tagged w/ Fossil Fuels
-
If you assume that Bill Gates is so well informed about all his philanthropic targets that you take his word at face value, you would be in good company, but you might be terribly wrong. Organizations well versed in the agricultural issues facing developing nations are saying his annual letter, released last week, is completely mistaken when it asserts that a lack of support for GMO crop development is responsible, in part, for allowing world hunger to endure. We interviewed Heather Pilatic, Ph.D., co-director of the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), to show us the other, important side of the story.
TakePart: In the introduction to his letter, Bill Gates cites the Green Revolution of the 1960s and '70s, saying scientists created new seed varieties for rice, wheat, and maize, and that this resulted in increased crop yield and a decrease in extreme poverty around the world. Do you agree that this is a model to use moving forward?
Heather Pilatic: The Green Revolution is a story that some people like to tell, but it has little basis in historical fact. Take the Green Revolution’s origins in 1940s Mexico, for instance. It was not really about feeding the world; Mexico was a food exporter at the time. Rather, the aims included stabilizing restive rural populations in our neighbor to the south, and making friends with a government that at the time was selling supplies to the World War II Axis powers and confiscating oil fields held by Standard Oil (a funding source for the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the key architects of the Green Revolution).
We can also learn from India, the Green Revolution’s next stop after Mexico. India embraced the Green Revolution model of chemical-intensive agriculture. Now it is the world’s second biggest rice grower with surplus grain in government warehouses. Yet India has more starving people than sub-Saharan Africa—at more than 200 million, that’s nearly a quarter of its population. History shows that a narrow focus on increasing crop yield through chemical-seed packages reduces neither hunger nor poverty.
So no, we do not agree that the Green Revolution offers a promising model for addressing poverty.
TakePart: Bill Gates is urging that more money be donated to agricultural innovation, including crop GMOs, because "one in seven people will continue living needlessly on the edge of starvation." Of course, this argument worries all of us. Will you explain PANNA's perspective?
Heather Pilatic: We could not agree with Gates more on the first point. Investment in agriculture in the developing world is enormously efficient and more impactful on the ground than investment in just about any other sector. It is also true that more people than ever before are going hungry, needlessly. We have enough food to go around now. We disagree with Gates on two points—one scientific and one political.
First, the science. Most of the rest of the world's experts agree that GMOs are not what the world's poor need to feed themselves. The science simply doesn't bear this claim out. Our staff scientist was a lead author in the most comprehensive analysis of global agriculture ever undertaken, the UN & World Bank's International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (the IAASTD). After four years and with the input of over 400 experts, and reams of evidence, the IAASTD concluded that the developing world's best bet for feeding itself in the 21st century was explicitly not the kind of chemically intensive farming that accompanies GMO seeds. Rather, these experts found that smaller scale, farmer-driven, knowledge-intensive, ecological agriculture is one of the most promising ways forward for the developing world in particular. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has reported that ecological farming can double food production within 10 years. This is the kind of agriculture we should be investing in.
Second, the political—and this cuts two ways. We must finally recognize that hunger is a problem of poverty and access to resources, especially land, not agricultural yield. The solution to world hunger is a political one: stop kicking farmers off their land and dumping product on the world market that puts them out of business; protect farmers’ rights to save and exchange seed; kick the bankers out of food-crop commodities speculation, they're playing roulette with our food system; write fair trade policies; listen to the world's poor, they know what they need...in short, democratize food and farming if you want to address hunger.
Finally, here in the U.S., kick the farm lobby out of Congress and the pesticide industry out of our federal regulatory agencies (EPA & USDA). Together, these two special interests have a chokehold on U.S. farm, aid and trade policy, and dominate our agricultural research agenda in ways that make it possible for a smart man like Bill Gates to believe and prosyletize on behalf of an approach to agriculture that A, the rest of the world knows is defunct; and B, has failed—after 14 years of commercialization and billions of dollars in public research funding—to deliver on a single one of its promises to the public.
More at the linkIf you assume that Bill Gates is so well informed about all his philanthropic targets... more
-
-
A loss of sea ice could be a cause of the bitter winds that have swept across the UK in the past week, weather experts say
The bitterly cold weather sweeping Britain and the rest of Europe has been linked by scientists with the ice-free seas of the Arctic, where global warming is exerting its greatest influence.
A dramatic loss of sea ice covering the Barents and Kara Seas above northern Russia could explain why a chill Arctic wind has engulfed much of Europe and killed 221 people over the past week.
The death toll from Arctic blast has been particularly severe in the Ukraine, where many of the dead have been people sleeping on the streets. Heating and food tents have been set up to ease their hardship. In Romania 24 people are known to have died and 17 in Poland.
A growing number of experts believe complex wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above.
In particular, the loss of Arctic sea ice could be influencing the development of high-pressure weather systems over northern Russia, which bring very cold winds from the Arctic and Siberia to Western Europe and the British Isles, the scientists believe. An intense anticyclone over north-west Russia is behind the bitterly cold easterly winds that have swept across Europe and some climate scientists say the lack of Arctic sea ice brought about by global warming is responsible.
"The current weather pattern fits earlier predictions of computer models for how the atmosphere responds to the loss of sea ice due to global warming," said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "The ice-free areas of the ocean act like a heater as the water is warmer than the Arctic air above it. This favours the formation of a high-pressure system near the Barents Sea, which steers cold air into Europe."
Sea ice covering the Barents and Kara Seas has been exceptionally low this winter, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado. But air temperatures above the Barents and Kara Seas have been higher than average. The relatively mild westerly winds that have kept Britain from freezing much of this winter have been blocked by fierce high pressure over north-west Russia, centred on an area just south of the Barents Sea.
