Shoving People Aside: The Kleptogarchy part 28
Posted: October 7, 2022 Filed under: Energy, Environment | Tags: Three Gorges Dam Leave a commentShoving People Aside
Endemic viruses weaken communities. Expulsions break communities up. In China, an unpublished number of people were displaced, moved out, by the mammoth Three Gorges Dam, on which work began in 1994. The estimated totals range from 1.3 million (Chinese Government), 1.4 million – 1.5 million (Antoine Vedeilhe and others for France 24) to 6 million (Dr Brooke Wilmsen at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.[1]) Brooke Wilmsen expanded the count to include people like fishermen whose livelihoods evaporated, and those whose homes disappeared in landslips or floods. It is not done in China to criticise the government, so fears about instability and collapse come mainly from outside the country. Hydraulic engineer Dr Wang Weiluo, working in Germany and not allowed to publish in China, told France 24 that there is distortion in the dam, and that if it broke, the wall of water would submerge Wuhan some 400 kilometres (250 miles) downstream. Coincidentally, Wuhan is widely accepted as the source of Covid-19.
News channel France 24’s ‘China’s Three Gorges Dam Revisited’[2], released in October 2020, reveals the low compensation paid to those whose homes and farmlands were to be submerged as the waters behind the dam rose 175 metres, just on 569 feet. A displaced farmer said he was offered €3,000 (about £2,520 at the rate on November 21st 2021) a pension of €6 (£5) a month, and accommodation 800 kilometers (500 miles) away. He chose to remain in a nearby town, renting a tiny room, and is poverty-stricken.
The world’s largest hydro-electric plant is at the dam, with a capacity of 22,500 MW. Each year the plant generates about 85TW hours of electricity, nearly 10% of China’s requirements[3], and saving over 100 million tonnes of CO2. The US Energy Information Administration reckons that, when burned, one ton of coal with 78% carbon content releases 2.86 tons of CO2. So the dam, the largest of 98,000 throughout China, and its hydro plant are better for the environment than coal-fired power stations, surely? Dams create a giant carbon footprint, though. The Three Gorges dam wall contains 27.2 million cubic metres of concrete. The manufacture of each cubic metre emits between 100 and 300 kg of CO2, depending on the composition, so 27.2 million cubic metres would have emitted between 2.7 million and 8.2 million tonnes, which at the upper estimate is a quarter of the annual CO2 emissions of Wales. The dam contains 463,000 tonnes of steel, embodying nearly 857,000 tonnes of CO2. Then there are the 102.6 million cubic metres of earth bulldozed out of the way, the turbines, all the ancillary works, and the ongoing maintenance. Is it fair, then, to class hydro power as renewable?
In operation, hydro power stations are ‘clean’ compared with burning coal. If the 85TW hours of electricity were generated from coal, around 67 million tonnes of CO2 would be added to the atmosphere. That is twice the total emissions from Wales and can be pictured as 13.4 million five-tonne African elephants flying around the sky.
Yet dams are no panacea. Just in China, in August 1975 up to 240,000 people died – no one is quite sure — and 11 million lost their homes, when the Banqiao and Shimantan dams, and 60 others, in Henan province failed after torrential rains.
What often accompanies global heating?
Torrential rains.
[1] https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/announcements/2017/the-dam-that-moves-a-mountain.
[2] Video by Antoine Vedeilhe, Angelique Forget, Camille Despierres, Antoine Morel and Charlie Wang, October 3rd 2020, on YouTube.
[3] https://www.power-technology.com/projects/gorges/, accessed November 21st 2021.
No Place for the Mega Metropolis: The Kleptogarchy part 25
Posted: September 19, 2022 Filed under: Environment, Guatemala | Tags: Jared Diamond, Mayan civilisation, Tikal Leave a commentNo Place for the Mega Metropolis
The future world, as I see it, will be a rural world with small cities. It will not be possible to provision large cities. We will see more former industrial centres like Detroit reclaimed by small-scale farming, with nature flourishing as in the Mayan jungle cities in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. Drought probably ended the power of the large and complex Mayan cities. As Jared Diamond wrote in Collapse,[1] “the Maya warn us that crashes can also befall the most advanced and creative societies”.
The Mayans outgrew their environment, not all at once but with more and more frequent emergencies which eventually coalesced. Expanding populations cut down forests, exposing soils which were eroded away. Deforestation and drought are intimately linked, as Joseph Stromberg explained in 2012: “Because cleared land absorbs less solar radiation, less water evaporates from its surface, making clouds and rainfall more scarce.”[2] Applying this conclusion to the Amazon basin, the world’s fastest depleting carbon sink, suggests that President Jair Bolsonaro’s drive to deforest Brazil, and replace trees with cattle and arable crops, is doomed to failure because less rain is likely, and when it does rain, soil will leach into the rivers. On depleting soils, crop yields will fall unless they are smothered in agrochemicals, which in turn will pollute the rivers and adjacent habitats. Lose, lose, rather than win, win.
The Mayan city of Tikal, now in northern Guatemala, was deserted in a time of drought, and wasreclaimed by jungle. Author’s photo.
Jared Diamond studied the Mayan city of Copán, in present day Honduras, and describes how the city’s “population was increasing steeply while the hills were being occupied. The subsequent abandonment of all those fields in the hills meant that the burden of feeding the extra population formerly dependent on the hills now fell increasingly on the valley floor, and that more and more people were competing for the food grown on those 10 square miles of valley bottomland. That would have led to fighting among the farmers themselves for the best land, or for any land…” As the civilisation’s resources waned, inhabitants’ health suffered, a process evident from skeletons recovered from the city and dated between 650 and 850 AD. By 1250 AD the city was being reclaimed by forest: the people had gone.
