Biden permanently bans offshore drilling in 625 million acres of ocean, making a Trump reversal difficult https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/06/business/biden-offshore-drilling-ban-trump/index.html President Joe Biden on Monday announced an executive action that will permanently ban future offshore oil and gas development in parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in a way that could be especially difficult for the incoming Trump administration to undo. Biden’s executive action will ban new oil and gas leasing across 625 million acres of US ocean. The ban will prevent oil companies from leasing waters for new drilling along the entire East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California, and portions of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea. “My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks.” The action, which CNN reported on Friday, invokes the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, a law that gives presidents broad authority to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing and development. The law does not give presidents explicit authority to revoke the action and place federal waters back into development, meaning President-elect Donald Trump would have to get Congress to change it before he could reverse Biden’s move. Nevertheless, Trump on Monday said in an interview he would try to undo the action. “Look, it’s ridiculous. I’ll unban it immediately,” Trump said in a radio interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” As Biden’s presidency draws to a close, environmental and climate groups have advocated for him to withdraw areas off the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, as well as other parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans — giving the areas permanent protections from future drilling. The move would guard against future oil spills and against adding more planet-warming pollution from fossil fuels to the atmosphere. “President Biden’s new protections add to this bipartisan history, including President Trump’s previous withdrawals in the southeastern United States in 2020,” said Oceana Campaign Director Joseph Gordon in a statement. “Our treasured coastal communities are now safeguarded for future generations.” Despite a friendly posture towards the oil and gas industry, Trump also moved to ban offshore drilling while president. After proposing a major expansion in offshore drilling early in his first term, Trump in 2020 extended a ban on future oil drilling in the Eastern Gulf and expanded it to include the Atlantic coasts of three states: Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. Still, Trump’s incoming press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, lambasted the decision, writing in a post on X, “This is a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.” The oil industry lashed out against the executive action, too. “President Biden’s decision to ban new offshore oil and natural gas development across approximately 625 million acres of US coastal and offshore waters is significant and catastrophic,” Ron Neal, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America Offshore Committee, said in a statement. “It represents a major attack on the oil and natural gas industry.” Neal said the ban would severely limit the industry’s potential for future oil and gas exploration in new areas, hurting the industry’s long-term ability to survive. But Biden noted in his statement that protecting coastlines from offshore drilling has bipartisan support. “From California to Florida, Republican and Democratic Governors, Members of Congress, and coastal communities alike have worked and called for greater protection of our ocean and coastlines from harms that offshore oil and natural gas drilling can bring,” Biden said. He argued that after the devastating 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the ban he imposed will help protect similar ecological disasters from happening again. “Every president this century has recognized that some areas of the ocean are just too risky or too sensitive to drill,” Earthjustice vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife and oceans Drew Caputo said in a statement Friday. Biden’s move was first reported by Bloomberg. Little economic impact Energy analysts told CNN the move won’t make much of a difference in US oil production, which has set new records under Biden. It’s “not particularly consequential for US exploration and production going forward,” Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, said on Friday. Kloza noted there are plenty of existing offshore rigs pumping oil in the Gulf of Mexico and added that offshore projects typically take 6-8 years to come online. “I don’t see it as having any real impact on US supply, exports, imports,” Kloza said. Biden agreed, arguing in his statement that preserving the environment and the coastlines will help local economies flourish. “We do not need to choose between protecting the environment and growing our economy, or between keeping our ocean healthy, our coastlines resilient, and the food they produce secure and keeping energy prices low,” Biden said. “Those are false choices.” Still, the American Petroleum Institute blasted Biden’s decision. “American voters sent a clear message in support of domestic energy development, and yet the current administration is using its final days in office to cement a record of doing everything possible to restrict it,” API CEO Mike Sommers said in a statement. “We urge policymakers to use every tool at their disposal to reverse this politically motivated decision and restore a pro-American energy approach to federal leasing.” In a separate announcement, the Biden administration is expected to declare two new national monuments in California in the coming week, a source familiar with the planning told CNN. Biden will establish the Chuckwalla National Monument in Southern California near Joshua Tree National Park and the Sáttítla National Monument in Northern California, the source said. Native tribes have been actively pushing the administration to protect the land from energy development. Biden has so far conserved or expanded 10 national monuments as president.