Studies by scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research have confirmed a link between the loss of Arctic sea ice and the development of high-pressure zones in the polar region, which influence wind patterns at lower latitudes further south. Scientists found that as the cap of sea ice is removed from the ocean, huge amounts of heat are released from the sea into the colder air above, causing the air to rise. Rising air destabilises the atmosphere and alters the difference in air pressure between the Arctic and more southerly regions, changing wind patterns.
Professor Rahmstorf said the Alfred Wegener study confirms earlier predictions from computer models by Vladimir Petoukhov of the Potsdam Institute, who forecast colder winters in western Europe as a result of melting sea ice.
Dr Petoukhov and his colleague Vladimir Semenov were among the first scientists to suggest a link between the loss of sea ice and colder winters in Europe. Their 2009 study simulated the effects of disappearing sea ice and found that for some years to come the loss will increase the chances of colder winters.
"Whoever thinks that the shrinking of some far-away sea ice won't bother him could be wrong. There are complex interconnections in the climate system, and in the Barents-Kara Sea we might have discovered a powerful feedback mechanism," Dr Petoukhov said.
More at the linkA loss of sea ice could be a cause of the bitter winds that have swept across the UK... more
-
-
Remarkably, more than half of the country (58%) experienced either a top-ten driest or top-ten wettest year, a new record.
Percentage of the contiguous U.S. either in severe or greater drought (top 10% dryness) or extremely wet (top 10% wetness) during 2011, as computed using NOAA’s Climate Extremes Index. Image credit: NOAA/NCDC.
by Jeff Masters, cross-posted from the WunderBlog.
Rains unprecedented in 117 years of record keeping set new yearly precipitation totals in seven states during 2011, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center revealed in its preliminary year-end report for 2011.
Precipitation rankings for U.S. states in 2011. Seven states had their wettest year on record, and an additional ten states had a top-ten wettest year. Texas had its driest year on record, and four other states had a top-ten driest year. Image credit: NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.
An extraordinary twenty major U.S. cities had their wettest year on record during 2011. This smashes the previous record of ten cities with a wettest year, set in 1996, according to a comprehensive data base of 303 U.S. cities that have 90% of the U.S. population, maintained by Wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt. Despite the remarkable number of new wettest year records set, precipitation averaged across the contiguous U.S. during 2011 was near-average, ranking as the 45th driest year in the 117-year record. This occurred because of unprecedented dry conditions across much of the South, where Texas had its driest year on record.
Wettest, driest, and warmest year records set during 2011 for major U.S. cities. No major cities had their coldest year on record during 2011.
2011 sets a new U.S. record for combined wet and dry extremes [see top graph]
If you weren’t washing away in a flood during 2011, you were probably baking in a drought. The fraction of the contiguous U.S. covered by extremely wet conditions (top 10% historically) was 33% during 2011, ranking as the 2nd highest such coverage in the past 100 years. At the same time, extremely dry conditions (top 10% historically) covered 25% of the nation, ranking 6th highest in the past 100 years. The combined fraction of the country experiencing either severe drought or extremely wet conditions was 58%–the highest in a century of record keeping. Climate change science predicts that if the Earth continues to warm as expected, wet areas will tend to get wetter, and dry areas will tend to get drier–so 2011′s side-by-side extremes of very wet and very dry conditions should grow increasingly common in the coming decades.
23rd warmest year on record, and 2nd hottest summer for the U.S.
The year 2011 ranked as the 23rd warmest in U.S. history, with sixteen states recording a top-ten warmest year on record. Delaware had its warmest year on record, and Texas its second warmest. However, these statistics don’t convey the extremity of the summer of 2011–the hottest U.S. summer in 75 years. The only hotter summer–and by only 0.1°–was the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, when poor farming practices had turned much of the Midwest into a parking lot for generating extreme heat. The June – August 2011 average temperatures in Texas and Oklahoma were a remarkable 1.6°F and 1.3°F warmer than the previous hottest summer for a U.S. state–the summer of 1934 in Oklahoma. The U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI), which is sensitive to climate extremes in temperature, rainfall, dry streaks, and drought, indicated that an area nearly four times the average value was affected by extreme climate conditions during summer 2011. This is the third largest summer value of record, and came on the heels a spring season that was the most extreme on record. When averaged over the entire year, 2011 ranked as the 8th most extreme in U.S. history, since the fall weather was near-average for extremes. The CEI goes back to 1910.
More at the linkRemarkably, more than half of the country (58%) experienced either a top-ten driest or... more
-
-
Disclaimer: The events depicted in this video and the previous two parts are of global climate extremes for 2011 that were unusual or extreme in scope and fit the trend that suggests the strongest link between anthropogenic global warming and weather events through extreme precipitation events, floods and droughts. Nothing was inferred by this video and any such inferment placed on this by the viewer is based on their own preconceptions and biases. All photos depict the events and all information was gleaned from public sources for educational purposes as noted at the conclusion of the video.
~~~~
Previously I had posted two parts of this video series that I put together of climate extremes for 2011. Seeing just this one year in totality is an eye opener. With all three parts put together there is close to a half hour of information and pictures depicting the world we are making for our children and it is not a good report on the human species.
There is no mistaking anymore that we are affecting the cycles of this planet that provide the two most basic needs for our survival: food and water. The willful damage we are inflicting on our lifeline is irresponsible, arrogant and immoral regardless of what you think is the cause. This year requires REAL action. So please, pass this on and thanks for watching.
This was for me a labor of love and my heart goes out to all in this world who lost loved ones and who stilll deal with the effects of this crisis daily. May we collectively find the moral courage we need now to make this right as much as possibly can be done at this point.
CLIMATE CHANGE KILLS.
``
I thought this fit here based on the events covered in this recap video:
"Brenda Ekwurzel, a UCS climate scientist, emphasized the varying levels of scientific certainty when it comes to links between extreme weather and climate change. “In some cases, the links between extreme weather and climate change are crystal clear,” she said. “In other cases, the picture is murkier.”