Competition for resources led, and leads, to conflict. During fierce conflicts, soldiering replaces everyday civilian occupations including farming, but soldiers must eat, even if it means consuming seed crops. In a decline, problems escalate and the means of resolving them diminish. That has been so through recorded history, and is where we find ourselves now, this time on a global scale.
[1] Collapse was published in the USA by Viking Penguin and in the UK by Allen Lane in 2005 by Penguin in 2006. The collapse of Mayan civilisation is on pages 157-177 of the Penguin edition.
[2] Joseph Stromberg, writing for smithsonianmag.com on August 23rd 2012, ‘Why Did the Mayan Civilization Collapse? A New Study Points to Deforestation and Climate Change’, was summarising a study by researchers at Columbia University, published in Geophysical Research on August 25th 2012 and titled ‘Pre-Columbian Deforestation as an Amplifier of Drought in Mesoamerica’. The authors were B I Cook, K J Anchukaitis, J O Kaplan, M J Puma, M Kelley and D Gueyffier. (This was after the study’s mention in the Smithsonian Magazine, which maybe had an advance copy.)
Tipping Over: The Kleptogarchy part 12
Posted: August 22, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Environment | Tags: Climate refugees, Jason Smerdon, Roger Revelle, Svante Arrhenius Leave a commentTipping Over
The heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide have been understood for decades. Swedish physicist and chemist Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927), who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, was a pioneer of applying principles of physical chemistry to estimate the extent to which the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is responsible for the Earth’s increasing surface temperature. Climate campaigner Greta Thunberg adopted the legacy of her fellow Swede, who had tried to alert the world to the likely repercussions of burning fossil carbon.
Roger Revelle (1909-1991), director of the USA’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography between 1950 and 1964, and fellow scientist Hans Suess (1909-1993) studied the rate at which CO2 has accumulated in the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and although they concluded that most of the additional CO2 had been absorbed by the oceans rather than accumulating in the upper atmosphere, they warned that “human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future”[1]
Reasons for the link between carbon dioxide and global warming emerge from this explanation by Sarah Fecht of the Columbia Climate School[2], quoting climate scientist Jason Smerdon[3]:
“When sunlight reaches Earth, the surface absorbs some of the light’s energy and reradiates it as infrared waves, which we feel as heat. (Hold your hand over a dark rock on a warm sunny day and you can feel this phenomenon for yourself.) These infrared waves travel up into the atmosphere and will escape back into space if unimpeded.
“Oxygen and nitrogen don’t interfere with infrared waves in the atmosphere. That’s because molecules are picky about the range of wavelengths that they interact with, Smerdon explained. For example, oxygen and nitrogen absorb energy that has tightly packed wavelengths of around 200 nanometers or less, whereas infrared energy travels at wider and lazier wavelengths of 700 to 1,000,000 nanometers. Those ranges don’t overlap, so to oxygen and nitrogen, it’s as if the infrared waves don’t even exist; they let the waves (and heat) pass freely through the atmosphere.
“With CO2 and other greenhouse gases, it’s different. Carbon dioxide, for example, absorbs energy at a variety of wavelengths between 2,000 and 15,000 nanometers — a range that overlaps with that of infrared energy. As CO2 soaks up this infrared energy, it vibrates and re-emits the infrared energy back in all directions. About half of that energy goes out into space, and about half of it returns to Earth as heat, contributing to the ‘greenhouse effect’.”
Over the 50 years from 1972 (average for the year) to 2022 (April), atmospheric carbon dioxide increased from 327.46 ppm (parts per million) to 420.23 ppm, a rise of 28.3%, according to data published by the USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from the observatory in Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The rate of increase peaked in the 1990s, surging to 373.21 ppm in 2001 from 358.13 ppm in 1991, a growth of 8.95% in one decade. Between 2001 and 2011 atmospheric CO2 increased more slowly, by 5.50%, but from 2011 to 2021 the expansion was 6.40%, showing that international efforts to control global warming were failing to make an impact, and setting the scene for a stark tragedy, a tragedy that politicians are pretending not to see: the tragedy of climate refugees.
Heat melts ice and expands water, and as a result of both processes, sea invades land, and people can no longer live there. Heat dries out forests and makes them much more likely to ignite. Winds spread fires, and the burning timber sends CO2 into the atmosphere, even if emissions from humans have been cut back. We have truly been playing with fire. There will be more and more climate refugees, but national governments have not figured out an ethical way of coping with humanity on the move. The moral vacuity of ‘solutions’ includes letting migrants drown at sea, a consequence of the policy plan expressed in 2021 by Priti Patel, the United Kingdom’s Home Secretary, to criminalise the rescue of migrants in trouble on the sea. In 2022 she hit upon a new plan, to fly refugees to Rwanda, a small African country just over twice the size of the English county Yorkshire and with two-and-a-half times the population, 13.3 million against 5.4 million. Rwanda, encircled by Uganda (from whence Patel’s parents migrated to the United Kingdom), Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Tanzania, suffered a genocide in 1994 when Hutu people slaughtered ethnic Tutsis.
The ethical emptiness of world leaders’ aggressively hostile responses to migrations – ex-President Trump’s determination to stop Central American migrants from entering the USA is a prime example – is explored by author Omar El Akkad in ‘The Climate Refugees are Coming. Countries and International Law aren’t Ready for Them’, in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, on July 31st 2021.[4]
Omar El Akkad wrote that “It is almost certain that, in the coming few decades, the world will see a mass displacement of human beings almost unmatched in modern history.” But there is no agreement on what to do:
“There is, in international law, almost no mechanism for dealing with this kind of forced migration. And unless one is developed and implemented quickly, the defining crisis of the coming decades will play out the way so many prior refugee crises have played out before – first with indifference, then rejection, and finally bloodshed.”
