Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He is the author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution

“We have zero years before climate and ecological breakdown, because it’s already here. We have zero years left to procrastinate. The longer we wait to act, the worse the floods, fires, droughts, famines and heatwaves will get… If we fail, the planet will continue to heat up, creeping past 1.5C, then 2C, then 3C of global heating as we keep squandering precious time. With every fraction of a degree, the floods and fires and heat will get worse. Coastal cities will be abandoned. Ocean currents will shift. Crops will fail. Ecosystems will collapse. Hundreds of millions will flee regions with humid heat too high for the human body. Geopolitics will break down. No place will be safe…”

Jennifer Francis is senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center

“If we do not succeed in changing our destructive behavior, the increasing trends in extreme weather, sea levels, government destabilization and human misery will continue and worsen. Extreme heatwaves, drought, wildfires and flooding events like those we’ve seen in recent summers will become commonplace. Many coastal cities and communities around the globe will be increasingly inundated by high tides and storm surges. Longer, more intense droughts will destroy cropland and force agricultural communities to uproot their families in search of a better life. The devastation of coral reefs around the world will worsen, wiping out fisheries that provide staple protein for millions of people. All of these impacts are happening now.”

Michael E Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He is author of the recent book, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back our Planet

“How many years do we have to act? Strictly speaking, zero – which is to say, that we must act, in earnest, now. We have a decade within which we must halve global carbon emissions…We must now choose between two paths as we face our future. One leads to massive suffering and collapse of our civilizational infrastructure. The other leads to a prosperous future for us, our children and grandchildren. But it requires that we leave fossil fuels behind. The choice is ours.”

Holly Jean Buck is a postdoctoral research fellow at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She is the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration

 “…If we don’t succeed in transitioning away from fossil fuels globally, we could face an uneven world where a few rich countries congratulate themselves for going green, and a few oil producer nations are supplying the rest of the world with dirty fuel, which they use because they don’t have alternatives…”

All these experts overlook one important point. Our economic system must be changed to sustainable socialism. What do we do when the scientific community cannot see the solution?

How many years until we must act on climate? Zero, say these climate thinkers | Jennifer Francis , Michael Mann , Holly Jean Buck and Peter Kalmus | The Guardian

 More news of how the capitalist sector is benefiting from the misfortune of the rest of us.

Tech corporations reported soaring profits as consumers upgraded their devices.

Climate change is the challenge of our time. It poses grave threats to agriculture and is already affecting the food security and livelihoods of small-scale farming households across the developing world.

Back-to-back droughts have pushed over a million people in southern Madagascar to the brink of starvation in the worst famine in half a century.  Villagers have sold their possessions and are eating the locusts, raw cactus fruits, and wild leaves to survive. Climate change bringing warmer temperatures is believed to be exacerbating this latest tragedy. Instead of bringing relief, this year’s rains were accompanied by warm temperatures that created the ideal conditions for infestations of fall armyworm, which destroys mainly maize, one of the main food crops.

Up to 40% of global food output is lost each year through pests and diseases, according to FAO estimates, while up to 811 million people suffer from hunger. 

Pests and pathogens have threatened food supplies since agriculture began. The Irish potato famine of the late 1840s, caused by late blight disease, killed about one million people. The ancient Greeks and Romans were well familiar with wheat stem rust, which continues to destroy harvests in developing countries. But recent research on the impact of temperature increases in the tropics caused by climate change has documented an expansion of some crop pests and diseases into more northern and southern latitudes at an average of about 2.7 km a year.

Understanding the relationship between climate change and plant health is key to conserving biodiversity and boosting food production today and for future generations.  Extreme weather events menace the livelihoods of 144 million smallholder rice farmers. Yet traditional cultivation methods such as flooded paddies contribute approximately 10% of global man-made methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Growing healthy crops needs to include environmental considerations. What is known as a One Health Approach starts from the recognition that life is not segmented. All is connected. Rooted in concerns over threats of zoonotic diseases spreading from animals, especially livestock, to humans, the concept has been broadened to encompass agriculture and the environment. This ecosystem approach combines different strategies and practices, such as minimizing pesticide use. This helps protect pollinators, animals that eat crop pests, and other beneficial organisms. The challenge is to produce food without increasing agriculture’s negative impacts on the environment, particularly through greenhouse gas emissions and unsustainable farming practices that degrade vital soil and water resources, and threaten biodiversity.