Ekwurzel said scientists see the strongest links to extreme heat and shifts in precipitation away from lighter and toward heavier events, meaning longer periods of drought punctuated by heavy flooding. "
Link to enitre article is in the thread.Disclaimer: The events depicted in this video and the previous two parts are of global... more
-
-
Officials say a new US-backed coal plant outside Johannesburg will be a boon to the community. Locals beg to differ.
—By Kate Sheppard
Earlier this week, I traveled to South Africa's Mpumalanga province, the center of the country's coal industry and the home of one of the newest coal-fired power plants, Kusile. Most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that their tax dollars have been used to underwrite Kusile, but they are. And when completed, the 4,800-megawatt plant will be among the largest in the world.
EMalahleni, the municipality in which Kusile is located, means "place of coal" in Zulu. South Africa consumes 93 percent of all the coal used in Africa, much of that here in Mpumalanga. While much of it is burned in the region's 11 power plants, 25 percent of it is exported to other countries. South Africa is the fifth-largest producer of coal in the world, and 80 percent of its mining takes place in this province.
A significant chunk of Kusile's upfront financing—$805 million—came from a direct loan from the Export-Import Bank of the United States to Eskom, South Africa's state-owned electric power utility. Construction on the plant began in 2007 and is expected to be completed in 2015. In April 2011, ExIm agreed to provide the loan to the plant to help ensure its construction. Kusile will be the 12th coal-fired power plant in this area, which lies to the east of Johannesburg.
The Kusile power plant
The region is also home to the Sasol plant in Secunda, which is both the largest coal-to-liquids plant and the largest point source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. The plant produces 160,000 barrels of fuel from coal every day, which is used to power buses, planes, and automobiles in the country.
The South Africa-based environmental group Groundwork reported that in a single four-month period last year, the country exceeded its ambient air pollution standards 570 times—mostly due to the emissions from plants in this region. The national air quality law, which was passed in 2004, is actually pretty good, says Groundwork director Bobby Peek, "but government doesn't have the capacity to enforce it." There are fines for violating the law, but in an area with numerous plants like Mpumalanga, it can often be hard to peg the violations to one particular plant.
Peek was my guide earlier this week for a trip to the region. The first plant we see is the Kendal power station, also owned by Eskom. Its six generators have made it the largest station in the country since it was completed in 1993, but Kusile will be even bigger.
More at the linkOfficials say a new US-backed coal plant outside Johannesburg will be a boon to the... more
-
-
In this extract from his book, To Cook A Continent, Nnimmo Bassey argues that climate negotiations, from Durban in late 2011 onwards, will increasingly confront the issue of climate justice.
The atmosphere is a common space, a global commons. Industrialised nations pumped a disproportionate amount of emissions into the atmosphere and they have cornered a disproportionate amount of global resources, largely by exploiting nations that are on the other side of the coin. Climate impacts are already being felt in a severe way in Africa as well as in other regions of the global South. Centuries of exploitation have weakened the resilience of these regions and in tackling climate change these historical facts must be addressed. One way of addressing this is by the payment of climate debt to make the needed financial and technological resources available to these vulnerable regions.
The Conference of Parties at Copenhagen and the following one at Cancun did not generate outcomes consistent with scientific warnings that the world faces a severe climate crisis. Copenhagen ended with an accord spearheaded by President Barack Obama of the United States with the backing of the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) concocted in a 'Green Room' dreamed up by Denmark's conservative ruling party. In that room, Patrick Bond recalled, were 26 countries 'cherry-picked to represent the world. When even that small group deadlocked, allegedly due to Chinese intransigence and the overall weak parameters set by the US, the five leaders (Obama, Lula da Silva, Jacob Zuma, Manmohan Singh, and Wen Jiabao) attempted a face-saving last gasp at planetary hygiene.'12
The demand of climate justice is that those who created the climate problem must be the ones to mitigate it, and in the process must transform their economies and societies.13 There are two ways to go about making this happen. First, rich nations must reduce rapacious consumption patterns and address the climate crisis with real solutions and not ones that have been seen to be false. Second, the rich nations have to support the poor nations who are being forced to adapt to a situation they did not create. One practical way of making that happen is through support for sustainable, green development paths.
Among governments, the Bolivians have made the clearest call for climate justice while India and China have used related arguments to defend their growth paths. At a time when the world has been calling for a curtailment of polluting industrial establishments, China has been building new coal-fired power plants at a prodigious rate.14 It is interesting to note that while China is massively expanding its coal-powered plants, it is also quickly assuming leadership in the utilisation of wind power. The discourse on how much both China and India must do in tackling global warming must not overlook the fact that vast numbers of people in both India and China still require electricity supply and that meeting that gap requires huge financial outlays.
Following the catastrophic outcome of the United Nations climate negotiations held in Copenhagen in December 2009, President Evo Morales of Bolivia announced that the world would meet in Bolivia for a thorough and inclusive discussion on this vital issue.
The summit, held in Cochabamba in April 2010, attracted 35,000 participants from 140 countries. The summit stood in sharp contrast to the Copenhagen event in many ways. First, this was an assembly of governments and peoples. In Copenhagen no effort was spared in keeping civil society out of the conference: the conference was marked by lockouts of civil society, detentions of climate activists and outright brutality towards non-violent protesters on the streets. In Cochabamba the police were offering assistance and were also participants. Whereas Copenhagen showed a disdain for the voices of the people, Cochabamba was about raising the voices of the people. The only similarity between the events is that they were both held in cities whose names start with letter 'C' followed by nine letters.
The key outcome of the Cochabamba conference was the People's Agreement. This agreement demanded that countries cut their emissions by at least 50 per cent at source in the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (2013–17), without recourse to offsets and other carbon trading schemes. In terms of finance, the People's Agreement demands that developed countries commit 6 per cent of their GDP to finance adaptation and mitigation needs. The financial suggestions of the Copenhagen Accord are a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed to secure vulnerable peoples and nations. The peoples of the world also affirmed that there is a climate debt that must be recognised and paid. The payment is not all about finance but principally about decolonising the atmospheric space and redistributing the meagre space left. Developed countries already occupy 80 per cent of the space.