We built our world with fire. Now heat is destroying our lives John Vaillant We fell in love with the power and speed that fossil fuels brought us. But the price being paid in California, and around the world, has become too high Sat 11 Jan 2025 Zero per cent contained. In layperson’s terms, that means “out of control and burning at will”. It’s a common designation for a wildfire – in the wild. But when a fire like this enters an urban area such as Los Angeles County, the most highly populated metropolitan area in the US, it becomes an exploding bomb, and this one has been detonating since last Tuesday. By now, the energy release from this wind-driven, drought-fuelled firestorm turned urban conflagration is into the megatons, and the nuclear-scale destruction is there for all to see: block after block and neighbourhood after neighbourhood levelled – roughly 12,000 structures destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, 55 sq miles of city and mountain burnt, nearly 200,000 residents evacuated – so far. There is more to come. The death toll has risen above 10 but, given the hurricane-force winds, the ignescent blizzards of flying embers, the frantic just-the-clothes-on-our backs evacuations, the gridlock, the wholesale terror, and the massive scale of this already historic event, such low fatalities are a kind of miracle. Watching the news, as I am in Orange County, 50 miles south of the city, you might think these were the only fires burning when, in fact, they are a regional flare-up in a much larger planetary event. We call ourselves humans, Homo sapiens (wise man), but ours is a fire-powered species, so much so that Homo flagrans – burning man – might suit us better. Fire has been our constant, if unreliable, companion since long before we found our way out of Africa: its spritely charisma and night-cancelling, animal-intimidating power was instrumental, not only to our ancestors’ survival, but to our evolution – to us becoming us. So integral has fire become to our daily activities, and to our identities, that we scarcely notice it any more. Almost invisibly now, its superhuman potency enables and amplifies virtually everything we do: cooking our food, heating our homes, powering our energy grids, and driving us – in our teeming billions – through the world at lethal speeds by land, sea and air. Fire, represented by its avatars, coal, oil and gas, is our superpower, pure and simple, and we can almost be forgiven for believing that we’ve mastered it. But we glossed over a crucial detail: we aren’t the only ones being supercharged. Due to the colossal scale on which our fire-powered civilisation now operates – including 50,000 seagoing ships, 30,000 jet planes, and nearly 2bn motor vehicles, powered by 100m barrels of oil every day – we have also supercharged the atmosphere. These fires are the beginning of a reckoning that begins with the question: are fossil fuels liberating us, or holding us hostage? Our atmosphere is a weather engine, and it is energised by heat. Thanks to the historic amounts of CO2 and methane generated by emissions from the uncountable fires we ignite every day, we have empowered fire much as it has empowered us, enabling it to burn hotter, faster, longer and more broadly across any environment containing hydrocarbons (a steadily broadening menu that now includes the margins of Greenland, and which could, in our lifetimes, include Antarctica). All that extra energy released by our combustive activities (talk about 0% containment) causes normal weather events – such as wildfires in southern California – to metastasise into full-blown catastrophes that violate natural boundaries of season, geography and historic norms. The LA fires, as shocking as their damage is to behold, and as traumatising as they are for those affected by them, are just one manifestation of the atmospheric monster that fossil fuel emissions have loosed upon the world. It may sound cruel to say this, but you could see this fire coming a decade away, and many did. So, we need to be frank here: climate science ain’t rocket science. If you can read a calendar and a thermometer, and you have noticed how laundry dries more quickly on hot, dry, windy days, you are well on your way to being able to predict the likelihood of wildfire. I am in southern California by sheer coincidence, visiting family, but the first thing I thought when I got down here was: “It’s January, and boy, those hills look dry – dry enough to burn.” I was not aware there hadn’t been rain in eight months, or that this current drought follows the hottest summer in LA’s history, but you can see it, and you can feel it: the region is a tinderbox. All of SoCal could burn as viciously as LA is burning right now, as viciously as Valparaíso, Chile and the Texas panhandle burned last spring, or Lahaina, Hawaii did in 2023, or Australia in 2020, or Paradise and Redding, California in 2018, or Santa Rosa, California in 2017, or Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016. These fires are only the beginning of a historic reckoning that starts with the question: are fossil fuels liberating us or holding us hostage? There is a clear answer to this, and it can be found in the ledgers of petroleum and automobile companies, and with the investors, banks, governments, insurance companies, lobbyists, churches and media outlets that enable them. As I write, late on Friday night, the several major fires burning in and around Los Angeles are still spreading and multiplying at will, their containment still near 0%. More strong Santa Ana winds are expected in the coming days, and there’s no relief in sight. The same goes for survivors’ grief and rage and PTSD, injuries that may take lifetimes to contain, thousands upon thousands of them. John Vaillant is the author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...world-with-fire-now-heat-destroying-our-lives