Protecting Plants Will Protect People and the Planet | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

The Democrats and the Republicans cannot agree on bi-partisan support for welfare programs but for the military there is a consensus and agreement between them.

It adds $2 billion to the Navy‘s shipbuilding budget — funding that would double the number of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers requested by the service.  The bill also includes funding for an expeditionary fast transport, two Virginia-class fast-attack submarines, an FFG(X) guided missile frigate and other support ships requested by the Navy.

“Just the proposed $25 billion increase to the Pentagon budget alone could end homelessness in the United States, making clear that senators are more interested in increasing the profits of military contractors than meeting the needs of everyday working people,” said Carley Towne, co-director of the anti-war group CodePink.

The $25 billion spending increase also matches the cost to scale up Covid-19 vaccine production to meet global demand.

The UK, the USA and the EU are turning back desperate, unfortunate peoples and transforming their countries into fortresses to keep them out. Yet another boat has capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, the latest of many disasters involving migrants heading to Europe. 

Mexico is dealing with a migration phenomenon on four fronts. On one hand, 12 million Mexicans live in the United States. And on the other, every year hundreds of thousands of migrants make their way through the country, mainly Central Americans and in recent years also people from the Caribbean, Venezuelans and even Africans.

The United States sends back to Mexico hundreds of thousands of people who cross its southern border without the required documents. Mexico is home to more than one million migrants and refugees who have chosen to make their home in that country.

Major recipients of refugees and asylum seekers in other regions are Turkey, in the eastern Mediterranean, hosting 3.7 million (92 percent Syrians), and, with 1.4 million displaced persons each, Pakistan (which has received a massive influx of people from Afghanistan) and Uganda (refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo and other neighbouring countries).

In Sudan, there are one million refugees, Bangladesh, Iran and Lebanon host 900,000 each, while in the industrialised North the cases of Germany, which received 1.2 million refugees from the Middle East, and the United States, which has 300,000 refugees and one million asylum seekers in its territory, stand out.

In the last six years, 5,650,000 Venezuelans have fled to Venezuela’s neighbouring nations. 

In this region “there is a living laboratory, where insertion and absorption efforts are working. The new arrivals are turning what was seen as a burden into a contribution to the host communities and nations,” Eduardo Stein, head of the largest assistance programme for displaced Venezuelans, explained,  setting an example in welcoming and integrating displaced populations, with shared benefits for the new arrivals and the nations that receive them. “This is the largest migration crisis in the history of Latin America,” Stein said.

Colombia stands out for receiving daily flows of hundreds and even thousands of Venezuelans, who already number almost 1.8 million in the country, and for providing them with Temporary Protection Status that grants them documentation and access to jobs, services and other rights. Iván Briscoe, regional head of the Brussels-based conflict observatory International Crisis Group, commented in the case of Colombia, “it has been impressive to receive almost two million Venezuelans, in a country of 50 million inhabitants, 40 percent of whom live in poverty.”

Colombia’s Fundación Renacer, which has assisted thousands of child and adolescent survivors of commercial sexual exploitation and other types of sexual and gender-based violence, is a model for how to welcome and help displaced persons. Renacer, staffed by activists such as Mayerlin Vergara, 2020 winner of the UNHCR’s annual Nansen Refugee Award for outstanding aid workers who help refugees, displaced and stateless people, rescues girls and young women from places like brothels and bars where they are forced into sexual or labour exploitation, often by trafficking networks that capture the most vulnerable migrants.

“In Colombian society as a whole there has been a process of understanding, after the phenomenon was the other way around for several decades in the 20th century, of people displaced by the violence and crisis in Colombia being welcomed in Venezuela,” Camilo González, president of the Colombian Institute for Development and Peace Studies, told IPS. When the great migratory wave began in 2014-2015, “many Venezuelans were taken on as half-price cheap labour by businesses, such as coffee harvesters and others in the big cities, but that situation has improved, even despite the slowdown of the pandemic,” said González.

