Berlin — German police said their methodical operation to clear hundreds of climate change activists from a tiny town that’s been sold to an energy company to dig up for coal was going according to plan on Wednesday. As Sweden’s high-profile climate campaigner Greta Thunberg said she would join the demonstrators squatting in the otherwise abandoned village, Day Two of the police’s effort got off to a rocky start.
There were more violent clashes and even some Molotov cocktails hurled at police early Wednesday, repeating scenes that played out the previous day, but the Aachen police force said its clearance of the hamlet of Luetzerath was moving forward, and they described the scene there as predominantly peaceful.
Despite the clashes early Wednesday, which first kicked off when hundreds of police started pushing into the occupied village on Tuesday morning, the police reported no arrests or injures. They have briefly detained people to record personal information, but there was no indication that anyone was facing charges as of late on Wednesday afternoon.
Police cart away an environmental activist from the settlement of Luetzerath, next to the Garzweiler II open cast coal mine, January 11, 2023 near Erkelenz, Germany.
Andreas Rentz/Getty
The energy company RWE, which wants to excavate the lignite (brown coal) reserves under the village, has started erecting a roughly one-mile fence around Luetzerath. RWE plans to demolish the village’s homes and streets once it’s cleared of climate protesters.
When the eviction operation began, police gave the activist-squatters a chance to leave the area without facing legal ramifications, and the force said many took advantage.
A spokesman said Aachen’s police “welcome the fact that a large number of activists have decided to leave the area here peacefully and without resistance.”
Some activists, however, climbed onto high platforms that were strung together deliberately to give protesters a place to try to avoid being dragged away from the site. Around noon on Wednesday, officers started using trucks with lift platforms to get the squatters off the structures.
A demonstrator is lifted from a wire scaffold by police with the help of a lifting platform during the clearing of the village of Luetzerath, Germany, January 11, 2023.
Federico Gambarini/picture alliance/Getty
Some of the activists offered a soundtrack to the scene, playing guitars and pianos.
Officials had cleared some of the first buildings in the village Wednesday, with police bringing activists out of a former agricultural hall that was reportedly being used as a communal kitchen by the demonstrators.
Police had not yet entered Luetzerath’s occupied homes, however.
As more barricades and fencing goes up around the site, it was expected to complicate and delay the eviction process, which police expect to take about a month.
Police officers carry a demonstrator to clear a road at the village of Luetzerath, near Erkelenz, Germany, January 10, 2023.
Michael Probst/AP
Roughly 300 to 400 activists were estimated to be in the village, with some small children among them.
“Due to widespread dangers in the area of operation, the Aachen police appeal to guardians to leave the area immediately with their children,” the local police department wrote on Twitter.
A demonstration was announced for Saturday, and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said she would be in Luetzerath to attend.
This Saturday 14/1 I will join activists in Lützerath to defend the village and stop the coalmine. Join us at 12.00 to protect life, and put people over profit!
Protests against the evictions, and Luetzerath being dug up as a coal mine, have also been announced in other German cities, including Munich and Hamburg.
Costly weather disasters kept raining down on America last year, pounding the nation with 18 climate extremes that caused at least $1 billion in damage each, totaling more than $165 billion, federal climate scientists calculated Tuesday.
Even though 2022 wasn’t near record hot for the United States, it was the third wildest year nationally both in number of extremes that cost $1 billion and overall damage from those weather catastrophes, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a report issued at the American Meteorological Society’s conference.
The amount, cost and death toll of billion-dollar weather disasters make up a key measurement, adjusted for inflation, that NOAA uses to see how bad human-caused climate change is getting. They led to at least 474 deaths.
“People are seeing the impacts of a changing climate system where they live, work and play on a regular basis,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said at a Tuesday press conference. “With a changing climate buckle up. More extreme events are expected.”
Hurricane Ian, the costliest drought in a decade and a pre-Christmas winter storm pushed last year’s damages to the highest since 2017. The only more expensive years were 2017 — when Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria struck — and the disastrous 2005 when numerous hurricanes, headlined by Katrina, pummeled the Southeast, federal meteorologists said. The only busier years for billion-dollar disasters were 2020 and 2021.
Ian was the third costliest U.S. hurricane on record with $112.9 billion in damage and over 100 deaths, followed by $22.2 billion in damage from a western and midwestern drought that halted barge traffic on the Mississippi River, officials said.
The $165 billion total for 2022 doesn’t even include a total yet for the winter storm three weeks ago, which could push it close to $170 billion, officials said. That storm, which affected the country from Dec. 21 to Dec. 26 and led to life-threatening freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall, killed dozens of people, especially in Erie County, New York, where blizzard conditions became “paralyzing.”
More than 40% of the continental United States was under official drought conditions for 119 straight weeks, a record in the 22 years of the federal drought monitor, easily passing the old mark of 68 straight weeks, Spinrad said. The country peaked at 63% of the nation in drought in 2022. Spinrad said he expects the atmospheric river pouring rain on California to provide some relief, but not a lot.
“Climate change is supercharging many of these extremes that can lead to billion-dollar disasters,” said NOAA applied climatologist and economist Adam Smith, who calculates the disasters, updating them to factor out inflation. He said more people are also building in harm’s way, along pricey coasts and rivers, and lack of strong construction standards is also an issue. With a good chunk of development beachside, real estate inflation could be a small localized factor, he said.
“The United States has some of the consistently most diverse and intense weather and climate extremes that you’ll see in many parts of the world. And we have a large population that’s vulnerable to these extremes,” Smith told The Associated Press. “So it’s really an imbalance right now.”
Climate change is a hard to ignore factor in extremes, from deadly heat to droughts and flooding, Smith and other officials said.
“The risk of extreme events is growing and they are affecting every corner of the world,” NOAA chief scientist Sarah Kapnick said.
The problem is especially bad when it comes to dangerous heat, said NOAA climate scientist Stephanie Herring, who edits an annual study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that calculates how much of the extreme weather in past years were worsened by climate change.
“Research is showing that these extreme heat events are also likely to become the new normal,” Herring said at the weather conference. Such events struck nationwide last year, with states from California to Pennsylvania grappling with high temperatures. Worldwide, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF has warned that extreme heat could put “billions” of children at risk.
Some scientists predict that by 2053, about a third of the United States population will deal with dangerous heat.
There’s been a dramatic upswing in the size and number of super costly extremes in the U.S. since about 2016, Smith said. In the past seven years, 121 different billion-dollar weather disasters have caused more than $1 trillion in damage and killed more than 5,000 people.
Those years dwarf what happened in the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s. For example, in the entire decade of the 1990s there were 55 different billion-dollar disasters that cost $313 billion total and claimed 3,062 lives.
“It’s not just one but many, many different types of extremes across much of the country,” Smith said. “If extremes were on a bingo card, we almost filled up the card over the last several years.”
In 2022, there were nine billion-dollar non-tropical storms, including a derecho, three hurricanes, two tornado outbreaks, one flood, one winter storm, a megadrought and a costly wildfires. The only general type of weather disaster missing was an icy freeze that causes $1 billion or more in crop damage, Smith said. And last month, Florida came close to it, but missed it by a degree or two and some preventive steps by farmers, he said.
That prevented freeze was one of two “silver linings” in 2022 extremes, Smith said. The other was that the wildfire season, though still costing well over $1 billion, wasn’t as severe as past years, except in New Mexico and Texas, he said.
For the first 11 months of 2022, California was going through its second driest year on record, but drenchings from an atmospheric river that started in December, turned it to only the ninth driest year on record for California, said NOAA climate monitoring chief Karin Gleason.
With a third straight year of a La Nina cooling the eastern Pacific, which tends to change weather patterns across the globe and moderate global warming, 2022 was only the 18th warmest year in U.S. records, Gleason said.
“It was a warm year certainly above average for most of the country but nothing off the charts,” Gleason said. The nation’s average temperature was 53.4 degrees (11.9 degrees Celsius), which is 1.4 degrees (0.8 degrees) warmer than the 20th century average.
The year was 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) below normal for rain and snow, the 27th driest out of 128 years, Gleason said.
NOAA and NASA on Thursday will announce how hot the globe was for 2022, which won’t be a record but likely to be in the top seven or so hottest years. European climate monitoring group Copernicus released its calculations Tuesday, saying 2022 was the fifth hottest globally and second hottest in Europe.
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions — which is what traps heat to cause global warming — rose 1.3% in 2022, according to a report released Tuesday by the Rhodium Group, a think tank. That’s less than the economy grew. The emissions increase was driven by cars, trucks and industry with electric power generation polluting slightly less.
It’s the second straight year, both after lockdowns eased, that American carbon pollution has grown after fairly steady decreases for several years. It makes it less likely that the United States will achieve its pledge to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, according to the Rhodium report.
The Federal Reserve has only a limited role to play in combating climate change, Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday, a stance that puts him at odds with environmental activists who have pushed central banks worldwide to take steps to restrict lending to energy companies.
Maintaining the Fed’s independence, Powell said, includes steering clear of issues that are more properly overseen by elected officials.
“Without explicit congressional legislation, it would be inappropriate for us to use our monetary policy or supervisory tools to promote a greener economy or to achieve other climate-based goals,” Powell said during a panel discussion in Stockholm on the subject of central bank independence.
