The world’s biggest fossil fuel firms are quietly planning scores of  oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic impacts.

The lure of colossal payouts in the years to come appears to be irresistible to the oil companies, despite the world’s climate scientists stating in February that further delay in cutting fossil fuel use would mean missing our last chance “to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”. 

The Guardian’s investigation has found that in the next seven or so years, they are likely to start producing oil and gas from projects that would ultimately deliver 192bn barrels, the equivalent of a decade of today’s emissions from China.

A third of the short-term expansion plans of oil and gas would come from “unconventional” and riskier sources. These include fracking and ultra-deep offshore drilling, which are inherently more dangerous – as the oil and gas companies drill deeper, the number of spills, injuries and blowouts increase.

The 192bn barrels are split roughly 50:50 between liquids, including crude oil, and gas. Burning this would produce 73bn tonnes of CO2. But methane routinely leaks from gas operations and is a powerful greenhouse gas, trapping 86 times more heat than CO2 over 20 years. Including this impact, at a standard supply-chain leak rate of 2.3%, means the equivalent of 97bn tonnes of CO2 added to the atmosphere and driving  faster towards climate hell.

Asad Rehman, a leading climate justice activist, explained, “Only the colonial mindset of political leaders in rich countries can make the brutal calculation that the interest of fossil fuel giants and their billions in profit is more important than the lives of people who are overwhelmingly black, brown and poor.”

The fossil fuel industry’s short-term expansion plans involve the start of oil and gas projects that will produce greenhouse gases equivalent to a decade of CO2 emissions from China, the world’s biggest polluter.

These plans include 195 carbon bombs, gigantic oil and gas projects that would each result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes, in total equivalent to about 18 years of current global CO2 emissions. About 60% of these have already started pumping.

The dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend $103m a day for the rest of the decade exploiting new fields of oil and gas that cannot be burned if global heating is to be limited to well under 2C.

The Middle East and Russia often attract the most attention in relation to future oil and gas production but the US, Canada and Australia are among the countries with the biggest expansion plans and the highest number of carbon bombs. The US, Canada and Australia also give some of the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per capita.

The US, the world’s largest extractor of oil, is poised to unleash these fossil fuels in spectacular volumes. Planned drilling projects across US land and waters will release 140bn metric tons of planet-heating gases if fully realised, placing the world on track for disastrous climate change.

Revealed: the ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

US fracking boom could tip world to edge of climate disaster | Oil | The Guardian

Bosses of some of the largest North Sea oil and gas companies have been handed bumper payouts. 

Executives of the 10 largest North Sea operators received a combined £54.4m in their last reported financial year, up from £29.4m a year earlier.

BP’s chief executive Bernard Looney,  his £4.5m pay package is up from £1.7m in 2020.

CEO of North Sea’s largest operator, Harbour Energy’s Linda Cook, landed a £4.6m “golden hello” as part of her £6m pay package.

Shell chief executive Ben van Beurden received £6.1m in 2021, up from £4.9m a year earlier.

French multinational TotalEnergies’ chairman and chief executive Patrick Pouyanné received €5.94m (£5.1m), an increase on €3.92m in 2020.

Smaller operators Spirit Energy, Apache and Ithaca Energy handed their highest paid directors a combined £4.86m in their last reported years.

Ten biggest North Sea oil and gas bosses pay rises to £54m | Executive pay and bonuses | The Guardian

 An estimated 4.8 million donkeys are killed for the rising demand for ejiao, a traditional Chinese alleged medicine remedy that uses donkey skins to produce a form of gelatine. 

 Sri Lanka’s economic crisis is taking a heavy toll on low-paid female garment workers sewing clothes for the West. Garment making is Sri Lanka’s No. 2 foreign exchange earner, with about 300 factories making clothes for dozens of well-known global brands. The industry contributes 6% to the country’s overall gross domestic product (GDP), providing direct employment to 350,000 people and to another 700,000 indirectly.

Sri Lanka is facing its worst financial crisis since independence in 1948, with foreign exchange reserves shrinking 70% to $2.36 billion in January. The dollar shortage has left the island struggling to pay for imports including food, medicine and fuel. Unprecedented blackouts – power often dies for hours at a time – have shuttered the most energy-intensive industries, textiles among them, and disrupted shipments.

 Some global brands have already turned to alternative markets, such as Bangladesh and India, to fill the gap.

