavovaly plastiky slepené Wolfem a jeho kolegy z tisíců plastových hraček zakoupených v USA spolu se snímky z továren. Podle organizace China Labor Watch se mnozí z dělníků v hračkářském průmyslu s otřesnými pracovními podmínkami potýkají dodnes.

Světoví výrobci hraček, jako je americký výrobce panenek Barbie Mattel a německý Ravensburger, začali uvedené problémy zohledňovat, k čemuž přispěly i protesty veřejnosti, které investigace vyvolaly. Výrobci se snaží snížit svou závislost na Číně tím, že přesouvají výrobu do zemí, jako jsou Indie, Mexiko, Vietnam a Malajsie.

Přesuny se však podle všeho zakládají spíše na ekonomických než morálních ohledech: v Číně prudce roste cena pracovní síly. A samozřejmě neexistuje žádná záruka, že pracovní podmínky v jiných zemích jsou lepší.

Evropská unie mezitím podnikla kroky k větší bezpečnosti hraček. Zakázala používání škodlivých chemických látek v hračkách prodávaných v rámci celé Unie. Podobná regulace existuje také ve Velké Británii a dalších zemích mimo Evropskou unii, včetně USA a Kanady. Předpisy se však ne vždy dodržují a evropský trh tak stále zaplavují nekvalitní hračky vyrobené za hranicemi Evropu.

V roce 2023 úřady různých členských zemí, zapojené do projektu pod společným vedením Evropské agentury pro chemické látky, zjistily, že ze zhruba 2400 analyzovaných spotřebitelských výrobků jsou hračky z hlediska nesouladu s právními předpisy Evropské unie hned na druhém místě. Horší je jen elektronika.

Kromě toxických chemických látek zvyšuje dopad hračkářského průmyslu na životní prostředí i jeho závislost na globálních obchodních a přepravních řetězcích. Nehoda v severním Pacifiku v roce 1992, kdy během bouře z nákladní lodi unikly do moře tisíce gumových kačenek, byla surrealistickou ilustrací toho, jak hračkářský průmysl přispívá ke zbytečnému znečištění oceánů plasty. Některé kačenky pluly po světě několik let a ještě deset a půl roku od havárie byly k vidění vyplavené na plážích ve Velké Británii, na Aljašce nebo v Austrálii.

S čím si zahrávají hráči

Děti a mladí lidé si však již dnes dávno nehrají jen s hračkami. Celosvětovou popularitu herního průmyslu dokládají jeho mamutí zisky. Odhaduje se, že více než dvě miliardy lidí na celém světě se věnují nějakému druhu hraní, ať už na počítačích, konzolích nebo mobilních telefonech.

I když se někteří domnívají, že videohry a všeobecný přechod na digitální média by mohly snížit dopad zábavního průmyslu na životní prostředí — a také podnítit reakci na klimatickou krizi prostřednictvím her, které například vyzývají hráče k obnově suchem postižené krajiny — i hraní ve virtuální má své zcela hmotné důsledky v reálném světě: společenské i environmentální náklady na těžbu elektronických materiálů nebo padesát tun elektronického odpadu, který každoročně končí na skládkách po celém světě.

Dalším závažným problémem je spotřeba energie pro servery a datová centra, stejně jako pro herní zařízení v domácnostech. Přestože některé platformy nyní nabízejí uživatelům možnost hrát online, bez nutnosti použití velkého hardwaru, čímž se snižuje množství elektronického odpadu, materiální dopad spotřeby energie spojené s hraním zůstává.

Bezpodmínečně bude také potřeba řešit kolosální spotřebu energie generativní umělé inteligence, již herní průmysl rovněž využívá. A stejně jako u hraček, ani hernímu průmyslu nejsou cizí nepřijatelné pracovním podmínky — průzkum UNI Global Union z roku 2022 mezi pracovníky v devětadvaceti zemích odhalil jako klíčové problémy nízké mzdy, povinné přesčasy i diskriminaci.

Další oblastí, na kterou je třeba se zaměřit, jsou tematické a zábavní parky. Celkový dopad těchto provozů, náročných na půdu i vodu, na člověka a životní prostředí, není zatím zcela jasný. Přímo ale souvisí s neudržitelným masovým turismem. Parky samy o sobě nabízejí svým návštěvníkům oddělený svět, zcela odizolovaný od okolní krajiny a komunit.

I v nich se objevují problémy spojené s pracovními podmínkami a vykořisťovatelskými pracovními praktikami: šetření Equal Times z roku 2018 například ukázalo, že pracovníci v Disneylandu v USA vydělávají mnohem méně, než kolik podle odhadů výzkumného institutu MIT činí minimální důstojná mzda.

Nakonec je tu masivní nárůst online hazardních her, který je částečně umožněn rostoucím používáním mobilních telefonů. Tuto oblast je třeba podrobovat zkoumání také z hlediska jejích dopadů na lidské zdraví. Evropská komise se nyní snaží vytvořit pro online hazardní hry regulační rámec. To je ovšem složité v neposlední řadě proto, že hazardní hry přinášejí také značné příjmy do státních pokladen.

Tvořivost a vynalézavost jsou základními prvky změn, které potřebujeme provést, abychom dospěli k zdravé rovnováze mezi naší potřebou hrát si a povinností pečovat o životní prostředí.

Negativní sociální dopady hazardních her jsou však mimořádné: ve Velké Británii a Irsku, dvou v tomto směru nejliberálnějších evropských zemích, výzkum University College Dublin odhalil jejich významný podíl na šíření osamělosti, rozpadu vztahů a duševních problémech. Ve Velké Británii výzkum příslušného regulačního úřadu dokládá, že třiačtyřicet procent lidí, kteří používají sázkové terminály v pohostinských zařízeních, jsou buď problémoví, nebo rizikoví hráči.

Chléb a hry

Zábavní průmysl obsluhuje naši potřebu zábavy, stimulace a rozptýlení. Pozdní kapitalismus je závislý na repetitivních smyčkách zábavy, na nadprodukci médií a dalších produktů a na reklamních a marketingových praktikách, které se jako „červi“ zarývají do našich mozků, pronikají do mysli a usídlují se v ní.