 Eduardo Stein, the head of the Interagency Coordination Platform for Venezuelan Refugees and Migrants (R4V), created by the UNHCR and IOM in partnership with 159 other diverse entities working throughout the region noted that in the first phase, the receiving countries appreciated the arrival of “highly prepared Venezuelans, very well trained professionals.”

“One example would be the thousands of Venezuelan engineers who arrived in Argentina and were integrated into productive activities in a matter of weeks,” he said.

But, Stein pointed out, “the following wave of Venezuelans leaving their country was not made up of professionals; the profile changed to people with huge unsatisfied basic needs, without a great deal of training but with basic skills, and nevertheless the borders remained open, and they received very generous responses.” Stein mentioned the positive example set by Colombia’s flower exporters, which employed many Venezuelan women in cutting and packaging, a task that did not require extensive training.

“Not everything has been rosy,” Stein admitted, “as there are still very complex problems, such as the risks that, between expressions of xenophobia and the danger of trafficking, the most vulnerable migrant girls and young women face.”

There have been expressions of xenophobia, as various media outlets interpreted statements by Bogotá Mayor Claudia López, who after a crime committed by a Venezuelan, suggested the deportation of “undesirable” nationals from that country. There were also demonstrations against the influx of Venezuelans in Ecuador and Panama, as well as Peru, where the policy of President-elect Pedro Castillo towards the one million Venezuelan immigrants is still unclear, as well as deportations from Chile and Trinidad and Tobago, and new obstacles to their arrival in the neighbouring Dutch islands.

However, throughout the region “there are places that have seen that immigrants represent an attraction for investment and labour and productive opportunities for the host communities themselves.” Stein pointed out.

Another promising example is provided by Brazil, with its Operação Acolhida (Operation Welcome), which includes a programme to disperse throughout its vast territory Venezuelans who came in through the northern border and first settled, precariously, in cities in the state of Amazonas.

More than 260,000 Venezuelans have arrived in Brazil – among them some 5,000 indigenous Waraos, from the Orinoco delta, and a similar number of Pemon Indians, close to the border – and some 50,000 have been recognised as refugees by the Brazilian government. Brazil has the seventh largest Venezuelan community, after Colombia, Peru, the United States, Chile, Ecuador and Spain. It is followed by Argentina, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Mexico.

Throughout the region, organisations have mushroomed, not only to provide relief but also to actively seek the insertion of Venezuelans, in some cases headed by Venezuelans themselves, as in the case of the Fundacolven foundation in Bogota.

According to Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, they have benefited from the fact that the countries of the region “are an example, and the rest of the world can learn a lot about the inclusion and integration of refugees in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Latin America Sets an Example in Welcoming Displaced Venezuelans | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Nigel Farage has accused the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) that it is facilitating illegal immigration and which is said to be operating a “migrant taxi service” by rescuing people at risk of dying in the water as they cross the Channel in small boats.

The volunteer lifeboat charity said it was “very proud” of its humanitarian work and it would continue to respond to coastguard callouts to rescue at-risk Channel migrants in line with its legal duty under international maritime law.  The charity says it is its moral and legal duty.

“Imagine being out of sight of land, running out of fuel, coming across incredibly busy shipping lanes when you’re frightened and you don’t know which direction you’re going in. That is by anyone’s standards distress. Our role in this is incredible important: simply to respond to a need to save lives,” said Mark Dowie, the chief executive of the RNLI. He continued,  “These islands have the reputation for doing the right thing and being decent societies, and we should be very proud of the work we’re doing to bring these people home safe.”

Dowie said he had spoken to crew members who shared “harrowing” details of “an appalling melting pot of possible risks” to understand the plight facing migrants and wanted to share these more widely. “I understand it’s a polarising and complex situation,” he said. “But unless you’ve experienced being in an open boat in the waves, it’s quite hard to get a feel for what it must be like.”

Testimonies from crew members released by the RNLI shed light on the dangerous situations for migrants. These include people lost in the ocean for 30 hours in -2C (28.4F) temperatures in January, families suffering from severe heatstroke and seasickness on sweltering summer days, people travelling on unseaworthy vessels such as inflatable dinghies, sailing catamarans and canoes, or sometimes floating on the broken remnants of boats without any lifejackets, hoping to be saved.

