If the internet were a country, it would be the sixth biggest user of electricity.

By Robin Scher, Independent Media Institute

6 min read

The paradox of combating climate change is that the extent of the emergency extends far beyond the actions taken by individuals to mitigate the climate crisis, yet collective action is what is most required to address this issue. There are so many examples of this dilemma—from recycling to how power is being generated, to what people should consume. In each case, broad-based action is required to shift the dial, and while it might seem insurmountable, every little bit counts. A great example of this sentiment in action can be found in the growing field of eco-friendly web design.

In a 2013 study, the internet’s annual carbon footprint was measured at 830 million tons of carbon dioxide. This would put the web’s electricity output at roughly the same level as the aviation industry. “If the internet were a country, it would now rank sixth in the world for its electricity demand,” states a 2014 article in the Guardian by Gary Cook, a senior IT analyst with Greenpeace.

Meanwhile, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic leading to people working remotely from their homes and increasingly relying on at-home entertainment, some countries reported a 20 percent increase in “internet traffic” since March 2020, according to a January 2021 article in Science Daily. Extrapolating that data through the end of 2021, the “increased internet use alone would require a forest of about 71,600 square miles—twice the land area of Indiana—to sequester the emitted carbon,” according to the study, which was conducted by researchers from Purdue University, Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It’s no wonder then that there is a growing interest in making the internet a more eco-friendly place. For instance, Tim Frick’s company Mightybytes is helping to create a more sustainable interweb for all. In an interview with the American Marketing Association (AMA), Frick explained how in the past, the internet was viewed as a “green solution” due to the paper-free nature of its existence. But, as more products and services go online, the need to think about the digital carbon offset has become increasingly important.

“On its own, a digital product might be lighter in terms of carbon emission and environmental impact, but when you multiply that by the number of users on the internet, that’s a potentially very large environmental impact and a big concern,” Frick told AMA, adding that it’s not just the carbon offset of a physical product that determines its environmental impact; it’s also its digital footprint.

Another way to understand why this is the case, Frick explained, is to look at the energy consumption of training a single artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm. According to a University of Massachusetts Amherst report, the amount of electricity used for this process is the equivalent of CO2 generated by five average American cars throughout their lifetime. When you begin to consider that thousands of algorithms are being created and trained every day, the scaling effect really begins to hit home.

What does eco-friendly web design look like?

For Frick and his team, sustainability starts by “including the planet as part of your stakeholders.” Website design should prioritize the user (thus the industry term UX, or user experience), which Frick argues should include considering the environment in how things get made. Many internet users and brands don’t consider how much energy is used to power a particular website. According to Frick, “by making your site fast, efficient and easy to find and load, you’re making it better for the planet.”

If this seems a bit abstract to you, there are tangible ways to measure roughly how a site ranks in terms of its eco-efficiency. Frick’s company Mightybytes, for instance, has created Ecograder, a platform where you can enter any URL and get a rating based on that website’s environmental impact. This ranking is based on various indicators which include performance, user experience, SEO ranking and whether the site uses renewable energy.

Eco-Friendly Web Design in Action

Dutch programmer Danny van Kooten offers a good working example of how a small adjustment to a piece of code can make a substantial difference. Featured in Wired in 2020, Van Kooten is the creator of a WordPress plug-in that helps website owners to allow their visitors to sign up for their Mailchimp mailing lists through an embedded form. Van Kooten had previously decided to cut down on his carbon footprint by giving up air travel and eating beef. But when he realized that his plug-in was responsible for making websites larger through the addition of several thousand lines of code required to execute its function, he realized he could do more for the environment than his personal consumer choices.

Over time, this extra code meant extra energy, so Van Kooten decided to simplify his plug-in. Although he only managed to reduce its data use by 20 KB, with more than 2 million sites using his plug-in, the cumulative effect on energy usage is significant. With that small adjustment, Van Kooten was able to save the world roughly 59,000 kilograms of CO2 each month, which is “roughly the equivalent to flying from New York to Amsterdam and back 85 times,” according to the article in Wired.

Frick, while speaking to Wired, offered another example in the form of ad code. “It’s constantly pinging servers; it’s not very efficient,” he said. Frick’s company, for example, found that when U.S. companies like USA Today were forced to remove certain tracking code from their sites due to European Union regulation, “USA Today’s homepage shed 90 percent of its data size and loaded 15 times faster.”

Sustainable fonts have become another popular form of environmentally friendly web design. An article published by Fast Company explores how this simple design choice is improving website efficiency and with it, its impact on the planet. The piece describes the efforts of Amsterdam-based design studio Formafantasma that redesigned its website in a collaborative project with Studio Blanco, a design agency, to make “[t]he site [look] about as plain as possible” by using Arial and Times New Roman as its only fonts. As Formafantasma co-founder Andrea Trimarchi explained to Fast Company, the reason for this design comes down to how a website loads.

“All the content that needs to be loaded in a page, including fonts, logos, etc., are a request to the server,” said Trimarchi. “Arial and Times New Roman are default fonts on both Macs and PCs, which means there are no extra requests required.” By saving the site from making these extra requests, the design ultimately conserves energy. Similar to Van Kooten’s bit of coding, this small amount of energy saved adds up over time. Other default fonts the Fast Company article lists include Courier New, Georgia, Verdana and Helvetica. Another advantage to using default fonts is that it means websites load faster. So, while the site may look more generic, the user experience is improved. And going forward, the simplified look of a website will serve as an indicator of its sustainability.

Despite the overwhelming majority of websites that remain wasteful in their energy expenditure, Frick remains hopeful of the growth of sustainable web design. Since first developing Ecograder in 2011, “[w]e’ve seen this burgeoning community growing globally,” Frick said during his interview with AMA, “but I would say it’s far from the majority. The only way to make a good, positive impact is at scale, so I would like to see most web designers and developers doing this as opposed to a minority.”

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Robin Scher is a writer based in South Africa. He is a graduate of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Find him on Twitter @RobScherHimself.

Take action…

Want a safer climate for future generations? A key part of the solution begins at home

The average U.S. household emits about 48 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions every year, with food accounting for up to 30 percent—and heating and cooling accounting for more than 40 percent—of a household’s carbon footprint, according to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan.

“The average carbon footprint for a person in the United States is 16 tons, one of the highest rates in the world,” according to the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit. “Globally, the average carbon footprint is closer to 4 tons. To have the best chance of avoiding a 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures, the average global carbon footprint per year needs to drop to under 2 tons by 2050. Lowering individual carbon footprints from 16 tons to 2 tons doesn’t happen overnight. By making small changes to our actions, like eating less meat, taking fewer connecting flights and line drying our clothes, we can start making a big difference.”

Ready to reduce your home’s carbon footprint? The best way to start is to find out what your carbon footprint is, which you can do using the Nature Conservancy’s Carbon Footprint Calculator. It’s a great activity to do with your kids, too. As Earth | Food | Life writing fellow Lucy Goodchild van Hilten writes in Yes! Magazine, “As grown-ups—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, doctors, and friends—we can help by talking to kids about climate change and empowering them to be a part of the solution.” In many ways big and small, saving the environment begins at home.

Cause for concern…

Think electric vehicles will drive us to a more sustainable future? Think again

There has been a surge in the sales of electric vehicles (EVs), with the third quarter of this year seeing more than 1.5 million sales in passengers EVs, including plug-in hybrids. But while many may think this is a good thing for the environment, there is a dark side.

“[Jeminda] Bartolome, 56, lives in one of the most biodiverse places on earth, a stunning [Philippine] island that draws legions of tourists to its crystal blue waters and pristine nature reserves. But these days, her livelihood, and the ancient rainforest system it depends on, are increasingly under threat,” report Karol Ilagan, Andrew W. Lehren, Anna Schecter and Rich Schapiro in an article published by NBC News and produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

“A nickel mine stretching nearly 4 square miles scars the forest above Bartolome’s farmland,” they write. “The mine, Rio Tuba, plays a vital role in satisfying the global demand for a mineral more coveted than ever due in part to the explosion of the electric car industry. The raw nickel dug out of the ground here ends up in the lithium batteries of plug-in vehicles manufactured by Tesla, Toyota and other automakers, according to an NBC News review of company filings and shipping records.”

“The reality is that we don’t need more electric vehicles; we need fewer vehicles, period. Just think of all the materials that go into making an electric vehicle: steel, iron, aluminum, copper, cobalt, lithium, manganese, carbon fibers, polymers, graphite, glass, and a variety of rare-earth minerals like dysprosium, neodymium, niobium, terbium and praseodymium,” reports EFL editor Reynard Loki. “The mining, processing and manufacturing industries required to extract and use these materials are highly destructive to ecosystems around the world—even deep-sea environments that are being ruined when waste rock and sediment from mining is dumped into the ocean—and emit tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

Round of applause…

Will ‘ecocide’ be made an international crime? Mother Nature needs legal protections, too

“The campaign to make ecocide an international crime took center stage in the Hague on [December 7] as Bangladesh, Samoa and Vanuatu advocated criminalizing environmental destruction during a virtual forum at the annual meeting of the International Criminal Court’s 123 member nations,” reports Katie Surma for Inside Climate News.

“The forum, attended by more than 1,300 individual participants, represented a collective cry for justice from three of the world’s most climate vulnerable countries,” writes Surma. “It came less than a month after they and other developing nations pressed their claims at the United Nations climate talks in Glasgow for greater resiliency and adaptation funding from the industrialized world, but came away largely unsatisfied.”

“We believe it is timely to discuss how the court’s mandate can be brought to bear on one of the world’s most pressing problems: that of ecological destruction and climate breakdown,” Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, Samoa’s prime minister, said in a recorded statement for the event. 

ICYMI…

Lies, deceit, denial, payouts? It’s just business as usual for ExxonMobil 

When then-ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy conceded in a secretly recorded video in May that the oil giant voiced support for a carbon tax only because it assumed it would never happen, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said the company was “shocked by these interviews” and stood by its ‘commitments to working on finding solutions to climate change.’

Wood’s reaction was reminiscent of Captain Louis Renault feigning surprise to discover gambling at Rick’s Café in the 1942 film “Casablanca.” After quietly pocketing his winnings, Renault justifies closing down the nightclub by exclaiming, ‘I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!’

Woods was shocked? Really? Just one look at his company’s financial records would show that despite claiming to endorse a carbon tax—initially in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill that was under consideration in 2009—ExxonMobil has funneled millions of dollars over the last decade to lawmakers who staunchly oppose the idea.

—EFL contributor Elliott Negin, “To Find Out If ExxonMobil Really Supports a Carbon Tax, Just Follow the Money” (CounterPunch, October 12, 2021)

Parting thought…

“When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Forget their policies for a moment, and consider how two politicians’ lives foreshadow our ecological future.

By Carter Dillard, Independent Media Institute

4 min read

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris does not have any biological children and grew up middle-class. Meanwhile, Utah Senator Mitt Romney, a Mormon with five kids, was born into wealth and has substantially increased it for his family.

Their lives prefigure very different futures for the country and its children.

If those in the U.S. who are privileged enough to be able to follow Romney’s example of having unearned family privileges and a large family choose to do so, then the entire country will eventually arrive at an ecologically degraded and unsustainable future, as well as a crowded political system, where the day-to-day reality of life is defined by massive inequity driven by family wealth. The increase in population, which is “rising unevenly,” is one of the contributing factors leading to an “unprecedented” decline in nature that is “accelerating” species extinction rates, according to a report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The continued and unchecked growth of the human population might exacerbate this situation further.

Meanwhile, if we follow Harris’ example, and especially if she uses her earned wealth to further social justice in her current position, we arrive at a more sustainable future and an optimal world population, where every vote counts, and privilege is earned rather than inherited.

Which of these two futures do parents want for their children?

Parents have a right to protect their children’s future by not following the example and choices of people like Mitt Romney, whose life is like a microcosm of what it means to exploit the environment and capitalize on one’s birth position.