“We are not, and will not be, a ‘climate policymaker.’ “
In his remarks, Powell suggested that the Fed’s independence from social and political influences was particularly important when it must carry out unpopular policies, such as when it raises interest rates, as it’s doing now to fight high inflation. Last year, the Fed raised its benchmark rate seven times, a series of hikes that have led to higher rates for mortgages and auto loans and made other business and consumer borrowing more expensive.
“Restoring price stability when inflation is high can require measures that are not popular in the short term as we raise interest rates to slow the economy,” the Fed chair said. “The absence of direct political control over our decisions allows us to take these necessary measures without considering short-term political factors.”
Climate activists have pushed central banks, including the Fed, to use their supervisory powers over commercial banks to push for greater consideration of environmental risks in lending. They note that natural disasters, made more common by climate change, could impose significant financial losses on banks, which would require more capital held in reserve. Activist groups also argue that lending to oil and gas companies should be seen as risky.
Powell did acknowledge the Fed has “narrow, but important responsibilities” to use its oversight of banks to ensure that they manage the risks to their finances created by climate change. And the Fed has taken modest steps to consider climate change, including joining the Network for Greening the Financial System, an international group of central banks and regulators.
That move and other speeches about climate change by Fed officials had come under sharp criticism from congressional Republicans.
Powell’s comments reflected the overall focus of the symposium: How to ensure that central banks make decisions on interest rate policies — their key responsibility — free of political considerations.
Powell: Let’s “Stick to our knitting”
“We should ‘stick to our knitting’ and not wander off to pursue perceived social benefits that are not tightly linked to our statutory goals and authorities,’” he said.
At the same time, Powell’s stance on climate change is more cautious than those of many of his counterparts overseas. The European Central Bank and Bank of England, for example, have been more outspoken about climate change risks.
Unlike the Fed, the ECB can cite the fight against climate change as part of its official mandate to support European Union economic policies — so long as it doesn’t intrude on its primary task of controlling inflation. One top ECB official, Isabel Schnabel, said at the symposium that the Frankfurt, Germany-based ECB would not moderate its series of interest rate hikes, which are intended to curb record inflation, in order to support investment in renewable energy.
“There is concern that higher interest rates may discourage efforts to decarbonize our economies,” Schnabel said. “So does this imply that we should raise our interest rates less forcefully? My answer is no. The green transition can only thrive with price stability.”
Schnabel, who serves on the six-member executive board that runs the bank, suggested that the main impediment to a green-energy transition was not rising borrowing costs. Rather, she said, the primary obstacle is a lack of progress by governments in implementing their commitments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. These commitments include expanding support schemes, removing bureaucratic hurdles and introducing comprehensive carbon pricing.
Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Jerome H. Powell participates in a panel during a Central Bank Symposium at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden, January 10, 2023.
Claudio Bresciani | TT | via Reuters
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Tuesday said the central bank will not get involved in issues like climate change that are beyond its congressionally established mandate, and vowed the institution will not become a “climate policymaker.”
Powell’s remarks, delivered at a conference hosted by Sweden’s central bank, follow calls from some Democrats for the Fed to play a more active role in addressing climate change and ensuring the country’s financial system is prepared for climate-related risks.
Powell has reinterred that climate change is not a main consideration for the Fed when developing monetary policy, noting that climate-related issues are more for the federal government than for his institution.
“Decisions about policies to directly address climate change should be made by the elected branches of government and thus reflect the public’s will as expressed through elections,” Powell said on Tuesday.
“Without explicit congressional legislation, it would be inappropriate for us to use our monetary policy or supervisory tools to promote a greener economy or to achieve other climate-based goals,” Powell said. “We are not, and will not be, a ‘climate policymaker.’”
In recent years, the Fed has tiptoed into addressing climate change, including creating of two internal committees focusing on the issue. It’s also joined the Network for Greening the Financial System, a group of global central banks aimed at addressing the systemic risk climate change poses to the financial sector.
But Powell on Tuesday said the Fed’s regulatory powers give it a “narrow” role to ensure financial institutions “appropriately manage” climate-related risks. He added the Fed should “not wander off to pursue perceived social benefits that are not tightly linked to our statutory goals and authorities.”
And while the Fed has requested big banks to examine their financial readiness in the event of climate-related disasters, Powell said this is as involved as the institution should be in addressing climate-related issues.
“The public reasonably expects supervisors to require that banks understand, and appropriately manage, their material risks, including the financial risks of climate change,” Powell said.
The Fed is set to launch a pilot program this year for six of the country’s largest banks to take part in a climate scenario analysis exercise that would examine the firms’ ability to manage major climate events.
A flooded village in Matiari, in the Sindh province of Pakistan. Credit: UNICEF/Asad Zaidi
by Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General (geneva)
Inter Press Service
An address to the International Conference on a Climate-Resilient Pakistan
GENEVA, Jan 10 (IPS) – For decades, I have been privileged to witness the boundless generosity and resilience of the Pakistani people amidst grave threats and upheaval.
From earthquakes and floods. To years of relentless terrorist attacks. To geopolitical nightmares like the wars in Afghanistan that have sent millions fleeing across the Pakistani border in search of safety over the decades — a trend that continues today.
But even through the darkest moments, the giving spirit of the Pakistani people has shone brightly. I have seen neighbours helping neighbours with food, water and shelter.
And I have seen Pakistani communities welcome Afghan refugees with open arms despite their scarce resources So my heart broke when I saw first hand the utter devastation of last summer’s floods.
No country deserves to endure what happened to Pakistan. But it was especially bitter to watch that country’s generous spirit being repaid with a climate disaster of monumental scale.
As the video we just watched showed, the epic floods were nothing short of a “monsoon on steroids” – as I mentioned in my visit – submerging one-third of the country, three times the area of my own country, Portugal.
A terrifying “wall of water” killed more than 1,700 people, injured thousands more, and affected a total of more than 33 million, displacing 8 million people.
It swept over roads, ruined millions of acres of agricultural land, and damaged or destroyed 2 million homes. And it pushed back 9 million people to the brink of poverty.
These are not numbers on a page. They are individual women, children and men. They are families and communities.
And under the leadership of the Government of Pakistan, the United Nations, donors and friends rallied to assist.
Tents, food, water, medicine and cash transfers were distributed. And a humanitarian response plan of $816 million was launched.
But all of that is just a trickle of support in the face of the growing flood of need.
At the same time, the people of Pakistan met this epic tragedy with heroic humanity.
From the first responders rushing to affected communities. To the doctors and nurses I met, fighting against time to save lives in overcrowded hospitals.
And I will never forget hearing the personal testimonies of women and men I met in September in the wake of the ruins.
They left their own homes and all their worldly possessions to help their neighbours escape the rising waters. They sacrificed all they had to help others and bring them to safety.
We must match the heroic response of the people of Pakistan with our own efforts and massive investments to strengthen their communities for the future.
Rebuilding Pakistan in a resilient way will run in excess of $16 billion — and far more will be needed in the longer term.
This includes not only flood recovery and rehabilitation efforts. But also initiatives to address daunting social, environmental and economic challenges.
Reconstructing homes and buildings. Re-designing public infrastructure — including roads, bridges, schools and hospitals.
Jump-starting jobs and agriculture. Ensuring that technology and knowledge are shared with Pakistan to support its efforts to build a climate-resilient future.
And throughout, supporting women and children, who are up to 14 times more likely than men to die during disasters, and face the brunt of upheaval and loss in humanitarian crises.
Women are consistently on the front lines of support during times of crisis — including in Pakistan. Their efforts are essential to a strong, equal, inclusive recovery.
It is crucial that women play their full part, as leaders and participants at every level, contributing their insights and solutions.
We also need to right a fundamental wrong. Pakistan is doubly victimized by climate chaos and a morally bankrupt global financial system.
That system routinely denies middle-income countries the debt relief and concessional funding needed to invest in resilience against natural disasters.
And so, we need creative ways for developing countries to access debt relief and concessional financing when they need it the most Above all, we need to be honest about the brutal injustice of loss and damage suffered by developing countries because of climate change.
If there is any doubt about loss and damage — go to Pakistan.
There is loss. There is damage.
The devastation of climate change is real. From floods and droughts, to cyclones and torrential rains.
And as always, those developing countries least responsible are the first to suffer.
Pakistan — which represents less than one per cent of global emissions — did not cause the climate crisis.
But it is living with its worst impacts.
South Asia is one of the world’s global climate crisis hotspots — in which people are 15 times more likely to die from climate impacts than elsewhere.
At the recent UN Climate Conference in Egypt, the world made some important breakthroughs.This includes progress on addressing loss and damage, speeding the shift to renewables, and an unprecedented call to reform the global financial architecture, particularly Multilateral Development Banks.
It also includes accelerating efforts to cover every person in the world with early warning systems against climate disasters within five years.
But we need to go much further. Countries on the frontlines of the climate crisis need massive support.
Developed countries must deliver on their commitment to double adaptation finance, and meet the $100 billion goal urgently, without delay.
And we need to reverse the outrageous trend of emissions going up, when they must go down to prevent further climate catastrophe.
Today’s conference is the first step on a much longer journey towards recovery and reconstruction in Pakistan.
The United Nations will be there for the long haul. The world must be, too.
And at every step, we will be inspired by the endurance and generosity of the people of Pakistan in this critical and colossal mission.
It was (yet another) bad climate year for our planet — and an even worse one for Europe, according to the EU’s climate change service.