Očekáváme a toužíme po stále větší porci zábavy, stejně jako po cestování a turistice. Vytváření umělých spotřebitelských tužeb je všudypřítomným společenským rysem a odvětví související se zábavou a pobavením v něm hrají významnou kulturní roli.

Souvislost mezi kapitalistickou výrobou a spotřebou zábavy vystihl francouzský filozof Guy Debord. Podle Deborda je spotřeba „spektáklu“ (doslova: podívané) v podobě informací, propagandy, reklamy nebo zábavy „společensky dominantním modelem života“. V příkrém kontrastu k „chlebu a hrám“ minulosti se ovšem dnes převládající formy zábavy odehrávají v prostoru definovaném extrémním individualismem.

Koloseum a hippodrom se nám slily v obrazy přímo před našima očima. Reprezentace, stimulace a hyperrealita existují s námi — nosíme je neustále v sobě. Naše mentální zkušenost je jimi neustále přetvářena. Propojením konzumace s tvorbou vlastního obsahu se pak stáváme zároveň diváky i podívanou — spektáklem.

Psychologické a kognitivní dopady této skutečnosti jsou potenciálně obrovské. Výzkumy v oblasti rozptylujícího účinku technologií jsou dosud poměrně omezené. Dosavadní studie — například z Centra pro humánní technologie — ale naznačují souvislost mezi nadměrnou stimulací a zvýšenou úrovní stresu, úzkosti a závislosti.

Podobně jako u závislosti si náš mozek zvykne na určitý výsledek, který nám na krátkou dobu uleví. Když je předmět nebo chování odstraněno, začneme po něm toužit a vzniká začarovaný kruh rozptýlení a uspokojení. A stejně jako u všech návykových chování se věčně unikající pocit nasycení stává předmětem nekonečného hledání, které má nebezpečné a nezdravé důsledky.

Nový příběh

Jak bychom se mohli tomuto aspektu moderního života vhodně přizpůsobit a jeho dopady řešit? Jak přemýšlet o proměně našeho vztahu k zábavě — ke hrám, které hrajeme, k množství vizuálních médií, která sledujeme, a k hračkám, které kupujeme?

Východiskem by mohly být etické principy opětovného používání, obnovy, nerůstu, ekonomiky dobrého života, udržitelnosti nebo takzvaného „znovuzdivočení“. Zelení politici a aktivisté se musí touto otázkou zabývat a nabídnout protipól dominantním přístupům, založeným na růstu, vykořisťování a extraktivismu, které ze zábavy činí trvalý a snadný zdroj zisku.

Inspirace se dá najít v tradičnějších druzích společenského života, stejně jako v zážitkových venkovních hrách a formách zábavy, které využívají a rozvíjejí hravost a tvořivost. V popředí takovýchto pokusů musí být důraz na fyzickou zkušenost, kterou online prostředí nemůže nahradit, a hledání cest k tomu, jak se mohou lidé lépe vyrovnávat s absencí stálých podnětů.

Uvažovat lze také o řadě politických návrhů, zaměřených na proměnu a snížení dopadů způsobu, jakým se bavíme. Korporace, které ze zábavy v online světě profitují, by měly převzít odpovědnost za její dopad a zajistit, aby jejich dodavatelské řetězce splňovaly vysoké pracovní a ekologické standardy. Na místní úrovni by mohly hrát klíčovou roli přístupy zaměřené na obnovu a podporu společenství, jako jsou takzvané „knihovny věcí“, kde mohou lidé sdílet nástroje, vybavení a další předměty.

Na evropské a státní úrovni je třeba účinně dohlížet na environmentální poplatky na dovoz hraček a přísné dodržování předpisů týkajících se například pracovních podmínek. Dobrým nápadem by byly pobídky, jako jsou daňové úlevy a dotace pro podniky, které investují do výzkumu a vývoje udržitelných materiálů v hračkách a inovativních her. Veřejné finance by měly být přesměrovány k regenerativním volnočasovým aktivitám s nízkými nároky na technologie.

Účet musí začít skládat také herní průmysl. Jedním z malých, ale potenciálně účinných opatření by mohlo být zavedení poplatku, který by platily telekomunikační a elektronické společnosti za každé stažení herních aplikací. Společnosti vyrábějící elektroniku a hardware musí také nést odpovědnost za úklid vlastního odpadu, podobně jako by ji měly nést firmy vyrábějící plasty.

V případě hazardních her, kasin a zábavních parků by mohl být přístup mnohem radikálnější. Je třeba zvážit postupné ukončení provozu zábavních parků, podobně jako je tomu u zoologických zahrad. Jsou pozůstatkem minulé éry, svátku průmyslového využívání půdy a vody, nadměrné spotřeby a masové zábavy konce devatenáctého století.

I v jiných podobných oblastech jsme svědky změn, které byly ještě nedávno nepředstavitelné: není to tak dávno, co bylo vykořisťování zvířat v cirkusech považováno za normální. Nyní je v mnoha zemích zakázáno. A přestože zákonná omezení sázek a hazardních her jsou částečně komplikována finanční účastí států na tomto odvětví, je třeba k online hazardním společnostem a kasinům přistupovat stejně jako k tabákovému nebo alkoholovému průmyslu.

Zatímco úplný zákaz hazardních her a zábavních parků lze považovat za neliberální a možná i kontraproduktivní, škodlivé činnosti by měly být stále více znevýhodňovány. Pokud můžeme argumentovat pro omezování fosilních paliv, můžeme totéž dělat i u dalších významných ekonomických aktivit s obrovským negativním sociálním a ekologickým dopadem.

Individuální spotřebitelská volba má svou roli, nicméně je třeba se vyhnout úplné individualizaci odpovědnosti. Potřebné změny jsou systémové a sociokulturní povahy, podobně jako změny v zemědělství, dopravě, energetice, stravování a obecných vzorcích spotřeby.