In March, the Senate passed legislation, urged on by Romney, that while appearing to lift children out of poverty, is probably better characterized as an attempt to nudge people to have more kids. The legislation does nothing to truly eliminate child poverty by moving toward recognizing every child’s right to a fair start in life and does not help to promote smaller and more sustainable families amid the climate crisis or provide solutions for preventing future population-driven pandemics. The legislation also does nothing to address fundamental problems that will continue to grow with the push for more babies. It does nothing to prevent child abuse and the horrific acts of torture some children continue to face at the hands of their caregivers. It does nothing to restore the natural world that previous generations enjoyed and that is likely to be stolen from future generations if nothing is done to remedy the situation.

What can people in the U.S. do to fight for their rights to a natural and democratic future when even a more progressive Congress ignores them? While many have lauded President Joe Biden’s plans as a modern-day New Deal, there is also a need to envision a more physical and intergenerational revision of the social contract where the people of this country can prioritize children’s right to an ecologically and socially fair start in life simply because future children represent the constant restarting of the agreement. The rights of the children, in this sense, override all competing rights, including the rights of the uber-wealthy—like those paying millions to be space tourists—to hoard resources that could instead be used for improving family planning.

This change can come from the grassroots, not just by telling political leaders what’s important to them, but also by engaging in their communities to spread information about the connection between ensuring a better future for children in terms of climate, democracy, and other opportunities. Given what’s at stake, it would be immoral not to recreate the social contract to make it fair from the start and move the country as a whole a bit more toward making choices that are represented by Harris rather than Romney.

Regardless of the action that people take and the example that they choose to follow, between Harris and Romney, they now have starkly different examples of the kinds of lives children can lead, and what they represent for the future of humanity at large.

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Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.

Take action…

Terre des Hommes: “Every child has the right to a healthy environment. But, this is severely threatened. The global environmental crisis, climate change, extinction of species, plastic waste and water and air pollution massively endanger the chances of survival, especially of children. Every year 1.7 million children die before their fifth birthday from drinking contaminated water or breathing polluted air. About 800 million children are contaminated with lead from the environment. Extreme drought threatens the lives of 160 million children. Hunger and malnutrition are the result. The home[s] of over 500 million children …  [are] in danger of being flooded.

“Environmental destruction kills children and their hope for a future worth living. That is why millions of children and young people all over the world are taking to the streets for stronger climate and environmental policies and a more sustainable way of life. It is time to listen and take children’s voices seriously.  We need a right recognized globally by the United Nations that holds all governments and all social actors accountable to protecting the children of today and tomorrow from environmental hazards. A healthy environment must be recognized as a human right.”

Urge the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child and the countries that signed onto its Convention on the Rights of the Child to secure the right of children to a healthy environment.

Cause for concern…

Industrial fishing has broken a fundamental oceanic law

“Life in the ocean [follows] a simple mathematical rule: The abundance of an organism is closely linked to its body size. To put it another way, the smaller the organism, the more of them you find in the ocean. Krill are a billion times smaller than tuna, for example, but they are also a billion times more abundant,” reports Matt Reynolds for WIRED. “The Sheldon spectrum, as it became known, has been observed in plankton, fish, and in freshwater ecosystems, too… But now humans seem to have broken this fundamental law of the ocean. In a November paper for the journal Science Advances, [Eric Galbraith, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at McGill University in Montreal,] and his colleagues show that the Sheldon spectrum no longer holds true for larger marine creatures. Thanks to industrial fishing, the total ocean biomass of larger fish and marine mammals is much lower than it should be if the Sheldon spectrum was still in effect.”

Round of applause…

The future of sustainable fashion: mushrooms?

Mushrooms are taking the fashion world by storm, in the form of one of the latest sustainable and cruelty-free alternatives to animal-based leather. Well-known global clothing brands like Adidas, Lululemon, Hermès and Stella McCartney are experimenting with a new fabric dubbed Mylo, which is made from mycelium, the fibrous root structure of mushrooms. “If you think about leather, it’s about a two-year or three-year process, from end to end, from a cow being born to a product being made,” said Dan Widmaier, the CEO of California-based Bolt Threads, the materials solutions firm that has developed the animal-free fabric. “With Mylo, it’s about eight weeks.”

Watch a short video about Mylo.

ICYMI…

What links all of Biden’s top priorities? Healthy rivers

“Each one of the 23,000-75,000 sewer overflows that occur each year releases up to 10 billion gallons of toxic sewageevery day into rivers and streams. This disproportionately impacts communities of color, because, for generations, Black, Indigenous, Latinx and other people of color have been relegated to live in flood-prone areas and in neighborhoods that have been intentionally burdened with a lack of development that degrades people’s health and quality of life. In some communities of color, incessant flooding due to stormwater surges or combined sewer overflows has gone unmitigated for decades. We have historically treated people as separate from rivers and water. We can’t do that anymore. Every voice—particularly those of people most directly impacted—must have a loudspeaker and be included in decision-making at the highest levels.”

—EFL contributor Katy Neusteter, “Restoring Our Water Systems Should Be Top Priority for Biden Administration,” (Truthout, January 19, 2021)

Parting thought…

(Screenshot via @JohnOberg/Twitter)

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

The Glasgow Climate Pact kicks the climate can down the road.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

After more than two weeks of negotiations during the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, diplomats from almost 200 nations finally agreed on two major points: ramp up the fight against climate change and help at-risk countries prepare. Specifically, governments agreed to meet again next in 2022 with more robust plans to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030, significantly reduce emissions of methane (which has even more global warming potential than CO2), and nearly double the aid to poor countries to help them mitigate the effects of climate change. Notably, nations agreed to initiate reductions in coal-fired power and to begin slashing government subsidies on other fossil fuels, representing the first time a COP text mentioned coal and fossil fuels.

Alok Sharma, COP26’s chief organizer, called the Glasgow Climate Pact “a fragile win.”

Acknowledging the deal is imperfect, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry registered his support. “You can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and this is good. This is a powerful statement,” he said. “We in the United States are really excited by the fact that this raises ambition on a global basis.”

And while the agreement represents a step forward, it has been roundly criticized by scientists, climate activists and representatives from small, poorer nations who will feel the brunt of the climate impacts much sooner than big, richer ones.

Shauna Aminath, environment minister of the Maldives, denounced the final COP26 deal as “not in line with the urgency and scale required.” The Maldives has supported life and human civilization for millennia, but 80 percent of the archipelago of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean is poised to be uninhabitable by 2050 due to rising sea levels caused by global warming. “What looks balanced and pragmatic to other parties will not help the Maldives adapt in time,” Aminath said. “It will be too late for the Maldives.”

“COP26 has closed the gap, but it has not solved the problem,” said Niklas Hoehne, a climate policy expert from Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Long before the annual climate chinwag, there was an air of futility about what has been described as our “last and best chance” at securing a livable environment for future generations. How could there not be? The leaders of more than 150 countries have been trying to lower humankind’s global warming emissions since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks started more than a quarter-century ago. And since the first summit was held in 1995, global emissions have, instead, skyrocketed.

The summit’s host, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson—who joined activists in invoking the mantra “keep 1.5 alive”—was unimpressed with his guests, saying during the G20 summit (held in Rome in the days leading up to COP26) that all the world leaders’ pledges without action were “starting to sound hollow” and criticizing their weak commitments as “drops in a rapidly warming ocean.”

Science has put a deadline on us. In order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—a limit decided by the Paris agreement—humankind must achieve “net-zero” emissions (i.e., whatever amount we emit into the atmosphere, we must also remove) by 2050. But that target seems highly unlikely. Big polluting nations like the United States, China and Russia not only continue to burn fossil fuels at an alarming rate but also continue to drill for more oil. China—the world’s biggest emitter, responsible for more than a quarter of humanity’s total emissions—and Russia have pushed their own net-zero targets to 2060. India has pushed it to 2070. That is kicking the climate can down the field, to be dealt with by future leaders. (A quick glance at a graphic created by the Economist showing the quick and steep drop in emissions that China must undergo to achieve its own target underscores the magnitude, and perhaps folly, of winning the war against the climate crisis.)

In the United States, a divided nation has ossified a gridlocked legislature that hasn’t passed many game-changing climate laws. Much environmental protection has been exercised through executive actions, such as regulations imposed by federal agencies, which can be simply overturned by the next administration. When a Democrat is in the White House, environmental protection is higher on the priority list. When a Republican is in the White House, it’s more about protecting polluters. The country lacks the necessary strong federal and state climate legislation to protect people and the environment from toxic, global-warming pollution, protect fenceline communities (which are often poor communities of color and Indigenous communities) and hold polluters to account.

One of the bright spots of the summit was a landmark $19 billion agreement between more than 100 nations—together responsible for about 85 percent of the world’s forests—to end deforestation by 2030. Healthy, intact forests are critical in the climate fight as they prevent around one-third of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

But in a press statement, Dan Zarin, the executive director of forests and climate change at Wildlife Conservation Society, said that the Glasgow Climate Pact “does not mean that the world has solved the climate crisis.” He pointed out that even if all the participating nations’ pledges to reduce emissions (known as “nationally determined contributions” or “NDCs”) were achieved, the world would not hit the 45 percent reduction needed by 2030 to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In the Glasgow Climate Pact, countries only agreed to strengthen their NDCs by the end of 2022.

President Joe Biden, who attended the summit, hailed the forest agreement, which aims to restore almost 500 million acres of ecosystems, including forests, by 2030. “We’re going to work to ensure markets recognize the true economic value of natural carbon sinks and motivate governments, landowners and stakeholders to prioritize conservation,” said Biden, adding that the plan will “help the world deliver on our shared goal of halting natural forest loss.”

But activists were less enthused. The forest agreement “is one of those oft repeated attempts to make us believe that deforestation can be stopped and forest can be conserved by pushing billions of dollars into the land and territories of the Indigenous Peoples,” said Souparna Lahiri of the Global Forest Coalition, an international coalition of NGOs and Indigenous Peoples’ organizations defending the rights of forest peoples.

“[R]eferences to the rights of Indigenous peoples are relatively weak” in the Glasgow text, said Jennifer Tauli Corpuz, a lawyer from the Igorot people in the Philippines and chief policy lead at Nia Tero, a nonprofit advocacy group for Indigenous peoples. Specifically, she said that “[w]e will have to watch closely the implementation of [COP26’s] new carbon scheme,” referring to the finalization of rules that will manage the creation of the international carbon market, and were part of the 2015 Paris climate accord.

In addition to the lack of Indigenous representation in the final text of the Glasgow Climate Pact, people from poorer island nations that are most susceptible to the impacts of sea level rise were also underrepresented at the talks, mainly due to COVID-19 restrictions. Just three out of 14 climate-vulnerable Pacific island states were able to send delegates to COP26, while the fossil fuel industry sent more than 500 delegates.

Ultimately, the climate pledges made by nations do not match the climate policies of those nations. And since the pledges are non-binding, there is no legal stimulus to ensure that actual policies line up with those pledges. “The NDCs are voluntary measures,” said Lakshman Guruswamy, an expert in international environmental law at the University of Colorado-Boulder. “There’s no way of implementing, imposing, or trying to enforce a non-binding agreement.”

No penalties, no legal ramifications, no climate court, no climate police. All people have is civil society. It’s up to us “regular people” to stand up, speak up and mobilize; to inspire care for the climate and the environment in young people; and to rethink and retool our own personal behaviors to be in line with the ultimate goals we have for the future. There can be no significant change without both the political will behind candidates who will fight against climate change and public pressure to hold elected officials to their word. What many engaged citizens in the U.S. don’t realize is that it’s not enough to participate only once every four years by voting in presidential elections. Real change happens when people take an active role in their local communities. It starts at home, with our families, our friends and our neighbors.