Copernicus’ latest report, published Tuesday, paints a dire picture that is now all too familiar.
Last year was the fifth-warmest on record globally and the second-warmest for Europe, where temperatures have increased by more than twice the global average in the past 30 years.
The Continent also experienced its hottest-ever summer, marked by devastating heat waves and wildfires that destroyed over 800,000 hectares of land and caused a spike in carbon emissions.
Extended droughts hit crop yields, with little hope in sight for a quick recovery. Unusually warm winters might be good for consumer energy bills, but without enough snow to restore rivers’ water supply this winter, farmers fear that the effects of last year’s drought might extend well into 2023.
The combination of adverse weather conditions and the fallout of the war in Ukraine is creating the perfect storm for a global food crisis, with millions of people facing starvation. Prices of staple commodities like wheat and vegetable oils, which had already experienced volatility in previous years, spiked in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though early signs suggest the crunch might be starting to ease.
Here’s Europe’s hot, long, dry 2022 — in eight charts and maps.
In this NASA false-color image, the blue and purple shows the hole in Earth’s protective ozone layer over Antarctica on Oct. 5, 2022. Earth’s protective ozone layer is slowly but noticeably healing at a pace that would fully mend the hole over Antarctica in about 43 years, a new United Nations report says.
NASA | AP
The Earth’s protective ozone layer is on track to recover within four decades, closing an ozone hole that was first noticed in the 1980s, a United Nations-backed panel of experts announced on Monday.
The findings of the scientific assessment, which is published every four years, follow the landmark Montreal Protocol in 1987, which banned the production and consumption of chemicals that eat away at the planet’s ozone layer.
The ozone layer in the upper atmosphere protects the Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which is linked to skin cancer, eye cataracts, compromised immune systems and agricultural land damage.
Scientists said the recovery is gradual and will take many years. If current policies remain in place, the ozone layer is expected to recover to 1980 levels — before the appearance of the ozone hole — by 2040, the report said, and will return to normal in the Arctic by 2045. Additionally, Antarctica could experience normal levels by 2066.
Scientists and environmental groups have long lauded the global ban of ozone-depleting chemicals as one of the most critical environmental achievements to date, and it could set a precedent for broader regulation of climate-warming emissions.
“Ozone action sets a precedent for climate action,” World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas said in a statement. “Our success in phasing out ozone-eating chemicals shows us what can and must be done — as a matter of urgency — to transition away from fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gases and so limit temperature increase.”
Scientists said that global emissions of the banned chemical chlorofluorocarbon-11, or CFC-11, which was used as a refrigerant and in insulating foams, have declined since 2018 after increasing unexpectedly for several years. A large portion of the unexpected CFC-11 emissions originated from eastern China, the report said.
The report also found that the ozone-depleting chemical chlorine declined 11.5% in the stratosphere since it peaked in 1993, while bromine declined 14.5% in the stratosphere since it peaked in 1999.
Scientists also warned that efforts to artificially cool the Earth by injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight could thin the ozone layer, and cautioned that further research into emerging technologies like geoengineering is necessary.
Researchers with the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations Environment Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Commission contributed to the assessment.
Mosaic Recently Contributed AI/ML Services to a Custom Application that Alerts on Carbon Emissions and Recommends Renewable Energy Portfolios. The company is also working with a leading risk management software firm to accelerate corporate ESG adoption.
Press Release –
Jan 9, 2023 13:15 EST
LEESBURG, Va., January 9, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Mosaic Data Science contributed machine learning algorithm development & deployment services to help a leading power firm automate the process of quantifying the switch to renewable energy portfolios from traditional energy sources while exploring the costs and tradeoffs of said offerings for their business-to-business customers. The solution is designed for enterprises that require power to a diverse set of business functions, such as industrial warehouses, production plants, and related physical infrastructure.
The application relies on a highly scalable, custom mathematical optimization algorithm to select the products to eliminate or offset the emissions required to reach the GHG targets. Mosaic’s data scientists collaborated with key stakeholders to lay out requirements for an interactive dashboard and the algorithms driving the portfolio recommendations.
In the past, this had been a manual, error-prone, and time-consuming effort as sales personnel had to piece together a portfolio to cover energy usage across tens of thousands of service locations for a customer over a multi-decade window. Automating the process is a massive win for the energy company and its customers.
As the world becomes increasingly exposed to climate change impacts, more companies have stepped up their efforts to provide environmental, social, and governance reports (ESG) with emissions reduction goals. The project is just one example of the many use cases of data science techniques in solving carbon footprint reduction problems and combating climate change, contributing to a healthier future for our planet.
Mosaic also works with a leading risk management software company to accelerate ESG adoption among global corporations. Mosaic is designing ML-based solutions to help corporations make more sustainable decisions.
According to Gartner, artificial intelligence was named one of the top technologies by CEOs to help accelerate sustainable business progress and could help deliver nearly one-third of the carbon emission reductions required by 2030.
“Mosaic’s artificial intelligence and machine learning skills can help the organizations focus on sustainable processes & practices,” said Drew Clancy, VP of Marketing and Sales. “Too often people generalize AI as trying to sell you more products, but this technology should play a critical role in increasing our resilience to the effects of climate change by helping us identify risk factors and develop plans to mitigate them.”
Companies that put AI at their core are far more likely to contribute positively to climate resilience, adaptation, and mitigation efforts than those that do not. Mosaic continues to be a champion of sustainability in its business practices.
About Mosaic Data Science
Mosaic Data Science is a leading AI/ML services company focused on helping organizations build and deploy custom solutions. The company makes complex artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions actionable, explainable, and usable to any organization.
“If there is any doubt about loss and damage, go to Pakistan,” he told delegates at the International Conference on climate resilient Pakistan. “There is loss. There is damage. The devastation of climate change is real. From floods and droughts to cyclones and torrential rains. And as always, those countries least responsible, are the first to suffer.”
33 million-plus impacted
More than 33 million people were affected by the flooding in Sindh and Balochistan, which is widely regarded to have been Pakistan’s greatest climate disaster.
Even today, months after the initial emergency, the floodwaters have only partly receded and the disaster is far from over for some eight million who were forced to flee the rising waters, which also killed more than 1,700 people.
Catastrophic damage
More than 2.2 million homes were destroyed along with 13 per cent of all health facilities, 4.4 million acres of crops, and more than 8,000 kilometres of roads and other vital infrastructure – including around 440 bridges.
The cost of helping communities hit in every conceivable way by the unprecedented monsoon rains in Pakistan that began last June, “will run in excess of $16 billion, and far more will be needed in the longer term”, the UN Secretary-General said.
Vulnerable children impacted
In parallel with the conference in Geneva, UN children’s fund UNICEF underlined the ongoing human cost of the emergency in Pakistan.
“Up to four million children are still living near contaminated and stagnant flood waters, risking their survival and wellbeing,” the UN agency said.
Acute respiratory infections had “skyrocketed” in areas affected by flooding, UNICEF continued, while the number of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition in the same areas nearly doubled between July and December, compared to 2021, leaving some 1.5 million youngsters still in need of lifesaving nutritioninterventions.
UNICEF/UN0730552/Bashir
On 3 November 2022 in Jacobabad, Sindh province, Pakistan, 15-year-old Sugra, whose home was destroyed in recent floods, holds her brother, Fayaz.
Paying over the odds
Reiterating the need to help developing countries such as Pakistan become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, the UN chief insisted that the international banking system needed reform “to right a fundamental wrong”.
He added: “Pakistan is doubly victimized by climate chaos and a morally bankrupt global financial system. That system routinely denies middle-income countries the debt relief and concessional funding needed to invest in resilience against natural disasters. And so, we need creative ways for developing countries to access debt relief and concessional financing when they need it the most.”
At Mr. Guterres’s side, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif explained why his country needed international solidarity now, more than ever.
“We need to get 33 million people who are deeply affected by the floods their future back,” he said. “Their families must stand on their feet and they must come back in life and earn their livelihood.”
UNICEF/Arsalan Butt
UNICEF’s Chief of Field Office in Sindh – Prem Chand observes 11-year-old Rahman wear a jacket provided by UNICEF during the winter kits distribution in Mitho Babbar Village, Dadu District, Sindh province.
‘Tomorrow, we could be the ones’
Representing conference host country Switzerland, Federal Councillor for Foreign Affairs Ignazio Cassis, reasoned that supporting those countries impacted by natural disasters was enlightened common sense: “Today, it’s you, Pakistan, that needs help. But tomorrow, it could be us, all of us. One thing is certain: none of us is safe. We are all concerned by climate change, a global threat that requires a global response.”
Echoing that appeal for solidarity among nations, French President Emmanuel Macron joined the conference by video link to announce that €360 million had been pledged by France “to respond to the challenge of resilience rebuilding and climate adaptation”.
But the French President also noted that only 30 per cent of the UN’s emergency funding appeals had been provided, just as winter temperatures have plunged.
“Look to the east, in Australia, extraordinary flood events; look to the west in California, extreme weather events, look to Europe, and people are wondering what happened to snow in winter, we are living in profoundly changing times.”
Watch a joint press stakehout held by the UN Secretary-General and Prime Minister of Pakistan on the conference, below:
“My grandma and my grandfather are now washed out in the sea,” says Mario Muschamp, gazing out at the coast near his close-knit Creole community. “You know, their graves are gone. That really hurts.”