"There is more than Hattley’s hunch to let people know their food’s quality is dropping because of climate change. Scientists have confirmed that as carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere, staple crops like wheat and rice lose vitamins, proteins and micronutrients like zinc and iron that humans need to survive." Climate change is already changing how we eat. It could get much worse Global heating is lowering crop yields while making food like rice and wheat less nutritious By Matthew Rozsa Staff Writer Published January 16, 2025 7:15AM (EST) In this photo taken on April 25, 2024 a farmer shows a dried up corn at a drought-stricken farm in San Antonio, Nueva Ecija. (JAM STA ROSA/AFP via Getty Images) Chetan Shetty is the executive chef at Passerine, a seasonal Indian restaurant in New York City’s fashionable Flatiron district. Before moving to the United States, however, Chef Shetty lived in Mahabaleshwar, a small town in India famous for its holy sites, majestic rivers and delicious strawberries. Yet Shetty ruefully acknowledges that climate change has put a damper on that last part of his hometown’s legacy. Thanks to Earth’s rising temperatures, there has been a “reduction in the yield and quality of strawberries” in Mahabaleshwar. It is just one example of a trend noticed by not only this Michelin-starred chef, but countless others who work with food for a living: Humanity’s overreliance on fossil fuels is hurting the agricultural industry we all rely upon. The trends of global heating makes people like Greg Hall nervous. The founder and owner of Virtue Cider, a Michigan-based creator of farmhouse cider only using locally sourced fruit, generates 61% of their electricity from 200 solar panels out of awareness of climate change. Hall is very aware of how climate change imperils his harvest. He says he’s lucky there aren’t issues with the quality of his apples, but yields have dropped as temperatures unexpectedly change. "Climate change has made early spring much warmer,” Hall said. “In 2012, the apple trees in Michigan went to bloom in March too early. When an April freeze came, since the buds were already out, they froze and didn’t produce apples.” Michigan lost over 90% of the apple crop that year as a result of that bout of weird weather. “The trees rebounded, but that was our first crop year. It was a disaster.” "While I can’t definitively say it’s all due to climate change, there’s no doubt that something is shifting." Jason Perkins is similarly worried about the raw materials he needs for his livelihood. He is brewmaster at the Maine-based Allagash Brewing Company, which crafts Belgian-based beers, and like all brewmasters Perkins relies on a range of crops. Beers can be made using grains like wheat, barley and hops, all of which are threatened by climate change. "We are finding challenges related to climate change in the reliability of being able to source raw ingredients,” Perkins said. “To both deal with that reality, and decrease our own footprint, we've been working closely with local farmers and maltsters to strengthen our food systems close to home." In addition to impacting the ease with which farmers can cultivate crops like strawberries and apples, or make alcoholic products like beer, climate change is also negatively impacting the nutritiousness of the foods that we finally are able to consume. Chef Nekia Hattley, the Los Angeles-based owner of vegan products and meals company My Daddy’s Recipes, told Salon she has noticed changes in the quality and flavor of food. “While I can’t definitively say it’s all due to climate change, there’s no doubt that something is shifting,” Hattley said. “Whether it’s the quality of our soil, the pesticides and chemicals we allow on our crops, or even food being grown in less natural conditions, the difference is undeniable.” As one example, Hattley points to watermelons, a crop known for being sensitive to fluctuations in temperature such as those caused by climate change. “What used to be a juicy, sweet reminder of summer now often tastes rubbery and bland,” Hattley said. Red bell peppers, which also suffer in quality and quantity because of climate change, “sometimes have an odd, dark discoloration inside and don’t seem as vibrant or crisp as they once were.” There is more than Hattley’s hunch to let people know their food’s quality is dropping because of climate change. Scientists have confirmed that as carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere, staple crops like wheat and rice lose vitamins, proteins and micronutrients like zinc and iron that humans need to survive. “It’s a really strong example of planetary health: Something that we’re doing to the environment is impacting health,” Dr. Samuel Myers, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health and a professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, said