LNG ([liquefied natural gas) which is created by cooling fracked gas to create a clear, colorless liquid, has been promoted by the oil industry as “climate-friendly.”

However, an analysis by Food & Water Watch,  titled LNG: The U.S. and E.U.’s Deal for Disaster, warned, “One year of emissions from 50 billion cubic meters (BCM) of LNG would be equivalent to yearly emissions from 100 coal plants.”

The U.S. is already the world’s biggest exporter of LNG, with exports averaging 0.32 BCM per day in the first half of this year. More than 70% of U.S. exports went to Europe this year, and while the Biden administration’s plan has promised an extra 15 BCM of LNG to Europe this year, the current pace “will triple” that pledge. Exporting 50 BCM of LNG per year would cost between $10 billion and $19 billion annually, while providing the E.U. with just 12% of its demand for gas as it faces an energy crisis. 

The same level of investment in utility-scale solar power could provide Europe with more than 540 megawatt-hours (MWh)—11% more energy than would would be provided by LNG. Onshore wind power costs are similar, providing 515 million MWh,” reads the report. “Scaling up renewables to this level would avoid over 500 million metric tons of fossil fuels, no matter if it is replaced with solar or wind. The choice is clear.”

“The White House vision for delivering gas to Europe will serve to deliver climate chaos across the globe, at a moment when we simply cannot build new fossil fuel facilities at all,” said Food & Water Watch research director Amanda Starbuck.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/10/26/bidens-lng-export-goal-would-spell-climate-disaster-analysis-warns

 A UN environment report analysed the gap between the CO2 cuts pledged by countries and the cuts needed to limit any rise in global temperature to 1.5C, the internationally agreed target. Progress has been “woefully inadequate” it concluded. There is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place”, the UN’s environment agency has said, and the failure to reduce carbon emissions means the only way to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a “rapid transformation of societies”.

Current pledges for action by 2030, if delivered in full, would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5C and catastrophic extreme weather around the world. A rise of 1C to date has caused climate disasters in countries from Pakistan to Puerto Rico.

If the long-term pledges by countries to hit net zero emissions by 2050 were delivered, global temperature would rise by 1.8C. But the glacial pace of action means meeting even this temperature limit was not credible, the UN report said.

The report found that existing carbon-cutting policies would cause 2.8C of warming, while pledged policies cut this to 2.6C. Further pledges, dependent on funding flowing from richer to poorer countries, cut this again to 2.4C.

Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said: 

“This report tells us in cold scientific terms what nature has been telling us all year through deadly floods, storms and raging fires: we have to stop filling our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and stop doing it fast. We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster. It is a tall, and some would say impossible, order to reform the global economy and almost halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but we must try,” she said. “Every fraction of a degree matters: to vulnerable communities, to ecosystems, and to every one of us.”

Prof David King, a former UK chief scientific adviser, said: “The report is a dire warning to all countries – none of whom are doing anywhere near enough to manage the climate emergency.”

Climate crisis: UN finds ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’ | Climate crisis | The Guardian

 Biodiversity expert John Mwangi Gicheha says the decline in species population abundance has now been validated by the newly-released Living Planet Report 2022.

“The health of planet earth is well and truly on a sharp decline, and we are not only seeing a decrease in the global population of species but a decline in their genetic diversity and a loss of species climatically determined habitats.”

This is the first ever most comprehensive report on the state of global vertebrate wildlife populations, and it makes a startling revelation: the world’s wildlife populations have declined by 69 percent since 1970.

As a measure of the state of the world’s biological diversity among population trends of vertebrate species from terrestrial, freshwater, and marine habitats, the 2022 Living Planet Index analyzed approximately 32,000 populations of 5,230 species across the world.

By tracking trends in the abundance of mammals, fish, reptiles, birds, and amphibians worldwide since 1970, a disturbing image emerged: one million plants and animals are threatened with extinction.

Worse still, 1-2.5 percent of birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and fish have gone extinct.

Key findings include revelations that monitored freshwater populations are hardest hit as there is an alarming decline of 83 percent in the last 50 years, more than any other species groups.

The decline in freshwater population is mainly caused by habitat loss and barriers to migration routes which account for an estimated half the threat to these populations. Further, only 37 percent of rivers over 1,000 kilometres remain free-flowing in their natural state.

Against this backdrop, the report stresses that the global community is living the consequences of double crises and shows how “interlinked emergencies of human-induced climate change and the loss of biodiversity are threatening the well-being of current and future generations.”

The greatest regional decline in wildlife population is in Latin America and the Caribbean region, whose average population abundance decline is 94 percent.