This is the reality for the inhabitants of Monkey River, who have watched on, powerless, as their football field, their homes, and even the graves of deceased loved ones, are claimed by the sea.
Man-made activity has been identified by experts as the main cause of the coastal erosion which is devastating the village and causing such deep suffering, notably industrial salt mining and water diversion. The situation has deteriorated to the extent that some members of the community have moved away.
The geotube fightback
Others, however, have decided to stay and fight, and, in the words of local schoolteachers Audra Castellanos, “put Monkey River back on the map”.
Mr. Muschamp is the President of the Monkey River Watershed Association, a community-based organization working to conserve and restore the integrity of the entire Monkey River Watershed, and ensure that it continues to provide a multitude of benefits to local residents and the coastal ecosystem.
To this end, the Monkey River Watershed Association partnered with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to install one hundred and sixty feet of sand filled “geotubes” in front of the most threatened properties.
Residents are teaming up with UNDP to install the geotubes, massive synthetic sandbags that create physical barriers to wave energy and erosion, and take other measures to slow the disintegration of the shoreline.
‘We need climate justice’
“Monkey River Village is one of those coastal communities that we prioritize,” said Leonel Requena, UNDP’s National Coordinator of the GEF Small Grants Programme. “Monkey River’s inhabitants are not responsible for the climate crisis, yet they are the ones that are suffering the greatest loss and damage. What we need is climate justice.”
The story of Monkey River is about a hub of biodiversity where the river meets the sea – but more than that, it is about a community that, like so many others, is joining forces to turn the tide on climate change, with the support of the United Nations.
Since a 2022 United Nations Global Lens video documentary on the community was produced in 2022, yet another home has been claimed by the sea, but the residents who have resolved to protect their village say nothing will wash away their resolve to fight coastal erosion.
“We have been doing our best to try and keep what we have,” said Mr. Muschamp. “I don’t want to see any more graves go to the sea.”
When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted in January 2022, it sent shockwaves around the world. Not only did it trigger widespread tsunami waves, but it also belched an enormous amount of climate-warming water vapor into the Earth’s stratosphere.
Now researchers in a new report have unveiled something else: the eruption set off more than 25,500 lightning events in just five minutes. Over the course of just six hours, the volcano triggered nearly 400,000 lightning events. Half of all the lightning in the world was concentrated around this volcano at the eruption’s peak.
“It’s the most extreme concentration of lightning that we’ve ever detected,” Chris Vagasky, meteorologist and lightning expert at Vaisala, told CNN. “We’ve been detecting lightning for 40 years now, and this is really an extreme event.”
The annual report by Vaisala found that 2022 was a year of extremes for lightning. Lightning increased in the US in 2022, with more than 198 million lightning strokes — 4 million more than what was observed in 2021, and 28 million more than 2020.
“We are continuing an upward trend in lightning,” Vagasky said.
The World-Wide Lightning Location Network, another lightning monitoring network led by the University of Washington, which is not involved with the report, said Vaisala’s findings about global lightning as well as the Hunga volcano are consistent with their own observations.
“We can do this because the stronger eruptions generate lightning, and lightning sends detectable radio signals around the world,” Robert Holzworth, the director of the network, told CNN. “The Hunga eruption was absolutely impressive in its lightning activity.”
Researchers have used lightning as a key indicator of the climate crisis, since the phenomenon typically signals warming temperatures. Lightning occurs in energetic storms associated with an unstable atmosphere, requiring relatively warm and moist air, which is why they primarily occur in tropical latitudes and elsewhere during the summer months.
But in 2022, Vaisala’s National Lightning Detection Network found more than 1,100 lightning strokes in Buffalo, New York, during a devastating lake-effect snowstorm that dumped more than 30 inches of snow in the city, but piled historic totals in excess of 6 feet in the surrounding suburbs along Lake Erie. Lake-effect snow occurs when cold air blows over warm lake water, in this case from the Great Lakes. The large difference in temperature can cause extreme instability in the atmosphere and lead to thunderstorm-like lightning even in a snow storm.
The report noted that many of these lightning events happened near wind turbines south of Buffalo, which Vagasky said was significant. He explained that the ice crystal-filled clouds were lower to the ground than usual, scraping just above the blades of the turbines.
“That can cause what is known as self-initiated upward lightning,” Vagasky said. “So the lightning occurs because you have charged at the tip of this wind turbine blade that is really close to the base of the cloud, and it’s really easy to get a connection of the electric charge.”
This is an area of ongoing research, he said, as the country turns to more clean energy alternatives.
“We’re seeing bigger and bigger wind turbines, and certainly as we’re putting in more and more wind energy and renewable energy, lightning is going to play a role in that,” he said.
The report comes after an unusual year in 2021, when they found lightning strokes increased significantly in the typically frozen Arctic region, which scientists say is a clear sign of how the climate crisis is altering global weather.
“Lightning in polar regions wasn’t mentioned [in this year’s Vaisala report], but our global lightning network shows a trend for much more lightning in the northern polar regions,” Michael McCarthy, research associate professor and associate director of the World Wide Lightning Location Network, told CNN. “That trend closely tracks the observed average temperature changes over the northern hemisphere.
“This close tracking suggests, but does not prove, a climate change effect,” McCarthy added.
Vagasky said lightning in colder areas will only amplify as the planet warms, noting that meteorologists and climatologists have been collecting more data to not only make the climate connections clear but also keep people safe.
“That’s why they’ve named lightning as an essential climate variable,” he said, “because it’s important to know where it’s occurring, how much is occurring, and so you can see how thunderstorms are trending as a result of changing climates.”
Luke Iseman conducting his balloon launch in Apr. 2022, before Make Sunsets was formally incorporated.
When Luke Iseman was thinking of launching a solar geoengineering startup, he talked to experts in the field. The strongest advice they gave him was not to use the word “geoengineering.”
The term refers to manipulating the Earth’s climate for human benefit, but in recent years it’s been used as shorthand for “solar geoengineering,” a theoretical process of releasing chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth and mitigate the effects of global warming. It’s controversial because it hasn’t been studied comprehensively, and we don’t know whether the unintended side effects will be better or worse than the impacts of climate change.
Iseman’s startup Make Sunsets, which has raised at least half a million dollars in venture capital, mostly skates around the hot-button word on its website.
“We make reflective, high-altitude, biodegradable clouds that cool the planet. Mimicking natural processes, our ‘shiny clouds’ are going to prevent catastrophic global warming,” reads the site’s About page. On the FAQ page, Make Sunsets calls what it is doing “albedo enhancement,” a scientific term for reflecting sunlight.
But Iseman confronted it head-on in an interview.
“I’m very opposed to geoengineering. I want no geoengineering to occur,” Iseman told CNBC. “Unfortunately, I was born into a world with a poorly geoengineered atmosphere where I, and everyone before me for the last couple hundred years, were emitting huge quantities of carbon dioxide to build the modern world. So I want to do as little geoengineering as necessary to fix that.”
I’m doing this because it needs to be done. And no one else is.
On the downside, injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere could damage the ozone layer, cause respiratory illness and create acid rain. It would also cost as little as $10 billion per year to run a program that cools the Earth by 1 degree Celsius, UCLA environmental law professor Edward Parson told CNBC in 2022. That’s remarkably cheap compared to other mitigation techniques.
So which of these two scenarios is less bad? Most scientists who study the problem aren’t sure, but they think it’s important to begin studying the ramifications.
Iseman doesn’t want to wait for those studies. There isn’t time, he says.
“There is not really anything that I’ve been able to find, other than albedo enhancement, that even has a chance of keeping us below more than two degrees Celsius of climate change. And that’s a that’s a pretty terrifying world to imagine,” Iseman told CNBC. “Basically, long answer short, I’m doing this because it needs to be done. And no one else is.”
In January, Make Sunsets plans to launch three latex weather balloons that will release anywhere between 10 and 500 grams of sulfur dioxide. The balloons will include a flight tracking computer, a geo-locating tracking device, and a camera, mostly provided by hobbyist suppliers. Within a week of each flight, Make Sunsets will publish data on its website about what it was able to find.
Iseman is an experienced doer. He has designed, invented, built and deployed biochar kilns in rural Kenya, a solar-powered wifi-connected garden sensor, and tiny homes made out of shipping containers, among other projects. For a year and a half, Iseman worked as the director of hardware at the leading Silicon Valley startup shop, Y Combinator.
He is currently living off the grid in Baja, Mexico, on land he bought a couple years ago, where he continues to tinker. He has a publicly viewable Google document with 40 ideas he wants to build or test, including a solar-assisted composting toilet with time and temperature monitoring, freediving safety gear and a floating solar panel.
Make Sunsets started as simply an idea to test solar geoengineering in a quick, cheap way.
Iseman says the academic consensus starts with spending $20 billion over 10 years to build a high-altitude plane, or to put mirrors high in space.
That wasn’t practical enough for him. “Here in reality, I was like, ‘OK, what can I buy, ideally, on my credit card, ideally on Amazon, to see if I can even do this?’ Maybe I’m missing something fundamental about how hard this is.”
Back in April, Iseman did his own rudimentary experiment with a 6-foot weather balloon, sulfur, a stainless steel kitchen pot with a lid, a pump that he took out of a water dispenser, and a tank of helium. (That experiment can been seen in the photo here.)