The climate debt is also about taking actions needed to restore the natural cycles of Mother Earth and one clear way of achieving this will be through the proclamation of a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, with clear obligations for humans. Bolivia is in the forefront of promoting the adoption of this declaration at the United Nations. The People's Agreement recognises that the causes of climate change are systemic and that systemic changes are needed to tackle them. On this note, the model of civilisation that is hinged on uncontrolled development can only compound the crisis. The world needs to move towards living well and not continue on the path of domination of others and of conspicuous and wasteful consumption.
An area glossed over in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations is the role of industrial agriculture in climate change. The People's Conference debated this key sector and reached the agreement that the way to a sustainable future is through the enthronement of food sovereignty based on agro-ecological agricultural systems. The issue of access to water being a human right was also affirmed by the people and later on in the year by the United Nations.
In all, the People's Agreement recognises that real strategies to tackle climate change must be based on the principles of equity and justice in dealing with the structural causes. Without climate justice it will also clearly be impossible to achieve the much talked about Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Cochabamba resonated with calls for urgently securing the rights of Mother Earth as a means of reconfiguring our relationship with the earth and with each other – in a way that respects the past, today and the future. All these will be a pipe dream unless peoples' sovereignty is supported, restored or built across the world. Cochabamba was a turning point in the march to transform our world from the path of conflict, competition, exploitation and domination to a path of solidarity and dignity. It held a ray of hope for Africa.
More at the link
~~~~~~
I posted this excerpt from this article because it hits the nail on the head about the mechanisms involved in the schemes being put forth by industrialized nations, the World Bank and corporations (industrial agriculture especially) looking to use this planetary emergency as a way to profit from it without really doing anything to address it. And that includes our seeds and water. Our voices now can make a dfference and they must be heard.In this extract from his book, To Cook A Continent, Nnimmo Bassey argues that climate... more
-
-
The battle between some of the world's most powerful energy companies and an Alaska village that's losing ground to climate change heads to federal appeals court on Monday.
Nine Kivalina residents, having survived the recent mega-storm that walloped western Alaska, will be at the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to watch their lawyers argue that ExxonMobil Corp., BP, ConocoPhillips and other corporate Goliaths owe the village at least $95 million in damages.
A key Kivalina argument charges that the energy companies are engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the link between their emissions and the earth's warming temperatures. A similar argument proved pivotal decades ago in helping smokers prevail in court against tobacco giants.
The Northwest Alaska village lost the first round of its lawsuit in 2009, when a U.S. District Court dismissed it, saying climate-change pollution needs to be regulated by Congress and the administration, not courts. The village lacked standing, the court said, because it could not show the companies' emissions caused the erosion threatening the village.
But Kivalina is optimistic this time around.
"What we have going for us is the science is changing by the day," and the causal connection between greenhouse-gas emissions and the climate is clarifying, said Heather Kendall-Miller, an attorney for Kivalina and head of the Alaska office of the Native American Rights Fund.
snip
Finding a new home
The quarter-mile-long rock revetment, installed in 2009 by the Army Corps, will buy the village an estimated 10 to 15 years before it must move.
But in 2019, what then?
.
The village is trying to find a new site where it can rebuild, out of harm's way. But when it does, how will it pay to build a school, homes and other facilities, and to scrape roads and an airstrip on the tundra?
That's where the lawsuit comes in. Moving could cost between $95 million and $400 million, according to figures from the Army Corps of Engineers and the General Accountability Office. That's at least $350,000 to $1.4 million for each village resident.
The city and tribe hope their lawsuit -- Kivalina v. ExxonMobil -- forces about 20 of the world's largest oil, power and coal companies to cough up the cash.
The village has prevailed against industry before. In 2008, with legal help from the San Francisco-based Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, Kivalina forced mining giant Teck-Cominco to settle a lawsuit and spend $120 million on a pipeline to protect drinking water.
More at the linkThe battle between some of the world's most powerful energy companies and an... more
-
-
International Energy Agency: “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.”
“… we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C [11°F]…. Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”
The International Energy Agency has issued yet another clarion call for urgent action on climate. Their 2011 World Energy Outlook [WEO] release should end once and for all any notion that delay is the rational course for the nation and the world.
The UK Guardian‘s headline captures the urgency:
World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns
If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change
We must start aggressively deploying clean energy now through myriad policies, including a price on carbon. That has been the conclusion of most authoritative studies, of course, including the recent one by California’s independent state science and technology advisory panel (see “Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy“).
The IEA report deserves the label “bombshell,” though, because for most of the past two decades, the IEA was the source of bland, conservative, business-as-usual analysis. When I was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, no one at DOE paid much attention to IEA reports. And that perspective continued through most of the 2000s.
But in just the last few years they have woken up to the risks posed to peak oil — see IEA top economist warns (8/09): “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us” — and especially climate change. In releasing its 2009 WEO, the IEA warned, “The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming.”
Now the IEA has done the calculation a different way, concluding, “Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.” Those who counsel waiting for breakthrough technologies are urging us on a path that is unsustainable, irreversible, potentially catastrophic, and economically indefensible, according to the IEA.
The IEA is one of the few organizations in the world with a sophisticated enough global energy model to do credible (i.e non-hand-waving) projections of the cost of different emissions pathways and the costs of delaying efforts to achieve them. Their 2008 analysis of the 2°C warming pathway demonstrated that the total shift in investment needed to stabilize at 450 ppm is only about 1.1% of GDP per year — and that is not a “cost” or hit to GDP, because much of that investment goes towards saving expensive fuel (see “IEA report: Climate Progress has the 450-ppm solution about right“).