Tvořivost a vynalézavost jsou základními prvky změn, které potřebujeme provést, abychom dospěli k zdravé rovnováze mezi naší potřebou hrát si a povinností pečovat o životní prostředí. Umožnit naší vlastní pozornosti a duševním obzorů „znovu zdivočet“ v tomto směru znamená obnovit prostor, osvobozený od neustálé záplavy „obsahu“ a otevřený myšlenkovým procesům, které se dějí v přirozeném čase, s uspokojením, jež někdy přijde až s časovým odstupem.

Zdaleka nejde o strohý a puritánský přístup, založený na odpírání si „zábavy“. Jde naopak o pěstování radosti, která pramení z života v přítomnosti a zapojení do smysluplných, vzrušujících společných aktivit. Do středu pozornosti je potřeba postavit pojem „dostatku“, a to nejen kvůli naší pozornosti a duševnímu zdraví, ale i kvůli zdraví planety.

David Ngibuini is a second-generation coffee farmer in Kenya’s central highlands, an area of cool temperatures and rich volcanic soil that’s long been one of the best places to grow coffee on Earth. On an afternoon in May, after a couple of months of rain, his 11-acre plot is lush. Six thousand trees — nearly all of them varieties of Coffea arabica, the most widely consumed and best-tasting coffee species — sit in neatly planted rows, their waxy, deep green leaves shimmering in the sun. Workers sort a pile of freshly-picked cherries — the red fruit that contains the beans that will be fermented, dried, and shipped to roasters around the world.

The vigor of this year’s harvest masks a deeper, existential struggle. Arabica coffee, which has been farmed in Kenya since the 19th century, is especially vulnerable to climate change. One 2022 study, from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, projects the amount of land most suitable to growing it will fall more than 50 percent by 2050. 

Ngibuini’s farm, Maguta Estate, is already feeling the impact. Rising temperatures have inhibited the growth of cherries and made trees more vulnerable to diseases and pests. Rains, which used to come reliably twice a year, are increasingly erratic, which leads to wide swings in volume and quality. In his best year, spanning 2020 and 2021, Ngibuini processed nearly 50,000 pounds of beans, sourced from his farm as well as others in the area. The next year, following a prolonged drought, output was down almost 80 percent. 

“We didn’t even have a major pest attack,” he said. “The drop was just because of the climate.”

David Ngibuini stands among rows of arabica coffee trees at his farm in Nyeri County, Kenya. Jonathan W. Rosen

As coffee’s precarity is rising, so is demand: According to some estimates, global consumption, currently 2.3 billion cups per day, could double by mid-century. The projected supply gap has left the industry scrambling for possible fixes, including non-arabica coffee species and caffeine-infused alternatives made from substances like chickpeas and date seeds.

For coffee purists, though, and millions of farming families like Ngibuini’s, the most promising solution might be a newfound push to improve adaptability, and yields, of arabica itself. That’s the idea behind Innovea, a new project led by the nonprofit World Coffee Research, that seeks to supercharge the breeding of improved arabica varieties — unique variations of a given species that have been selected for certain characteristics. In an industry that has long neglected to fund research and development, Innovea, a collaboration with government-affiliated research institutions in nine partner countries, including Kenya, is widely considered to be the most sweeping coffee breeding initiative in decades.

According to Vern Long, CEO of World Coffee Research, or WCR, which is based in the United States and funded by the coffee industry, new varieties are one of the best ways to “improve a crop’s productivity and reduce risk.” Innovea’s goal, she said, is to develop trees that are optimized for a range of production environments — and ultimately give farmers more climate-resilient options.

Although nearly every commodity faces threats from a warming climate, arabica is especially picky. Its trees perform best in areas with moderate rainfall and temperatures that stay between 59 and 82 degrees Fahrenheit. This typically means regions of the tropics at least 3,000 feet above sea level; Ngibuini’s farm near Mount Kenya, Africa’s second-highest peak, sits at a cool 5,700. As temperatures warm, many expect cultivation to shift to even higher altitudes. This, however, has its limits. “The higher up you go, the less land there is available,” said Roman Grüter, an environmental scientist who led the Zurich University of Applied Sciences study. Farmers shifting upwards, he added, are more likely to encounter slopes that are too steep, or protected conservation areas.

Arabica is so fragile in part because its gene pool is surprisingly narrow. The 58 varieties that are widely grown today are all derived from a subset of wild forest coffee native to Ethiopia, which was brought by Arab traders to Yemen in the 15th century and later spread by European colonizers across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Because it is a slow-maturing tree crop, new variety development, which involves breeding over several generations, can take decades. Coffee R&D, like much crop innovation, is largely state financed — and in the low- and middle-income countries where arabica is grown, governments are often strapped for cash. While Brazil and Colombia, the two largest arabica producers, have a history of strong government support for coffee research, many of their counterparts have long lacked sufficient resources for variety development. A study commissioned by WCR in 2023 estimates that just $115 million is invested in coffee R&D each year, less than one-tenth of one percent of coffee’s $200 billion retail value.

Read Next The best coffee for the planet might not be coffee at all L.V. Anderson

“If you’re a low-income country, and you need to pay for roads and clinics and teacher’s salaries, there’s a strong pull to put revenue from coffee into those things instead of research,” Long said. 

For much of coffee’s history, the importers, roasters, and retailers of the rich world haven’t put much money into crop improvement either: As long as they had a reliable supply of beans, they didn’t have to. A wakeup call came in 2012, when shifts in temperature and rainfall linked to climate change triggered an outbreak of coffee leaf rust, a debilitating fungus, that would affect Latin America for years. A group of coffee businesses established WCR that year as a way to facilitate collaborative R&D; the organization today is funded by 177 member companies. 

WCR began by conducting a trial of existing varieties, planting 31 of them from around the world in a range of climate zones in 15 countries. It also established a project to develop and trial new “F1 hybrids,” varieties created from genetically distant parents that tend to be higher yielding but are also more expensive to cultivate.

Jane Cheserek and Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization staffers sow Innovea seed. World Coffee Research

Innovea, which launched in 2022, builds upon both efforts. To start, WCR breeders created 30 novel crosses from 16 parent varieties chosen based on their performance in prior trials. WCR then shipped 5,000 resulting seeds — each of them genetically distinct — to government researchers in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, India, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, and Hawai‘i. Planting on experimental sites began this year and will continue into 2025.