Luke Iseman launching a balloon in April 2022 on his property in Baja, California.
Photo courtesy Luke Iseman
He gave himself until the end of 2022 to raise money to run more tests, or just publish a description of what he had done. Eventually, he got a bite for a half-million dollars, and incorporated on Oct. 1.
Make Sunsets is also selling what it calls “cooling credits,” starting at $10, which companies will be able to buy to offset the effects of their carbon emissions.
Iseman has been wary of the the idea of companies or individuals paying to remove carbon or mitigate global warming effects. “Initially, I was really skeptical entirely of the of the voluntary carbon credit market,” Iseman told CNBC. “I thought it was either really expensive for very legit things that in 50 to 200 years will save the world, hopefully. Or it was inexpensive things where you’re like trading the right to not cut down a future tree. Basically, most of the credits that I’ve found below $50 per ton feel very scammy.”
But Iseman believes future carbon markets will evolve to include two things that actually work: permanent carbon dioxide removal, which will be expensive, and sunlight reflection technology, which Iseman says will be incredibly inexpensive at scale. The primary cost of sunlight reflection technology efforts at scale is sulfur dioxide.
Apart from the unknown side effects, there’s another moral conundrum with solar geoengineering: If there’s a cheap and easy way to mitigate climate change, then there’s no incentive to do the hard work of eliminating carbon emissions.
“That’s a real concern philosophically and academically. However, back here in the real world, people are dying, right? Maybe 20 years ago should have had those discussions and had the time to think about that. And if we had a magical world government that could organize all of these things, then yeah, that would be great,” Iseman told CNBC. “If international law for that matter held meaningful teeth, or if we didn’t have a land war in Europe, then maybe we could have an adult conversation about this — that’s not the reality that we live in, unfortunately.”
Brayton Williams, a co-founder of San Mateo-headquartered venture capital firm BoostVC, told CNBC the firm invested $500,000 in Make Sunsets because they were impressed with Iseman’s dedication, and because tackling climate change is the kind of big, complicated problem the firm likes to tackle.
“We have invested in companies working on banking the unbanked of Latin America, eradicating heart disease, abundant nuclear energy, one-hour global travel and many, many more,” Williams told CNBC. “These are moonshot opportunities, but if they work they really do make a huge positive impact on the world.”
Williams knows the investment is a bit of a risk, but cautions that the firm is still at a very early stage and the details could change along the way.
“I always encourage people to not judge an early stage two-person startup like you might a public entity,” Williams said. “If nothing else, I hope Make Sunsets helps encourage a bunch more founders to take action to really make a positive impact on our planet.”
Make Sunsets has also received venture capital funding from Pioneer Fund, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, mostly disparaged the idea of Make Sunsets because there are no international governance standards for solar geoengineering yet.
But he’s not surprised someone’s trying it.
“This all sounds crazy. A for-profit company trying to make money by cooling the planet. Crazy, yes, but perhaps asign of the times?” Pasztor told CNBC. “The climate crisis is getting worse by the day. The world is getting — and will continue to get — warmer. Governments are not taking their responsibilities seriously enough. And we live in a capitalist society where actors make money in many different ways, like it or not. So how surprising is this?”
UCLA’s Parson wasn’t particularly surprised either, as he wrote in a blog post forLegal Planet. “Those following debates on active climate interventions have been expecting — and worrying about — something like this for a few years.”
The climate crisis is getting worse by the day. The world is getting – and will continue to get — warmer. Governments are not taking their responsibilities seriously enough. And we live in a capitalist society where actors make money in many different ways, like it or not. So how surprising is this?
Janos Pasztor
Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative
Unsurprising or not, experts in the field object to what they see as rogue and dangerous boundary pushing.
“It makes no sense as a business nor as a statement,” said Harvard professor David Keith, who has been working on the topic since the late 1980s.
The critical issue with solar geoengineering is trust and that trust must be earned carefully, Keith said on Twitter after the MIT Technology Review earlier wrote about Make Sunsets.
“There is no reasonable doubt that commercial-off-the-shelf tech could be adapted to cool the planet at a tiny cost using strat aerosols. Science suggests benefits could be far larger than risks,” Keith wrote. “But the research community is thin and distrust is widespread. Trust must be earned with a far broader, more inclusive research effort, one that makes systematic efforts to look for errors and uncertainty.”
Kelly Wanser, the executive director of SilverLining, an organization promoting research and governance of climate interventions, says that it’s impossible to measure the effects of solar geoengineering accurately enough to sell cooling credits.
“Currently, the effect of releasing quantities of particles into the atmosphere cannot be attributed or quantified, due to two major areas of uncertainty in related climate science: the effects of particles (aerosols) on clouds and climate, and uncertain side effects of specific approaches, for which any credits would have to be adjusted,” Wanser told CNBC. “No one who supports meaningful climate outcomes or healthy credit markets should engage with this now.”
Pasztor objects because the impacts of solar geoengineering are global, so he believes it’s inappropriate for a single entity to be moving forward without careful governance structures and buy-in from a wide group of stakeholders.
Parson thinks the balloon launches aren’t codified enough for providing real research answers. He also believes injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere shouldn’t be the work of a private company.
“There is plenty of incentive for self-interested actors, particularly those with revenues on the line, to misrepresent these. Nothing about this process, except perhaps specific aspects of implementation under some hypothetical future governmental or intergovernmental control, can be entrusted to private firms,” he wrote.
Iseman isn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of solar geoengineering being managed by a private company, either. But he doesn’t think international governments will cooperate and coordinate in enough time.
“While we don’t have meaningful enough international cooperation for something like the UN to run this right now, we do have plenty of companies that dominate their category worldwide. So as as depressing philosophically as that sounds, the most likely way that I think this will happen is that one company gets the social permission and government sign off — or at least turning a blind eye — to do this worldwide,” Iseman told CNBC.
“That is millions of lives and hundreds of thousands of species saved — compared to not doing this at all,” Iseman said.
Droughts are a growing threat to global food production, particularly in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS
by Busani Bafana (bulawayo)
Inter Press Service
BULAWAYO, Jan 06 (IPS) – Escalating conflict and climate change threaten the implementation of the Great Green Wall Initiative (GGWI), an ambitious land restoration project across Africa.
Promoters of the Great Green Wall have called for strong political will in engendering peace and increasing investment in environmental preservation, which the project launched 16 years ago seeks to enhance.
Competition over natural resources that are affected by climate change is fueling interstate conflicts, especially in West Africa, a region in the path of the Great Green Wall. The Wall is an Africa-led project to stop the march of desertification across Africa through the restoration of more than 100 million hectares of degraded land.
These trees will grow money
The project was initially aimed at planting trees in the Sahel region from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, but its scope has been expanded to cover the restoration of degraded land in more than 20 countries with a view to sequestering 250 million tonnes of carbon and creating 10 million green jobs by 2030, the promoters of the project say.
To date, the project has covered more than 4 percent of the target 100 million hectares, but it is making good progress to make the deadline, says Paul Elvis Tangem, coordinator for the Great Green Wall Initiative at the African Union Commission.
According to a United Nations status report, the Great Green Wall needs to cover 8 million hectares of land a year at a cost of up to $4.3 billion if it is to meet the implementation deadline.
Tangem says the project, which has received multiple funding from governments, donors, and multilateral development banks, would need more than 50 billion US Dollars to be realized by 2030. Currently, about 27 billion US dollars has been pledged, a seemingly huge amount which Tangem says is not much if the return on investment at 1:7 US dollars in nature-based solutions is considered.
Tangem notes that the escalating impacts of climate change across Africa justify the speedy implementation of the project, which is now more than just planting millions of trees across Africa but a holistic approach to unlocking economic and ecological benefits for many countries.
Launched in 2007, the Great Green Wall is envisaged that the land restoration initiative will boost economic prosperity in the participating countries, create employment, reduce hunger and reduce conflict, which has been linked to a fight over access to and use of natural resources across the width of Africa.
“The various COPs from UNFCCC COP 15, the UNFCCC-COP27, and the CBDCOP15 have recognized the Great Green wall as an important project giving more impetus to mainstream it in all development plans and giving more visibility to it,” Tangem said, noting that the current climate change impacts and conflicts arising from natural resource use were challenges that the project was seeking to solve.
Restoring land, restoring peace
Conflicts and climate are the greatest threats to the full realization of the Great Green Wall currently, Tangem explained, adding that the impact of drought across Africa has justified the importance of the GGWI, which has garnered global attention as a solution to land degradation, drought, and desertification.
“The main challenges we have now, especially for farmers, is the issue of grazelands which is the biggest push of conflict in the drylands of Africa,” Tangem told IPS in an interview, highlighting that there was high competition for rangelands between countries and within countries, especially in West Africa where part of the Great Green Wall runs. He cited the conflict in the Tigray region as less political and more environmental.
“It is the competition for land, the politics of it is what we see, but the underlying causes are natural resources,” said Tangem. “People do not want to speak the truth, but many conflicts in Africa are basically in the drylands, which are the areas most vulnerable to climate change and where the GGWI is focusing on. So we have a challenge.”
Remarking that it was now impossible to work in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger Republic, Chad, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Eritrea as a result of conflict, Tangem underscored the need to restore peace by restoring the environment.