One volunteer described an especially harrowing encounter: “They’d paddled this thing about 80% of the way across the Channel and they’d been doing this all night. They’d made it into the middle of the shipping lane, and they were just so exhausted they couldn’t go on and they had nothing left and they’d stopped. When we got there, they were so tired they hardly reacted to us.”



Other volunteers shared experiences of “vile abuse” on the beach as they returned with people, including young children, in desperate need of medical attention, such as having beer cans thrown at them and people shouting “fuck off back to France”.

The RNLI is looking to promote empathy and understanding among the British public with respect to migrants crossing the Channel despite criticism on social media of its humanitarian work after it was included in a Daily Mail article that claimed to reveal “migration madness”.

Dowie stressed that the RNLI’s role was solely to save lives, not to act as an additional border control force.

RNLI hits out at ‘migrant taxi service’ accusations | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

 There are some who hold that the root of the Syrian Civil War was due to the effect of climate change. Will global warming be responsible for unrest in Iran next?

People in Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan province are desperate. The whole province is parched. Suffering from drought and water shortages since March, they’ve taken to the streets in the last couple of weeks to express their anger with the government and its poor management of water resources. According to official sources, at least four men, including one policeman, have died in the protests.  But protests have already spread to other provinces; on July 23, a 20-year-old demonstrator died in the city of Aligudarz, in the western province of Lorestan. According to Amnesty International, as of that date security forces using live ammunition had already killed at least eight people in seven Iranian cities.

The head of Iran’s meteorological service has said the months from October 2020 to mid-June 2021 were the driest in the past 53 years, and that the average temperature in the country has increased by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1960s. Meanwhile, rainfall has decreased by as much as 20% in the last two decades. The Karun, which flows through Khuzestan, is Iran’s largest and only navigable river — in theory, that is. It has now dried up. 

Environmental experts have said the current water shortage is also the consequence of a mistaken understanding of agriculture development and progress. The government continues to be focused on maximizing self-sufficiency, in response to sanctions. It has been promoting agriculture and allowing the digging of deep wells, which have exhausted the available water resources. The traditional crops in Khuzestan are rice and sugar cane, both of which require large amounts of water. Around 90% of Iran’s total water consumption is used up by agriculture. Iran’s groundwater reserves have declined over the past 14 years. The paper demonstrated that 76% of Iran’s surface area suffers from excessive exploitation of groundwater reserves, above all by agriculture.

 Experts have been warning that some regions in Iran’s south and east that are considered arid or very arid are in danger of becoming permanently uninhabitable. If this were to happen, millions of Iranians could be forced to move and start over elsewhere.

Iran: Drought, water shortages spark protests | Middle East| News and analysis of events in the Arab world | DW | 26.07.2021

 Industrialised farming methods contribute to climate change. 

Raising cows and pigs on factory farms accounts for 14.5% of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, the vast majority coming from producing corn and soy to feed factory-farmed animals. In fact, the top 20 meat and dairy corporations together contribute more greenhouse gases than the entire country of Germany, and together the top five contribute more than fossil fuel giants Exxon, Shell, or BP. These meat and dairy corporations are pushing factory farm expansion, further driving up greenhouse gas emissions, while family-scale livestock farms struggle to survive. 

Agriculture is the leading known cause of pollution in U.S. rivers and streams and is the second-largest known contributor to the contamination of wetlands. Pollution from animal feeding operations threatens or impairs over 13,000 miles of U.S. rivers and streams and 60,000 acres of lakes and ponds. In one stark example, nearly 500,000 dairy cows on factory farms in Tulare County, California produce more manure waste than the human residents of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. 

 Factory farms drive water shortages through climate-induced droughts, they also directly poison vast quantities of freshwater across the country through the waste they produce. 

Wildfires, heatwaves, hurricanes and droughts: the deadly impacts of climate change are becoming more intense and devastating.  Big-Ag’s business-as-usual model to solve the food and climate crisis cannot deliver the systemic transformation of food production needs today.

 A real, renewable energy system is imperative to a livable climate future.