After six years, when the new trees have matured and produced several harvests of their own, many will have traits that are undesirable, Long said. Some, though, will be “high yielding, disease resistant, and taste good,” and will be moved to further trials or used to make new crosses that could result in even better trait combinations. While the breeding is done using traditional methods, it’s being aided by low-cost genetic sequencing technology, which allows WCR and partner breeders to correlate observed traits with plant DNA and make new crosses faster.

“The idea is to identify the genes we’re looking for and move on with those plants instead of others,” said Jane Cheserek, lead breeder at Kenya’s government-run Coffee Research Institute, WCR’s Kenyan partner. 

Innovea is not the only private sector-funded coffee breeding effort: At least two big industry players, Nestlé and Starbucks, have variety-development programs in-house. 

What makes Innovea stand out is its scale and its collaborative approach. Although coffee-exporting countries are natural competitors, Long said, partner governments have accepted that it’s in their best interest to cooperate on R&D and allow their genetic material to move across borders. WCR expects to make 100 new pre-commercial varieties available for trials by 2030 and will then work with partner governments to release a subset of those to farmers as soon as 2036. Ultimately, these “finished varieties” will be owned by governments, rather than by WCR or its financial backers. 

The effort “amps collaboration up to a new level,” said Stuart McCook, a historian at the University of Guelph in Ontario who studies coffee and other tropical commodities and who is not involved in Innovea. The program, he added, represents the first coffee breeding project of such a global scope since a Portugal-led effort to develop and circulate leaf rust-resistant coffees in the 1960s. 

Creating new crosses through hand-pollination at WCR’s Flor Amarilla Research Farm in El Salvador. World Coffee Research

While McCook believes that new variety development is vital to the quest to make coffee more resilient, he and many other experts argue it’s not a panacea. As coffee growing regions warm, he said, innovations in breeding will need to be combined with adaptations in farming practices, like the introduction of “shade trees” — other types of trees to block the sun — and efforts to regenerate depleted soils. Coffee growers around the world, especially at the 12.5 million smallholder farms that produce 60 percent of the world’s supply, will continue to face a global market defined by wild swings in price that at times mean selling harvests for below the cost of production — which in turn makes investing in these adaptations even harder. One 2018 study by the Kenya Coffee Platform, an industry association, estimated that only 49 percent of Kenya’s coffee smallholders earned a “living wage” from the crop. Kenya’s coffee output today is less than half that of its peak in the 1980s, in part because younger generations are turning to more profitable crops, like macadamia nuts or avocados, or selling land to developers. On the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, many areas that once brimmed with arabica have been paved over for housing estates or shopping malls.  

Ngibuini, 32, is somewhat insulated from the market’s excesses: he sells most of his beans, which have won awards for quality, to a specialty buyer at a premium. In recent years he’s planted shade trees, which have also boosted soil nutrients and led to improved cherry quality. 

What he cannot do, at least for now, is plant the perfect variety of coffee. While he has several on his farm, all of them come with tradeoffs: One Kenya-developed F1 hybrid, for example, which he chose for its disease resistance, struggled more than other varieties in the recent drought. Ideally, he’d plant a variety that could resist the coffee berry borer, a beetle that feasts on coffee cherries, and that would ripen with greater uniformity. The erratic rains, he said, mean cherries are ripening less consistently than ever, which makes harvesting and processing less efficient.    

This variety, today, remains hypothetical. Yet in the years ahead, if Innovea lives up to its promise, Ngibuini will have more control over the types of coffee trees he cultivates — so he can better play his part in saving the morning brew for all of us.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside a new experiment to find the climate-proof coffee of the future on Jul 23, 2024.

In northwestern Montana’s Swan Valley, a pile of about 100 small logs, 10 feet long or so, sits neatly stacked, ringed by berry bushes, a few white wildflowers, and towering larch trees. Surrounding the logs are several acres of U.S. Forest Service land, which was thinned of dead, downed, and dense understory trees last year to reduce wildfire risk. The log pile that remains is too small to be processed into lumber, plus the sawmill just down the highway recently closed. So the wood may get sent to a pulp mill, if the price is right. Or it may sit in the forest for years. Smaller limbs may be burned in a prescribed fire. But Ning Zeng, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, is sizing up the pile, too. He sees another solution: burying the logs, and all the planet-heating gases they’d otherwise release, underground.  

That’s the idea of a carbon sequestration technique called wood vaulting. Forests throughout much of the western U.S. are overgrown, full of tangled trees and brush that’s primed to burn. The Forest Service’s wildfire crisis strategy calls for removing excess vegetation on up to 50 million more acres of federal, state, tribal, and private lands by 2032. Scientists and climate tech companies alike say wood vaulting could help store some of the carbon dioxide equivalent, in the form of flammable vegetation, that the Forest Service must deal with in the coming years — an estimated 2.2 billion metric tons. That’s roughly as much CO2 as cement production worldwide emitted in 2016, and as much as forests globally removed from the atmosphere last year. 

“There’s more wood in the forest than markets for it to go,” said research forester Nate Anderson, who studies product supply chains for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula. Valuing the carbon stored in wood vaults could change that. 

A site in Montana where two companies are partnering on biomass burial after a wildfire burned hundreds of acres of privately owned land. Courtesy of Mast Reforestation

If done properly, burying the debris could help limit the release of greenhouse gases that warm the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. “I don’t see any reason why it can’t be actually quite significant and reach millions of tons of carbon dioxide sequestered per year, in the U.S. alone,” said Sinéad Crotty, the director of the nonprofit Carbon Containment Lab. Daniel Sanchez, a professor who studies CO2 removal at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees. “Wood vaulting is a newly emerging approach that we think is relatively low-cost and relatively scalable,” he said. 

Investors, including Bill Gates, have poured millions of dollars into jumpstarting wood vaults in recent years. A handful of small-scale sites are in progress across the country, including in Maryland, Nevada, Texas, and Colorado. The Department of Energy recently awarded $50,000 for two companies, including Zeng’s Carbon Lockdown Project, to construct a wood vault in Montana — one of many carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, pilot projects to receive funding. According to the 2023 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Synthesis Report, CDR technology — which can include direct air capture technology, land-based carbon sinks, and more — is an “unavoidable” component of limiting warming to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius, which experts say is necessary if we are to avoid irreversible effects of climate change. 