The new analysis shows that because of soaring emissions, we are running out of time for the “450 Scenario.” We are at risk of irreversibly “locking in” dangerous warming — a point I agree with mostly, but not entirely:
More at the linkInternational Energy Agency: “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use... more
-
-
The weather is becoming so extreme in a manner that climate scientist had been predicting for decade that it’s getting harder to ignore. At the same time, climate scientists are starting to do a good job of documenting the link to global warming and coming up with good analogies with which to explain it to the public, like Meehl’s steroids analogy.
Indeed, the AP also reported on a leaked version of a new IPCC report on this subject with the headline, “More weather disasters ahead, climate experts report; Some locations will become ‘increasingly marginal as places to live’.” Here are some key excerpts:
Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.
The final draft of the report from a panel of the world’s top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world already weary of weather catastrophes costing billions of dollars.
The report says costs will rise and perhaps some locations will become “increasingly marginal as places to live.”
The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be issued in a few weeks, after a meeting in Uganda.
It says there is at least a 2-in-3 probability that climate extremes have already worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases.
Other studies makes stronger statements (see “Bombshell: Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming” and “Bombshell: Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming“).
More at the linkThe weather is becoming so extreme in a manner that climate scientist had been... more
-
-
What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?
Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.
In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.
Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.
And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.
The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.
Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.
Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.
Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.
If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.
In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.
More at the linkWhat if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the... more
-
-
*Gates plan spends 40% of R&D funding on risky "silver bullet" GM projects with DFID help
As the world population reaches 7 billion GM Freeze says in a new report published today [1] that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s policy on agricultural development to tackle hunger is "swimming against a tide of informed opinion".
The report reveals the Gates Foundation has allocated over 40% of its committed research expenditure from 2005 to 2011 on projects involving risky “silver bullet” GM technology.
The collaboration between the Gates Foundation and DFID, announced in February 2011, includes a commitment to carry out GM research into altering the photosynthesis of rice to make it more tolerant of drought. [2] This theoretical switching of rice metabolism has been described as "high risk" by many, including the Royal Society, because of the complex changes required to make it work and the high chance of failure. [3]
In contrast GM Freeze reveals that the Gates Foundation has only allocated some US$20 million (4% of the total budget of US$521 million) to all soil research despite acknowledging the poor state of some African soils. However the Gates Foundation has pledged nearly US$214 million to research involving GM techniques from 2005 to the present – ten times the budget for soil research.
The group's report says the Gates Foundation and DFID are ignoring the recommendations of key research, including the unprecedented IAASTD report in 2008, endorsed by the UK Government, which recommended agroecological approaches to farming to restore natural resources, such as the soils, biodiversity and water and a switch away from fossil-fuel based artificial fertilisers and pesticides. [4]
GM Freeze also reveals the Gates Foundation funding of the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA) to distribute artificial fertilisers to small farmers. AGRA plan to deliver 187,000 tons of fertilizer "to small farmers through wholesale and retail networks by December 2012" at a overall cost of US$164 million to the Gates Foundation – eight times their allocated expenditure on soil research.
The Gates Foundation collaborate closely with agri-biotechnology companies including Monsanto, BASF, Du Pont, Dow and the Syngenta Foundation in projects to develop GM seeds and promote fertilisers, pesticides and hybrid seeds to small African farmers through bodies such as African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) and projects like Harvest Plus – both also funded by DFID.
Pete Riley of GM Freeze said:
"The Gates Foundation approach to agricultural development is swimming against of tide of informed opinion if it is serious about tackling hunger.
"Instead of promoting proven, low-cost solutions, the Foundation is mimicking discredited high input farming that has cost millions in Northern countries due to pollution, soil erosion and disastrous impacts on biodiversity above and below the soil. DFID is meekly following this lead despite expert analysis showing that in a world with eroded natural resources, climate change and rising demand and costs of energy and fertilisers, a switch to agroecological approaches is urgently needed.
"Offering small and family farmers GM technology will only lock them into expensive and failing intensive farming approaches that benefit big business.
More at the link*Gates plan spends 40% of R&D funding on risky "silver bullet" GM... more
-
-
New Delhi: Developing countries have pledged greater levels of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions than the rich nations despite the developed world being responsible for a large part of the historical emissions.
This conclusion by the Stockholm Environment Institute has stirred debate about how far India would now be willing to go with the US and Europe lagging behind on substantial actions to prevent climate change but asking for greater commitments from the developing world.
"There is broad agreement that developing country pledges amount to more mitigation than developed country pledges," a report by the institute said.
Countries provided these pledges under the Copenhagen Accord with developing countries such as India pledging to take actions to reduce emissions voluntarily despite not being required to do so under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The SEI report is based on four detailed studies from different reputed institutions including UNEP and McKinsey and Company.
The four independent studies used different parameters and assumptions to bring the different kinds of pledges into a comparable format and all four came to the same conclusion though the difference between promised goals of the rich and developing countries varied.
The authors of the SEI report concluded that unless the UN accounting system shut the loopholes, the rich countries would be able to meet their pledges "with very little actual mitigation, and possibly with none at all".
It also noted that the rich countries had not decoupled their consumption patterns from emissions but rather they had shifted many of those emissions to developing countries. In other words, the fossil-fuel driven consumption levels of the rich countries have not reduced over time and the actions taken by them to reduce emissions have been only those which brought net-benefit to their economies.
The report said the developed countries held three-quarters of the world's GDP and were responsible for 75% of the historical emissions. "It seems self-evident that the developed world should take responsibility for much more mitigation effort than the developing world, and that this effort must have both a domestic and an international dimension," it said.
"The developed world must raise their level of ambition to the levels demanded by science and equity. And, of course, they must fulfill those ambitions through actual mitigation, not through accounting loopholes," it added.