The biggest challenge we are having today is security,” Tangem observed. “Conflicts are a big, big challenge. Most of the challenges that are happening now are because of competition for natural resources, the use of benefit sharing of the scarce resources from water, fertile land, fishing, and pastoral lands.”
When the Great Green Wall Initiative started, there was skepticism that it was a ‘white elephant’, Tangem said, but now it was the project to support.
Droughts are a growing threat to global food production, particularly in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS
In November 2022, global leaders launched the International Drought Resilience Alliance to give political impetus to making land’s resilience to drought and climate change a reality by 2030. The Alliance is a boost to the Great Green Wall Initiative.
Droughts are hitting more often and harder than before, up nearly by a third since 2000. Climate change is expected to cause more severe droughts in the future. Recent droughts in Australia, Europe, the western United States, Chile, the Horn, and Southern Africa show that no country or region is immune to their impacts, which run into billions of dollars each year, not to mention human suffering, says Ibrahim Thiaw, Executive Secretary, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
The United Nations has recognized the Great Green Wall Initiative as one of 10 pioneering efforts to revive the natural world, designating it as one of its inaugural World Restoration Flagships.
Tangem said this recognition of the Great Green Wall Initiative as a key programme for land restoration had elevated it beyond being an African project.
“When people were still talking about the reality of climate change, Africa saw the need to respond to this challenge through this programme. The project has taken desertification and drought to the global agenda,” Tangem said.
Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), warns that the world cannot turn a blind eye to the impacts and effects of degraded lands in places like the Sahel, where millions face multiple vulnerabilities, including climate shocks and conflict. Action to tackle the drought is of utmost urgency, Andersen stressed.
Noting that desertification was becoming a massive crisis, Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, which is part of the International Drought Resilience Alliance, said the alliance is focusing on finding nature-based solutions and the right technology and societal approaches to prevent further land degradation.
Presidents Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón of Spain and Macky Sall of Senegal rallied world leaders to create the Alliance as “a specific solution for the United Nations” to the impacts of climate change. In a joint communication, they declared that building resilience to drought disasters was the way to secure the gains made on sustainable development goals, particularly for the most vulnerable people.
IPS UN Bureau Report
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The average consumer may not realize how much power goes into placing the targeted ad they see online every day. So for many, the hidden impact of digital advertising may come as a surprise: Digital advertising has a massive carbon footprint. A typical digital-ad campaign for a single brand can produce hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide. In the U.K., for example, an average digital ad campaign emits over 5.4 tons of CO2. To put that number in perspective, this accounts for one-half of one consumer’s annual emissions in the U.K. and over one-third of carbon emissions from fossil fuel per capita in the U.S.
The world is failing to reach the Paris Agreement’s target to limit the rise of global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in a multitude of ways, so you might be wondering: Why do we need to pay special attention to the amount of CO2 emissions contributed by online advertising specifically? Well, one reason seems obvious: such emissions often go unacknowledged.
Like it or not, the global online advertising industry has a massive influence on everyone, making us all part of the problem. Aside from being a powerful driver of our frequently excessive (and wasteful) shopping habits, the mere daily viewing of multiple search ads, banners, interstitials and video pre-rolls, in addition to hundreds of the so-to-speak digital-out-of-home ads (on the streets, in shopping malls and elsewhere) has a massive impact on the global carbon footprint.
Just think about it: A footprint of one short email is estimated at 0.3 grams of CO2, and this number can grow up to 17g for a longer version, according to Mike Berners-Lee’s research. And how many of those do you get every day? Tens, if not hundreds, and counting.
And while the jury’s still out on whether we can make online advertising carbon-neutral, this key question remains: What actual steps do we need to take to get closer to this goal?
But first, let’s define what carbon neutrality actually means.
What is carbon neutrality?
To put it simply, carbon neutrality implies the amount of carbon emissions is balanced with the amount of absorbed emissions by natural carbon sinks (e.g. rainforests).
So to count as a carbon-neutral company, a business needs to demonstrate its amount of emitted greenhouse gasses are being negated by the amount of adsorbed gasses, either by reducing the number of its emissions or by purchasing the so-to-speak carbon offset credits — in other words, permits to emit a specific amount of greenhouse gasses, like CO2.
Identifying the sources of emissions in the digital ad supply chain
The first step in reducing digital ad emissions is to identify the main sources of these emissions in the digital ad supply chain. When it comes to online advertising, aside from the travel costs, the key sources of emissions include data transmission, data center and device usage in each of the following:
The production of ad creatives — from equipment rental to post-production and crew travel.
Programmatic ad transactions — defined as the automated buying and selling of online advertising space — play a huge role in the production of carbon emissions. For example, WPP, the world’s largest investor in media advertising, reports that 55% of its current carbon emissions come from the programmatic supply chain that delivers campaigns on behalf of its clients.
Ad targeting and measurement — this includes the selection of audience segments, uploading the audience segment to the advertising platform, and the continuous tracking of ad performance by multiple scripts on websites.
The delivery of ads across desktop and mobile web, connected TVs and mobile apps — for instance, streaming a one-minute video on a 50-inch LED TV in the U.S. reportedly results in 0.98g CO2 emissions, whereas watching the same video on one’s smartphone reduces the carbon footprint by almost six times.
So, what are the possible solutions to reduce digital ad carbon emissions, and who should act on it?
Advertisers need to drive change
While every member of the advertising supply chain needs to do their part towards achieving carbon neutrality, brands and media agencies need to take an extra step, specifically in online ad production and media planning areas.
Namely, the scope of actions may include:
The localization of ad production so it’s closer to the team’s location to reduce travel-related carbon emissions.
The use of 3D modeling animation instead of video shooting to minimize the CO2 emissions produced by production crew travels and utilized equipment.
The production of short video ads, instead of long ones. As a general rule, the shorter the video, the less the file weighs, and the less server load its delivery and streaming require. This, in turn, should result in reduced CO2 emissions by viewers’ devices, data transmission and data centers.
A reduction of the size of image ads. Similarly to video ads, the lighter the image file, the fewer CO2 emissions it emits.
The upcycling of existing media creatives by tweaking old video and image ads instead of creating new ones to curtail carbon footprint.
The delivery of ads during non-peak times in order to balance off-peak server load, which usually requires extra power consumption and results in larger CO2 emissions.
On a broader scale, making a positive change also implies a shift in the perception of brand safety, that is, adding sustainability benchmarks to the picture.
First, this involves defining the brand purpose and actually investing in the promotion of carbon-conscious behavior among the company’s customers.
Second, this means optimizing for or even adding extra incentives for carbon-efficient publishers and ad tech partners (i.e. being willing to pay a higher price for placing ads on carbon-efficient websites, spending more money on carbon-efficient video ad servers, etc.), hence driving the further transformation of the entire ecosystem.
And third, this requires the maximization of return on CO2 emissions, in addition to ROI. In other words, brands need to strive for the maximum reduction of carbon emissions, while maintaining overall advertising efficiency. For instance, a company may choose to target smartphone users with short video ads (e.g. 5- or 10-second long) instead of longer ones, which happen to perform better in the mobile segment.
But real change cannot be achieved without digital ad consumers
While the majority of top-tier brands — like the members of the World Association of Advertisers (WFA) — have already made their Planet Pledge, and tech giants such as Microsoft and Google have reaffirmed their sustainability commitments, actual positive change would not be impossible without digital ad consumers.
Even though most businesses’ carbon-neutrality promises sound ambitious, chances are the reported data is being miscalculated, misrepresented or both. It’s up to us, the consumers to keep them accountable, by doing the following:
An analysis of climate pledges that have already been made. You can do this by reviewing the brand’s website and other digital resources to find out which promises on CO2 carbon footprint reduction have already been made.
Continuously monitoring progress achieved. For example, check if the brand publishes regular reports on how it has been reducing carbon emissions in the past quarter, year, and so on.
Staying alert for the greenwashing red flags. A company that doesn’t share granular data on emissions, or keeps the message brief, like “We’ve cut emissions by half and now we’re carbon-neutral” are all common signs of greenwashing.
Being ready to leave, if the expectations haven’t been met. You might find out your favorite brand has been caught lying or misrepresenting its data on CO2 emissions multiple times. Taking a stand by quitting the use of its products or services ensures they’re being held accountable for deceptive and unethical marketing practices.
Ultimately, it’s up to each of us to make our own carbon-conscious decisions, when it comes to our media perception, ad consumption and our shopping habits. If we don’t, we’ll pay an even greater price.
And as a growing number of European ski resorts at lower altitudes struggle to provide adequate snow cover for their early-season visitors, the WMO pointed to widely accepted peer-reviewed scientific data from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicating that the frequency of cold spells and frost days “will decrease”.
“Strong declines in glaciers, permafrost, snow cover extent, and snow seasonal duration at high latitudes/altitudes are observed and will continue in a warming world,” the IPCC said.
According to the UN agency, New Year temperatures soared above 20 degrees Celsius (C) in many European countries, even in Central Europe.
National and many local temperature records for December and January were also broken in several countries, from southern Spain to eastern and northern parts of Europe, WMO said.
Temperatures lift off in Spain
At Spain’s Bilbao airport, a reading of 25.1C on 1 January smashed the previous all-time record established 12 months earlier, by 0.7C.
And in the eastern French city of Besançon, which is usually chilly at this time of year, temperatures hit a new all-time high of 18.6 degrees on New Year’s Day, 1.8C above the previous record, dating back to January 1918.