Wood vaulting is conceptually simple: Dig a hole with an excavator and bury small trees, woody debris, and other plant materials that aren’t large or valuable enough to sell. The vaults resemble a layer cake of trees, gaps filled with dirt, and more trees stacked on top, finished off with a frosting of topsoil. 

Once companies acquire biomass, not just any hole will do. The intrusion of water, oxygen, and even termites could compromise a vault’s durability by encouraging decomposition. Digging vaults in clay or silty soil, away from groundwater, is thought to be best practice. (Some alternative methods actually submerge the wood in water entirely, but that’s less common.) Conditions inside the vault must remain stable — ideally in perpetuity, without human intervention — for projects to uphold their promises. The same kinds of sensors already used in landfills can be installed to monitor data like oxygen, moisture, and methane levels over time. 

Digging holes 15 to 25-plus feet deep can mean disturbing soil, destroying habitat, or removing nutrients from the landscape — all potential downsides of wood vaulting — so companies are considering using already-degraded locations, like old industrial sites or mines. (Several also have plans to rehab wood vault sites after trees are buried, planting the soil with native seeds for pollinator habitat or grazing use.) The ideal location for a wood vault is near the source of its biomass, which cuts back on transportation emissions and logistics. Enough labor to transport biomass and construct vaults, plus some sort of protection that they won’t just get dug up in a few decades, are other key factors.

Another concern with wood vaulting is that it may incentivize more logging than necessary. But so far, the industry is focused on burying the leftovers of wildfire risk reduction treatments, as well as trees that have already burned or were hazard trees removed from urban environments. Guidelines from Stripe Inc.’s Frontier fund, one of the leading funds that purchases carbon dioxide removal credits from startups, recommends the leftovers of wildfire risk reduction projects as a sustainable source. 

The science to know how long these vaults could keep CO2 out of the atmosphere is still in the works. “We want to be as clear-minded as possible when promising anything around durability,” Crotty said. If done properly, Sanchez thinks vaults might be able to store CO2 for hundreds to thousands of years; companies share numbers that range from 100-plus to 1,000-plus years.

While it’s hard to say exactly how long wood vaults may be able to store carbon, previous discoveries hold clues. A bulldozer on Carbon Lockdown Project’s Canada site found a red cedar log buried deep in the soil; Zeng still has it in his office today. He says further analysis (yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal) confirmed it was 3,000 years old but had only lost 5 percent of its carbon.

Another way to analyze wood vaulting’s potential is by comparing how much carbon it can store to other more established techniques. Wood vaulting’s carbon yield is high compared to that of biochar, a charcoal-esque soil amendment that comes from partially combusted organic material. Biochar can retain about 30 percent of its biomass’ original carbon, while wood vaulting is thought to store over 90 percent, according to Sanchez. 

Read Next Biochar is a ‘shovel-ready’ climate technology, but can it scale up? Max Graham

Wood vaulting is also fairly cheap compared to other methods. Calculations from one of Zeng’s test sites found it cost $105 per metric ton of CO2, mostly in transportation costs. For comparison, the average cost of biochar in California is $400 per metric ton of CO2, and direct carbon capture technologies can cost anywhere between $600 to $1,000 per metric ton of CO2. “That’s the transformative aspect of this idea compared to many other biomass utilization strategies,” Zeng said. “It is going to come down to economics.” 

Several companies are currently trying out wood vaulting, mostly on private land. Zeng created the Carbon Lockdown Project, which began with a research site outside Montreal, in 2013. He’s now working on a property in Maryland for trees removed from urban settings that would have otherwise been mulched. 

Then there’s Mast Reforestation, a company that seeks to replant forests after they burn for carbon credits. CEO Grant Canary said he’s especially interested in burying the already-burned trees that create a hazard for workers and the tiny saplings they plant. The company plans to store between 5,000 and 20,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent that come from trees on hundreds of acres of recently burned private land in central Montana. Mast Reforestation is partnering with Zeng’s Carbon Lockdown Project on the site, and Canary said construction may be underway as soon as the end of 2024 or early 2025. As a winner of the Department of Energy’s prize, the project promises over 17,000 carbon dioxide removal credits to the federal government by the end of 2028. 

Mast Reforestation plans to store between 5,000 and 20,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent that come from trees in central Montana. Courtesy of Mast Reforestation

Also out West, Kodama Systems is in the permitting phase for a wood vault to store about 1,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in western Nevada. Material could be in the ground as soon as later this year. Arid rangelands in this area are considered prime for wood vaults; researchers at the Carbon Containment Lab also say the Four Corners region of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah has high potential for wood vault development. Carbon Containment Lab scientists partner with companies, including Kodama Systems, to collect their own independent data. 

So what’s needed to turn wood vault projects from the handful of pilot sites that currently exist to a carbon dioxide removal technology at scale? More science to verify longevity and storage claims, more money to jumpstart additional projects, and more buyers of carbon dioxide removal credits. While companies and scientists have their sights set on working with the Forest Service someday, government land management agencies are notoriously slow to try something new, meaning a public-private partnership on wood vaults is still far off. 

For Zeng, standing in the middle of the woods, seeing everything from mill infrastructure to potential wood vaulting sites in Colorado, Montana, and beyond was illuminating, fusing theory with practice on the ground. “I got really encouraged on this trip,” he said. “The dots are getting connected.” While wood vaulting is not a single-handed solution for overgrown forests, wildfire risk, and a rapidly warming climate, it may be a simple solution to sequester some carbon and reduce wildfire risk, too. 

toolTips('.classtoolTips1','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips3',' A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 16% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over short periods, it is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Wood vaulting’: A simple climate solution you’ve probably never heard of on Jul 23, 2024.

Ilan Zugman  is Latin America Director at 350.org, based in Brazil, and  Fanny Petitbon is France Team Lead at 350.org.