in a statement at the time. “As we change these complex systems, we’re seeing unintended consequences and unanticipated results.” People who enjoy steak and burgers, as well as dairy products, will also feel the strain because of these nutrient deficiencies. Cattle eat grasses that provide them with essential proteins, and that protein content is dropping as grasses languish with rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels. Even when climate change is not making vital foods more scarce and less nutritious, it is literally knocking the raw materials around by causing extreme weather events. "As a chef, I’ve come to realize that many vegetables now have increasingly shorter seasonal availability due to unpredictable weather,” Shetty said. “Flooding and drought significantly impact wild-foraged products, with damage that often takes years to stabilize. For example, the floods in North Carolina in September 2024 severely affected Appalachian truffle foragers.” He also mentioned how climate change is driving coral ecosystems to extinction, which will hurt his bottom line by “disrupting the delicate balance of the food chain.” If things continue to spiral out of control, what’s different on the menu might be the least of our problems. In some cases, there could be no menu at all. As the world gets hotter, famine too has risen. "In 2023, 281.6 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 59 countries/territories, with numbers increasing every year since 2019," reads an introduction to a 2024 special issue on famine and food insecurity in the journal Disasters. The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is caused by human activity, particularly our overuse of fossil fuels. As humans dump carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases and water vapor into the atmosphere, the overheating planet causes droughts and heatwaves to become more frequent and more intense, sea levels to rise and hurricanes to become more extreme. As this happens, food experts like Hattley will find innovative ways to improve the quality of what they create, despite the fossil fuel-imposed obstacles. "For me, the solution has been sourcing as much as I can from local farmers who prioritize soil health and traditional growing methods,” Hattley said. “The produce I buy from them feels closer to what I remember eating as a child — flavorful and nutrient-dense. If climate change continues to disrupt growing seasons and traditional farming methods, I fear that unless we’re proactive, food quality will only continue to decline, and we’ll lose more of the natural goodness we once took for granted." https://www.salon.com/2025/01/16/cl...-changing-how-we-eat-it-could-get-much-worse/
It's not just about climate change, we are crossing a lot of boundaries... New Study Finds Big Increase In Microplastics Found In Human Brains Most of the plastics found in brain tissue were tiny nanoplastics far narrower than a human hair. By Nick Visser Feb 4, 2025, 08:11 AM EST A new study found dramatic increases in microplastics in recent human brain samples compared to brains from just eight years ago. The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, analyzed 24 brains of people who died within a few months of January 2024. When researchers compared those results with 28 brains collected in 2016, they found that levels of micro- and nanoplastics had jumped about 50% in less than a decade. The results were also shocking when researchers analyzed the brains of 12 people who were diagnosed with dementia before they died. Those brains had dramatically higher amounts of plastics, more than five times the levels from 2024 on average. Microplastics are smaller than a pencil eraser, but nanoplastics are thinner than the width of a human hair. Photo by Peter Dazeley/Getty Images “Every time we scratch the surface, it uncovers a whole host of, ‘Oh, is this worse than we thought?’” Professor Matthew Campen, a lead author of the report from the University of New Mexico, told The Washington Post. Researchers say it’s too early to link microplastics to diseases like dementia, as such patients have weaker blood-brain barriers that could lead to more plastics in the samples, the Post added. “Atrophy of brain tissue, impaired blood–brain barrier integrity and poor clearance mechanisms are hallmarks of dementia and would be anticipated to increase [micro- and nanoplastic] concentrations,” the paper warns.” Thus, no causality is assumed from these findings.” Most of the plastics found in brain tissue were tiny nanoplastics far narrower than a human hair. Those particles were largely from polyethylene, which is used in plastic bags and to package food and bottled drinks. To bolster their findings, the researchers later obtained brain tissue from samples taken between 1997 and 2013 to see if there was any notable increase from that period as well. There was. Plastic concentrations were more than double in the 2016 brain samples and almost four times higher in the brains from 2024. The paper notes that the full extent of the microplastics on human health remains unclear. However, study after study has shown increased levels of microplastics in both the environment and the human body. Scientists said last May they found microplastic in every human testicle they sampled, and such particles have been found elsewhere, including in the liver, blood and placenta. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/human-brain-microplastic-nanoplastic_n_67a1634be4b0ec9b035402e4