Make no mistake: Our personal decisions as consumers play a decisive role in the state of the global climate. “While large oil companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, we consumers are complicit,” writes Renee Cho, a staff writer for the Columbia Climate School. “We demand the products and energy made from the fossil fuels they provide. One scientist found that 90 percent of fossil fuel companies’ emissions are a result of the products made from fossil fuels.”

Sadly, according to a recent poll, even though a majority of people believe that climate change is a serious issue, few are actually willing to change their lifestyles to help save the environment. “Citizens are undeniably concerned by the state of the planet, but these findings raise doubts regarding their level of commitment to preserving it,” according to the survey of 10 countries, which included the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. “Rather than translating into a greater willingness to change their habits, citizens’ concerns are particularly focused on their negative assessment of governments’ efforts… The widespread awareness of the importance of the climate crisis illustrated in this study has yet to be coupled with a proportionate willingness to act.”

Even if consumers become more willing to adapt their behaviors to make them more climate-friendly, they are not necessarily knowledgeable as to how to make those changes. “[I]ndividual consumers are not capable of identifying the behavior changes that are really worth doing to help the climate,” writes John Thøgersen, an economic psychologist at Aarhus University, in the journal Behavioral Sciences.

Emmanuel Rivière, director of international polling at Kantar Public, which ran the 10-country survey to coincide with COP26, said the poll results contained “a double lesson for governments.”

First, they must “measure up to people’s expectations… [b]ut they also have to persuade people not of the reality of the climate crisis—that’s done—but of what the solutions are, and of how we can fairly share responsibility for them.”

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Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Counterpunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

Take action…

Global Forest Coalition: One industry links two of the greatest crises humanity faces—climate breakdown and new pandemics. That industry is industrial animal agriculture, responsible for runaway deforestation and 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as for degraded natural environments and cruel animal welfare which make new viruses like COVID-19 more likely to emerge. Yet major development banks—such as the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development—who should be helping humanity create a more sustainable and safer world—are lending billions to the worst forms of animal agriculture… Development banks are funded through our taxes – contributions from governments all over the world. Experts project that the livestock sector will account for almost half of the world’s allowable budget for greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050. Without urgent action, the industry will continue to drive climate breakdown, leading to more extreme heat, droughts, floods and poverty.

Urge development banks to stop investing in industrial animal agriculture.

Cause for concern…

“The [COP26] conference produced new pledges and alliances aimed at phasing out fossil fuels, but a look at the details of these promises shows they are likely to result in little, if any, change, at least in the short-term,” reports Nicholas Kusnetz for Inside Climate News.

• In Glasgow, COP26 negotiators do little to cut emissions, but allow oil and gas executives to rest easy (Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News)
• Glasgow climate deal’s success hinges on pledges becoming action (Bobby Magill, Bloomberg Environment)
• Flooding and nuclear waste eat away at a tribe’s ancestral home (Mark Walker, New York Times)
• Pet cats are spreading a brain parasite to wildlife, new research suggests (George Dvorsky, Gizmodo)

Round of applause…

“If the cement industry were a country it would be the third-largest emitter in the world, after China and America,” writes the Economist. But new technologies might help cement capture and store carbon dioxide before it gets to the atmosphere.

• How cement may yet help slow global warming (The Economist)
• Biden proposes 20-year ban on new oil drilling near Native American site in New Mexico (Ella Nilsen, CNN)
• The River Thames was declared ‘biologically dead’ 60 years ago, but it’s making a comeback (Taylor Avery, USA Today)
• Vegan fast food is on the rise (Tiffany Duong, EcoWatch)

ICYMI…

“For tree-huggers like me… bottled water is definitely not the solution. Plastic is terrible for the environment. Plastic bottles take more than 1,000 years to biodegrade, and “[a]t least 8 million tons of plastic end up in our oceans every year,” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which notes that “[t]he most visible and disturbing impacts of marine plastics are the ingestion, suffocation and entanglement of hundreds of marine species.” And in some cases, bottled water has been found to contain disinfection byproducts, fertilizer residue and pain medication. But in an interview, Michigan State University professor and water microbiologist Joan Rose reminded me how lucky I am to not question the safety of my tap.”

—EFL reporter Lorraine Chow, “COVID Has Underscored the Need for Safe Drinking Water—But Not Everyone Has It” (Truthout, January 10, 2021)

Parting thought…

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Managing solar radiation through technology is possible, but there are ethical and political concerns.

By Daniel Ross, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

Desperate times call for desperate measures, as the saying goes. As scientists, policymakers and politicians keep one increasingly startled eye on climate change’s ticking clock and the other on the ongoing, upwardly mobile trend in greenhouse gas emissions, it’s no wonder possible solutions that have been long dismissed as fringe slices of science fiction are making their way into the mainstream.

Enter center stage geoengineering, a hitherto black sheep of the fight against global warming.

Geoengineering is a broadly encompassing term with a few close etymological cousins—namely climate engineering and climate change mitigation—along with a sizable stable of associated technologies. Some of them, like afforestation and ocean iron fertilization, fall under the umbrella of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in that they seek to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But these are techniques that would in all likelihood shift the climate change needle relatively slowly.

In comparison, technologies under the rubric of solar radiation management (SRM) are expected to work on a much faster timescale, and as a consequence, generate arguably the greater buzz. Solar engineering is the idea that humankind artificially limits how much sunlight and heat are permitted in the atmosphere, and includes the thinning of high-level cirrus clouds to help infrared rays more easily escape upward, along with the brightening of low-level marine clouds to help reflect sunlight back into space.

The one SRM practice with perhaps the greatest political currency concerns the spraying of aerosols like sulfur dioxide into the upper layer of the atmosphere to act as a barrier against sunlight. These technologies take their inspiration from volcanic eruptions—like Pinatubo 20 years ago—which belch huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Once airborne, the aerosol turns into a cloud of sulfuric acid that reflects inbound solar energy, in the process cooling the planet.

The idea that such actions could be imitated in a controlled manner has bounced around for a while. For example, the right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute embarked upon a research program into SRM technologies back in 2008. One year later, in 2009, the UK’s Royal Society released a report recommending that CDR and SRM techniques be considered possible avenues to address climate change, but only after extensive research. Recently, however, talk around geoengineering—and SRM in particular—appears to have shifted gears, even if some of it substantively sounds familiar.

In March 2021, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) released a report that advocated a multinational research program into solar geoengineering. Researchers from Harvard are seeking the green light for a potentially groundbreaking experiment to release an aerosol made from calcium carbonate into the stratosphere to see how it behaves. The project’s first test flight, in Sweden, was penciled in for this June, but has been postponed until next year as a result of pushback from local Indigenous groups. In April, Rolling Stone curated a debate on solar engineering which included Harvard’s David Keith, who spearheads the geoengineering project. During the debate, Keith described the process of releasing aerosols into the stratosphere as “technically pretty easy.”

Easy it may be. But with august political institutions continuing to weigh in on solar engineering as a legitimate solution to global warming, perhaps the most salient question is this: Should such techniques ever be deployed?

Practical and Ethical Concerns

At the heart of the debate is the fact that currently there’s simply not nearly enough known about the vast and complex set of overlapping consequences, akin to falling dominoes, that solar engineering might trigger—a yawning data gap resulting from the meager amounts of funding put toward such research thus far. “There’s just not much money going into this [research, relative] to the looming possibility of actually needing to use it to avoid catastrophic climate change,” said Dane Scott, director of the Center for Ethics at the University of Montana.

And while major climate models show that solar engineering certainly has the potential to reduce key climate hazards like atmospheric temperature increases, changing water accessibility and rising sea levels, with limited data available through practical field application, computer simulations of solar engineering proposals remain for the most part stalled at the conceptual stage.

With that in mind, it’s no wonder many experts mirror calls by the likes of NASEM for major investments in solar engineering research. But if this research is to be conducted, these same individuals warn, it needs to be approached openly and transparently with engagement from all four corners of the global community, both developed and developing nations alike.

“It would be irresponsible not to do vigorous research on it,” said Scott, about the use of stratospheric aerosols in particular. “But it would just be awful if we were to do this research in secret since it affects everybody in the world.”

This brings us to the slippery ethical conundrums that SRM technologies pose, with all sorts of societal, political and environmental considerations that can often seem hard to digest. One useful way to view this debate is through the lens of moral hazard, which refers to the idea that the more protected we are from the consequences of our behavior, the riskier our behavior becomes.

In terms of SRM technologies, therefore, one fear is that any concerted approach to studying their relative viability could offer false hope to political leaders who, in turn, might redirect attention and vital resources away from other climate mitigation efforts, especially those seeking to curb greenhouse gas releases in time to reach to the 2050 “net-zero” emissions goal approved by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Another fear is that any meaningful deployment of SRM technologies could act as a green light for fossil fuel companies to continue with business as usual, a scenario with all sorts of implications, including health-related impacts associated with exposure to pollutants from fossil fuel usage.

Moral hazard is a “core concern with a lot of different responses to climate change,” said Holly Buck, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s a real and pervasive concern, because we haven’t seen a real commitment to climate action yet.”

Solar engineering deployment also brings significant geopolitical concerns. “You always have to ask about power,” said Duncan McLaren, a research fellow and professor in practice at the Lancaster Environment Center, England. “It’s an unfortunate problem of the liberal Western narrative of how the world works.” In other words, who wields the levers of governance and how will accountability be practiced? These are no small issues to grapple with.

One fear is that a rogue nation or two—or even a billionaire “Greenfinger,” who is “a self-appointed protector of the planet” as law professor David Victor put it more than 10 years ago—could take it upon themselves to tame the sun alone. Who exactly would stop them, and under whose auspices? That leads to issues surrounding unintended consequences, post-deployment. What would happen in the event that a country or a region suffers a period of major drought for which political leaders blame the use of solar engineering? What kind of political mechanisms are in place to deal with such a scenario? Can a country then unilaterally pull the plug on the program?

Then there’s the possibility—though slim—that global actors intentionally weaponize solar engineering against political enemies. “I’ve always been pretty skeptical that [SRM] could be effectively weaponized,” said David Morrow, an academic who works on climate ethics and climate policy. The exception is marine cloud brightening, which could be “deployed regionally,” he added.

At the same time, possible blueprints for governance and enforcement already exist, Morrow explained, pointing to complex structures like the global financial system, the electric grid and GPS satellite tracking systems. “Obviously, all analogies have limits,” Morrow added. “One of the important limits with all the things I’ve just mentioned is that individuals or countries can opt out of those things—at great cost, but they could do it. That’s not true for solar engineering.”

Perhaps one of the most potent obstacles that proponents of SRM technologies face is the court of public opinion. Polls show the U.S. public is ambivalent, at best, toward geoengineering as a possible fix to the climate crisis. This hesitation may not be surprising within Western culture’s dire warnings of the consequences of humanity’s hubris, epitomized by the popular canonical ancient Greek tale of Icarus, whose waxen wings melted after he flew too near the sun. More recently, the post-apocalyptic world of the TV series “Snowpiercer” introduced us to a fictional frozen hellscape brought about by botched efforts by humans to block the sun.

According to Alan Robock, a distinguished professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, public reticence could prompt the kind of action necessary to ensure that global warming is reversed without resorting to solar engineering.

“If you tell someone in the public, ‘Here’s the deal, we’re going to fly an airplane over your daughter’s school, we’re going to spray sulfuric acid in the atmosphere, and that’s going to solve the global warming problem,’ they might reply, ‘Really, you’re thinking about something that crazy? Well, maybe I should worry more about global warming than I did before.’ So, it might actually work in the opposite direction,” Robock said.

###

Daniel Ross is a journalist whose work has appeared in Truthout, the Guardian, FairWarning, Newsweek, YES! Magazine, Salon, AlterNet, Vice and a number of other publications. He is based in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @1danross.