The report noted that even after the rich countries agreed to do so, it would still require actions by the developing world to prevent dangerous climate change.New Delhi: Developing countries have pledged greater levels of reduction of greenhouse... more
-
-
Wintertime droughts are increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible, according to a new analysis by NOAA scientists and colleagues at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). In the last 20 years, 10 of the driest 12 winters have taken place in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a paper published online in the Journal of Climate this month. “This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.”
The above is from a news release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “NOAA study: Human-caused climate change a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts.”
It’s a bombshell for three reasons. First, this NOAA team has not always found a human cause for extreme weather events, as Climate Progress discussed here. Second, the study found that global warming is already driving drought in a key region of the world: Climate change is harming a great many people now. Third, the analysis provides important confirmation of climate predictions that human-caused emissions would lead to drying: “The team also found agreement between the observed increase in winter droughts and in the projections of climate models that include known increases in greenhouse gases.”
This comes on the heel of the USGS study, that, despite its flaws still found, “The decrease of floods in the southwestern region is consistent with other research findings that this region has been getting drier and experienced less precipitation as a likely result of climate change.”
And these studies amplify the piece I had in the journal Nature this week that argued drying and Dust-Bowlification driven by climate change — and the impact on food insecurity — are probably the gravest threats the human race faces in the coming decades.
The fact that the NOAA analysis confirmed the climate models predictions of drying is especially worrisome because the climate models project a very dry future for large parts of the planet’s currently habited and arable land in the coming decades:
More at the linkWintertime droughts are increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and... more
-
-
Flailing through mounds of sludge left by torrential rains, rescue workers cleared debris and hunted for survivors in Tuscany and Liguria on Wednesday after mudslides and flooding left at least six people dead and hundreds homeless in those areas, among the most picturesque in Italy.
Video images showed vast devastation, including in Monterosso al Mare, a village on the Unesco World Heritage List.
In some towns, videos showed, streets had become canals, furniture was piled pell-mell outside homes, bridges were swept away, highways were blocked by tree trunks and overturned trucks, cars were washed out to sea and boats were shredded like matchsticks.
Telecommunications and electricity were severed in the worst-hit towns, while train service was disrupted and numerous roads and highways were closed, civil protection authorities said.
In Monterosso al Mare, one of the five medieval towns that make up the picturesque Cinque Terre, a popular tourist draw on the Italian Riviera, one video showed a muddy river sweeping through a street, the water lapping at the ground floors of the buildings.
Angelo Betta, the mayor of Monterosso, said the rains had come fast and hard starting Tuesday night, causing five canals to overflow at the same time. “We need food, water, doctors, even toilets,” he told Italian television.
Interviewed by the news media, residents of Monterosso, which is popular with hikers who trek from town to town along a 12-mile footpath offering breath-catching views, described apocalyptic scenes of scrambling to reach upper stories while water swirled into the town like a speeding train.
The rains extended into Wednesday, causing more destruction. The Italian Army was sent in to assist civil protection rescue workers, and President Giorgio Napolitano said on television that climate change was the cause of the disaster.
“This is the very painful price we are unfortunately paying,” he said.
Environmental groups also blamed unregulated construction and expressed concerns that government cutbacks to environmental protection agencies, a consequence of Italy’s budget and economic travails, had undermined efforts to better manage such catastrophes.
Vittorio Cogliati Dezza, president of Legambiente, an Italian environmental organization, called on the government to restore financing to the Environment Ministry. He said preventive measures to strengthen geologically fragile areas were more economically sound than tackling emergencies, “which result in unsustainable costs for the population with no effective savings for public coffers.”
The torrential rains were likely to become more common because of climate change, said Fausto Guzzetti, the director of a geological institute that is part of Italy’s National Research Council. A different issue, he said in an interview, was the impact that they had on infrastructure and towns, as a result of the often unregulated and widespread urban development that took place throughout Italy during the postwar boom. What happened in Tuscany and Liguria, he said, “should not have happened, but it did because we have built in places where we should not have built. Now it is too late, and we are paying the consequences.”
More at the linkFlailing through mounds of sludge left by torrential rains, rescue workers cleared... more
-
-
I went to the Occupy Wall Street march last week, as part of the NYC food justice delegation. We carried baskets of farmers’ market vegetables and signs reading “Stop Gambling on Hunger” and “Food Not Bonds.” Food justice advocates came out from around the city—urban farmers, gardeners, youth, professors, union members, and community organizers. The vegetables attracted a lot of attention. Food so often attracts a lot of attention—the New York Times is just one of the outlets to focus in recent days on the makeshift kitchen at Zuccotti Park. What was more surprising were all of the puzzled looks we got from the bloggers, photographers, and other marchers who wanted to talk to us. “What’s the connection here with food?” we were asked many times.
The connection of the protests with food, of course, runs from the local to the global, the specific to the ephemeral. Food justice advocates are connecting with Occupy sites all around the country to donate fresh, healthy, local food or to help find kitchen space. On a broader philosophical level, as Mark Bittman writes in the Times, “Whether we’re talking about food, politics, healthcare, housing, the environment, or banking, the big question remains the same: How do we bring about fundamental change?” But there are also clear and specific reasons that all of us working for a just and fair food system, as the food movement should make the connection between our work and Occupy Wall Street explicit and strong.
In the U.S. today, the richest one percent hold 40 percent of the wealth, while almost one in five Americans is on food stamps. Rampant Wall Street speculation on commodities is driving up food costs, small farmers are being driven off their land, and agribusiness holds monopoly control of our seeds and stores. In this climate, the struggle against massive wealth disparities, unregulated financial institutions, and excessive corporate power is our struggle as well. Two points in the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City address the food system. While barely scratching the surface of the potential connections, the protesters have provided an important opening for the food movement. Will we seize it?