There are no safe places, but some are less immediately in danger than others. The United Kingdom is one of those places, but it is the fossil-fuel powered industrial processes foisted onto the world by the UK and other colonial powers that have accelerated the rising seas, the fires and the droughts that force people from their homes. What will happen to the people of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean when their islands, in the main just a metre above sea level, are under water? The aeroplanes which carried tourists to ‘dream holidays’ brought a false prosperity and contributed to the heating world that is raising the waters.
Tipping points. They are no joke. Passing an irreversible tipping point would mean a system would not revert to its original state even if the forcing lessened or reversed, explained Dr Richard Wood, who leads the Climate, Cryosphere and Oceans group in the Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre. He told Carbon Brief: [5]
“In some cases, there is evidence that once the system has jumped to a different state, then if you remove the climate forcing, the climate system doesn’t just jump back to the original state – it stays in its changed state for some considerable time, or possibly even permanently.”
Carbon Brief continued:
“This phenomenon is known as ‘hysteresis’. It occurs when a system undergoes a ‘bifurcation’ – which means to divide or fork into two branches – and it is subsequently difficult, if not impossible, for the system to revert to its previous state. For example, part of the reason that Greenland has an ice sheet today is that it has had that ice sheet for hundreds of thousands of years. If the Greenland ice sheet were to pass a tipping point that led to its disintegration, simply reducing emissions and lowering global temperatures to pre-industrial levels would not bring it back again. It would probably require another ice age to achieve that.”
Tipping points have been too scary a topic for mass media. Instead, there has been a drive to keep populations quiescent, by plying them with entertainment and seeking to criminalise protest, so they do not threaten economic power networks and their political executive arms. There is a third, equally sinister mechanism of control – tracking by technology. Geographical positioning systems? Your phone provider knows exactly where you are. Smart speakers? You are contributing to a dossier of information about you, and not for your benefit. Social media? The algorithms build up detailed personal profiles that are sold for tight targeting. If you are a left-leaning peace-and-justice type, you are unlikely to receive messages promoting far right, or even Conservative, political viewpoints. You are in an insulated bubble, and you don’t know what people in other bubbles are being told. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism [6] and be alarmed. She explains:
“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvements, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behaviour predictions that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behaviour.”[7]
Replacement of paper money and coinage with programmable cryptocurrency would take surveillance a stage further, dictating how much, where, and on what a person can spend money allocated to them for work done or as benefits. It could happen.
If powerful interests want to exert greater control over populations, the technology exists for them to do so. To transmit the message that climate change is not a major problem, for example, you mine the data to identify climate sceptics and stream propaganda at them, propaganda that climate change worriers may never see and therefore cannot directly oppose. It is a classic example of the ploy to divide and rule.
Scientist Dr James Lovelock (1919-2022), who developed the Gaia Theory, of the Earth as a complex living system, commented in his 2006 book The Revenge of Gaia that “in spite of the expertise and the powerful computing machinery, our forecasts are provisional and do not include all surprises. Some, like the threshold of irreversible change, we think exist, and we wonder if the circulation of warm and cold water in the North Atlantic may be poised for sudden change. But we are not much better at dealing with the unexpected than were Columbus and his sailors when they set sail westwards for the East Indies. Their model of a round earth was good, but the real planet had a huge and unexpected surprise, the existence of the North American continent. We could be wise to expect that instead of temperature and sea level rising smoothly as the years go by, as in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s predictions, there will be sudden and wholly unpredicted discontinuities”.[8]
The circulation of warm water in the North Atlantic, the flow that we call the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), or colloquially the Gulf Stream, has weakened substantially.
Dr David Thornalley, of University College, London (UCL), said in 2021:[9]
“Whilst climate modelling has long predicted a slowdown of the AMOC as a result of human-induced warming, this study shows the increasing evidence in support of the modern Atlantic Ocean undergoing unprecedented changes in comparison to the last millennium, and in some cases longer. Alongside other human pressures on the marine environment, the changes we are observing in ocean circulation are impacting marine ecosystems in both the surface and deep ocean. We will need to take account of these ongoing changes in our efforts to conserve and manage marine resources.”
The UCL article pointed out that AMOC is vital for heat redistribution, is crucial to Earth’s climate as we know it, and that abrupt slowdown “could trigger disruptions around the globe – including a sudden rise in regional sea levels, changes in the position of major rainfall and arid climate zones”. Winter weather in Europe could become “more extreme and intense” and the east coast of the USA would be at greater risk of flood events.
Higher temperatures, lower temperatures and wild oscillations, spell discomfort and stress at best, the disappearance of numerous species at worst. For humans, high temperatures and humidity together can be lethal. The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance already happens, but it could become much more prevalent. We are talking about wet bulb temperatures (TW):
“A normal internal human body temperature of 36.8° ± 0.5°C requires skin temperatures of around 35°C to maintain a gradient directing heat outward from the core. Once the air (dry-bulb) temperature (T) rises above this threshold, metabolic heat can only be shed via sweat-based latent cooling, and at TW exceeding about 35°C, this cooling mechanism loses its effectiveness altogether. Because the ideal physiological and behavioural assumptions are almost never met, severe mortality and morbidity impacts typically occur at much lower values”, reported Colin Raymond, Tom Matthews and Radley M Horton in ‘The Emergence of Heat and Humidity Too Severe for Human Tolerance’, published in Science Advances in May 2020.[10]
Switch on the air conditioner? That may be a temporary solution for a few people, but the heat does not disappear, it is pumped into the atmosphere making it even hotter. Air conditioners run on electricity. There will not be enough generating capacity or potential, or distribution infrastructure, for renewable electricity to power the world as it is in 2021, and the infrastructure that exists will be at greater risk of destruction than in the relatively benign past. We take so much for granted, for example that we will always be able to battle wildfires with water-carrying aircraft. But what if aeroplanes are not there? BBC News’ Gareth Evans asked on November 17 2019 ‘How do you fight extreme wildfires?’[11]. Australian firefighter Kirsten Langmaid said of the first attack on a wildfire that “We always send a rapid response team out during this first attack. These are crews who are fully kitted out with firefighting gear and water-carrying vehicles. If the location is a little more remote, then we’ll send a plane or a small helicopter up straight away. This is usually just to check it out and they’ll give us a rough estimate of how big the fire is.” If a fire is not contained, Kirsten said, “In a worst-case scenario we would have hundreds of people on the ground, multiple different agencies involved and multiple aircraft in the skies.”