Take action…

Build Back Fossil Free to President Biden: “Our country is in crisis. In the midst of a pandemic and climate catastrophe, our communities turned out in record numbers to elect you. Now it’s time to fulfill your promises to end the era of fossil fuel production, protect communities reeling from the climate and COVID-19 crises, and #BuildBackFossilFree… Stop approving the fossil fuel projects fueling climate chaos. Protect the Black, Indigenous, Brown, AAPI and working-class communities that are disproportionately harmed… Declare a climate emergency. Repair the harm caused by environmental racism and Build Back Fossil Free, delivering jobs, justice, and clean energy for all.”

Sign the petition urging President Biden to take executive action to address to the climate crisis, including declaring a climate emergency.

Cause for concern…

“Across the world, many countries underreport their greenhouse gas emissions in their reports to the United Nations, a Washington Post investigation has found. An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be versus the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere,” report Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin, Desmond Butler, John Muyskens, Anu Narayanswamy and Naema Ahmed for the Washington Post.

• Nations’ climate pledges built on flawed data, investigation finds (Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin, Desmond Butler, John Muyskens, Anu Narayanswamy and Naema Ahmed, Washington Post)
• Climate change may impact corn and wheat crops as early as 2030 (NASA)
• Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to cap emissions, but oil companies have other plans (Ainslie Cruickshank, Narwhal)
• Koalas are dying from chlamydia, and climate change is making it worse (Ben Westcott, CNN)

Round of applause…

“The $47 billion in the bill designated for climate resilience is intended to help communities prepare for the new age of extreme fires, floods, storms and droughts that scientists say are worsened by human-caused climate change,” report Coral Davenport and Christopher Flavelle for the New York Times. “The money is the most explicit signal yet from the federal government that the economic damages of a warming planet have already arrived. Its approval by Congress with bipartisan support reflects an implicit acknowledgment of that fact by at least some Republicans, even though many of the party’s leaders still question or deny the established science of human-caused climate change.”

• Infrastructure bill makes first major U.S. investment in climate resilience (Coral Davenport and Christopher Flavelle, New York Times)
• U.S. agrees to end fossil fuel financing abroad (Sara Schonhardt, E&E News)
• COP26 pledges could limit warming to 1.8°—only if commitments are delivered fully (Jillian Ambrose, Fiona Harvey and Jonathan Watts, Guardian)
• Restoring Mexico’s mangroves can shield shores, store carbon (María Verza, Christina Larson and Victoria Milko, Associated Press)

ICYMI…

“An Associated Press (AP) investigation has revealed that Ferrero, one of two makers of the popular Girl Scout cookies, is sourcing their palm oil, an ingredient in the cookies, to plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia where tens of thousands of children are estimated to work alongside their parents. The investigation bolsters a campaign launched last year by Olivia Chaffin, a 14-year-old girl scout of the Southern Appalachian council, urging Sylvia Acevedo, CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, to remove palm oil from Girl Scout cookies.”

—Reynard Loki, “Investigation Links Child Labor and Human Rights Abuses to Palm Oil Found in Girl Scout Cookies” (Independent Media Institute, January 19, 2021)

Parting thought…

​​​​​​Editor’s note: We’ve been following John Oberg’s inspiring work as an animal rights advocate for many years. When I invited him to write a piece for Earth | Food | Life, he thought to tell the story about how his mother put him “on a path to living with compassion.” As we approach the season of “thanks—and giving,” it’s worth a read—and a share.

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

There is a chance we can prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, but world leaders must hold businesses accountable and listen to Indigenous communities.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

11 min read

It would be an understatement to say that there is a lot riding on COP26, the international climate talks currently being held in Glasgow, Scotland. Officially, the gathering marks the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the third meeting of the parties to the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit the global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, preferably limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Since 1995, the countries that have signed onto the UNFCCC have met every single year (except in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), attempting to come up with an action plan to stem the climate crisis. But still, every year, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions keep going up. And for a fortnight that started on October 31, world leaders will try to come up with an action plan yet again. More than 100 heads of government and some 30,000 delegates are now gathered and deliberating in Glasgow in the most recent international attempt to implement the Paris agreement goals. CNBC called the summit “humanity’s last and best chance to secure a livable future amid dramatic climate change.”

“We face a stark choice: Either we stop it or it stops us,” said United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres in his opening remarks at the start of the World Leaders Summit of the COP26. “It’s time to say ‘enough.’ Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves… We need maximum ambition from all countries on all fronts to make Glasgow a success.”

The summit comes just a few months after the August release of a grim report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found that climate change was “unequivocally” caused by human activity, and that within two decades, rising temperatures will cause the planet to reach a significant turning point in global warming. The report’s authors—a group of the world’s top climate scientists convened by the United Nations—predict that by 2040, average global temperatures will be warmer than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, causing more frequent and intense heat waves, droughts and extreme weather events. Guterres called the bleak findings a “code red for humanity.”

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting the summit, likened the race to stop climate change to a spy thriller, warning that “a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know it.” He added, “The tragedy is this is not a movie, and the doomsday device is real.”

The dire assessment of the state of the planet’s climate was not lost on U.S. President Joe Biden, who called on world leaders to take aggressive action immediately to stave off the climate crisis in his remarks at the summit’s opening day. “There’s no more time to hang back or sit on the fence or argue amongst ourselves,” he said. “This is the challenge of our collective lifetimes, the existential threat to human existence as we know it. And every day we delay, the cost of inaction increases.”

But despite all the troubling data and dire warnings, the summit has had a fairly inauspicious start. On October 30, the day before COP26 opened, leaders of the G20 nations—19 countries and the European Union, which together are responsible for 80 percent of the world’s emissions—sought to bolster international leadership on climate change as they concluded their own meeting in Rome just before the summit in Glasgow. But their deliberations ended with a whimper: a mere reaffirmation of the Paris agreement goals. During the G20 summit, Johnson said that all the world leaders’ pledges without action were “starting to sound hollow,” and he criticized the commitments as “drops in a rapidly warming ocean.” Adding to the disappointment was the fact that the summit was not attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping, even as both Russia and China “are among the world’s biggest polluters”: Russia and China are respectively responsible for 5 percent and 28 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, respectively. Those two nations have pushed the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 ahead to 2060.

A failure in Glasgow could have grave, cascading consequences. On October 26, the UN Environment Program released a worrying report warning that with “climate change intensifying… humanity is running out of time” due to the climate promises that have been made but have not yet been delivered. Failure to stem the climate crisis “would mean less food, so probably a crisis in food security. It would leave a lot more people vulnerable to terrible situations, terrorist groups and violent groups,” said UNFCCC executive secretary Patricia Espinosa. “It would mean a lot of sources of instability… [t]he catastrophic scenario would indicate that we would have massive flows of displaced people.”

“We’re really talking about preserving the stability of countries, preserving the institutions that we have built over so many years, preserving the best goals that our countries have put together,” said Espinosa, who took on the UN climate role in 2016. A former minister of foreign affairs of Mexico, Espinosa shares responsibility for the talks with UK cabinet minister Alok Sharma, who serves as the COP26 president. “What we need to get at Glasgow are messages from leaders that they are determined to drive this transformation, to make these changes, to look at ways of increasing their ambition,” Espinosa said.

In a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology, a group of international scientists found that if the world continues “business-as-usual” emissions, the impacts of the climate crisis could triple across 45 different “life zones”—distinct regions representing broad ecosystem types—across the planet. “The likely future changes in the world’s life zones is likely to have a substantial impact on [people’s] livelihoods and biodiversity,” said Dr. Paul Elsen, a climate adaptation scientist at Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and lead author of the study. “Large areas of the world are getting hotter and drier and this is already impacting the earth’s life zones,” added Elsen. The researchers predict that more than 42 percent of the planet’s land area will ultimately be affected if emissions are not significantly reduced. Dr. Hedley Grantham, director of conservation planning at WCS and a co-author of the study, said, “COP26 is our best chance of countries committing to reducing emissions and putting us on a better future pathway for climate change and its impacts.”

There have, however, been a few bright spots in the early days of the summit. On November 2, world leaders announced new plans to reduce the emissions of methane, a powerful global warming gas that “has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere.” President Biden welcomed the methane agreement, calling it a “game-changing commitment,” while also announcing that for the first time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was going to enforce limits on the methane “released by existing oil and gas rigs across the United States.”

The Biden administration said that the government’s vast spending bill would mark the “largest effort to combat climate change in American history.” But with this critical climate legislation stalled on Capitol Hill, Biden’s aggressive target of reducing the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by about half of its 2005 levels by the end of this decade will likely have to be pursued through executive actions such as regulations.

And on November 2, more than 100 nations, which together are responsible for about 85 percent of the world’s forests, agreed to a landmark $19 billion plan to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. Prime Minister Johnson said that it is critical for the success of COP26 “that we act now and we end the role of humanity as nature’s conqueror, and instead become nature’s custodian,” adding that “[w]e have to stop the devastating loss of our forests, these great teeming ecosystems—three-trillion-pillared cathedrals of nature—that are the lungs of our planet.”

​​In other welcome news, 14 nations including the United States, working on the sidelines of COP26, backed a Denmark-led initiative to reduce global maritime emissions to zero by 2050. “With around 90 percent of world trade transported by sea, global shipping accounts for nearly 3 percent of global CO2 emissions,” according to Reuters.

Indeed, non-state actors, i.e., businesses, are key participants in the world’s climate goals. UN chief Guterres said that the private sector has a critical role to play in this fight—and the UN will judge the performance of businesses’ pledges to achieve net-zero emissions. “I will establish a group of experts to propose clear standards to measure and analyze net-zero commitments from non-state actors,” which will go beyond mechanisms that have been established by the Paris climate accord, he said.

In the U.S., businesses are trying to influence Biden’s massive spending plan. “Across industries, business groups successfully pushed lawmakers to make significant changes to key sections of the original $3.5 trillion bill. Their lobbying efforts revolved around Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who ultimately sided with the business community on several issues… The White House plan does not raise tax rates on corporations—keeping a central part of the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts intact—in a stunning win for business interests,” stated an article in the Hill.

“This growing call for action can’t be underestimated,” writes EFL contributor Patti Lynn, executive director of Corporate Accountability, a consumer advocacy group, in Truthout, referring to the surge in climate activism across the world in recent years. But she also offered a caveat: “We need great social and economic change to fully and justly solve the climate crisis, and no change on this scale happens without public engagement fueling the political will to create such changes. But we also must be clear-eyed about what stands in the way of achieving such transformative change.” She added that for the world to move “from visions to actual policies that are just and effective, we must address the largest obstacle that lies between today’s status quo and a livable future for all: the influence of the fossil fuel industry on climate policy.”

Rainforest Action Network, a nonprofit environmental group, also trained their sights on the private sector, tweeting, “World leaders… must meet the climate crisis by holding brands and banks accountable to end fossil fuel expansion and deforestation.” But the COP26 homepage suggests a different story: Unilever, Scottish Power, Sainsbury’s, National Grid, Microsoft, Hitachi and GSK are some of the many corporations that COP26 thanks as “principal partners.”

And while many private firms, including several of the COP26 partners, have made significant climate commitments, they are often met with criticisms of “greenwashing”—appearing that they are climate-friendly when in fact, the promises are often not regulated by governments and actually not making a dent. “Businesses are the big polluters,” said Kristian Ronn, CEO and co-founder of Normative, a Swedish startup that has launched a carbon emissions tracker that he says can help end corporate greenwashing. The private sector is “responsible for two-thirds of the total emissions,” he said. “So they need to account for the footprint and mitigate that footprint, because essentially what gets measured gets managed.” He added, “There are no mechanisms in place to ensure the completeness of the information.”

COP26 partner Microsoft, for example, has formed Transform to Net Zero, a new initiative with several other companies, including Nike and Starbucks, to help the private sector achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But as Emily Pontecorvo reports in Grist, “There’s one gaping hole that persists in Microsoft’s climate action, one that the company has been repeatedly criticized for: How can it expect to pull more carbon out of the air than it puts in if it’s actively helping fossil fuel companies find and pull more oil and gas out of the ground?”