“I have never seen anything like this in my 20-year career,” said one factory owner, who employs 20 women, now compelled to find new jobs or else 20 families will be short of cash to make vests and slips, some of whom have been on his payroll for over a decade. He says he is leaving the clothing industry, hit by rolling power cuts, soaring costs for raw materials, shrinking orders and a labour shortfall: a fistful of problems for an island that depends on exports for income. “The game is over,” he explained, whose small textile operation in Moronthuduwa lies close to Sri Lanka’s main city of Colombo. “I am compelled to close my factory.”

Shutdowns, shortages and pay problems are playing out across the island, with the female backbone of the garment industry paying the highest price. Many rural, low-paid women have already lost their jobs or say they have taken on loans or extra shifts to make ends meet each month. 

“One luxury brand garment piece [Victoria’s Secret negligee] stitched in our factory is worth our monthly salary. When they earn millions of dollars off of our many hours of arduous work, we are paid little,” said 22-year-old Charika Fernando. “The prices of vegetables, meat and fish have all gone up. In February, following trade unions’ demands, we received a salary increase of 2,500 rupees. And just before the salary increase, my landlord raised the rent of my room to 15,000 rupees per month.”

Plus her workload has ballooned, she said, which often means 12-hour days, six days a week.

“The targets have gone up. If we don’t reach the target, we will have four hours of overtime. Our factory set a historic record for the highest monthly targets in March. Factory owners must have reaped the harvest,” she said.  “…We are not compensated for our sick days. We don’t get vacations.”

“We have to spend more than half of our wages on transportation to and from the workplace … leaving almost nothing to support our family or maintain a roof over our heads,” said Jasintha Nilmini, who works at an underwear factory. “The situation has only become worse.”

Women make up about eight in every 10 workers in the sector and most come from rural areas in search of jobs to make clothes in the commercial capital’s Katunayake Free Trade Zone (FTZ).

“If you care about women’s rights, you should worry about how the fashion business runs,” said Padmini Weerasooriya, who defends garment workers in Sri Lanka and said it was more difficult to unionise women. “They are repressed not just at home, but also at work, school, and in their families,” said Weerasooriya, a trade unionist for more than 20 years. “We want everyone who works in the garment industry to be paid a fair wage.”

Sri Lanka has ordered troops to shoot on sight after it granted its military and police emergency powers to arrest people without warrants in the wake of protests that left seven people dead and resulted in the resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa. Protesters are also demanding the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the younger brother of Mahinda Rajapksa. 

Crisis after COVID for Sri Lankan women who dress the West (trust.org)

Further background 

Sri Lanka: capitalism unable to provide economic security – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)

1.5 million households across the UK will struggle to pay food and energy bills over the next year, as rising prices and higher taxes squeeze budgets, according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR).

It predicts the UK will fall into recession this year.

 NIESR warned that the decision not to scrap a planned rise in National Insurance tax – are hitting the poorest households hardest.

The think tank predicted that inflation would average 7.8% in 2022 and will remain above 3% until 2024. Meanwhile, government policies are set to lower the real incomes of households in the UK, according to NIESR. It forecast a real income decline of 2.4% in 2022, accompanied by a rise in unemployment next year.

Cost of living: 1.5m UK households will struggle to pay bills – report – BBC News

 A warm welcome has been given to most people fleeing Ukraine for a safe haven but Roma women and children are struggling to find a similar reception. Romany refugees have hit a wall in finding a home. Romany refugees face not only a lack of support but outright discrimination, both from relief providers and fellow Ukrainian refugees. 

“They face discrimination,” says Mariam Masudi a coordinator at a refugee hostel, working for Salam Lab, an NGO. “Roma are not admitted to other reception points. No one wants to rent to them. I don’t know anyone who has managed to settle in Poland. Those who have been able to move out of the hostel have moved abroad.” 

Institutional help has not been forthcoming. Most of the relief has been coordinated by self-organised individuals and NGOs, says Joanna Talewicz-Kwiatkowska an anthropologist at the University of Warsaw, who organised the Facebook group, Poland-Roma-Ukraine at the start of the war. “We wanted to gather information about people in need of help, communicate with central organs and find people ready to host Romany refugees,” she says. “We didn’t think that all responsibility for the situation would be shifted on to us.”

“Without governmental support, we will not manage. There is no way,”  says Karol Wilczyński, director of Salam Lab.

“In the first days of the war, we saw Poles make beautiful gestures of solidarity towards refugees from Ukraine,” says Talewicz-Kwiatkowska, who is a member of Poland’s Roma. “I would have never imagined we would be here talking about discrimination or dehumanisation, but that is what we are seeing.”