What happens when all that kit is no longer there?
Aircraft cannot fly in very hot air, typically above 52 deg C / 126 deg F for Airbus and Boeing jets[12]. The hotter the air, the less dense it is, and this means there is insufficient lift to allow take-off and to keep planes in the air. Temperatures exceeding 50 deg C were recorded in June 2021 in Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Oman, and other Middle Eastern locations.[13] Europe’s highest temperature recorded up to August 11th 2021 was in Siracusa, Sicily, on August 11th: an alarming 48.8 deg C / 119.8 deg F. The trend is upwards.
Extreme heat damages roads, rails, bridges, power lines; drought restricts water for cooling at power stations and other energy-intensive industrial sites. Repairs boost GDP[14] figures, but for how long will it be affordable to keep patching? Before long, the kleptogarchy will run out of victims to fleece, and extractive capitalism should fail. At this point, though, even dedicated anti-capitalists would hardly be celebrating.
[1] ‘Carbon dioxide exchange between atmosphere and ocean and the question of an increase of atmospheric CO2 during past decades’ by Roger Revelle and Hans E Suess, 1957, in Tellus Vol.9 No.1 pps. 18-27.
[2] February 25 2021, https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-cause-global-warming/, accessed August 2 2021.
[3] Jason Smerdon is a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
[4] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-climate-refugees-are-coming-countries-and-international-law-arent/, accessed August 2 2021.
[5] ‘Nine tipping points that could be triggered by climate change’, in Carbon Brief, February 10 2020, https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-nine-tipping-points-that-could-be-triggered-by-climate-change, accessed August 4 2021.
[6] The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power was published in the USA in 2019 by Public Affairs, Hachette Book Group, and in the UK by Profile Books Ltd.
[7] The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p.8.
[8] The Revenge of Gaia, published by Allen Lane, chapter 4 p.50.
[9] ‘Earth’s Gulf Stream System at its weakest in over a millennium’, news from University College London, February 25 2021, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/earths-gulf-stream-system-its-weakest-over-millennium, accessed August 5 2021. The article refers to ‘Current Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation weakest in last millennium’ in Nature Geoscience, by L. Caesar, G. D. McCarthy, D. J. R. Thornalley, N. Cahill & S. Rahmstorf, 2021, Vol.14, pps.118–120.
[10] ‘The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance’, Science Advances, May 8 2020, Vol.6, No.19. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838, accessed August 5 2021.
[11] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-50410481, accessed August 11 2021.
[12] https://monroeaerospace.com/blog/why-airplanes-cant-take-off-or-fly-in-extreme-heat/, accessed August 11 2021.
[13] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/1/interactive-mapping-hottest-temperatures-around-world, accessed August 11 2021.
[14] GDP is the Gross Domestic Product measure of the financial worth of national economic activity.
Jailing Steven Donziger: The Kleptogarchy part 6
Posted: August 16, 2022 Filed under: Corporations, Environment, Law | Tags: Chevron, Ecuador, Steven Donziger, Texaco, toxic waste Leave a commentJailing Steven Donziger
Steven Donziger was not a familiar name to me until I saw posts on Twitter and realised that he was under house arrest in New York. His crime, at base, was to have angered oil company Chevron by assisting lawyers in Ecuador to mount a prosecution against the corporate giant for polluting its former well sites in Orellana province, amid the Amazon rainforest. Back in 1969, the US oil company Texaco, with Petroecuador, found oil in Orellana. As they drilled, toxic waste was dumped in pools that were later covered with soil. Waste continued to leak into water courses. In 1990 the companies agreed to spend between US$8 million and $13 million on a clean-up. The bill became larger in 1995, when the Ecuador Government got Texaco to agree to pay $40 million. By then Steven Donziger, a crusading lawyer in his early 30s, had represented some 30,000 Ecuadorians in a class action lawsuit against Texaco, filed in the USA in 1993. Nothing much happened. In 2000 Chevron did a deal to buy Texaco for a reported $38.7 billion, and so Chevron became the accused in the Ecuadorian dispute, which reached a wider audience in 2009 with the release of the Joe Berlinger film Crude. The film highlights the legal get-outs employed by Chevron to deny responsibility for environmental damage, such as pointing out that the toxic waste carried no trademarks or logos tying it to Texaco/Chevron; that the local partner Petroecuador had been solely responsible for waste after Texaco withdrew from Ecuador in 1992; that Texaco had paid $40 million for cleaning up, and that the Ecuadorian Government had released the company from further liability. Kent Robertson, in 2022 Chevron’s General Manager, Public Affairs, was media relations adviser when Crude showed him lambasting the litigants as a “group of conmen”.
The International Journal of Epidemiology published a paper in 2002 comparing the incidence of cancers in populations within and outside oil extraction areas in Amazonian Ecuador. The key messages included “significantly higher incidence of cancer for all sites combined in both men and women living in proximity to oil fields” and “urgently recommended” an ”environmental monitoring and cancer surveillance system in the region”.[1] In Crude, Chevron’s Sara McMillen, Chief Environmental Scientist, maintains there was no evidence of an increase in the cancer death rate. Maybe her words were very carefully chosen, as there was evidence of a rise in cancer occurrence.