When G20 finance ministers gather in Rio de Janeiro this week, Brazil and France have a chance to put these powerful countries on track to deliver a global wealth tax that could raise over $680 billion per year in the fight to tackle poverty and the climate crisis. Both countries have been vocal supporters of taxing the super-rich to fund international development and climate action.  

In April, finance ministers Fernando Haddad (Brazil) and Bruno Le Maire (France) announced their intent to tax the wealth of billionaires by at least two percent annually, prompting ministers from Germany, South Africa and Spain to back the proposal. As the current host of the G20, Brazil commissioned an investigation into the feasibility of this global wealth tax – and the results were published by French economist Gabriel Zucman in June, generating further momentum in efforts to fill the funding gap for climate and development.  

Zucman’s findings show that a global wealth tax on the super-rich – billionaires and people with assets worth more than $100 million – could be enforced successfully even if all countries did not adopt it. It is also a popular measure: more than two-thirds of people across seventeen G20 countries show support for making the super-rich pay higher taxes as a means of funding major improvements to our economy and lifestyles.  

This isn’t surprising. Ensuring that billionaires are properly taxed could deliver significant, tangible benefits in people’s lives and go some way to addressing the systemic injustices and inequality reflected by the climate crisis and poverty. 

The world needs a new global deal on climate and development finance

An ambitious global wealth tax, together with higher and permanent tax on oil corporations and extraction, would provide hundreds of billions of dollars/euros each year to properly fund scaling up renewable energy, rolling out heat pumps and insulation programmes to lower the cost of heating or cooling our homes, new public transport links, future-proof jobs and much more – helping communities to thrive.  

It would also end more than a decade of broken promises by G20 states, ensuring that some of the world’s wealthiest countries have enough money in their national coffers to provide adequate finance to pay for those suffering the consequences of climate impacts now. Helping the poorest communities prepare for unnatural disasters like increased wildfires, flooding and sea level rise, and ensuring people can rebuild their homes, infrastructure and places of work when preventative measures are not an option. 

Power to communities

A global wealth tax is a moral imperative. By implementing a fairer system of taxation, the G20 could accelerate a just transition to a low-carbon economy, cutting dangerous carbon emissions and boosting living standards and energy access at great scale, while also tackling deep-rooted injustice. Delivering finance for community-oriented renewable energy projects across Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific would put power back in the hands of communities that continue to suffer from the violent legacy of colonialism and extractive profiteering. 

For this to be achieved France, and other wealthy nations in the G20 like Germany and the UK, must be willing to make concessions and assume historical responsibility for exploiting fossil fuel extraction in the economically poorer countries whose citizens are experiencing the worst consequences of the climate crisis. The emerging French government must deliver concrete plans to redirect its fortune and tax its billionaires towards a renewable energy-powered planet. 

Where East African oil pipeline meets sea, displaced farmers bemoan “bad deal” on compensation

It is incumbent on both Brazil and France to seize the opportunity presented by growing support to deliver a global wealth tax at the meeting of powerful finance ministers this week. Both countries must do everything they can to build trust and political will around the crucial proposal. But this will be a challenge if they undermine their stance on the international stage with contrasting domestic policy, something both governments are guilty of. 

Brazil has been pushing for new oil projects, including in the Amazon and is gearing up to become the fourth-largest oil producer in the world. France, despite being fined by the European Commission, is still not on track to meet its domestic renewable energy targets and announced in February a two billion-euro cut to the budget allocated for environmental and energy transition programmes. It is high time for both countries to stop the smoke and mirrors approach to international diplomacy, by aligning their commitments at national and international levels. 

Leaders’ summit

This week, ministers Haddad and Le Maire have a responsibility to rally their G20 counterparts around the wealth tax proposal and send a strong and unified signal to heads of state and governments to take concrete action that delivers a global wealth tax on billionaires when they meet in November. 

The stakes are high. The vast scale of global inequality means that nearly one in eleven people around the world live below the poverty line according the World Bank. In addition, this is set to be yet another record-breaking year for climate impacts, in a critical decade to prevent global heating from tipping over the 1.5°C threshold – a limit beyond which the ability of impacted communities to survive and thrive will be put at intolerable risk. We need to see vast quantities of finance mobilised to scale up renewable energy at the speed needed, and billionaires and multi-millionaires need to be forced to pay up.  

We’re all rooting for this one to work – it can take us a long way.

The post A global wealth tax is needed to help fund a just green transition appeared first on Climate Home News.

A new study suggests that metals scattered about the deep ocean may be producing oxygen, a finding that could strengthen the case against controversial deep-sea mining.

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“What do you think about this?” My friend, Sonya Daw, had called out to me from where she was standing at the edge of Beaver Creek. I joined her. I had just scrambled over a massive log and was grateful for an excuse to catch my breath.

“Hmm,” I said, still breathing hard. In front of us, water burbled over some branches that had fallen across the creek. Had they fallen, though? Or had they possibly been placed there by beavers?

As one of 11 teams taking part in a “beaver scavenger hunt” across the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southwest Oregon, we were looking for any sign of beavers — willow stumps, sticks with “corn-on-the-cob”-style teeth marks, or even scent mounds, which beavers use to mark territories. What we and the other teams discovered would help the nonprofit Project Beaver focus their beaver-restoration efforts.

My team included Sonya, who writes for the National Park Service, her husband Charlie Schelz, the former monument ecologist, and Barb Settles, a spry 78-year-old and avid naturalist.

Photo: Juliet Grable

Charlie joined us, and we contemplated the creek. “I don’t think that’s anything,” he said. “But look how the sediment is piling up behind the branches; how cool is that?”

It was June 1 — not just a beautiful time to be hiking through the forest but the ideal window for beaver activity. Beaver moms have their babies in late spring and then send their older offspring packing. These dispersing youngsters are on the move, exploring new creeks and sampling the buffet of plants.

We took our time in flatter areas, especially where willows or red osier dogwood — beaver “dessert plants” — grew in clumps near the banks. We weren’t likely to find beavers along this steep stretch, but it was still fun to look and marvel at the enormous sugar pines, Douglas firs, and incense cedars that had escaped loggers’ chainsaws last century.