According to Talewicz-Kwiatkowska, Roma have been refused access to transport and resources offered by the volunteers welcoming refugees at the border. “Roma were chased away from reception points, where it was said they were stealing clothes to later sell. We also received information that Romany families and groups were turned away from cars and buses offering transport,” she says. “Finding accommodation was another challenge, because when someone does not want to have Roma in their car, you can imagine they will not want to invite them under their own roof.”

Roma fleeing Ukraine often face discrimination from other refugees. “When they see Roma at the reception point, the other refugees loudly tell each other to hide their belongings. Roma in Ukraine are used to facing discrimination, and what they experience in Poland is the continuation of this,” Masudi says.

Nadia arrived in Lviv, she says train station staff would not allow her and her family into the boarding area reserved for women and children hoping to travel to Poland. “Ukrainian women were let in with their pets,” she says. “But they didn’t want to let me on. They didn’t believe I was a refugee from Donetsk.” Only after she showed her papers, proving she had come from the east, was she allowed to board the train. “But still, they wouldn’t give me any of the food they were giving out to refugees,” she says.

‘Meet us before you reject us’: Ukraine’s Roma refugees face closed doors in Poland | Global development | The Guardian

 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has built a massive surveillance system that gives it access to the personal details of almost every person in America, a two-year investigation by Georgetown University law center in  their report, American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century has found. The Center on Privacy & Technology released one of the most comprehensive reviews of ICE activities, concluding that the federal organisation has strayed well beyond its duties as an immigration body to become what is in effect a domestic surveillance agency. 

Operating in secret and with minimal public oversight, ICE has amassed a formidable armory of digital capabilities that allows its agents to “pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time”. The agency operates enormous banks of information stored by state and local government, utility companies, social media platforms and private data brokers. The end result is that Ice enjoys almost universal reach, with its intelligence weaponised through the use of powerful algorithmic tools for searching and analysing data. Almost all of that activity, the report points out, is done in the absence of warrants and in secret, beyond the purview of federal and state authorities.

The vast data to which Ice now has access includes:

Driver’s license data for three of every four adults living in the US

Data drawn from the utility records of 75% of adults, covering more than 218m unique utility consumers in all 50 states

Information on the movements of drivers in cities that contain 75% of the US population

Facial recognition technology drawn from the driver’s license photos of at least a third of all adults

ICE now had an unfettered ability to trace the movement of your vehicle on the roads, look up your address from your water or electricity bills, and conduct face recognition searches on your ID photos, all without needing a search warrant.

“These tactics open massive side doors around existing privacy protections, and many lawmakers still have no idea.”

Nina Wang, a policy associate at the Center on Privacy & Technology and a report author, said: “In its attempts to target an ever-growing number of people for detention and deportation, Ice has reached into the private homes and lives of almost every person in America.”

The Georgetown researchers suggest the motivation was partly to increase the number of deportations of undocumented people and partly as part of the US government’s “larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives”. One of the most disturbing aspects of the Ice surveillance system is how it has been used to skirt controls introduced by cities and states and designed to protect communities from precisely these kind of intrusive searches. After many legislatures introduced so-called “sanctuary” policies that prevented police forces working with Ice agents to facilitate deportations, Ice simply sidestepped the restrictions by finding other channels through which it could acquire intelligence, including through DMVs, private data brokers and utility companies.

US immigration agency operates vast surveillance dragnet, study finds | Surveillance | The Guardian

 More than 90% of neighborhoods in America’s major cities were unaffordable to the majority of local Black residents at the start of the pandemic, according to a new study by the National Equity Atlas on the worsening housing crisis in urban regions across the US. It compared rents and wages in the 100 most populous American metropolitan regions in 2019 and examined whether the majority of households of different racial groups made enough income to afford median market rents in their neighborhoods.

The findings paint a bleak picture of both severe racial inequality and a growing shortage of affordable housing in cities across the US. The authors found that:

Only 7% of zip codes in the top 100 metro areas had rents that were affordable to Black residents of those cities in 2019, while 69% of zip codes were affordable to white households.

Forty-eight metro areas in the list had no zip codes at all that were affordable to Black residents.

Only 16% of zip codes in the list had rents that were affordable to Latinx households.

Twelve metro areas had zero zip codes with affordable rents for Latinx households, including Los Angeles, Orlando and Miami, cities with large Latinx populations.