In the German city of Dresden, the 1961 New Year’s Eve record of 17.7C was left trailing by the 19.4C reading taken on 31 December 2022, just as Poland’s Warsaw residents saw in the new year with temperatures peaking at 18.9C, a staggering 5.1C higher than the previous all-time record for January, from 1993.
Further north, in Denmark’s Lolland island, 2023 started with a new high of 12.6C, overtaking the 12.4C record set in 2005.
Highs and lows
WMO attributed the warm spell in Europe to a high-pressure zone over the Mediterranean region which encountered an Atlantic low-pressure system.
Their interaction “induced a strong south-west flux that brought warm air from north-western Africa to middle latitudes”, the UN agency explained, adding that this hotter-than-normal air “was further warmed when passing the North Atlantic, due to a higher-than-normal sea surface temperature”.
Highlighting the influence of warmer sea waters on weather patterns, the WMO noted that in the eastern North Atlantic, sea surface temperature was 1C to 2C higher than normal, and “near the coasts of Iberia, even more”.
“All this caused record-breaking heat in several European countries on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day,” WMO concluded.
In recent years, Bosnia and Herzegovina in Eastern Europe, has been impacted by climate change-related extreme weather, from intense rainfall to heat waves.
Sign of the times
The weather extremes experienced in Europe are projected to carry on increasing, the WMO warned, as it referenced recent analysis published with “high confidence” by the influential UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “Regardless of future levels of global warming, temperatures will rise in all European areas at a rate exceeding global mean temperature changes, similar to past observations,” the IPCC said.
According to the IPCC’s regional fact sheet for Europe, “the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, including marine heatwaves, have increased in recent decades and are projected to keep increasing regardless of the greenhouse gas emissions scenario”.
The panel’s experts further warned that “critical thresholds” for the environment and humans “are projected to be exceeded for global warming of 2C and higher”.
Oslo, Norway — Electric vehicles accounted for almost four out of every five new car registrations in Norway last year, setting a new record, according to figures released Monday. Led by U.S. carmaker Tesla, which topped the list with a 12.2% market share, 138,265 new electric cars were sold in the Scandinavian country last year, representing 79.3% of total passenger car sales, the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said in a statement.
In doing so, Norway, which is both a major producer of oil and gas, as well as a pioneer for zero-emission cars, comfortably beat the previous record of 64.5% set in 2021.
Comparatively, electric cars made up just 8.6% of new car registrations in the European Union over the first nine months of 2022.
In December alone, electric cars hogged 82.8% of sales as Norwegian households rushed to buy them before a tax change came into force in 2023.
An electric vehicle (EV) passes the Opera House in Oslo, Norway, May 5, 2022.
Fredrik Solstad/Bloomberg/Getty
Norway aims for all new cars to be “zero emission” — in other words, electric or hydrogen – by 2025.
“Eight out of 10 people choosing fully electric instead of combustion engines is a considerable step towards Norway reaching its climate goal of 100% BEV [battery electric vehicle] sales in 2025,” said Christina Bu, Secretary General of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association.
“Our message to the rest of the world is crystal clear: Now there is no excuse for the internal combustion engines’ unnecessary pollution when the climate crisis is so urgent to solve,” she said in a statement
To promote sales in Norway, EVs have benefitted from being tax-free, as well as being charged lower fares for road tolls and public parking.
But with their popularity growing, and subsequent loss of income for the state, Norwegian authorities have started to roll back some of the benefits.
As of January 1, the 25% sales tax exemption on the purchase of new electric vehicles applies only to the first 500,000 Norwegian kroner (about $50,500) of the price.
About one in five cars on Norwegian roads are currently electric.
Radio Free Europe’s return to prominence in Russia and former Soviet territories; Earth currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction, according to scientists; Promising new weight loss medication in short supply and often not covered by insurance.
SYDNEY, Jan 02 (IPS) – 2022 has been a year of great uncertainty when it seemed the world perilously reached the brink of self-destruction – be it human-induced climate change or military conflict. Welcoming 2022, we had enough reasons to be optimistic; but it was another ‘year of living dangerously’ – Tahun vivere pericoloso in the words of Soekarno, or an annus horribilis in the words of the late Queen Elizabeth.
Anis Chowdhury
No end to Covid-19
The joy of the COVID vaccine discovery quickly vanished as the ‘vaccine apartheid‘ blatantly prioritised lives in rich nations, especially of the wealthy, over the ‘wretched of the earth’, and corporate profit triumphed over people’s lives. Meanwhile, Dr Anthony Fauci’s sober warning of a more dangerous COVID variant emerging this winter may come to be true as China, the country of 1.4 billion, struggles to deal with the surge in cases since it has largely abandoned its unpopular ‘zero COVID’ policy.
New cold war turns into proxy war
Whereas the global pandemic required extraordinary global unity, unfortunately, a ‘new cold war’ quickly turned into a ‘hot war’, bringing the world to the verge of a devastating nuclear war for the first time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Russia, finding itself cornered by an expanding NATO, decided most foolishly to invade Ukraine, believing it could overrun the country without any resistance. While the heroic Ukrainians continue to defend their motherland, Russia seems to have become bogged down in a proxy war with NATO.
If the proxy war with Russia was not enough, the US is recklessly provoking China towards another ‘hot war’, following Trump’s trade war. Clearly the monopoly capital of the US and its military-industrial complex are pushing the US to a ‘Thucydides Trap‘. More than 60 years ago, President Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation, warned about the military-industrial complex, a formidable union of defence contractors and the armed forces. Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general, who led the allies on D-Day, saw the military-industrial complex as a threat to democratic government and global peace. Alas, his dire warning fell on deaf ears.
Western hypocrisy exposed
The Russian invasion of Ukraine exposed Western pretence. The Western mainstream media unashamedly declared the dislocation of Ukrainians intolerable because the victims are blue-eyed, blond-haired Europeans, not “uncivilized” third world inhabitants or “barbaric” Arabs. Western duplicity is nowhere as blatant as it is in the case of the Palestinian plight. To them, Russia’s occupation and annexation of parts of Ukraine is illegal; but Israel’s occupation and annexation of Palestinian land as well as gross human rights violations are justified on various professed grounds, e.g., right to protection from “terrorist acts”.
Leadership vacuum
The world now needs Eisenhower to resist the military-industrial complex; it needs Teddy Roosevelt to break monopoly capital’s stranglehold and to protect consumers, workers and the environment; it needs Franklin Roosevelt to promote multilateralism and social justice; it needs Kennedy to defuse crises. At the height of the ‘old cold war’, Kennedy ate humble pie by quietly removing the security threat to the USSR posed by offensive weapons (Jupiter MRBMs) deployed in Turkey, and publicly pledging that the US would never invade Cuba or attempt another Bay of Pigs operation. Eisenhower was magnanimous enough to bear the lion’s share of financing the USSR’s proposal for global efforts to eradicate smallpox – the leading cause of death and blindness then.
Alas, we see no such signs in a world of Trump, Biden, Johnson, Marcon and Scholz. Even ‘out of touch‘, billionaire Sunak does not inspire any hope, despite being the first coloured person of colonial descent to occupy the 10 Downing Street. Sunak will probably try to prove himself holier than the Pope, instead of promoting the interest of former colonies or descendants of colonial subjects or downtrodden.
No better leadership in the South
The South is also devoid of visionaries, such as Nkrumah or Nehru who promoted non-alignment and Southern unity. Nehru’s land is now overtaken by Modi’s Hindutva movement, openly promoting violence against minorities. Unsurprisingly, Modi was in sync with Trump; but he equally cosies up to Biden professing to promote democracy and human rights. Sadly, Mandela’s South Africa is mired in scandal after scandal.
Although many, including myself, eagerly looked forward to Lula’s victory in Brazil, neither his return to power nor the so-called ‘second pink tide’ in Latin America should make one overly joyous. The Left has demonstrated its propensity to fracture or implode easily, e.g., contributing to Correa’s defeat in Ecuador, or aiding the Right to strike back in Peru. In Colombia, Finance capital, mining giants and the elite have already ganged up on Petro’s vow to tackle inequality with tax and land reforms and his proposed ban on new oil and gas exploration. Chile’s Boric has faced setbacks including the rejection of a new constitution, forcing his concessions to the Centre-Right. Constitutional coup is a common strategy of the established vested interest.
Some inspirations down under
Down under, the Australians soundly defeated an increasingly autocratic and unaccountable conservative government in May. It was the government that implemented inhumane off-shore detention centres for people seeking to escape persecution and starvation in their own countries (about to be emulated by the UK Tory Govt.). It also was cruel enough to pursue vulnerable people on social security payments with a robotic program whilst cutting taxes for the wealthy and letting them evade tax. It was the government which created plumb jobs for the boys. It was the government which continued to deny climate science and refused to act.
Finally, the Australians got rid of it. Labor showed extraordinary discipline in opposition, and in government, it stood up to big business and vested interests. It has quickly moved to put in place the processes to:
set up an independent anti-corruption body with real teeth;
recognise the voice of First Nations people;
respect human rights of asylum seekers languishing in detention centres;
review RBA’s performance to ensure monetary policy serves broader national interest, not the finance; and
balance geo-political alliances.