Chevron’s tactics were to stop a hearing in the USA and transfer it to Ecuador. This happened in 2002 when Chevron agreed it would accept the decision of the Ecuadorian court. The case, with Donziger advising, moved through the court system, slowly. In 2011 a provincial court awarded damages of $18 billion, reduced to $9.5 billion by Ecuador’s National Court of Justice. But Chevron never paid, and moved assets out of the country so they could not be seized. Instead, Chevron counter-sued Donziger under the USA’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, accusing him of bribing an Ecuadorian judge. In the USA, Judge Lewis A Kaplan agreed with Chevron and in 2014 recused the company from paying anything to Ecuador, and ordered Donziger to pay $800,000 to Chevron. The oil company had relied heavily on testimony from a former Ecuadorian judge, Alberto Guerra, whom the company accommodated and paid in the USA. Guerra later said that he lied.
When Donziger refused to hand over his phones, computers and any other electronic devices to Chevron, which said it needed them to search for assets that could be seized to pay the $800,000, he was charged with contempt of court. Judge Kaplan wanted the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York to prosecute, but his request was turned down. Then Judge Kaplan recruited the private law firm Seward and Kissel, although the firm had recently represented Chevron. The case, heard by Judge Loretta Preska, resulted in Donziger’s conviction and in October 2021 was sentenced to six months in jail. Two months later he was released to serve out the term under house arrest.
This is a headline condensation of a process that started half a century ago with toxic waste. The waste is still there. Chevron has not paid the reparations ordered by the National Court of Justice in Ecuador. Chevron turned the tables on Donziger, the lead US lawyer representing the blighted communities, by accusing him of fraud. Judge Kaplan cited racketeering, extortion, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, judicial bribery, coercion, witness tampering, and arranging for experts’ reports to be ghostwritten, much of the evidence coming from former Ecuadorian judge Alberto Guerra, who subsequently admitted to lying. Many in the legal world disagreed with the sledgehammer used on Donziger; in September 2020, the National Lawyers Guild and International Association of Democratic Lawyers reportedly filed a complaint against Kaplan, because of the way Donziger had been treated.
No doubt that Chevon’s business was and is lucrative for lawyers. Probably there is a bias in favour of US corporations when they are pursued in court by foreigners with limited resources. But the injured parties in the Ecuadorian Amazon are left with a toxic environment. The oil profits were privatised, but no one is willing to pay for a proper clean-up.
Meanwhile, Donziger tweeted on April 14th 2022: “Video of my ankle bracelet being cut at the halfway house yesterday. The U.S. government shackled this metal to my skin 24/7 for almost 3 years. I showered with it, slept with it, ate with it, and charged it with a battery at least once per day. Still not free; 11 days to go.” Donziger was 60 years old in 2021. The battle against Texico, then Chevron, has overshadowed 30 years of his life. Profits extracted at the expense of people and the environment will come to an end when Earth is uninhabitable, but it’s surely better to stop the rot right now.
[1] ‘Geographical differences in cancer incidence in the Amazon basin of Ecuador in relation to residence near oil fields’ by Anna-Karin Hurtig and Miguel San Sebastián, International Journal of Epidemiology, Vol.31 No.5, October 2002, pps. 1021–1027. https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/31/5/1021/745815, accessed April 18th 2022.
Toxic Urbanisation: The Kleptogarchy part 2
Posted: August 12, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Environment, Population | Tags: China, Kleptogatchy, Stern Review Leave a commentBY PDR
The landmark Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, commissioned by the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the time the Labour politician and future Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was published in October 2006. Nicholas Stern, a British economist, former Chief Economist at the World Bank, and now Lord Stern of Brentford, calculated that to stabilise emissions of CO2 and other greenhouses gases would cost 1% of gross national product (GNP) globally, while if there were no action GNP could fall eventually by 20% or more.
The Stern Review tiptoed through the data, careful not to sound too alarmist, although it did call climate change the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen, and stressed that the benefits of early action far outweighed the costs of not acting. Without action, the review said, the overall costs of climate change would be equivalent to losing at least 5% of GDP, extending possibly to 20% and above. Initially the review proposed that investment of 1% of global GDP could be enough to stem the climate crisis, but only two years later in 2008, the 1% was doubled to 2%. This, it was thought, could be enough to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at 500 to 550 parts per million (ppm) by 2050.
in the UK about climate change when
his report was published in 2006.
Photo by Johann Morgenbesser, Vienna, Austria.
Creative Commons licence.
A ceiling this low now looks improbable. From 372 ppm in April 1999, concentrations measured from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory rose to 421 ppm in April 2022. Estimates reported on the website http://www.co2.earth indicate that by 2087 there could be 611 ppm, an almost two-thirds increase in just 88 years, a nano speck in geological time. The fossil coal we have burnt within a tiny window of 250 years originated between 290 and 354 million years ago.
We need to stop burning coal but China, which accounts for more than more than half the world’s annual consumption, plans to continue. The China Electricity Council has suggested that by 2030 coal-powered generating capacity should reach 1,300GW, up from 1,050GW in 2020. This is a very long way from a cut! China rushed headlong to industrialise, quickly constructing new mega cities, dams, airports and factory complexes on former rural land. The small farmers since displaced by urbanisation were the majority when Mao Zedong’s Communists seized power in 194. Then 89% of China’s 540 million people lived and worked in the countryside. By 2020, only 40% of the vastly increased 1,412 million population were country dwellers. This was a numerical rise from 481 million to 565 million, but in 1949 just 59 million lived in towns and cities, compared to 847 million two generations later. The 847 million in large towns and cities are the drivers of the ‘economic miracle’ that is a short cut to the edge of a toxic, unliveable planet. The 847 million are a colossal barrier to any Chinese effort to limit, let alone stop, severe climate change. They must be kept on side if the Communist Party is to remain in power, and that means providing them with work and wages sufficient to buy food, housing, utilities, and consumer goods. A major ‘return to the land’ drive would be exceptionally difficult because land fertility was sacrificed in the drive to industrialise. The Chinese Government is a barrier to meaningful climate policies both at home and in its spheres of influence abroad.