The majority of zip codes that were affordable for Black, Latinx and low-income households were classified as “low opportunity” neighborhoods, meaning they have long suffered from disinvestment and lack high-quality schools, clean air, parks, safe streets and good jobs, the researchers said.

“Longstanding patterns of racial segregation are deepening,” said Rasheedah Phillips, co-author of the report and director of housing at PolicyLink, “Low-income Black and brown households are being pushed out of their neighborhoods … and confined to the outskirts of what are otherwise prosperous cities.”

Ten California metro areas had no zip codes that were affordable to low-income renters or Black renters in 2019. The Riverside area, east of Los Angeles, was the only major metro region in California that had any neighborhoods affordable to low-income people. That region is one of the most polluted in the nation, and even there, only 14 zip codes were affordable in 2019, a sharp decrease from 2013.

Research in LA has repeatedly found that families are living in overcrowded homes in immigrant and Latinx neighborhoods.

“In California, incomes are not keeping up with rents, and we’re not building housing for people with low-incomes,” said Sarah Treuhaft, PolicyLink’s vice-president of research. Experts expect the crisis will only continue to grow. There are signs that the crisis has escalated since 2019, the authors noted; rents increased at sharp rates in cities across the US in 2021, and estimates show that as of April 2022, nearly 6m households were behind on rent in the US, roughly double the pre-pandemic figure.

Revealed: 93% of districts in major US cities unaffordable to Black residents | Race | The Guardian

 About 9.6 million children in Afghanistan have been unable to secure food on a daily basis  Save the Children has said.

“Every single day our front-line health workers are treating children who are wasting away in front of our eyes because they’re only eating bread once a day – and those are the lucky ones,” said Save the Children’s director of advocacy, communications and media, Athena Rayburn. “Children in Afghanistan have never known a life without conflict and if action is not taken soon, they will not know a world without gnawing hunger and empty stomachs,” 

The international NGO called for “immediate food assistance” to save lives in the short-term, adding however that aid alone was “not enough to tackle the country’s worst hunger crisis on record”.

 “Despite a significant amount of food aid reaching families in recent months, 19.7 million children and adults, almost 50 percent of the population, are still going hungry and need urgent support to survive,” said the report.

According to the report, about 20,000 people were pushed into famine during the past two to three months alone.

Millions of dollars in international aid have dried up due to the sanctions and Biden’s decision to repurpose $3.5bn in Afghan assets as compensation to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Although 18.9 million children and adults were expected to need food aid for the latter half of this year, available funding for food aid could only provide support for 3.2 million people.

“Each day that passes without the funds needed sees more children lose their lives to preventable causes.” Rayburn added.

Nearly 10 million children going hungry in Afghanistan, says NGO | News | Al Jazeera

Democracy can seem abstract when your ability to make changes to your community feels limited to choosing between a small number of political parties every few years. And how can any winning party really represent the needs of all 119,000 residents in Tunbridge Wells borough?

Party politics will always get in the way of local residents being able to make changes that help build a better community for all. The main parties are limited by decisions and views made centrally, and conflict between them distracts from the need to work for improvements that benefit the greatest number of people. Two councillors this year alone have resigned from their parties for failures in both local administrations and at the very top of government. Whether Liberal Democrat or Tory, it is not the party but the political system they wish to maintain which causes these issues. We must strive to create a political system that ensures all members of society are listened to and can contribute. And this must start at the very grass roots of politics, not the top.

In Tunbridge Wells, there has been a disturbing number of cases of women’s drinks being spiked in bars and clubs. This problem won’t be resolved until every woman is safe and secure while out at night. We should ask what leads some people to violent and antisocial behaviour, and aim for a culture which treats everyone with respect.

Community projects which work to safeguard and support our community never have enough funding, part of a wider problem of neglected public services which has led to problems such as the lack of NHS dental care. Capitalist society is shaped by money, with most wealth ending up with the elite and the majority left to cope with dwindling resources and high prices.

The Green Party would have you believe capitalism can be managed to mitigate the effects of industry on the environment. Locally, efforts to maintain and protect our green spaces, stop developments outside of brownfield sites, reduce traffic, and efficiently renovate properties are constrained by the economic system. The main parties merely attempt treatment of the symptoms; we propose treating the cause by advocating for a socialist society built to satisfy everyone’s needs, and those of the planet.

Shannon Kennedy, the Socialist Party candidate, Pantiles & St. Marks Ward.