Speculation Drives up Food Costs
At the most obvious level, as the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy recently wrote, “Wall Street deregulation has not only made the stock market extremely volatile, it has increased prices and price volatility in agricultural markets.” That is, the relationship between government and Wall Street firms has turned food into commodity like any other, subject to the whims of the market. For decades, only people directly involved in agriculture (e.g., farmers) could freely participate in trade of futures of agricultural commodities (e.g., corn, soy, wheat). Outside speculators were allowed into these markets but with strictly enforced limits to how much they could buy. Futures trading served a practical purpose, giving farmers a guaranteed price for future harvests, and prices stayed relatively stable and reasonable for both buyers and sellers.
But in 2000, a wave of industry-backed deregulation raised and then removed these limits on speculation, which opened commodity markets to a flood of new players—these later included funds controlled by some of the biggest Wall Street firms looking for new investment opportunities after the housing bubble burst. Flooded with new investments unconnected to any direct stake in crop prices, in 2008, the commodity markets exploded, driving up grain prices worldwide. The grain price spikes were catastrophic for millions of people worldwide. Farmers, who sometimes benefit from high grain prices, mostly were no better off, because similarly skyrocketing energy prices also drove up prices of agricultural inputs.
In 2008 and 2009, the UN estimated that an additional 130 million people were driven into hunger by the food price bubble. Spontaneous food riots broke out in dozens of countries where chronic hunger is a reality. Today’s Wall Street protests are not unconnected to those; the effects of food and energy speculation continue in 2011. A study in June by University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Robert Pollin estimates that U.S. gasoline prices are $0.83 higher per gallon due to Wall Street speculation. The CEO of ExxonMobil said he estimates prices are $1.20 to $1.40 higher per gallon. And food commodity prices are as high, or higher, than they were in 2008—while 46 million Americans are now living below the poverty line, struggling with basic expenses like food.
A New Colonialism
Wall Street firms aren’t just gambling on food prices, they have begun speculating on land as well. Alerted to the potential market in agriculture, investors are buying up huge parcels of farmland all over the world, displacing the occupants, and converting subsistence production to cash crops—or, worse, simply leaving the land fallow and waiting for its value to increase. According to international NGO GRAIN, which first reported on this trend in 2008, more than 50 million hectares of land has been transferred from farmers to corporations since 2009. “Land grabs” have affected tens of thousands of people around the world who have been driven off their land–often violently–with little or no compensation, given no say in the process, and left with no recourse. For most of them, land is their livelihood; without it, the future is bleak.
More at the linkI went to the Occupy Wall Street march last week, as part of the NYC food justice... more
-
-
Global energy consumption will increase by 53 percent over the next 25 years to a mind-boggling 225,700 terawatt-hours (770 quadrillion BTUs ) as water- and carbon-intensive fossil fuels continue to dominate the world’s economies, despite the global recession and the strong growth in the renewable sector, according to a new annual report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
About half of the projected increase in energy use will occur in China and India, the world’s first- and third-largest energy consumers, respectively. The two developing economies will account for more than 30 percent of the global energy use during the next two decades.
“China alone — which only recently became the world’s top energy consumer — is projected to use 68 percent more energy than the United States by 2035,” said Howard Gruenspecht, the administrator for the EIA, in a press release.
In general, however, the overall projections made in the EIA report only reflect laws and policies as they stood at the beginning of 2011. In other words, the report does not incorporate prospective legislation — in China, for example — that, together with oil-price volatility and the pace of global economic recovery, could significantly affect energy markets.
Coal Production and Consumption
China relies on coal for about 70 percent of its energy generation, consuming 3.15 billion metric tons (3.5 billion tons) of coal last year. Meanwhile, India has been steadily increasing domestic coal production, its major source of energy, reaching over 500 million metric tons (551 million tons) in 2010.
Though future generation from renewables, natural gas, and nuclear power will largely displace coal-fired production, coal will remain the largest source of world electricity through 2035, particularly in developing nations, according to the EIA projections. China alone will account for 76 percent of the projected increase in world coal use.
more at the link
__
WE ARE GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.Global energy consumption will increase by 53 percent over the next 25 years to a... more
-
-
Cambodia's worst floods in over a decade have killed 167 people, a disaster official said Wednesday, as efforts intensified to provide aid to tens of thousands of families.
Sixty-eight children were among those who died in nearly two months of flooding caused by heavy rainfall that has also seen the Mekong River overflow, said Keo Vy, spokesman for the National Committee for Disaster Management.
Some 300,000 hectares (740,000 acres) of rice paddies have been inundated and more than 23,000 families had to be evacuated to higher ground in provinces across the country, he added.
"The government and the Red Cross are giving the necessary help to those affected," Keo Vy said, adding that aid, including food deliveries, had so far reached 40,000 families.
He estimated that nearly 230,000 families across the impoverished nation had been affected by the unusually severe floods but he indicated the situation was under control.
"As Prime Minister Hun Sen has said, we are not appealing for aid but we welcome any assistance," he said.
International relief organisation Oxfam, which has started handing out hygiene kits in some areas, has urged all relevant agencies in Cambodia "to urgently deliver food, clean water, sanitation supplies and shelters".
In neighbouring Thailand, the worst monsoon floods in decades have left more than 220 people dead.Cambodia's worst floods in over a decade have killed 167 people, a disaster... more
-
-
"The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods. But just three weeks into the new year, 2011 has already had an entire year's worth of mega-floods. “ -- Meteorologist Jeff Masters
I spend hours a day researching what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls “global weirding”: the destabilization of our weather system fueled by the three million tonnes of fossil fuel pollution we inject into it each hour. So it is a rare day when something shocks me as much as a recent U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) report on last year’s extreme rainfall.
As most locals know from soggy personal experience, our corner of planet Earth since last spring has been a bit wetter and greyer than normal. And next door, our Washington neighbours donned their gum boots and slogged through their fourth wettest year since 1895.
Still, we got off lucky. Very lucky it turns out.