File under: WASF The End of Climate-Change Idealism: Facing Geopolitical and Economic Reality February 19, 2025|Art Berman Geopolitical and economic reality is overwhelming climate policies. When economies tighten, climate takes a backseat. Biden poured billions into renewables, but Trump is flipping the script—slashing EV and clean energy support in favor of fossil fuels. Germany, once the poster child for decarbonization, is shifting focus to security and migration. Billions in climate subsidies are frozen, hydrogen and green steel projects are stalled, and conservatives plan to gut funding, leaving industry on edge. China just launched its biggest coal-power buildout in a decade. Renewable advocates don’t get it. Intermittent power needs backup, which means more fossil fuels, not less. If renewables can’t stand on their own, what’s the point? Japan remains hooked on coal and gas, needing a 73% emissions cut by 2035 to meet its stated climate goals; yet AI, data centers, and chip factories push power consumption higher. Argentina and Indonesia are questioning whether the Paris Agreement is worth the cost. Austria’s far-right is pushing climate off the table. Geopolitics and Economic Pressures Are Moving Climate Policy to the Sidelines In Europe and OECD countries, climate concerns are being drowned out by more immediate crises—tariffs, trade wars, inflation, and higher energy costs. People want relief, not long-term climate plans. Immigration, crime, and populist battles dominate political debates, while fractured coalitions, fading old-guard parties, and leadership crises make action even harder. At the recent Munich Security Conference, U.S. Vice President JD Vance made it clear: Europe can’t keep riding on America’s defense budget. “We have to grow up in that sense and spend much more.” J.D. Vance Translation—Europe needs to step up. That means spending money it doesn’t have. France and Italy—Europe’s largest economies after Germany—are already breaking EU fiscal rules on debt limits. They can’t boost defense spending without slashing other programs. The same goes for Belgium and Greece. NATO’s Mark Rutte says Europe needs to spend well over 3% of GDP on defense, a shift that would require at least €230 billion more every year—a steep price for nations already stretched thin by energy costs, inflation, and economic stagnation. Defense spending isn’t optional anymore. Europe either builds its own military or learns to live with the consequences. When survival politics take over, climate goals don’t stand a chance. Mario Draghi has gone further saying that Europe has neglected funding its own productivity for years. He warned that closing the gap will take €750-800 billion a year. “The share of investment in GDP would have to rise to levels not seen in Europe since the 1960s and 70s. The effort would be more than double that of the Marshall Plan.” Mario Draghi Europe can’t afford to keep funding programs that don’t drive growth—and unfortunately, climate change falls into that category. Geopolitical Reality Always Wins Michael Every argues that economic policy thrives when times are good—when crises hit, realism and economic statecraft take over. “A more geopolitical world, by definition, should arguably preclude sole reliance on business-as-usual economic or market thinking.” “One should start by asking what a state’s key interests are in a challenging geopolitical environment; what its grand strategy is; then considering if this can be achieved best with economic policy, or idealist or realist economic statecraft. Michael Every Rising energy nationalism, U.S.-China tensions, and supply chain instability mean energy isn’t just an environmental issue—it’s a strategic asset. Nations that ignore this are fooling themselves. A realistic approach to economic statecraft starts with national interests, not abstract decarbonization goals. In a multipolar world, energy policy is shaped by security concerns and industrial strategy, not wishful thinking. Reality beats idealism every time. Energy Idealism vs. Reality The physics of energy matters. Renewables have promise but lack the density, storage, and infrastructure to replace fossil fuels on a political timeline. Betting energy security on wind and solar without a reliable baseload (fossil fuels or nuclear) is energy idealism—and in the real world, idealism doesn’t keep the lights on. But electricity is only 21% of final energy use—and that’s where the energy transition fantasy really falls apart (Figure 1). Figure 1. Electric power accounted for 21% of world final energy consumption in 2023. IEA expects its share to increase to 24% by 2030. Source: IEA & Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc. Mining, shipping, trucking, rail, and militaries run on oil—not solar panels and wind farms. That isn’t changing fast enough to matter, especially when voters care more about paying their bills than cutting emissions. A Realist Energy Strategy A geopolitical, realist-driven energy policy doesn’t reject renewables—it just treats them differently. Scaling up wind and solar requires massive investment in grids, storage, and minerals like lithium, cobalt, and copper. Energy security conflicts with globalized renewable supply chains. Countries swapping oil and gas dependence for Chinese solar panels and battery components are just trading one dependency for another. When economies tighten, affordability beats emissions targets every time. Geopolitical shocks—Ukraine, Taiwan, Red Sea disruptions—expose the cracks in energy transition plans. This is why fossil fuels remain central to energy security, no matter what the idealists believe. The Missing Piece: Energy Realism Energy needs come first—climate targets come second. Think of it like a power law: oil delivers 80% of energy, electricity 20%—which one is more