Wanted: Ecosystem Engineers

The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument encompasses 114,000 acres, mostly in southwest Oregon. The Klamath and Cascade Mountains converge here, creating a patchwork of oak woodlands, forests, grasslands, and wetlands support a dazzling array of butterflies, bees, birds, and plants, including many that are found nowhere else.

President Bill Clinton designated the monument in 2000, not for its stunning canyons or breathtaking vistas but its “outstanding biological diversity.” In 2017 President Barack Obama expanded the monument by another 48,000 acres.

Beavers undoubtedly once populated the many streams and meadows, but by the time the monument was designated, they had been all but eradicated — the case all over Oregon. Now there is only one known established beaver family in the entire monument, says Jakob Shockey, executive director at Project Beaver. There could be others; Shockey says he’s seen evidence of random individuals on several creeks.

The Bureau of Land Management manages the monument but has partnered with the nonprofit to help bring beavers back. The task has become more urgent in the face of recent drought, which has left its mark in swaths of dead conifers. This part of southwest Oregon is dry and hot in summer, and getting more so. Beaver dams could help hold more moisture on the landscape, attracting more birds in the process. Wet meadows engineered by beavers could even serve as a firebreak, helping tame the spread of catastrophic wildfires.

Ralph Arvesen (CC BY 2.0)

Friends of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, the group that hosted the scavenger hunt, is a key player in the project.

“We see our role as letting people know what makes the monument special and what’s needed to support the ecological integrity of this special place,” says Friends’ executive director Collette Streight.

Friends has hosted several “bio-blitz” events, where volunteers fan out in search of butterflies or reptiles. Streight wanted to create an event with the “juicy” energy of a bio-blitz that produced data with practical applications. After talking with Schelz, Shockey, and others, she honed in on beavers.

Pond of Dreams

Ultimately, the key to attracting beavers — and more importantly, convincing them to stay and set up shop — is restoring habitat. This “build it and they will come” approach can attract beavers from miles away.

“One of the first steps is to get information: Where are the beavers, and what are they doing right now?” says Streight.

Last summer, they beta-tested the scavenger hunt with a “Hike and Learn” led by Shockey.

“We need to know this information, and it really will impact future restoration work,” says Shockey. “What I don’t have is the ability to walk a bunch of creeks by myself.”

We didn’t find any evidence of beavers on our steep stretch of creek, but after clambering back to the car, we had just enough time to check out a meadow on the upper portion of Beaver Creek, where last fall Project Beaver installed a series of post-assisted log structures, or PALS.

The broad, flat meadow was a totally different landscape from where we’d been searching. Our boots squished as we wandered through clumps of sodden grass. Soon Sonya and I were reaching for our binoculars. Birdsong filled the meadow: Lazuli buntings called from the willows; robins chortled from a massive pine at the meadow’s edge. I broke out the Merlin bird-identification app to sort through the confounding songs of warblers.

Charlie pointed out one of the PALS — several small posts pounded into the creek bottom, with willows woven between them. Water had pooled behind the structure, creating a shallow, murky pond full of bugs.

Photo: Juliet Grable

“This is great to see,” he said, as he bent low to admire butterflies dancing across the surface and examine willow stakes that had been planted there. They were starting to leaf out. It wasn’t difficult to imagine a beaver setting up shop here, and not just for the scenery.

“Beavers like to surround themselves with water; it helps keep them from being eaten,” Charlie told us. Without that buffer, beavers are an easy (and meaty) target for a host of predators, including cougars, bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and of course, humans.

A Rebranding Campaign

Beavers, once pilloried as pests, have undergone an image makeover in the Beaver State, thanks in part to legislative champions. Last year Oregon’s governor signed the “Beaver Believer” bill, which recognizes the rodent’s potential role in mitigating climate change. Beavers, whom the state had perplexingly classified as predators (they’re vegetarians), have now been rebranded as furbearers. As of this July, private landowners must obtain a permit before they can trap or kill so-called “nuisance” beavers. For the first time, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife will also begin collecting data on all beavers killed in Oregon.

Some conservationists have been lobbying the Biden administration to ban hunting and trapping of beavers on federal lands. More locally, advocates have pushed for a trapping ban within the monument’s borders. They hoped it would be included in a new draft “Resource Management Plan” released by the BLM this year, but it was nixed.

Shockey has mixed feelings about such a proposal.

“Traditionally, trapping bans have been used as a wedge issue between those who hunt and those who don’t,” says Shockey. Increasingly, anglers and hunters are coming to appreciate beavers’ good work in streams and meadows — the places they fish and hunt.

And, as Shockey points out, a trapping ban won’t matter if beavers are shot out of spite. Having more beaver advocates actively monitoring in the monument might be the most effective way to protect the animals. Events like the scavenger hunt help by elevating their profile, making more people aware of their presence and importance.

“Beavers are so interesting in the way that people relate them,” says Shockey. “They’re kind of a charismatic animal and they’re easy to find compared to a lot of wildlife that people care about, yet they’re still pretty invisible.”

Setting the Stage

Late in the afternoon, after the scavenger hunt had run its course, 50 or so tired but happy citizen scientists reconvened at the local elementary school to share their findings. A few teams had discovered fresh sign, including along one stretch of creek where Shockey had never detected beavers before. Teams that found no fresh beaver signs shared other sightings — a snake skin, a junco nest, blooming lilies, chewed willow stumps from years past.

 

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Shockey was pleased. “The data are going to directly inform where we’re going to do restoration,” he said, after he’d thanked the volunteers.

“I’m incredibly proud about what we accomplished,” says Streight. From the fundraising campaign to last-minute scrambling when two team leaders cancelled, the scavenger hunt had required a huge amount of effort. Best of all, no one had twisted an ankle or succumbed to heatstroke.

She hopes to capitalize on the scavenger hunt’s momentum. “We feel we could have volunteers at the ready” to help Shockey’s crew monitor sites or plant willow stakes, she says. “They are really jazzed.”

Project Beaver and the BLM have secured $227,000 for beaver restoration, which is enough to support an eight-person crew for three years. Each spring and fall, they will spend two weeks building and repairing structures in creeks, with the ultimate goal of enticing beavers back. They hope to allow beavers to find the habitat on their own and start breeding.