It’s not just China experiencing sudden urbanisation, of course. In 1960 66%, 1.971 billion, of the world’s 3.032 billion population was classed as rural, according to the World Bank. Sixty years later in 2020 44%, 3.430 billion of the much larger 7.795 billion population was rural. Over the six decades the urban population grew from 1.061 billion to 4.365 billion – a more than fourfold increase., while the rural population expanded by less than three-quarters.
Cities depend on the capacity of rural areas to feed them, and that is looking less and less certain. The World Bank summarises:
“Many countries are facing growing levels of food insecurity, reversing years of development gains, and threatening the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Even before Covid-19 reduced incomes and disrupted supply chains, chronic and acute hunger were on the rise due to various factors, including conflict, socio-economic conditions, natural hazards, climate change and pests. The impact of war in the Ukraine adds risks to global food security, with food prices likely to remain high for the foreseeable future and expected to push millions of additional people into acute food insecurity.[1]
Hungry cities are a political powder keg, sources of social unrest. Failures to deal with the externalities of are greenhouse gas emissions, and their wider impacts, are worsening hunger. The failures owe much to corporations’ grim determination to extract profits by shifting the costs of climate and environmental damage onto the generality of society.
Tom Burgis’s explanation, in his 2021 book Kleptopia,[2] is fear:
“the fear that soon there will not be enough to go round, that on a simmering planet the time is approaching for those who have gathered all they can unto themselves to cut free from the many, from the others.” (p.338) The fear of losing out when the music stops, when somebody else is holding the parcel, intensifies kleptocratic tendencies, to hide and hoard resources that kleptocrats believe will enable them to survive the heat, droughts and scarcities that they themselves have hastened and intensified.
[1]Food Security Update from the World Bank, May 5th 2022. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-security-update, accessed May 21st 2022.
[2]Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World, 2020 and 2021. See bibliography, to be published later in this series.
False Booms: The Kleptogarchy part 1
Posted: August 11, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Corporations, Environment | Tags: Kleptogarchy Leave a commentFarmers Weekly magazine was booming when I joined as a reporter in 1972. We journalists were well paid, worked a 6 ½ hour day (in theory anyway), were entitled to first class rail travel and we also drove company cars. We had a pension scheme geared to our final salaries, and that is sustaining me today. The money to pay us so well would have been impossible without copious advertising for fertilisers, agrochemicals, veterinary pharmaceuticals, fuels, and super-sized machines.
The vast scale of the agricultural supply industry has been enabled by fossil fuels, which are raw materials for products like nitrogen fertiliser (made from ammonia released by burning natural gas), and they also power manufacturing processes for other farm inputs, and the machines that farmers use.
‘Externalities’, costs not met by businesses but pushed into the future, such as soil compaction under heavy machinery, and eutrophication[1] of streams, rivers, lakes, seas and oceans caused by fertiliser run-off, are not deducted from revenues and therefore contribute to ‘profits’. Costs to communities, and threats to humans’ future ability to survive on planet Earth, have not been allowed to get in the way of corporate profits or economic growth, although they shorten the period during which growth is possible!
‘Profits’ are the central concept of our capitalist economic system, but they are achieved by hiding the real costs of production, or by inflating brand values through mass advertising and promotions which brainwash people into believing that big spending on branded stuff, often on borrowed ‘money’, is essential to their sense of self-worth.
Imagine that I am thinking of starting a bread factory. Perhaps for budget bread, in which case I would focus on low costs and squeezing maximum productivity out of workers paid the minimum wage, which in the UK is currently £9.50 an hour for people of 23+. Even if I make profits, the staff are not going live comfortably, unless I share the profits out. Or I could go for gourmet breads, requiring considerable baking skills and high-quality ingredients. Production and labour costs will be elevated, so how do I persuade potential customers to pay over the odds? Will there be enough of them to make it work? Would I have to embark on an endless round of advertising?
But as a customer for wheat to make the bread, I would probably not know if its production damaged the soil, or added to toxic run-off entering water catchments, or had a high carbon footprint because of the fertilisers and agrochemicals applied to it. I would not necessarily know its ‘food miles’, the distances travelled between field and plate. These are among the ‘externalities’, costs that have been socialised, meaning that they do not fall on the individuals and organisations directly responsible for them, but they fall, eventually, on society as a whole. Profits ignore ‘externalities’ because if they were included in business costings, profit would often switch to loss. Businesses are therefore being subsidised by everyone else, including their customers.
Climate change, which could make the world uninhabitable for humans, is the largest externality. The application of conventional economics to climate issues has helped commercial and political global leaders to minimise the dangers of a warming world, but the evidence of costly weather disasters from around the world is now worrying wider populations. Insurance companies know how much specific disasters have cost them, but property insurance is unaffordable for billions across the world, and so the loss of their homes, workshops, crops and possessions go uncounted. Even in the UK, in 2022, property insurance for the standard house I live in, in a village far from the risk front line, would have come to about £440 if I had not taken on more voluntary excesses, meaning that only in the most extreme event such as the house being struck by lightning, catching fire and burning down, would it be cost-effective to make a claim. I read that about one house in 200 in the UK is hit by lightning every year, and that number is likely to rise as storms multiply in our hotter, more unstable atmosphere, so I guess it’s worth insuring — for as long as insurance companies remain solvent.