Opinion | It’s Time for an Urgent Intervention in the Food System Ruining Our Climate | Mark Schlosberg (commondreams.org)

 Transport logjams and paltry harvests in producing regions have conspired with surging demand to stoke food inflation. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) expects the value of global food imports to reach nearly $1.9trn this year, up from $1.6trn in 2019. In May its index of main soft commodities hit its highest value since 2011, after rising for 12 straight months. Another benchmark index, by S&P Global, a research firm, has risen by 40% since July 2020. On July 22nd the boss of Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch maker of everything from Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to Hellmann’s mayonnaise, said that pricier raw materials have caused his firm’s costs to swell at their fastest pace in a decade. Economists warn that the price spikes could feed broader inflation, which is already on the rise in many countries.

That would be bad for consumers. But their loss is a gain for the giant firms that source, store and ship foodstuffs on behalf of state buyers and multinational companies. These opaque traders, which possess the networks of silos, railways and vessels, as well as the data and relationships, necessary to redraw supply routes, thrive on volatility. The four biggest—ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, collectively known as the ABCDs—have been adding to their total workforce of 240,000 and ploughing billions of dollars into new businesses that rely less on cycles of feast and famine. Their prospects offer a foretaste of global food markets in decades to come.

 Last year was nevertheless a bumper one for the ABCDs, whose combined net profits doubled, to $4.5bn. Analysts expect ADM and Bunge, which are publicly traded and report second-quarter results this week, to do even better in 2021. All four benefit from abruptly changing patterns of demand for crops and of their supply.

 Droughts in North and South America have curtailed output. Brazil’s winter-wheat harvest is down by a fifth—and that fifth was meant for export. Besides the container shortage that affects specialty crops such as coffee, the grounding of commercial flights is stranding fresh fruit and vegetables. Rising bulk-shipping rates, up by 150% this year, are adding to the squeeze. Part of that is the result of rising oil prices, which also increase the cost of petroleum-derived fertiliser and other chemicals, and of running farm equipment (which is itself more expensive to buy as farmers take advantage of high crop prices and cheap credit to invest in new tractors and other machinery).

This cocktail of forces is  raising global wholesale prices. 

Soyabeans and corn are, respectively, 56% and 68% more expensive than a year ago. This filters through to consumer prices. The uncertainty and shrinking stockpiles are creating volatility. IFPRI, a think-tank in Washington, DC, has had corn on high “excess price variability” alert for nearly four months. Wheat and coffee prices have been volatile, too.  Demand is likely to stay strong. Analysis by Josef Schmidhuber and Bing Qiao of the FAO suggests global agricultural trade volumes will grow by 16bn tonnes, to 444bn, in 2021. 

Big traders are enjoying the boom. Higher prices give the ABCDs more margin to play with. Bigger volumes, as farmers sell more to lock in the high rates, let them recoup fixed costs more quickly. And more volatility makes it possible to exploit price discrepancies across time and space. The share prices of ADM and Bunge are still up by a third since 2019.  A cash injection by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign-wealth fund bought a 45% stake in Dreyfus. Cargill is headed for record earnings after the first three quarters of 2020.

The ABCDs are diversifying. All of ADM’s recent capital spending has gone into less cyclical and more lucrative businesses such as flavouring, colouring and other ingredients for fast food, fizzy drinks or vitamin supplements. In the first quarter of this year its nutrition-ingredients units generated $154m in operating profit on revenues of $1.6bn. That is about 8% of its total, and growing fast. ADM expects this business to expand twice as fast as its core business, which tends to track global GDP. Bunge has sold dozens of mills, elevators and other assets to invest in plant-protein and edible-oil factories. Cargill now derives most of its profits from animal feed and animal protein. Its food-production facilities include a fish farm in Norway, a poultry farm in the Philippines and cultured-protein factories in America and Israel. It has become one of America’s largest meat processors, as well as a big investor in venture-capital funds focused on food and life sciences. Dreyfus has invested in Leong Hup International, one of South-East Asia’s biggest integrated producers of poultry, eggs and livestock feed.

As food prices soar, big agriculture is having a field day | The Economist

 Wildfires raged through the Italian island of Sardinia on Sunday, forcing emergency services to evacuate almost hundreds of people from their homes.

Tens of thousands of acres have gone up in flames in what Italian officials called “an unprecedented disaster.”

Italy: Wildfires rage through Sardinia, forcing evacuations | News | DW | 25.07.2021