“Can we increase the amount of beaver activity through our restoration work? That’s how we’re going to measure success,” says Shockey.

Scroll down to find our “Republish” button Previously in The Revelator:

Can Wildlife Services Learn to Believe in Beavers?

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Will Labour be green? Channel Comment brendan 22nd July 2024 Teaser Media

With much fanfare and celebration, Georgia Power, the state’s largest electricity provider, just marked a major milestone: Two new nuclear reactors near Augusta are now generating enough energy to power a million homes, without using fossil fuels or emitting planet-warming carbon dioxide.

The new Plant Vogtle nuclear reactors are the first built in the United States in decades. They entered service years later than originally promised and at twice their original budget, after more than a decade of construction and financial delays. 

At the launch event in May, a parade of utility executives and elected officials celebrated the project as a triumph of perseverance — and as a major step forward for clean energy. 

Also applauding the effort was Chris Smith, the chief implementation officer for Hyundai’s new electric vehicle plant near Savannah.

“I’m very happy to be here to support another positive step toward clean energy in Georgia,” Smith told the crowd. “Hyundai is committed to contributing to the sustainable future of society and seeks to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.”

Smith said the carbon-free power from Plant Vogtle will help the car company reach its climate goal. But it doesn’t achieve it entirely. 

As part of its target, Hyundai has pledged to use 100 percent renewable energy from the start of mass production at the Georgia plant, expected later this year. Even with the new reactors at Plant Vogtle, less than half of Georgia Power’s electricity is carbon-free, according to the utility’s data. 

While Georgia Power’s next long-range plan isn’t due until next year, the current plans put forward by the utility and approved by the state’s Public Service Commission won’t significantly change that ratio in the near future; the utility has expanded solar, for instance, but also added gas turbines and floated delaying coal plant retirements. That has left Hyundai to make up the difference on its own. The company recently signed a deal to offset its Georgia energy use with power from a solar farm in Texas. 

Voluntary clean energy targets like Hyundai’s are increasingly common among corporations and government entities — as are gaps between their ambitions and the clean energy that utilities and their regulators are providing.

As climate change intensifies, this story is playing out repeatedly in Georgia and across the country. Key deadlines for clean energy targets are looming — many of them cite 2025 or 2030 as their first goalposts — and companies and local governments can’t achieve those goals on their own. They need support from electric utilities and regulators in the form of pro-renewable energy policies and investments as well as more carbon-free energy, support that some say isn’t coming fast enough.

Read Next Want clean electricity? These are the overlooked elected officials who get to decide. Emily Jones

“Your schedule for operation is not dependent on your utility’s programs,” said Katie Southworth, who leads policy work in the U.S. Southeast for the Clean Energy Buyers Association, which represents more than 400 members looking to go carbon-free. “You have to have energy Day One.” 

Georgia Power’s parent corporation, Atlanta-based Southern Company, has announced it aims to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050. At the company’s annual meeting in May, CEO Chris Womack touted its progress: “Over 80 percent of the resource additions planned across our system, totaling nearly 10,000 megawatts from 2023 to 2030, are zero-carbon emitting resources,” he said.

But Southern Company subsidiaries like Georgia Power are still adding new gas plants and putting off coal retirements, committing to continued carbon emissions for years in the future.

Grist and WABE are collaborating to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission through ongoing reporting, community workshops, printable resources, and local journalism training.

Explore more PSC coverage, including a glossary of terms to know and downloadable fact sheets.

Share your thoughts: Tell us what you want to know about energy affordability and utility regulation in Georgia.

Georgia Power and Southern Company both declined interviews for this story. Georgia Power pointed to its programs to expand clean energy, and Southern says it’s committed to its own net zero target. 

Still, these and other utilities’ pace of change has companies and governments worried about meeting their own clean energy targets. Some are bypassing public service commissions and utilities by looking for alternative sources of energy outside, as in the Hyundai example. Others are wading into the world of state energy regulation, aiming to change utilities’ plans. 

The city of Decatur, Georgia’s energy and sustainability manager David Nifong said the town is adding solar panels and improving energy efficiency as it aims to reach 100 percent citywide clean energy by 2050. But, he said, Decatur can’t do it alone. The city needs help from Georgia Power, which supplies electricity to 2.7 million customers in 155 of the state’s 159 counties, including all of Decatur.

“Our clean energy plan says it explicitly. We’re not going to be able to meet our clean energy goals without the utility,” he said.

So Decatur has joined forces with other local governments across the state to intervene before the state’s Public Service Commission, which has final say over Georgia Power’s prices and energy sources. They have opposed the utility’s proposals to add fossil fuel generation and pushed instead for expanded use of renewables, as well as more affordable energy for residents.

Large corporations with a presence in Georgia, like Microsoft, are citing their own fast-approaching clean energy deadlines as they aim to influence the state’s Public Service Commission, or PSC, as well. 

Even the U.S. Department of Defense, which is trying to achieve carbon-free energy by 2035, had harsh words at PSC hearings earlier this year, criticizing Georgia Power’s updated integrated resource plan, or IRP, which lays out the utility’s long-range plans for generating electricity.

“I’m frustrated that we are probably your biggest customer and nothing in this IRP addresses any of our needs, which are substantial,” said Defense lawyer John McNutt. 

Southworth of the Clean Energy Buyers Association said large customers are willing to pay for adding clean energy. “Our members are very motivated to bring solutions to utility commissions and to utilities,” she said.

There are small signs of progress from these efforts: Georgia Power has pledged to develop a new clean energy program that Nifong in Decatur and the other local governments pushed for, which will help customers install renewable energy paired with batteries that Georgia Power can draw on to bolster the power grid when demand spikes. The company’s latest IRP, approved by the Public Service Commission in April, also adds battery storage to existing solar fields at two Air Force bases. 

Still, as death tolls from blistering heat rise and extreme weather intensifies, critics say the utility is moving too slowly — extending carbon emissions that climate experts say the planet can’t afford.

“We need utilities to match our ambition,” Southworth said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Georgia, companies want to cut emissions. Utilities are holding them back. on Jul 22, 2024.