important? Renewables? Just 15% of that electricity slice. Wind and solar make up just 3% of total energy supply—and they’re not pulling their weight. After decades of waiting for the rookies to deliver, the crowd is done cheering. In a multipolar, crisis-prone world, energy policy isn’t about ideological commitments to decarbonization—it’s about power and survival. I don’t say this lightly. I want a livable planet, too. But the last twenty years show that we have to work with reality, not against it. A successful approach to living within planetary boundaries means acknowledging challenges, adapting strategies, and making sure the path forwardis not just aspirational—but achievable. Climate Change is a Failed Paradigm Climate change is a systemic crisis fueled by carbon emissions from human expansion. That’s a concept—a single idea that explains a phenomenon. Climate change is a systemic crisis solved by switching to renewables. That’s a paradigm—a system of thought that shapes how we interpret reality and approach solutions. The concept of climate change is undeniable. The climate change paradigm has failed. It’s failed because switching to renewables hasn’t reversed rising emissions or temperatures—despite more than $3 trillion spent since 2020 (Figure 2). Emissions and temperature move together, and renewables haven’t broken that link (Figure 2). Arguing that it could have been worse isn’t convincing. Figure 2. Global temperature has increased +1.5° Celsius (+17%) since 1970. CO2 concentration has increased +96 ppm (+29%) over the same period. Source: Our World in Data, Columbia University & Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc. The data is clear—we’re in deep trouble. Wishful thinking won’t change that. This is the right paradigm: Human expansion beyond planetary limits has pushed Earth’s systems to the brink. The solution isn’t just new technology—it’s a fundamental shift in how we think about energy and resources, and how we relate to Nature—and to our own nature. It’s time to broaden our perspective. Climate change matters, but it’s not the only crisis, nor is it the only thing that matters. Even among those who care about the Earth, few understand how recent and fragile our wealth—our stored energy—really is. It was a lucky break. About 10,000 years ago, Earth’s climate stabilized just enough to make agriculture possible.That stability created the first real surpluses any species had ever known—and it changed everything for humans.Then came fossil fuels and the carbon pulse, putting our species on steroids. Now, our impact on Earth’s ecosystems is unraveling the very stability that made civilization possible. Yet some mistakenly believe a hotter world means more abundance—as if higher temperatures alone will lead to more food. They fail to see the bigger picture. The natural systems that allowed surplus to exist in the first place—stable seasons, predictable rainfall, fertile soils—are finely tuned to the climate we’ve known. Push past that threshold, and surplus turns to scarcity. Ecosystem collapse, geopolitical instability, wars, and an overextended financial system propped up by unsustainable claims on energy and materials—these crises are not separate, but deeply connected. There are many battles ahead, and climate change isn’t the only one worth fighting. I don’t know the future, but I do know this: we have to let go of a failed climate paradigm. Renewables weren’t the answer. Depressing? Maybe. But it’s a far better, more honest path than clinging to solutions we already know don’t work. https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-...ism-facing-geopolitical-and-economic-reality/
Earth's pollution sinks overflowing, the human enterprise is too big and too consumptive to be sustained much longer... The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie We might at the very least be honest with ourselves. We ship our waste to the other side of the planet not only because we produce far too much of it but also because we insist on an environment exorcised of our own material footprints. February 19, 2025 Alexander Clapp New York Times DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times In the closing years of the Cold War, something strange started to happen. Much of the West’s trash stopped heading to the nearest landfill and instead started crossing national borders and traversing oceans. The stuff people tossed away and probably never thought about again — dirty yogurt cups, old Coke bottles — became some of the most redistributed objects on the planet, typically winding up thousands of miles away. It was a bewildering process, one that began with the export of toxic industrial waste. By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America. In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an injustice that Daniel arap Moi, then the president of Kenya, referred to as “garbage imperialism.” Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention, entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries. If only the story had ended there. Despite that legislative success, the poorer nations of the world have never stopped being receptacles for the West’s ever-proliferating rubbish. The situation now is, in many respects, worse than it was in the 1980s. Then, there was widespread recognition that waste export was immoral. Today, most waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the language of planetary salvation. For the past two years I’ve been traveling the globe — from the plains of Romania to the slums of Tanzania — in an attempt to understand the world trash is making. What I saw was terrifying. I started in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where millions of faltering electronics have been “donated” by Western companies and universities since the 2000s. There I met communities of “burner boys,” young migrants from the country’s desert fringes who make cents an hour torching American cellphone chargers and television remotes once they stop working. They told me about coughing up blood at night. It’s no surprise: The section of Accra they inhabit, a squalid estuary known as Agbogbloshie, regularly ranks among Earth’s most poisoned places. Anyone who eats an egg in Agbogbloshie, according to the World Health Organization, will absorb 220 times the tolerable daily intake of chlorinated dioxins, a toxic byproduct of electronic waste. It’s not just your old DVD player getting shipped to West Africa. Today’s waste trade is an opportunistic bonanza, an escape valve of environmental responsibility that profits off routing detritus of every conceivable variety to places that are in no position to take it. Your discarded clothes? They may go to a desert in Chile. The last cruise ship you boarded? Hacked to pieces in Bangladesh. Your depleted car battery? Stacked in a warehouse in Mexico. Is some of it run by organized crime? Of course. “For us,” a Naples mafioso boasted in 2008, “rubbish is gold.” But much of it doesn’t have to be. Waste export remains scandalously underregulated and unmonitored. Practically anyone can give it a go. Nowhere does today’s waste trade reach more boggling dimensions than with plastic. The time scales alone are dizzying. Bottles or takeaway cartons that you own for moments embark on arduous, monthslong, carbon-spewing journeys from one end of Earth to another. Upon arrival in villages in Vietnam or the Philippines, for example, some of these objects get chemically reduced — an energy-intensive task that unleashes innumerable toxins and microplastics into local ecosystems. The process’s ability to produce new plastic is at best dubious, but the environmental and health cost is cataclysmic. Plastic waste in the developing world — clogging waterways, exacerbating air pollution, infiltrating human brain tissue — is now linked to the death of hundreds of thousands every year. The fate of much other plastic waste that gets sent to the global south is more rudimentary: It gets incinerated in a cement factory or dumped in a field. In Turkey, I met marine biologists who fly drones along the Mediterranean coast to search for stray piles of European plastic waste, which enters the country at the rate of one dump truck roughly every 15 minutes. In Kenya, a country that outlawed plastic bags in 2017 only for the American petrochemical sector to conspire to turn it into Africa’s next waste frontier, more than half the cattle that wander urban areas have been found to possess plastic in their stomach linings, while a shocking 69 percent of discarded plastic is believed to enter a water system of one form or another. That still pales in comparison to what I witnessed in Indonesia. Across the country’s 17,000-odd islands, domestically consumed plastic is so mishandled that 365 tons of it are believed to enter the sea every hour. And yet, deep in the highlands of Java, there are hellscapes of imported Western waste — toothpaste tubes from California, shopping bags from the Netherlands, deodorant sticks from Australia — stacked knee-high as far as the eye can see. Too voluminous to even attempt to recycle, it is used as fuel in scores of bakeries that supply Java’s street markets with tofu, a culinary staple. The result is some of the most lethal cuisine imaginable, with poisons from incinerated Western plastic ingested hourly by great numbers of Indonesians. Can the waste trade ever be legislated into oblivion? As with drug trafficking, it may be that there’s too much money going around to fix the problem. Traveling trash, after all, has many advantages. Rich countries lose a liability, and garbage producers are let off the hook. The need to find a place to put all our rubbish has never been more dire: A recent United Nations study found that one out of every 20 objects moving through global supply chains is now some form of plastic — amounting to a trillion-dollar annual industry worth more than the global arms, timber and wheat trades combined. Most crucially, it’s hard for Western consumers to recognize the extent of the crisis — that the story they’ve been told about recycling often isn’t true — when it is continually rendered invisible, relocated thousands of miles away. Yeo Bee Yin, the former environmental minister of Malaysia, may have put it to me best: The only way to really stop waste from entering her country, she told me, would be to close Malaysia’s ports entirely. We might at the very least be honest with ourselves about what we are doing. We ship our waste to the other side of the planet not only because we produce far too much of it but also because we insist on an environment exorcised of our own material footprints. Everything you’ve ever thrown away in your life: There’s a good chance a lot of it is still out there, somewhere, be it headphones torched for their copper wiring in Ghana or a sliver of a Solo Cup bobbing across the Pacific Ocean. Here the adage doesn’t ring true. Rare is the trash that becomes anyone’s treasure. Alexander Clapp is a journalist and the author of “Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash,” from which this essay is adapted. https://portside.org/2025-02-19/story-youve-been-told-about-recycling-lie