As world leaders attempt to hammer out a path to achieve the Paris climate accord goals, they would do well to listen to the world’s Indigenous people, who have been successful caretakers of their ecosystems for many generations—including 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, though they represent just 5 percent of the global population—but who are suffering on the front lines of the climate fights, from deforestation to rising seas.

Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon, co-founder of the Indigenous-led nonprofit organization Ceibo Alliance, and an EFL contributor, wrote an open letter to world leaders in 2020 that is even more important today. “When you say that the oil companies have marvelous new technologies that can sip the oil from beneath our lands like hummingbirds sip nectar from a flower, we know that you are lying because we live downriver from the spills,” writes Nenquimo, who was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. “When you say that the Amazon is not burning, we do not need satellite images to prove you wrong; we are choking on the smoke of the fruit orchards that our ancestors planted centuries ago. When you say that you are urgently looking for climate solutions, yet continue to build a world economy based on extraction and pollution, we know you are lying because we are the closest to the land.”

###

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Counterpunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

Take action…

Amazon Frontlines to Ecuador’s Constitutional Court: “The Amazon rainforest is our home, and our home is keeping us all alive! And yet, your world is destroying it. What we are asking you for is very simple: For you to listen to us, to respect us and to recognize that we, Indigenous Peoples, have the right to decide what happens in our home. We have made our decision–we must defend our home, the Amazon. Will you protect our right to decide?”

Sign the petition urging Ecuador’s Constitutional Court to protect the Amazon rainforest and Indigenous rights from destructive mining and oil drilling.

Cause for concern…

• Watch how the sea will drown major cities if the planet continues to warm (Ray White, Mashable)
• The green steel revolution is picking up steam (Molly Taft, Gizmodo)
• America’s food safety system failed to stop a salmonella epidemic (Bernice Yeung, Michael Grabell, Irena Hwang and Mollie Simon, ProPublica)
• Climate change is altering the very color of fall foliage (Marc Abrams, Fast Company)
• 43 out of 50 top U.S. fast-food chains lack vegan options, report finds (Paige Bennett, EcoWatch)

Round of applause…

“The BLM is committed to responsible development on public lands, including ensuring that our environmental reviews consider the climate impacts of energy development on lands and communities,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. agency that oversees onshore oil and gas management.

• Biden administration to require new climate analysis before oil leasing (Heather Richards, E&E News)
• Climate change became the largest part of Biden spending bill (Coral Davenport, New York Times)
• G20 nations agree to new limits on coal-burning power plants (Somini Sengupta, Jason Horowitz and Jim Tankersley, New York Times)
• Veganism can offer multiple health benefits including mental health and well-being (Aman Puri, Financial Express)

ICYMI…

“In order for us to be free, wilderness—or the relative absence of human domination over nature—has to remain and be protected as a potential baseline against the imposition of human power. Without it, we will lose our point of orientation to know what it means to be free from others. Or as Senator Frank Church of Idaho said in helping to pass the Wilderness Act of 1964, that ‘without wilderness this country will become a cage.’ Consider this, and the uber-wealthy class: People like Elon Musk insert themselves between us and nature in order to overrun it and promote increased population growth to accelerate that process. They envision a future in which the world is one big market, or a place they can dominate as the alternative—or the free world of Thoreau—recedes into extinction.”

—EFL contributor Carter Dillard, “Groundbreaking Court Case Argues U.S. Climate Denial Policy Violates Americans’ Right to Be Free” (EcoWatch, January 7, 2021)

Parting thought…

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be burled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

—excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

ExxonMobil has spent more than $39 million to manufacture doubt about climate science.

By Elliott Negin, Independent Media Institute

11 min read

In a secret video recording made public in late June, a top ExxonMobil lobbyist—Keith McCoy, who was fired soon afterward—not only conceded that the oil giant’s support for a carbon tax is a sham, but he also admitted that the company quietly financed climate science denier groups to stave off government action and maximize its profits—a fact that my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others revealed more than a decade ago.

“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” McCoy, then ExxonMobil’s senior director of federal relations, said during the interview. “Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”

For all his candor, McCoy got at least one thing wrong. ExxonMobil did “join”—in other words, pay—denier groups to spread disinformation to blunt initial government attempts to curb carbon emissions. But McCoy inaccurately used the past tense. In fact, the company continues to fund them.

That videotaped interview caused some major heartburn for McCoy’s boss, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, especially since the House Committee on Oversight and Reform has invited Woods—as well as top executives from the American Petroleum Institute, BP America, Chevron, Shell Oil and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—to testify at a hearing on October 28 on the “long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.”

ExxonMobil has been at the heart of that campaign. Since 1998, the company has paid a network of seemingly independent think tanks and advocacy groups more than $39 million to manufacture doubt about climate science and stymie government action. Only Charles Koch and his late brother David, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries, are known to have spent more.

In 2020, according to ExxonMobil’s most recent corporate grantmaking report, the company spent $490,000 on three grantees—the American Enterprise Institute ($100,000), the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University ($140,000), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($250,000). That amount is down from the $790,000 the company reported it spent on nine climate science denier groups in 2019 and a fraction of what it spent in the past, but there’s a catch.

True, the company lost more than $22 billion in 2020 and cut back its grants across the board. But another factor for this decline is that ExxonMobil changed how it reports grants. As first reported by Salon, the company only listed grants of $100,000 or more in its 2020 annual giving report. In previous years, it included grants of $5,000 or more. The change reduces transparency and ultimately means there is no way to tell how much the company spent in smaller donations to support climate disinformation in 2020 or compare the grants it made in 2020 with previous years.

Only three denier groups—the same three named in the 2020 grantmaking report—received $100,000 or more from ExxonMobil in 2019. That year, their grants collectively amounted to $625,000. The other six denier groups the company funded in 2019—the Center for American and International Law ($5,000), the Federalist Society ($10,000), the Hoover Institution ($15,000), the Manhattan Institute ($90,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000)—collectively received $165,000. None of those grants, even if ExxonMobil continued them, would wind up in the 2020 report, given the company’s new threshold.

Still, it’s worth taking a closer look at where the bulk of ExxonMobil’s self-reported climate disinformation budget did go in 2020.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Since 2014, ExxonMobil has given more than $5 million on top of its annual dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—a major player in blocking action on climate change for decades. A few years after becoming an ExxonMobil grantee, the Chamber gained some unwanted notoriety by financing a widely debunked report that then-President Trump cited as a primary rationale for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

In 2019, however, the Chamber appeared to flip 180 degrees, declaring on its website, “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change is inaccurate, given that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, but the statement did represent a quantum leap from when the association spuriously maintained in comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that “a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans.”

That said, the Chamber vowed in an August 24 press release to “do everything [it] can to prevent” the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill—which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors—“from becoming law.” And in a section on its website addressing climate change, the Chamber calls for “the increased use of natural gas” to make “further progress.”

Increase the use of natural gas?! That runs counter to what climate science says about the need to swiftly decarbonize the energy sector, essentially trading one major carbon pollution source—coal—for another—methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. Moreover, according to a December 2019 study in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the boom in natural gas use over the last decade alone have now surpassed the emissions avoided by closing coal-fired power plants.

The American Enterprise Institute

Economist Benjamin Zycher might be considered the climate science denier in residenceat theAmerican Enterprise Institute(AEI),which hasreceived $4.86 million from ExxonMobil since 1998. Zycher insists that a carbon tax would be “ineffective,” has called the Paris climate agreement an “absurdity,” and rejects the scientific consensus about the causes and seriousness of global warming.

Zycher published his most recent broadside against climate science in the Summer 2021 issue ofNational Affairs, a formerly independent conservative policy quarterly that AEI brought in-house in 2019. In his essay, “The Case for Climate-Change Realism,” he falsely argued that the “available science” does not support the notion that human activity is “the single most significant cause of climate change” and the “available data” undercut the assessment that extreme weather events are “evidence of an ongoing climate crisis.”

As he has in previous articles, Zycher cited roundly debunked hypotheses for the primary causes of climate change, including a shift in northern Pacific Ocean circulation patterns called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which scientists have determined is incapable of causing a long-term warming trend, and “changes in solar activity,” when, in fact, the sun’s energy has declined since the 1980s while average global temperatures have continued to climb.

This summer was not a fortuitous time to be peddling discredited theories. On August 9, less than two months after Zycher posted his essay, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark, nearly 4,000-page “code red for humanity” report warning that the climate crisis is close to spiraling out of control and human activity is “unequivocally” to blame.

Zycher’s main objective? To make a case, no matter how specious, for continued reliance on fossil fuels, which he falsely claimed are less expensive than renewables. Proposals to cut carbon emissions, including the Paris agreement, would have little real impact, he argued, and could “be accomplished only by substituting expensive energy for cheaper energy.” In fact, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg, it is “now cheaper to build and operate new large-scale wind or solar plants in nearly half the world than it would be to run an existing coal or [natural] gas-fired power plant.” To be sure, no one would confuse Zycher for a scientist or National Affairs for a peer-reviewed journal. But he serves ExxonMobil’s interests as a seemingly independent expert who continues to express doubt about climate science and the viability of renewable energy, thereby providing cover for climate science deniers in Congress.

George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center

The relatively unknown Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington (GW) University received $140,000 from ExxonMobil in 2020 and $1.2 million from the company since 2013. Director Susan Dudley founded the center in 2009 after serving as President George W. Bush’s “regulatory czar” at the Office of Management and Budget and, before that, running the Regulatory Studies Program at Koch-financed Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She currently serves in various capacities for other longtime climate science disinformation groups, including the Koch-founded Cato Institute, the Federalist Society, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Regulatory Studies Center portrays itself as an “objective, unbiased” policy shop, but—like the Mercatus Center—its primary raison d’être is to weaken and quash government regulations, according to a 2019 analysis by the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. The GW center’s main tools are reports and public comments it submits to Congress, and although it does not get much mainstream news media attention, it has found a receptive audience on Capitol Hill—and in the previous administration. Much of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda, Public Citizen found, echoed the center’s recommendations, including “dramatically reducing the cost that the government attributes to carbon emissions.”

But should the Regulatory Studies Center be lumped in with climate science disinformation groups? In response to the Public Citizen report, as well as criticism from UnKoch My Campus and GW student groups, the center issued a statement in February disputing the charge that it rejects climate science. “Contrary to unsubstantiated claims, no one in the Regulatory Studies Center questions climate science,” it said. “In fact, most of the Center’s scholars do not focus on environmental or energy issues at all. Those who have written on climate issues address economic and legal questions, not the science.”

Whether or not the center directly disputes climate science is beside the point. In the face of incontrovertible scientific evidence, most ExxonMobil-funded disinformation groups have revised their position on the reality of climate change. Instead of challenging the science, their efforts now tend to focus on denigrating renewable energy, overstating the costs of transitioning to a clean energy economy while ignoring the benefits, and preventing government action. That is exactly what the Regulatory Studies Center does. In recent years, for example, it has published papers and filed public comments opposing stronger efficiency standards for home appliances and vehicles that would dramatically reduce carbon emissions.

The center also has enlisted the help of unabashed climate science deniers. In the fall of 2018, for example, it tapped Julian Morris to file a public comment supporting the Trump administration’s proposed rollback of Obama-era standards for cars and light trucks designed to increase fuel economy and, for the first time, substantially reduce tailpipe carbon emissions. Morris, president and founder of the International Policy Network and vice president of research at the Reason Foundation—two libertarian, climate science denier organizations—falsely declared in a paper published in March 2018 that the “effects of climate change are unknown—but the benefits may well be greater than the costs for the foreseeable future.”

Millions More for Disinformation

The money ExxonMobil donated in 2020 to AEI, the GW Regulatory Studies Center and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents only a small percentage of the company’s recent outlays to sway public opinion and blunt government climate action. It is difficult to document all of the company’s related expenditures, but they include:

• More than $5 million on Facebook ads in 2020, which is more than half of the $9.6 million that the U.S. oil and gas industry spent on the ads, according to an analysis by the think tank InfluenceMap that reviewed more than 25,000 ads on Facebook’s U.S. platform. Many of the ads described natural gas as a “green” fuel source and argued that cutting carbon emissions would drive up energy costs.
  