[1] Eutrophication is accumulation of nutrients in rivers, lakes, seas and oceans, spurring the growth of algae and other surface plants, which prevent oxygen and light from penetrating into the water. When the plants decompose, they release carbon dioxide which makes the water more acidic.
Next time
Toxic Urbanisation
PDR is serialising content from The Kleptogarchy, her investigation into why there is, and will be, insufficient action to slow global heating.
Electric Fairy Tales
Posted: April 8, 2021 Filed under: Energy, Environment | Tags: electric cars, less travel, rare earths Leave a commentStaring at the display from the front passenger sea of a little green Renault Zoe electric car, I worried that we would not make our destination. Fifty miles possible, just over 50 miles to go, but no charging points on the hilly route, or even near to it. We just made it, but it was not exactly restful motoring.
New electric cars are uncommon around here. Partly it’s the purchase cost, from £15,000 upwards and a mainstream cost range of £25,000 to £35,000, much more for luxury models, and partly it’s the lack of charging points. There are no public ones within eight or nine miles. Not everyone can have a home charger, for example if they have no parking space at their home.
OK, electric cars don’t have fossil fuels in the tank, but their manufacture is just as polluting and carbon-dioxide-emitting as the production of conventional vehicles, so they are not allies in efforts to limit climate change, or even to improve our battered environment. Their batteries are at the centre of likely geopolitical tensions, as the rare earths they require – such as lithium, nickel, cobalt – are significantly under the control of China or under the ocean, to the alarm of organisations like Greenpeace. Mining a ton of rare earths on land generates 75 tons of acid waste and a ton of radioactive residues, according to the environmental website youmatter.world (September 25 2018).
Traffic: switching to electric won’t solve pollution, or climate change.
Photo by Alexandr Podvalny on Pexels.com
Then, if electric cars replace petrol and diesel ones, will we have enough electricity to charge them up? The UK’s 33 million cars have an average annual mileage of about 10,000, according to statistica.com. Those cars would, if electric, require 99 terawatt hours of electricity. (One car uses about 30kWh per 100 miles, so 3,000 kWh for 10,000 miles, and 99 billion kWh for the UK car fleet, equating to 99 TWh, terawatt hours.)
The present electricity consumption of the UK, for all purposes, is just over 300 TWh. Therefore converting all cars to electric power could add 32.8%, almost a third, to national electricity use, when we have very little idea of how all that power could be generated cleanly, and without massive, expensive, infrastructure replacement programmes at least every quarter-century.
And we have considered only cars, not freight vehicles.
Currently electric cars have slightly lower running costs than petrol or diesel alternatives, but the difference is not that great. Carwow suggests that a 40 kWh recharge would be sufficient for 168 miles. At 17.5 pence per kWh, a reasonable level for 2021 according to gocompare.com, recharging a 40 kWh battery would cost £17. Petrol for 168 miles, in a vehicle returning 50 miles per gallon, would be £19.29 if the fuel cost £1.26 a litre. But of course many cars achieve less than 50 mpg.
The possible slight present advantage is nullified if an out-of-guarantee electric car battery has to be replaced. They cost a lot of money, say £5,000 in round figures for a smallish car, as well as causing environmental harm.
Electric cars are not the answer. There is no answer if we insist on consuming to the max. No, we have to travel less, freight fewer goods, live local lives, be frugal. And that is not what politicians want to tell us.
PDR
Post-Brexit Environment Regulator to be Tiny and Toothless
Posted: November 10, 2020 Filed under: Environment, Law | Tags: Natural Capital Committee, Office for Environmental Protection 1 CommentFar from strengthening environmental protections, the present Westminster Government seems set on diluting them into oblivion.
The Natural Capital Committee issued its final report last month, October 2020. The Natural Capital Committee has been axed. It will be replaced in 2021 by the Office for Environmental Protection, the OEP.
The OEP is to be a very small organisation, reported as likely to have between 60 and 120 staff, covering the whole of England and perhaps Northern Ireland too.[1]
By way of comparison, my local council, Carmarthenshire in Wales, employs about 8,300 people.
The OEP is supposed to take over the environmental protection work that has been overseen by the European Union. To do that, I feel sure it will need more staff and an adequate budget. The budget has not yet been published, despite our closeness to 2021. When it is known, it will cover five years.
The Government has just amended the overarching legislation, the Environment Bill, to weaken the OEP. It will be empowered to investigate only “serious” breaches of environmental protection law. What is “serious”? The government will reserve to itself the right to decide. The bill is not law yet — this month it is at the committee stage in the House of Commons – but the Conservatives’ 80-seat majority means that it is unlikely to be altered in any way counter to the wishes of the Cabinet.
The chair and board members of the OEP are to be appointed by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, currently the Rt Hon George Eustice, MP for Camborne and Redruth in Cornwall. The OEP is supposed to hold the Secretary of State to account, but that is tricky if you are the boss’s appointee.
The instruction, to investigate environmental breaches, disasters and catastrophes only if government says they are serious enough, is deeply troubling – particularly because the final report of the Natural Capital Committee shows that England’s environment is in danger, and we might be even more worried about it if there were not so many gaps in our knowledge.
The report, 486 pages long, assembles data on the health or otherwise of natural capital, by which is meant the air, land, water and living organisms of our planet – without which we cannot live. In many cases the data does not exist, the report says, and where it does, it often reveals deteriorating standards. This simple statement, “…the government is not on course to achieve its objective to improve the environment within a generation”, suggests to me that a small office controlled by the government is not the answer, and could indeed be used to cover environmental decay with greenwash.