"if we become reliant on solar geoengineering, the world will be left subject to a catastrophic termination shock if the intervention is ever halted – any time during the next millennium or even longer" The UK’s gamble on solar geoengineering is like using aspirin for cancer Raymond Pierrehumbert and Michael Mann Injecting pollutants into the atmosphere to reflect the sun would be extremely dangerous, but the UK is funding field trials Some years ago in the pages of the Guardian, we sounded the alarm about the increasing attention being paid to solar geoengineering – a barking mad scheme to cancel global heating by putting pollutants in the atmosphere that dim the sun by reflecting some sunlight back to space. In one widely touted proposition, fleets of aircraft would continually inject sulphur compounds into the upper atmosphere, simulating the effects of a massive array of volcanoes erupting continuously. In essence, we have broken the climate by releasing gigatonnes of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide, and solar geoengineering proposes to “fix” it by breaking a very different part of the climate system. The fix is more like taking aspirin for cancer, treating symptoms but leaving the underlying malignancy to keep growing. It poses arguably unsurmountable governance issues in our turbulent modern political environment. And if we become reliant on solar geoengineering, the world will be left subject to a catastrophic termination shock if the intervention is ever halted – any time during the next millennium or even longer. Since our 2021 commentary, the situation has grown far worse, with tens of millions of dollars pouring into the scheme, mostly from private philanthropy. Bill Gates was an early backer, and the tech and fintech industries have piled on since. But we never imagined that the UK government itself would be leading the charge into what is almost universally recognized as the most dangerous and destabilizing sort of research: field trials that risk developing dangerous technology and paving the way for deployment. That is precisely the emphasis as the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) prepares to hand over $58m for solar geoengineering research and development. Outdoor experimentation is such a controversial undertaking that even the Simons Foundation, which funds research in solar geoengineering, has shied away from making grants in this area. Aria, with an initial budget of £800m, arose from the fevered dreams of Dominic Cummings at the height of the Boris Johnson crony capitalism years. After a rocky start for the office, Cummings’s legacy lives on in the current Labour government, which seems to have lost track of what Aria is doing. Aria, a wannabe clone of the US Defense Advanced Projects Agency (Darpa), works in darkness. It is not subject to freedom of information requests. It gives a pot of money to each of its (often inexperienced) directors, to direct expenditure largely as they wish, with only minimal peer review. The director in charge of the solar geoengineeering project is Mark Symes, an electrochemist with no background in climate science. It is ironic that Aria is funding a project that is not only a waste of money but is actively harmful, at a time when the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is busily hunting for places to cut government expenditures. Surely this project should count as low-hanging fruit for Reeves’s sharp scissors. The Aria programme thesis document on “cooling the Earth” makes for chilling reading. The project goes all-in on the supposed need for field trials, without making a case that such trials could answer any of the really important questions about what would happen with a sustained global-scale deployment. That the trials are described as “small scale” is little comfort, because even small-scale trials risk developing the technology somebody else (think Musk, Trump or Putin) might use for a large-scale deployment. (The Adam McKay film Don’t Look Up adroitly satirises the existential threat of a geoengineering-happy Musk-like plutocrat). There is extreme danger in launching such field trials into an environment with neither national nor international governance in place. The only governance would be that imposed by Aria directors, who are accountable to basically nobody. Worse, Aria can fund projects outside the UK, which invites shopping for sites with poor environmental regulations and limited opportunities for public protest. Provision of government funding for crossing the Rubicon to outdoor experimentation will inevitably legitimise such programmes, opening the floodgates for yet more money to pour into developing geoengineering technology worldwide. And once the engineers involved realise, as they inevitably will, that “small scale” experiments do not answer any of the truly critical questions, there will be demand for ever-larger trials, putting us on a slippery slope to full-scale deployment. The Aria geoengineering programme is a dangerous distraction from the work that needs to be done to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. The net-zero goal is one that is enshrined in UK law, and one that the Labour government purports to uphold. The UK government should not encourage false solutions like solar geoengineering and the people of the UK should not stand for it. Aria is already evaluating proposals for its dangerous project. It is not too late to halt this juggernaut, but to do so will require vigorous pushback that starts right now. Raymond T Pierrehumbert FRS is professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford. He is an author of the 2015 US National Academy of Sciences report on climate intervention Michael E Mann ForMemRS is presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/12/solar-geoengineering-uk