• An estimated $10 million in annual dues to the American Petroleum Institute (API) (based on how much Shell Oil recently revealed it paid). The U.S. oil and gas industry’s oldest and largest trade association, API is working overtime to block stricter methane emissions standards. McCoy indirectly referenced API during the secretly taped interview when he said ExxonMobil relied on third parties to publicly represent its interests in Congress. “We don’t want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing,” he said. “It’s getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be, for the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of Congress.”
  
• At least $100,000 in annual dues to trade associations (based on what it reported it spent in 2019) that have a long track record of peddling climate disinformation, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
  
• Nearly $834,000 during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles to 118 of the 139 climate science deniers currently in Congress. Over that same time period, the company reportedly spent nearly $41 million to lobby in Washington, but neither McCoy nor ExxonMobil’s other in-house lobbyists have broached the topic of a carbon tax—the company’s avowed top priority—with legislators since 2018, according to its quarterly lobbying reports.
  

So while ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and his colleagues proclaim that they fully understand the threat posed by climate change and are “committed to being part of the solution,” the evidence shows they continue to spend tens of millions of dollars every year to promote gridlock in Congress on the issue. The future of the planet as we know it hangs in the balance, but as McCoy acknowledged in his interview, ExxonMobil was—and still is—looking out for its investments and its shareholders’ short-term interests, regardless of the long-term consequences.

###

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.

Take action…

ExxonKnew “Recent reports have shown that Exxon knew about the threat of climate change decades ago. Yet over the course of nearly forty years, the company has contributed millions of dollars to think tanks and politicians that have done their best to spread doubt and misinformation—first on the existence of climate change, then the extent of the problem, and now its cause. If Exxon intentionally misled the public about climate change and fossil fuels, then they should be held accountable. We’re calling for an immediate investigation.”

Urge the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil for lying to the public about fossil fuels’ threat to the climate.

Cause for concern…

“Rising temperatures have led to higher rates of heat illness, causing farmworkers to collapse in fields and elderly people to die in their apartments,” reports Sarah Kaplan for the Washington Post, while referring to a new analysis from more than 100 doctors and health experts. “Insects carrying tropical diseases have multiplied and spread toward the poles. The amount of plant pollen in the air is increasing, worsening asthma and other respiratory conditions. Extreme floods and catastrophic storms have boosted the risk of cholera and other waterborne diseases. Smoke from fires in California infiltrates the lungs and then the bloodstreams of people as far away as Texas, Ohio and New York. Droughts intensify, crops fail, hunger stalks millions of the world’s most vulnerable people.”

• Inaction on climate change imperils millions of lives, doctors say (Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post)
• Senator Joe Manchin has been fighting to keep billions in subsidies for fossil fuels (Alleen Brown, The Intercept)
• World currently faces unprecedented catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity (United Nations)
• Is the Amazon near a tipping point? Three real-world studies are ominous (Stephen Eisenhammer, Reuters)
• World landmarks that could disappear due to climate change (Love Exploring)

Round of applause…

• Environmentalists secure water rights for Great Salt Lake (Ben Winslow, Associated Press)
• Climate change: The environmental disasters we’ve almost fixed (Helen Briggs, BBC News)
• The humpback chub, a rare fish, has been brought back from the brink of extinction (James Anderson, Associated Press)
• Listen to these cheeky turkeys ‘laugh’ after one of them nips CNN’s Anna Stewart in the bum (Annie Reneau, Upworthy)
• Recipes using faux meat that will convert the carnivore in your life (Ben Mims, Los Angeles Times)

ICYMI…

“In truth, not only is meat consumption not necessary for humans to stay healthy, but it’s also potentially quite harmful. Consider meat’s links to heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers. Or the millions of people who fall sick from listeria, E. coli, and salmonella each year due to the consumption of contaminated meat. Or the more than 2.8 million Americans who contract antibiotic-resistant infections—which is a result of a nasty upshot of the rampant use of antibiotics on factory farms.”

—EFL contributor Jennifer Barckley, “The Myth That Meat Is Essential for Human Health Could Harm Us All” (Public Seminar, July 29, 2021)

Parting thought…

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

—excerpt from Ted Hughes’ “The Thought Fox,” from Collected Poems (Faber, 2003)

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Author Paul Watson has no problem with critics calling him and his marine-life-defending colleagues pirates—it’s far better than helplessly standing by and doing nothing in the face of the violence against animals they have witnessed.

By Captain Paul Watson

9 min read

This excerpt is from Death of a Whale, by Captain Paul Watson (GroundSwell Books, 2021). This web adaptation was produced by GroundSwell Books in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

In 1975, Robert Hunter and I were the first people to physically block a harpooner’s line of fire when we intercepted a Soviet whaling fleet and placed our bodies between the killers and eight fleeing, frightened sperm whales. We were in a small inflatable boat, speeding before the plunging steel prow of a Russian kill boat. As the whales fled for their lives before us, we could smell the fear in their misty exhalations. We thought we could make a difference with our Gandhi-inspired seagoing stand. Surely these men behind the harpoons would not risk killing a human being to satisfy their lust for whale oil and meat. We were wrong!

The whalers demonstrated their contempt for our nonviolent protests by firing an explosive harpoon over our heads. The harpoon line slashed into the water and we narrowly escaped death. One of the whales was not so lucky. With a dull thud followed by a muffled explosion, the entrails of a female whale were torn and ripped apart by hot steel shrapnel.

The large bull sperm whale in the midst of the pod abruptly rose and dove. Experts had told us that a bull whale in this situation would attack us. We were a smaller target than the whaling ship. Anxiously, we held our breath in anticipation of sixty tons of irate muscle and blood torpedoing from the depths below our frail craft.

The ocean erupted behind us. We turned toward the Soviet ship to see a living juggernaut hurl itself at the Russian bow. The harpooner was ready. He pulled the trigger and sent a second explosive missile into the massive head of the whale. A pitiful scream rang in my ears, a fountain of blood geysered into the air, and the deep blue of the ocean was rapidly befouled with dark red blood. The whale thrashed and convulsed violently.

Mortally wounded and crazed with pain, the whale rolled, and one great eye made contact with mine. The whale dove, and a trail of bloody bubbles moved laboriously toward us. Slowly, very slowly, a gargantuan head emerged from the water, and the whale rose at an angle over and above our tiny craft. Blood and brine cascaded from the gaping head wound and fell upon us in torrents.

We were helpless. We knew that we would be crushed within seconds as the whale fell upon us. There was little time for fear, only awe. We could not move.

The whale did not fall upon us. He wavered and towered motionless above us. I looked up past the daggered six-inch teeth and into the eye the size of my fist, an eye that reflected back intelligence and spoke wordlessly of compassion and communicated to me the understanding that this was a being that could discriminate and understood what we had tried to do. The mammoth body slowly slid back into the sea.

The massive head of this majestic sperm whale slowly fell back into the sea. He rolled and the water parted, revealing a solitary eye. The gaze of the whale seized control of my soul, and I saw my own image reflected back at me. I was overcome with pity, not for the whale but for ourselves. Waves of shame crashed down upon me and I wept. Overwhelmed with horror at this revelation of the cruel blasphemy of my species, I realized then and there that my allegiance lay with this dying child of the sea and his kind. On that day, I left the comfortable realm of human self-importance to forever embrace the soulful satisfaction of lifelong service to the citizens of the sea.

The gentle giant died with my face seared upon his retina. I will never forget that. It is a memory that haunts and torments me and leaves me with only one course to chart toward redemption for the collective sins of humanity. It is both my burden and my joy to pledge my allegiance to the most intelligent and profoundly sensitive species of beings to have ever inhabited the Earth––the great whales.

Reykjavik, Iceland, November 1986

Despite the criticisms, the name-calling, and the controversy that have arisen from our work since 1975, one indisputable fact emerged from a raid made by my crew (which included Rod Coronado of the U.S. and David Howitt of the UK) on two whaling ships in Reykjavik in 1986 in order to enforce an international moratorium on commercial whaling that had been established that year: it was successful.

The two whaling ships were razed, although their electronics and mechanical systems had been totally destroyed. Insurance did not cover the losses because the owners had stated that terrorists sank the ships, and apparently they were not insured for terrorism.

Most importantly, from that day of November 8, 1986, to sixteen years later in the year 2002, the Icelanders did not take another whale. What talk, compromise, negotiations, meetings, letters, petitions, and protests had not accomplished, we achieved with a little monkey-wrenching activity in the wee hours of the morning.

Were we terrorists? No, not even criminals, for we were never charged with a crime, even though we made ourselves available for prosecution. We had simply done our duty, and we put an end to an unlawful activity.

The only repercussion was that Iceland moved before the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1987 that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society be banned from holding observer status at the meetings of the IWC. After this passed, Iceland resigned from the IWC, leaving us with the distinction of being the only organization to enjoy the status of banishment from the IWC.

How ironic, I thought, to be the only organization banned from the IWC because we were the only organization to have ever enforced an IWC ruling.

It was not much of a punishment. I had never enjoyed listening to the delegates of the member nations barter whales like they were bushels of wheat or pork bellies. I also never had much use for the posturing of the nongovernmental organizations pretending that they were actually making a difference by attending this annual circus. All that we were interested in were the rulings of the IWC, and we fully intended to continue to enforce those rulings.

I have been asked many times why we consider the IWC rulings important. Why not just oppose all whaling everywhere? The answer is that we do oppose all whaling by everyone, everywhere. However, we only actively attack whaling operations that are in violation of international conservation law. The reason for this is simple: We do not presume to be the judges and jury. We simply execute the rulings of the IWC or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) or any rulings from international conservation authorities, and we do so in accordance with the definition of intervention as defined by the 1982 United Nations World Charter for Nature, Part III (Implementation), Principle 21, Section (e): “States and, to the extent they are able, other public authorities, international organizations, individuals, groups and corporations shall… Safeguard and conserve nature in areas beyond national jurisdiction.”

As a seaman, I have a great and abiding respect for the traditions of the law of the sea. To attack without a vested authority would be piracy. Thus, the difference between a privateer like Sir Francis Drake and a pirate like Blackbeard was that the former was in possession of a letter of marque from a sovereign authority and the latter practiced the same trade solely upon his own authority.

I have never considered it my place to judge the illegal activities of others. However, I feel that when there are laws and international treaties that it is the responsibility of individuals and nongovernmental organizations to strive toward the implementation of these rulings, especially in light of the fact that there is no international body empowered to police these international laws. Nation-states intervene when it is advantageous for them to do so, but little enforcement is carried out in the interests of the common good of all citizens of the planet.

It is worth noting that it was not the British or Spanish navies that brought the piracy of the Caribbean under control in the 17th century. There were too many conflicts of interest, too much corruption, and too little motivation for any real action to have been taken. The bureaucracies in the British admiralty and the Spanish court did nothing because the very nature of a bureaucracy is the maintenance of the status quo. The achievement of first shutting down piracy on the Spanish Main is attributed to one man––a pirate himself.

Henry Morgan did what two nations chose not to do: he drove the pirates to ground and ended their reign of terror. As a result, the “pirate” was made governor of Jamaica, although history would show that the man was far more effective as a pirate than as a politician. In fact, he was more of a pirate as a politician than he was as an actual pirate.

When Andrew Jackson failed to get the support of the merchants of New Orleans to back his attack on the British, it was a pirate who came to his service in the personage of Jean Lafitte. When the United States successfully endeavored to cast off the yoke of British rule, it was a pirate who achieved the most dramatic and successful naval victory at sea. That person was captain John Paul Jones. Consequently, it is a pirate who was the founder of what is today the world’s most powerful navy.