Its progressive agenda is quite long. Let me end here, wishing the Australian Labor Government success to inspire other nations – large and small, developed and developing; and with best wishes for you to be safe and remain healthy, even if not quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
In what year will the human population grow too large for the Earth to sustain? The answer is about 1970, according to research by the World Wildlife Fund. In 1970, the planet’s 3 and a half billion people were sustainable. But on this New Year’s Day, the population is 8 billion. Today, wild plants and animals are running out of places to live. The scientists you’re about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction on a scale unseen since the dinosaurs. We’re going to show you a possible solution, but first, have a look at how humanity is already suffering from the vanishing wild.
In Washington state, the Salish Sea helped feed the world.
Dana Wilson: With this weather and the way things feel once I get out here, it’s time to be fishing, that’s what it feels like.
Commercial fisherman Dana Wilson supported a family on the Salish Sea’s legendary wealth of salmon. He remembers propellers churning the water off blaine, washington and cranes straining for the state’s 200 million dollar annual catch.
Dana Wilson: That used to be a buying station, they’re gone now, they don’t buy anymore. So, that building over there used to buy salmon, they don’t buy salmon anymore, it’s just not here.
In 1991, one salmon species was endangered. Today, 14 salmon populations are foundering. They’ve been crowded out of rivers by habitat destruction, warming, and pollution. Dana Wilson used to fish all summer. Today, a conservation authority grants rare, fleeting, permission to throw a net.
Scott Pelley: There was a season.
Dana Wilson: There was a season.
Scott Pelley: Now there’s a day?
Dana Wilson: There’s a day, and sometimes it’s hours. Sometimes you might get 12 hours, 16 hours. that’s what we’re down to.
Dana Wilson
Here, the vanishing wild scuttled a way of life that began with native tribes a 1,000 years ago.
Armando Brionez: I don’t remember anybody doing anything other than salmon fishing.
Fisherman Armando Brionez is a member of the Lummi Tribe, which calls itself “people of the salmon.” He didn’t imagine the rich harvest would end with his five fishing boats.
Armando Brionez: All of a sudden, you’re trying to figure out, “Well, how am I gonna make that paycheck for my family?” Well for me it was like well, I have a backup for a backup, for a backup, for a backup.
Armando Brionez
Brionez’s ‘backups’ include his new food truck, switching to crab fishing, and consulting on cannabis farms. His scramble to adapt is being repeated around the world. A World Wildlife Fund study says that in the past 50 years, the abundance of global wildlife has collapsed 69%, mostly for the same reason.
Paul Ehrlich: Too many people, too much consumption and growth mania.
At the age of 90, biologist Paul Ehrlich may have lived long enough to see some of his dire prophecies come true.
Scott Pelley: You seem to be saying that humanity is not sustainable?
Paul Ehrlich: Oh, humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths. Not clear where they’re gonna come from.
Scott Pelley: Just in terms of the resources that would be required?
Paul Ehrlich: Resources that would be required, the systems that support our lives, which of course are the biodiversity that we’re wiping out. Humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we’re sawing off.
In 1968, Ehrlich, a biology professor at Stanford, became a doomsday celebrity with a bestseller forecasting the collapse of nature.
Scott Pelley: When “The Population Bomb” came out, you were described as an alarmist.
Paul Ehrlich: I was alarmed. I am still alarmed. All of my colleagues are alarmed.
Paul Ehrlich
The alarm Ehrlich sounded in ’68 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine. He was wrong about that. The green revolution fed the world. But he also wrote in ’68 that heat from greenhouse gases would melt polar ice and humanity would overwhelm the wild. Today, humans have taken over 70% of the planet’s land and 70% of the freshwater.
Paul Ehrlich: The rate of extinction is extraordinarily high now and getting higher all the time.
We know the rate of extinction is ‘extraordinarily high’ because of a study of the fossil record by biologist Tony Barnosky, Ehrlich’s Stanford colleague.
Tony Barnosky: The data are rock solid. I don’t think you’ll find a scientist that will say we’re not in an extinction crisis.
Barnosky’s research suggests today’s rate of extinction is up to 100 times faster than is typical in the nearly 4 billion year history of life. These peaks represent the few times that life collapsed globally. And the last was the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
Tony Barnosky: There are five times in Earth’s history where we had mass extinctions. And by mass extinctions, I mean at least 75%, three quarters of the known species disappearing from the face of the Earth. Now we’re witnessing what a lot of people are calling the sixth mass extinction where the same thing could happen on our watch.
Liz Hadly: it’s a horrific state of the planet when common species, the ubiquitous species that we’re familiar with are declining.
Tony Barnosky’s colleague in the study of extinction is his wife, biologist Liz Hadly, faculty director at Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Research Preserve in California.
Tony Barnosky and Liz Hadly
Liz Hadly: You know, I see it in my mind and it’s a really sad state. If you’ve spent any time in California, you know the loss of water. The loss of water means that there are dead salmon you see in the river right before your eyes. But it also means the demise of those birds that rely on the salmon fishery, eagles. It means, you know, things like minks and otters that rely on fish. It means that our habitats that we’re used to, the forests that– you know, 3,000-year-old forests are going to be gone. So it means silence. And it means some very catastrophic events because it’s happening so quickly.
Tony Barnosky: It means you look out your window, and three quarters of what you think ought to be there is no longer there. That’s what mass extinction looks like.
Liz Hadly: What we see just in California is, you know, the loss of our iconic state symbols. We have no more grizzly bears in California.
Scott Pelley: The only grizzly bears in California are on the state flag?
Tony Barnosky: that’s our state mammal and they are not here anymore.
Scott Pelley: Is it too much to say that we’re killing the planet?
Liz Hadly: No.
Tony Barnosky: I would say it is too much to say that we’re killing the planet, because the planet’s gonna be fine. What we’re doing is we’re killing our way of life.
The worst of the killing is in Latin America where the World Wildlife Fund study says the abundance of wildlife has fallen 94% since 1970. But it was also in Latin America that we found the possibility of hope.
Mexican ecologist Gerardo Ceballos is one of the world’s leading scientists on extinction. He told us the only solution is to save the one third of the Earth that remains wild. To prove it, he’s running a 3,000-square-mile experiment. In the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve near Guatemala, he is paying family farmers to stop cutting the forest.
Gerardo Ceballos: We’re going to pay each family certain amount of money that is more than you will get cutting down the forest, if you protect it
Scott Pelley: And how much are you paying out every year?
Gerardo Ceballos: For instance, each family here will get around $1,000.
Gerardo Ceballos
More than enough, here, to make up for lost farmland. In total, the payouts come to $1.5 million a year. Or about $2,000 per square mile. The tab is paid through the charity of wealthy donors.
Gerardo Ceballos: the investment to protect what is left is, I mean, really small
The payoff on that investment is being collected on Ceballos’ jungle cameras. Thirty years ago the jaguar was very nearly extinct in Mexico. Now Ceballos says they’ve rebounded to about 600 in the reserve.
Scott Pelley: There are other places where there are reserves around the world where they’ve been able to increase the populations of certain species. But I wonder, are all these little success stories enough to prevent mass extinction?
Gerardo Ceballos: All the big success that we have in protecting forests and recovering animals, like tigers in India, jaguars in Mexico, elephants in Botswana, and so on, are incredible, amazing, successes. But they are like grains of sand in a beach. And to really make a big impact we need to scale up this 10,000 times. So, they are important because they give us hope. But they are completely insufficient to cope with climate change.
Scott Pelley: So what would the world have to do?
Gerardo Ceballos: What we will have to do is to really understand that the climate change and the species extinction is a threat to humanity. And then put all the machinery of society: political, economic, and social, towards finding solutions to the problems.
Finding solutions to the problems was the goal, two weeks ago, at the U.N. Biodiversity Conference, where nations agreed to conservation targets. But at the same meeting in 2010, those nations agreed to limit the destruction of the Earth by 2020—and not one of those goals was met. This, despite thousands of studies including the continuing research of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich.
Scott Pelley: You know that there is no political will to do any of the things that you’re recommending.
Paul Ehrlich: I know there’s no political will to do any of the things that I’m concerned with, which is exactly why I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.
In the 50 years since Ehrlich’s population bomb, humanity’s feasting on resources has tripled. We’re already consuming 175% of what the Earth can regenerate. And, consider, half of humanity, about four billion, live on less than $10 a day. They aspire to cars, air conditioning and a rich diet. But they won’t be fed by the fishermen of Washington’s Salish Sea, including Armando Brionez.
Scott Pelley: The tribe has been fishing salmon here for hundreds of years?
Armando Brionez: Yeah.
Scott Pelley: And your generation is seeing the end of that?
Armando Brionez: It’s getting harder and harder. I hate to say– I don’t wanna say it’s the end of it.
Scott Pelley: why do you feel so emotionally attached to this?
Armando Brionez: It’s everything we know. I’m fortunate enough to know where I know a lot of different things. I’ve done a lotta different things in my life. I’ve gotten good at evolving and changing. But not everybody here is built like that. To some of us this is what they know, this is all they know.
The five mass extinctions of the ancient past were caused by natural calamities—volcanoes, and an asteroid. Today, if the science is right, humanity may have to survive a sixth mass extinction in a world of its own making.
Produced by Maria Gavrilovic. Associate producer, Alex Ortiz. Broadcast associate, Michelle Karim. Edited by April Wilson.