Africa comes second with a 66 percent fall in its wildlife populations over the past 52 years, and across the board, the poor and marginalized remain highly vulnerable and most affected by the decline.

There was an 18 percent decline in Europe and Central Asia and a 55 percent decline in wildlife populations in the Asia Pacific.

More findings show despite mangroves being unique forests of the sea; they remain at great risk as they continue to be lost to aquaculture, agriculture and coastal development at current rates of 0.13 percent per year.

Mangrove loss is not only a loss of habitat for biodiversity, the report emphasizes, but the loss of ecosystem services for coastal communities.

Further, approximately 50 percent of warm water corals have already been lost. Even worse, a warming of 5 degrees Celsius will lead to a loss of 70 to 90 percent of warm water corals.

Overall, the global abundance of 18 of 31 oceanic sharks and rays declined by 71 percent since 1970. By 2020, three-quarters of sharks and rays were threatened with an elevated risk of extinction. 

Judy Ouya, a government official in Kenya’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry said that said consequences could no longer be ignored as they are too severe and frequent. They include loss of lives and economic assets from extreme weather conditions, deepening poverty and, severe food and water insecurity from droughts.

WWF: Global Vertebrate Wildlife Population Has Plummeted | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

From schools to now the universities Iranians are expressing their discontent with theocratic government rule. 

Students protested on Tuesday at Beheshti University and the Khaje Nasir Toosi University of Technology, both in Tehran, as well as Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, in Khuzestan province.

Despite what rights group Amnesty International has called an “unrelenting brutal crackdown”, young women and men were again protesting. “Death to the dictator” and “Death to the Revolutionary Guards”, women chanted.

 The Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR) said the demonstrations so far had cost the lives of at least 141  protesters.

During the past five weeks, thousands of Iranians have protested against the theocracy in over 100 cities. 

“In challenging the mandatory hijab, they are questioning and rejecting the very essence of the rules and principles upon which the hijab is imposed,” Sanam Anderlini, native Iranian and member of the International Civil Society Action Network explained. “On one level it is about the question of choice about the hijab, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. The hijab is an integral symbol of the regime’s ‘Islamist’ identity, which embeds women’s second-class status, discrimination in the constitution and law.”

Socialists cannot make predictions about the future but we can voice our support and solidarity for fellow workers campaigning for more freedom.

Climate for Change

When, three hundred million years ago

Lepidodendra, solar sponges, fell,

They were pressed deep into the earth. A slow

Transmutation from toppled tree to coal,

Petrifying sunshine, eons before

The first human eye looked upon the world

And sought to abate the dark and the cold,

Beginning to dig into nature’s store:

But human industry will have its way.

While those who exploit power for their own ends

Have grown careless of the way profit tends

To determine the climate’s desperate trends.

A choice to be made, socialism’s sense

Or capital’s storm, famine and pestilence.

D. A.

“The world is finally waking up to the injustices of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination, and putting laws in place to stop them from destroying people’s lives. Povertyism must be treated just as seriously,” said Olivier De Schutter, special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. 

Prejudice against poor people is “a stain on society” that needs to be made illegal, according to him. He calls for the term “povertyism” to be included in anti-discrimination law alongside sexism and racism “to stop destroying people’s lives”. De Schutter defines “povertyism” as the negative stereotyping of the poor, and “a major source of non-take-up of rights” in that it can discourage people from applying for jobs and benefits. He added that while povertyism was a global problem, there tended to be greater stigmatising of the poor in wealthier countries where inequalities are starkest.

“Poverty will never be eradicated while povertyism is allowed to fester, restricting access to education, housing, employment and social benefits to those who need them the most,” De Schutter said.

Examples cited include employers judging CVs more harshly when an applicant’s address is in a deprived area, landlords refusing to rent apartments to tenants on benefits, and poorer school pupils being given different advice from that given to their more privileged peers.

Such “humiliation and exclusion” will not disappear on their own, argues De Schutter. He is calling on governments to include “socio-economic disadvantage” in anti-discrimination laws as a protected characteristic similar to age, sex, disability and race. He also wants “pro-poor affirmative action”, which he considers essential to breaking the vicious poverty trap.

“We have many studies showing that the belief in meritocracy is highest in those more unequal societies and the UK is not faring very well in this regard for the moment, nor is the US in fact. And it is the elites in those countries that believe in meritocracy because, of course, that’s a way for them to confirm their sense of superiority,” he said.