Today, with the pirates of corrupt industry aided by corrupt politicians plundering our oceans for the last of the fish, killing the last of the whales, and polluting the waters, we find that there is very little real resistance to their activities upon the high seas. Once again it is time for some good pirates to rise up in opposition to the bad pirates, and I believe that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is just such an organization of good pirates.

When our critics call us pirates, I have no problem with that. In fact, we have taken their criticisms and in an aikido-like manner; we have incorporated their accusations into our image. Our ships are sometimes painted a monochromatic black. We have designed our own version of the pretty red [a flag which, when translated to French, becomes “joli rouge” and is rumored to have inspired the “jolly roger” phrase applied to pirate flags], and our black-and-white flag flies from our mast during campaigns. We even carry cannons, with the difference being that our guns fire cream pies and not red-hot balls.

As good pirates, we have evolved to suit the time and culture in which we live, and this being a media-defined culture, our primary weapons are the camera, the video, and the internet. Like modern-day Robin Hoods, we take from the greedy and give back to the sea. We don’t profit materially, but we profit tremendously both spiritually and psychologically.

###

Captain Paul Watson is a Canadian-American marine conservation activist who founded the direct action group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1977 and was more recently featured in Animal Planet’s popular television series “Whale Wars” and the documentary about his life, “Watson.” Sea Shepherd’s mission is to protect all ocean-dwelling marine life. Watson has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, including Death of a Whale (2021), Urgent! (2021), Orcapedia (2020), Dealing with Climate Change and Stress (2020), The Haunted Mariner (2019), and Captain Paul Watson: Interview with a Pirate (2013).

Take action…

Ocean Research & Conservation Association of Ireland: “The annual mass slaughter of some of the most vulnerable yet important species for healthy ecosystem functioning is under threat due to hunts in Norway that officially begin in April and end in September every single year. Whaling… in Norway results in a dramatic chase to harpoon minke whales… unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of these minke whales have been shown to be pregnant when they’re killed. This year, Norway killed more whales than in the last 5 years, at 575 minke whales slaughtered. According to the International Whaling Commission, in 2019 the Norwegian whale quota for whale hunting was 1,278. This is a 28 percent increase from the previous year. The use of explosive Penthrite grenade harpoon is a method that has been used for years in the act of killing whales. This vicious way of killing can take up to 25 minutes for the whale to die—a slow and inhumane way of slaughter.”

Sign the petition to ban whale hunting in Norway. (Change.org)

Cause for concern…

“An adult manatee eats 100 to 200 pounds of seagrass per day to survive,” report Jim Waymer and Max Chesnes on Florida Today. “But up to 90 percent of the seagrass coverage in much of the sea cow’s most important habitat—the Indian River Lagoon—vanished after severe, successive algae blooms that began a decade ago. The blooms blocked the sunlight their staple seagrass diet needs to photosynthesize.”

• Florida’s record manatee die-off nears 1,000 victims (Jim Waymer and Max Chesnes, Florida Today)
• Key Biden climate plan likely to be cut because of Manchin opposition (Coral Davenport, New York Times)
• More than 120,000 U.S. sites feared to handle harmful PFAS ‘forever’ chemicals (Carey Gillam and Alvin Chang, Guardian)
• G-20 climate talks stall ahead of critical Rome summit (Bloomberg Law)
• U.S. heating bills sill jump as much as 54% this winter, says government (Stan Choe, Associated Press)

Round of applause…

“The Human Rights Council’s decisive action in recognizing the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is about protecting people and planet—the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. It is also about protecting the natural systems which are basic preconditions to the lives and livelihoods of all people, wherever they live,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet following the Council’s October 8 declaration that a healthy environment is a human right. “Having long called for such a step, I am gratified that the Council’s action today clearly recognizes environmental degradation and climate change as interconnected human rights crises.”

• Access to a healthy environment, declared a human right by UN rights council (United Nations)
• Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing (Matthew P. White, et. al., Scientific Reports)
• Biden administration moves to curtail pollution by PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ (Annie Snider, Politico)
• Dubai’s salty farming experiment could help tackle food security challenges (Kelly Clarke, The National)
• What a dairy-free diet can do for your sex life (Audrey Enjoli, LIVEKINDLY)

ICYMI…

“As we remove large semi-wild parklands and play areas from our communities, we restrict the opportunity for our children—and ourselves—to explore and develop a comfort level with these environs. When we are not comfortable with wild nature, we discourage our children from exploring it. And so, we have now created a positive feedback cycle.

“In many cities, children cannot name even one local bird. We do not protect what we cannot name. As we reduce the areas of wild nature in our cities because of development pressure, we increase our fear of it, and we reduce our children’s time in the remaining areas of wilderness. As we reduce our own and our children’s play time in wild nature, the benefit and use of these spaces diminishes, and the protection of these spaces is reduced, allowing their unopposed destruction and development as urban areas. Because of this strange and unhealthy positive feedback, we find ourselves valuing wild lands less, even as they become much scarcer.”

—Teresa Coady, “How the Built Environment Is Damaging Children’s Connection to Nature,” excerpted from Teresa Coady’s book Rebuilding Earth: Designing Ecoconscious Habitats for Humans; adapted by the Independent Media Institute for the web with permission from North Atlantic Books. (October 1, 2020)

Parting thought…

His beak could open a bottle, 
and his eyes — when he lifts their soft lids —
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder —
Blake, maybe, 
or the Book of Revelation.

Never mind that he eats only 
the black-smocked crickets, 
and the dragonflies if they happen
to be out late over the ponds, and of course
the occasional festal mouse.
Never mind that he is only a memo
from the offices of fear —

…

Somewhere in the universe, 
in the gallery of important things, 
the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish, 
sits on its pedestal.

—Mary Oliver, “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard,” House of Light (Beacon Press, 2012)

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Counterpunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Despite claiming to endorse a carbon tax, ExxonMobil has funneled millions of dollars to lawmakers who oppose the idea.

By Elliott Negin, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

When then-ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy conceded in a secretly recorded video in May that the oil giant voiced support for a carbon tax only because it assumed it would never happen, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said the company was “shocked by these interviews” and stood by its “commitments to working on finding solutions to climate change.”

Wood’s reaction was reminiscent of Captain Louis Renault feigning surprise to discover gambling at Rick’s Café in the 1942 film “Casablanca.” After quietly pocketing his winnings, Renault justifies closing down the nightclub by exclaiming, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Woods was shocked? Really? Just one look at his company’s financial records would show that despite claiming to endorse a carbon tax—initially in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill that was under consideration in 2009—ExxonMobil has funneled millions of dollars over the last decade to lawmakers who staunchly oppose the idea.

Backing Climate Science Deniers

One tried-and-true way corporations ensure access to Congress is by making campaign contributions. Although there may not be a verifiable quid pro quo, donations guarantee access, and access guarantees influence.

So, given ExxonMobil’s professed support for a carbon tax, one might reasonably assume that the company’s political action committee (PAC) and employees would back lawmakers who sponsor such legislation and, over time, withdraw their funding for senators and representatives who stand in the way.

In fact, the opposite is true.

During the video interview, McCoy—who at the time was ExxonMobil’s senior director of federal relations—compared lobbying Congress with fishing.

“When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress,” he said, “I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out…. And… [then you start to] reel them in…. They’re a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them.”

The goal, he explained, is to develop a close relationship with legislative staff. “You want to be able to go to the chief… and say, look, we’ve got this issue, we need Congressman So-and-So to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter,” he said. “You name it, we’ve asked for everything.”

Not quite everything. ExxonMobil apparently has not asked for a carbon tax, notwithstanding the fact that the company was one of the founding members of the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), a bipartisan, industry-supported group, which was formed in 2017 to promote a carbon tax, and a year later, the company pledged to give $1 million over a two-year period to Americans for Carbon Dividends (AFCD), the council’s lobbying arm. Over the last decade, members of both houses have voted on a handful of carbon tax-related amendments and nonbinding resolutions. In every case, a sizable majority who received donations from ExxonMobil’s PAC and employees rejected the idea. For example:

• In March 2015, the Senate voted 58 to 42 to pass a budget amendment prohibiting a carbon tax. Thirty of the 40 senators who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2010, including amendment sponsor Roy Blunt (R-MO), voted in favor of the prohibition.
• In June 2016, the House passed a resolution introduced by Steve Scalise (R-LA) stating that a carbon tax “would be detrimental to American families and businesses” by a 237 to 163 margin. Eighty-five percent of the House members who voted for the resolution had received ExxonMobil political donations since 2013. By contrast, only 26 of the representatives who voted against the resolution—16 percent—had received ExxonMobil money.
• In July 2018, the House passed another Scalise-sponsored resolution asserting that “a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy,” this time by a 229 to 180 vote. During the 2018 election cycle, 75 percent of the representatives who gave the resolution a thumbs up received ExxonMobil donations. Only 23 percent of the 180 who voted against it got ExxonMobil funding.

The disparity between ExxonMobil’s PAC donations to supporters of the July 2018 Scalise resolution and its opponents is even more telling, given that PACs—which can contribute as much as $10,000 to a candidate per two-year cycle—more accurately represent a company’s agenda than that of individual employees. The ExxonMobil PAC contributed more than $935,000 to 74 percent of the resolution’s supporters, but only $109,500 to opponents during the 2018 election cycle. Scalise, the resolution’s sponsor, and 37 of his 48 resolution cosponsors received ExxonMobil PAC contributions.

The most recent congressional carbon tax vote took place in the Senate in February during a round of votes on the pandemic relief bill. John Hoeven (R-ND) sponsored an amendment that would have prohibited such a tax. It was rejected on a strict party-line vote: All 50 Republican senators voted for the amendment; all 50 Democratic senators voted no.

ExxonMobil PAC donations to those senators are mostly party-line, too. Twenty-seven of the 50 Republicans collectively have received $233,000 during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. Over that same time frame, the PAC contributed just $62,000 to 11 of the Democrats.

Snubbing Carbon Tax Proponents

In January 2018, ExxonMobil Vice President of Public and Government Affairs Suzanne McCarron reaffirmed the company’s support for a carbon tax, the Paris climate agreement and other related climate policies in a blog post on the company’s website. ExxonMobil, she maintained, is “committed to being part of the solution.”

Nevertheless, during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, ExxonMobil employees and its PAC donated nearly $834,000 to 28 of the 30 senators and 90 of the 109 representatives currently in Congress who, according to the Center for American Progress, still reject the scientific consensus that global temperatures are rising and that burning fossil fuels is largely to blame. The company’s PAC funded 16 of the climate science deniers in the Senate and 81 in the House.

Lawmakers sponsoring carbon tax legislation, meanwhile, have enjoyed considerably less support. Over the last two election cycles, climate science deniers in the 117th Congress received six and a half times more from ExxonMobil than carbon tax proponents.

Two carbon tax bills have been introduced in the Senate this session, both by Democrats: one sponsored by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, which has nine cosponsors, the other by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin. Three carbon tax bills have been introduced in the House: one sponsored by Pennsylvania’s Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick with one cosponsor, another by Connecticut’s Democratic Rep. John Larson with two cosponsors, and a third by Florida’s Democratic Rep. Theodore Deutch with 84 cosponsors.

Since 2017, ExxonMobil employees and the company PAC have donated only $127,692 to these carbon tax proponents: $35,486 to eight of the 11 sponsors and cosponsors in the Senate and $92,206 to 33 of the 90 sponsors and cosponsors in the House. The PAC contributed to only three of the senators and 12 of the representatives.

Despite this decidedly lopsided funding pattern, McCoy insisted during the interview that ExxonMobil wants to work with lawmakers on carbon tax legislation. “Put forth a bill and we’ll show you that we’ll support that bill, we’ll help you work on that bill,” he said. But, he added, “Nobody wants to do that because it’s not politically expedient to put forth a tax for people, it just isn’t.”