According to this jaw-dropping NASA report, worldwide rainfall and snowfall were so extreme, in so many places last year, that sea levels fell dramatically.
Sea levels have been rising steadily for over a century as the ever warmer ocean water expands and the world’s remaining glaciers and ice sheets melt. In fact sea levels are rising twice as fast now as they were a few decades ago. As the NASA chart above shows there have been some ups and downs but nothing in the modern satellite record comes close to the 6 mm drop worldwide last year.
While 6 mm might not sound like a lot, when collected from the surface of all our planet’s oceans it adds up to 26,000 gallons of water per human.
So just where did all this missing water go?
The ringleader of the great water heist was one of the strongest La Nina cycles of recent times. La Nina shifted and altered weather patterns causing extreme precipitation to funnel into places like India, Pakistan, Australia, and northern tiers of both South and North America.
In the map below, produced from NASA’s GRACE satellite data, blue indicates areas that gained water last year. The darkest blue areas gained as much as 50 mm in one year.
These dark blue spots are also the sources of the world’s epic floods of the last couple years which not only left tens of millions homeless and destroyed agriculture and infrastructure, but also left behind so much water that global oceans were depleted by 6 mm.
A YEAR OF RECORD FLOODING
Last year 182 floods affected 180 million people, almost double the annual average for the last decade. Here are a few:
snip
NOW WHAT?
Well in the short term the seas will start rising again. As the NASA report states:
“water flows downhill, and the extra rain will eventually find its way back to the sea. When it does, global sea level will rise again. ‘We're heating up the planet, and in the end that means more sea level rise’".
What happens in the medium and long term depends on us. We humans really have only one question to answer: To burn or not to burn?
OPTION A: Leave most fossil fuels in the ground -- forever.
OPTION B: Keep doing what we are doing and dig up every last crumb of carbon and burn it.
The climate science is clear that we cannot burn most of the fossil fuels we already know about and also have a stable enough weather system that we can continue to prosper.
As local Nobel laureate and world famous climate scientist, Andrew Weaver, explained in a talk at UBC the other night, just reducing the rate at which we burn fossil fuels won’t prevent dangerous levels of climate change beyond 2C warming. Instead we must totally eliminate fossil fuel emissions.
Weaver showed that even if humanity cut 90% of our fossil fuel use by 2050 but kept burning that last 10% into the future, then we would still heat the climate by more than 2C. That sends us into the realm of dangerous and dramatic climate changes that Canada, USA and every major nation has stated clearly we must avoid.
As Weaver summed it up:
"At some point we just have to say stop.”
More at the link"The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods.... more
-
-
Understanding of the ‘problem’ of agriculture took a giant step forward in 2007 with publication of the UN IAASTD report. This report, which was as important for agriculture as the IPCC reports have been for the climate, pinpointed a move to ecology-based agriculture as the key to meeting many other fundamental needs such as clean water, safe food and sustainability. What the IAASTD didn’t do, at least directly however, was to focus on politics, especially the obstacles to progress in improving agriculture.
A new report, The Wheel of Life: Food, Climate, Human Rights and the Economy (Sept. 2011), released by the Center for Food Safety (CFS) and the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Foundation, usefully complements this deficit. It does this in part by drawing attention explicitly to some common myths on which support for conventional production-oriented solutions for agriculture are based. Among these myths are that hugely enhanced food production will be required in the future, that biotech (GMO) seeds are needed to solve hunger and mitigate climate change, and that traditional agriculture is wasteful and inefficient.
The Wheel then examines how major current crises—hunger, climate change, and ecological degradation—are deeply interlinked. Despite the evident linkages, however, government and international institutions typically address these issues as if they were disconnected from one another. Thus the IPCC, for example, still has not adequately considered agriculture as a contributor to climate change. The consequence of this disconnect, The Wheel of Life points out, is that many policies do not tackle root causes and therefore negative global trends have tended to intensify.
Confronting global hunger is one example identified in the report. Leaders on each end of the political spectrum uniformly assert that economic growth is needed to address hunger and poverty. Yet economic growth is typically conducted via industrial activities that contribute to climate change, which in turn, negatively impacts the ability to grow food.
Similarly, in addition to their effects on climate change, economic and trade policies can spur growth for a few while undermining the ability of small-scale farmers and rural communities to provide food for local populations. The Wheel of Life suggests these complex interactions help explain why, even though economic growth indicators have risen in many countries over the last decade, hunger rates have increased too, especially within the last several years.
To successfully remedy social injustices, climate change, and agriculture, The Wheel of Life argues that political action is needed that incorporates social and ecological needs. And it notes that while governments dither on climate change and agricultural reform, agribusiness is already positioning its products as the preferred solutions. The strategy proposed by The Wheel of Life is to incorporate civil society input into political and economic discussions. Some countries, such as Germany, already have productive dialogues with civil society, but in the US and Britain, for example, interactions are negligible. To encourage cooperation the report also provides a list of civil society organisations with compatible aims in the areas of climate change, agriculture, environment, human rights, women’s rights, and migration.
The Wheel concludes that lasting solutions to hunger and other major crises of our day must, above all, be guided by fundamentals of ecology.
“Policies and practices must begin with the ecological imperative in order to ensure authentic security and stability on all fronts-food, water, livelihoods and jobs, climate, energy, and economic,” writes report author Debbie Barker, international director at the Center for Food Safety. “In turn this engenders equity, social justice, and diverse cultures.”
---Understanding of the ‘problem’ of agriculture took a giant step forward in... more
-
-
Time to get louder at government about this. Time to win this conversation with truth. CO2 traps heat. One of the main points of this, plus some others I divulge. ;l). Thanks Current for this venue for us to tell it like it is.
This video is dedicated to the indigenous peoples of our world and those experiencing the brunt of the effects of climate change/biodistress. May we find it within us to do what is right for all.Time to get louder at government about this. Time to win this conversation with truth.... more
-