Professor Dieter Helm, chair of the terminating Natural Capital Committee (NCC), wrote this in his message at the front of the report:
“A previous Defra Secretary of State, Michael Gove, specially requested that the NCC scrutinises the 25 YEP [25 Year Environment Plan] annual reports, paving the way for the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) to undertake this function from 2021.
“The Committee provided an assessment of the government’s first Progress Report in 2019. In the absence of a natural capital baseline, the Progress Report focused on a long list of actions, with very little evidence of improvements in the state of our natural capital.
“Many of these mistakes have been repeated in the government’s 2020 Progress Report. The NCC’s interim response to this report, published earlier this year, highlights that the integrated, systems based approach the 25 YEP demands is at real risk of being lost.”
That is quite a warning.
The committee’s members are all highly qualified academics. Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford, is also a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
The six other members are all professors: Chris Collins, Environmental Chemistry at the University of Reading; Colin Mayer, Management Studies, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; Ian Bateman, Environmental Economics, University of Exeter; Kathy Willis, Biodiversity, University of Oxford; Melanie Austen, Science for the Sea and Society, Plymouth Marine Laboratory; and Paul Leinster, Environmental Assessment, Cranfield University.
The number and range of their recommendations should alarm everyone. They draw attention to lack of resources for their work: “It should be noted that the following areas of analysis were not feasible given resource constraints: i) identifying and analysing all available data; ii) an assessment of the overall environmental system/future trajectories; and iii) the potential impact of the change in natural assets (stocks) on important ecosystem service flows. Such comprehensive analysis is critical for informing whether or not the government will meet the environmental ‘significant improvement test’ that it has set itself in the Environment Bill and developing optimal policy interventions across not only the ten 25 YEP goals, but also for attaining net zero by 2050. The NCC advises that the OEP should be properly resourced to undertake a comprehensive assessment of all available data and the environmental system, including by prioritising the development of a natural system model/decision support tool to determine the impact of changes in the environment on ecosystem service flows and associated societal benefits.”
There are huge gaps in the data: “A key building block for assessing progress robustly is to develop a natural capital baseline. The Committee’s analysis indicates that a number of existing datasets could be used for some of these baseline asset measurements, in particular those for atmosphere and freshwater. For several of the assets, however, and in particular soils and marine, data is very limited. The NCC strongly recommends that Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] ensures that the planned Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment pilot, and any subsequent fully developed baseline exercise, focuses on identifying and measuring the extent and condition of all natural capital assets across England, as per the NCC’s detailed advice – not just habitats. Consideration should also be given to incorporating a substantial citizen science component. The baseline should comprise an agreed set of metrics for each asset, measured at an agreed spatial resolution throughout England. The timing of the measurements should also coincide to create an environmental census that can be repeated at regular intervals to determine trends over time.”
There must be enough money to do the job: “The NCC recommends that the Treasury should ensure that the baseline assessment is properly funded at the next Spending Review – there are huge economic opportunities to be realised from understanding the state of England’s natural assets. The OEP will be unable to carry out its 25 YEP scrutiny function effectively without a natural capital baseline.”
The remit for the new Office for Environmental Protection has to be wide enough: “The NCC advises that OEP’s remit needs to be expanded in the Environment Bill so that the government must consider and respond to its advice on setting and any revisions to interim and long term targets/Environmental Improvement Plans. Without such a role for the OEP, the ambition to significantly improve the environment could be softened in favour of other government priorities and lead to further stalling of progress in meeting the 25 YEP objectives, undermining public confidence in the government’s green commitments.”
Since the publication of this report, the Conservative Government has done exactly what the committee feared, and has narrowed the OEP’s remit to those issue that the government itself admits are “serious”.
The state of the environment is summarised in these words: “The NCC’s overall assessment of progress against the 25 YEP, across seven natural assets…. atmosphere, freshwater, minerals and resources, marine, soils, land and biota, highlights starkly that the government is not on course to achieve its objective to improve the environment within a generation. None of the assets are rated ‘Green’, a number of assets are assessed as ‘Red’ (e.g. freshwater, soils, biota and land), and several assessed as ‘Amber’ (e.g. atmosphere and minerals and resources).”
The Westminster Government may give more importance to immediate issues like staving off pandemic-induced unemployment and business collapses, but in the end there can be no economy in a dead environment, not even for major donors to political parties and their beneficiaries.
PDR
[1] ‘Why the Chair of the Office for Environmental Protection will have their work cut out’ by Ruth Chambers, greenallianceblog.org.uk, August 11th 2020.
Grim Now, Grimmer Later: Time to Act
Posted: July 4, 2015 Filed under: Climate, Corporations, Eco Politics, Economics, Energy, Environment | Tags: Cambria Books, David Thorpe, Pat Dodd Racher, Solving the Grim Equation Leave a commentOfficial launch on Tuesday July 7th — ‘Solving the Grim Equation’, published by Cambria Books and written by me, Pat Dodd Racher
Upstairs at The Angel, Rhosmaen Street, Llandeilo, at 7.30pm.
Author and One Planet Council patron David Thorpe will lead a question and answer session and discussion.
The Grim Equation means that increased consumption now will result in lower consumption in the future.
Exciting pioneer projects in Wales show that families can reduce consumption dramatically and use less energy, and still live happily. Pioneers have had to battle against hostility in local government, but thanks to the Welsh Government’s ‘One Wales One Planet’ policy the chances of projects being approved are increasing.
The One Planet Development policy, and guidance in Technical Advice Note 6, and the establishment in Wales of the One Planet Council, can give Wales a leading role in the inevitable One Planet future — because we have only one planet on which to live.
The longer we wait, the more uncomfortable the fall
Ecopoliticstoday's Blog 