In fact, a number of lawmakers have “put forth a bill” to establish a carbon tax in successive congressional sessions, but the company has shown no support, and neither McCoy nor ExxonMobil’s other in-house lobbyists have broached the topic with members of Congress since 2018—the same year it announced its $1 million donation to the Climate Leadership Council’s lobbying arm, AFCD—according to ExxonMobil’s quarterly lobbying reports.

Staffers working for Rep. Larson and Sen. Whitehouse, who both have been sponsoring carbon tax legislation for years, recently verified that ExxonMobil has not expressed support for their respective proposals. Larson introduced a bill in 2009, the same year that ExxonMobil announced that it favored the policy, while Whitehouse first sponsored one in 2014 and has reintroduced a version of it in every session since.

Out of frustration, Whitehouse and his fellow bill sponsor, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, sent a letter to ExxonMobil in August 2016 criticizing the company for its indifference.

“Regarding ExxonMobil’s alleged seven years of support for a carbon fee, we’ve seen no meaningful evidence of that,” the senators wrote. “None of the top executives that make up ExxonMobil’s management team has expressed interest in meeting with any of us to discuss the Whitehouse-Schatz proposal or any carbon fee legislation.”

Five years later, nothing has changed on that front. A Whitehouse spokesperson says his office is not aware of ExxonMobil supporting any carbon pricing legislation, let alone the senator’s.

But McCoy’s revelations did have consequences: The Climate Leadership Council kicked ExxonMobil out of the organization in August; the Union of Concerned Scientists and other public interest groups cited McCoy’s comments in a “friend of the court” brief filed in Minnesota’s climate science deception lawsuit against ExxonMobil; and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform asked McCoy to testify about his company’s campaign to mislead the public “about the dangers of fossil fuels and their role in causing global climate change.”

As for McCoy’s job status, an ExxonMobil spokesperson told E&E News in late September that “McCoy no longer works for the company.”

If McCoy does wind up testifying before Congress, he would serve as the opening act for a hearing that the Oversight Committee plans to hold on October 28 featuring his former boss Darren Woods and top executives from other major oil and gas companies. Finally, under oath, Woods and his colleagues will have to answer questions about their decades-long effort to block government action on climate.

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Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Take action…

Change.org: Nathaniel Scott from East Lyme, Connecticut, wrote in 2019, when he was nine years old: “Arctic animals are dying every day because of more and more oil and gas expansions. We need to help them. The situation for Arctic species is already very bleak but will be even worse if more and more journeys to the north are happening, where the habitat for these animals is being disturbed. Also, more fossil fuel means more pollution and climate change, which means a smaller habitat for these creatures to call home. But together we can stop oil expansion in the Arctic. With your help, oil and gas expansion will hopefully be stopped in the far north so these beautiful creatures can live a good wholesome life in the wild. If the government and major oil companies take these issues [seriously] then hopefully more and more people will agree and try to save the Arctic. Killer whales, walruses, polar bears—the list goes on and on of species [that] will become more and more endangered unless we do something about it.”

Urge ExxonMobil, Shell and Gazprom to stop plans to expand oil and gas exploration in the Arctic.

Cause for concern…

“We have to make sure… (the COVID-19 stimulus measures) [are] strengthening biodiversity and not adding to the problem,” said David Cooper, deputy executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. “Globally, if you look around, the stimulus packages are making it worse rather than better.”

• United Nations warns that nations aren’t spending enough on species protection as new talks begin (David Stanway, Reuters)
• Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) wants to cut $100 billion in proposed climate funds, sources say (Coral Davenport, New York Times)
• In secret tapes, palm oil execs disclose corruption, brutality (Desmond Butler, Washington Post)
• As the climate bakes, Turkey faces a future without water (Paul Hockenos, Yale Environment 360)

Round of applause…

“Replacing dangerous HFCs [hydrofluorocarbons] in key products will bring us a smooth and rapid transition to climate-friendlier air conditioners, refrigerators, aerosols, insulation, and other products Americans use every day, saving money and energy for consumers, creating new jobs, and protecting our climate and our health,” said Christina Theodoridi, a climate and clean energy policy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit, following the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to grant 10 petitions to cut the use of HFCs, which are a potent greenhouse gas.

• EPA grants petitions to stem climate pollutants in future rules (Jennifer Hijazi, Bloomberg Law)
• DOE announces goal of 5 million homes powered by community solar (Zack Budryk, The Hill)
• Top United Nations panel votes to recognize human right to a clean environment (Katie Surma, Inside Climate News)
• End to deforestation sought at COP26 climate summit (Michael Taylor, Thomson Reuters Foundation)
• 30 percent of global consumers ‘likely’ to eat vegan eggs instead of conventional ones (Jemima Webber, Plant Based News)

ICYMI…

“[C]limate change isn’t the only issue exacerbated by methane: Public health also suffers, as methane emissions increase ground-level ozone, commonly known as smog, a cause of respiratory disease like asthma, as well as cardiovascular disease. In the COVID era, anything that negatively impacts lung function makes people more susceptible to the effects of coronavirus infection. Natural gas development also emits pollutants, including ultrafine particulate matter that can damage the heart, liver, kidneys and central nervous system. Fracking, the process of extracting natural gas, also uses more than 50 toxic chemicals that are known or suspected carcinogens. These health effects impact ‘frontline communities,’ communities of color and low-income, whose neighborhoods usually lack basic infrastructure to support them and protect them from pollution, many of them near oil and gas facilities.”

—EFL editor Reynard Loki, “Methane: The Forgotten Climate Change Driver That’s Poisoning Frontline Communities,” Independent Media Institute, January 5, 2021.

Parting thought…

“A bird comes to the window. It’s a mistake
to think of them
as birds, they are so often
messengers. That is why, once they
plummet to the sill, they sit
so perfectly still, to mock
patience, lifting their heads to sing
poor lady, poor lady, their three-note
warning, later flying
like a dark cloud from the sill to the olive grove.”

—Louise Glück, “Penelope’s Stubbornness,” from Meadowlands (1996)

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Smaller, more sustainable families would create massive long-term savings and catalyze sustainable development.

By Carter Dillard, Independent Media Institute

4 min read

Existential crises, from accelerating climate change to a pandemic that is mutating to overcome the defenses of our immune system, have prompted talk of the need for fundamental change. This talk rarely, if ever, touches on the one form of change that is the most fundamental: Altering the way we have kids or create future generations. It is a choice that would change who we as a society are—and who we are becoming.

This option is almost never discussed, despite the disproportionate long-term positive impact better family planning policies can have on the environmental, inequality, and public health crises we face, because it means making decisions that are not individualistic in nature, but are, instead, shaped by the need to ensure a better and a more sustainable future for everyone. Whatever happens in the world, for many, that sense of familial autonomy and privacy—the right to have as many kids as they want, when they want, irrespective of the needs of both their own families and the environment, the opportunities the children will or won’t have—gives them a feeling of power and freedom. Most people are at best unaware of and at worst uncaring about how their decisions impact the freedom of others—future generations’ freedom to a fair start in life, and freedom from the ravages of the climate and other ecological crises.

Much like the refusal to wear a mask during the peak of the pandemic, the assertion of autonomy relating to the questions of having kids is absurd and cruel in the current circumstances. It’s a power-grab masquerading as an assertion, rather than the praxis, of freedom. Unlike those who refuse to wear masks to protect others from the spread of COVID-19, however, people asserting the self-contradiction of procreative autonomy are buoyed up by the population growth culture pushed by governments and big business because baby-making grows the pyramid—which Nobel laureate Steven Chu decried—atop which these parties sit.

In my experience—having spent over a decade wrestling with leadership in civil society and social justice to stop treating the right to have kids as an unlimited right, instead of something more nuanced like free speech—I have found that the dilemma boils down simply to being a collective action problem. Most people would plan for and have children more sustainably and equitably if they could be assured others would too. But there is a lack of trust that whoever goes first will see others follow suit. Such problems are nothing new. That is why we have a social contract and government, which can help us act collectively, and perhaps lead us to a more child-centered thinking of working together to give every child a fair start in life.

What would that look like?

In the United States, Black families typically have one-tenth the wealth of white families. The impacts of this wealth disparity are especially hard on kids, and can ripple forward into future generations. President Biden’s child care and tax credit proposal is a step in the right direction, but it could be better. All benefits to wealthy families who don’t need the funding could be cut. Those savings could then be used as cash incentives to power up family planning and early childhood investment systems in the United States to target child abuse by amending the federal child abuse law, incentivizing having kids only when parents are really ready, and promoting smaller and more sustainable families, as well as fostering and adoption. These changes can have 20 times the impact on climate emissions, as compared to short-term fixes, and when they are made as part of recognizing our sacred constitutional right to nature, they will create massive long-term savings and catalyze sustainable development.

Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) has already proposed a vehicle called “baby bonds,” which would “create a new American birthright—giving every child a fair chance at economic opportunity and mobility,” and if these changes are made progressively, they can accomplish significant sustainable changes.

This change can help combat climate change and widen the opportunities for children, all while achieving goals that go beyond U.S. partisan values. It specifically prioritizes children and social equity over big business (as leftists seek to do) and improves the possibility of personal autonomy without the interference of so-called big government (thus satisfying the interests of the right wing).

This is not a loss of control—when we take into account future generations, it’s a net gain, where future generations have control over their lives that a fair start would provide, control over systems of governance, and control over the environment that can help us deal with the climate change crisis in an effective manner.

###

Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.

Take action…

India is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, after China and the United States. From 1990 to 2018, the nation’s emissions skyrocketed a staggering 335 percent. Aman Sharma, a student in India, has launched a public petition—already signed by more than 374,000 people around the world—urging the Indian government to declare climate change a national emergency. “Record-breaking heat waves have become a regular occurrence in India, killing thousands of people,” he writes. “Melting snowcaps are slowly increasing the sea level. Rainfall patterns in India are changing, and this has had a devastating effect on farmers’ harvests and affecting the migration patterns of different birds and animals.”

Urge India’s environment minister to declare climate change a national emergency.

Cause for concern…

• Crews race to limit damage from major California oil spill (Amy Taxin and Christopher Weber, Associated Press)
• Deportations of Haitians spark concerns over environmental refugees (Rachel Frazin and Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill)
• Arizona drought ignites tensions and threatens traditions among the Hopi (Simon Romero, New York Times)
• North Carolina civil rights groups say hog waste ‘biogas’ harms communities of color (Aman Azhar, Inside Climate News)
• The high price of living near the shore is about to go through the roof (Darryl Fears and Lori Rozsa, Washington Post)

Round of applause…

• Biden administration resumes enforcement of unlawful bird deaths by industry, reversing Trump (Matthew Brown, Associated Press)
• These giant floating islands could keep cities warm, without burning fossil fuels (Nate Berg, Fast Company)
• South Korea considers ban on eating of dog meat as pet ownership grows in the country (Grace Moon and Andrew Jeong, Washington Post)
• 3 simple ways to help save the planet, according to the women behind ‘Plastic-Free Fridays’ (Stacey Leasca, Travel + Leisure)
• I interviewed animals with a tiny mic again (Maya Higa, YouTube)

ICYMI…

“In addition to its role in human rights abuses, the palm oil industry is also a primary driver of deforestation, which not only exacerbates climate change by releasing into the atmosphere carbon that was previously safely stored in trees cut down to make room for plantations, but threatens wildlife and biodiversity… Made from the oil palm plant, palm oil is the world’s most widely traded vegetable oil. It is found in about half of all consumer goods, including common foods like bread, cookies, crackers, doughnuts, peanut butter and breakfast cereal, as well as everyday household products like soap and laundry detergent. Palm oil is also found in a host of cosmetics and beauty products like lipstick, mascara, body lotion, bubble bath and anti-wrinkle creams. The list goes on.”

—EFL editor Reynard Loki, “Palm Oil: The Ingredient Behind Human Rights Abuses and Eco-Destruction That’s Probably in Your Home Right Now” (Independent Media Institute, December 22, 2020)​​​​​​​

Parting thought…

“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.” —George Bernard Shaw

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.