Make poverty discrimination illegal like racism or sexism, official to tell UN | Global development | The Guardian

Methane is the second biggest contributor to global heating after carbon dioxide, with a greenhouse gas impact at least 27 times worse than CO2 over a 100-year time span. The gas is already responsible for about one-fifth of all global heating. Most of Europe’s methane emissions come from agriculture – particularly livestock – but the EU has avoided using policy levers such as its €387bn common agricultural policy to directly tackle the problem, according to the report by the Changing Markets Foundation. The EU won’t achieve a promise to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Methane emissions rose by their highest ever amount to a new record last year

Nusa Urbancic, the campaigns director for the Changing Markets Foundation, said: “We’re in a climate emergency and cutting methane is the best short-term measure to slow the temperature increase. That is why we need urgent policy action to transform our food production systems. Our leaders must start listening to scientists instead of lobbyists, otherwise the EU won’t be able to meet the global methane pledge.”

 The Institute for European Environmental Studies, finds that the bloc is still failing to set dedicated methane targets for the livestock sector, or channel subsidies for methane cuts, forcing a reliance on loophole-ridden regulations which may hide agricultural emissions. The new report says that “undue influence” from agri-industry lobbyists, who EU officials met three times more often than non-industry groups, watered down legislative initiatives that could have cut livestock emissions. Methane releases from animal farming in Europe now have the global heating power of 160 coal-fired power plants, measured over a 20-year period. 

Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, explained, “Enteric methane emissions [from cow burps and farts] alone would add at least 25% more to agricultural emissions by 2050, compared to 2010.” Searchinger said the best ways to mitigate methane emissions would be to feed livestock more efficiently, use new feed additives which may reduce emissions, and cut down on beef consumption.

EU on track to break pledge to cut methane emissions by 30%, warns report | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian

 Peoples Temple was a church founded in 1954 in Indianapolis by a man named Jim Jones. In the mid-1960s the church moved to California. In 1974 it leased land in the rainforest of Guyana, near the northern coast of South America, for an agricultural settlement that came to be known as Jonestown. It was there, in November 1978, that over 900 people were poisoned or otherwise killed  – an act that Jones glorified as ‘revolutionary suicide’ but more closely resembled a massacre. 

Although Peoples Temple had the trappings of a Christian church, the doctrine preached by Jones combined Christian and Oriental religious beliefs with political ideas taken from the American Communist Party. Jones claimed to be a reincarnation of both Jesus Christ and Lenin. Other heroes of Jones were Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-Sung. Everything that Jones did from his late teens onward was done in the name of socialism and communism.

Survivors of Peoples Temple have kept in touch and built a partly online community of remembrance. Many have written about and tried to make sense of an ambiguous experience. A key role in this community is played by the Jonestown Institute, sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. The institute maintains a richly informative website and publishes an annual report. Both are open to contributions from anyone with something to say about Peoples Temple, regardless of political, religious, or philosophical viewpoint.

Here was an opportunity to offer members of this community a new perspective on Peoples Temple. I submitted four articles to the Jonestown Institute. They are listed with links on the page assigned to me on the institute’s website. They will also appear in the next annual Jonestown Report, scheduled for publication around November 1.

My first article, Jim Jones: an attempt at psychic-political analysis, focuses on Jones as an individual. I suggest that Stalinism, as a system of domination supposedly aimed at ending domination, was well suited to psychic needs rooted in the severe neglect he suffered in early childhood. 

The next article, Peoples Temple and socialism, questions the widely held assumptions that Jones was a socialist and Peoples Temple a socialist movement. I analyze Jonestown as a peculiar kind of class society and conclude that genuine socialism is impossible without democracy. 

The third article argues that even within a highly authoritarian structure there may exist islands of autonomy.

The last article — Was Jonestown sustainable? — argues that the whole project of establishing such a large and permanent agricultural settlement in the middle of the rainforest may have been ecologically unsustainable. 

Stephen Shenfield

Jonestown: in the name of socialism – World Socialist Party US (wspus.org)

 Worldwide, 820 million people rely on fishing for their livelihoods, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. In some regions like west Africa, up to a quarter of the workforce are involved in fishing. Fish consumption also accounts for a sixth of the global population’s intake of animal proteins, and more than half in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Gambia, Ghana, Indonesia, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka.

More than 90% of global fisheries stocks are being fully exploited, overexploited or depleted, according to the UN. Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a major driver of the marine ecosystem’s destruction and accounts for one-fifth of the global fisheries’ catches, worth up to $23.5bn (£20bn) annually, the third most lucrative natural resource crime after timber and mining. IUU fishing represents around 20% of the global fish catch, according to a 2013 report by the Pew Trust, thus playing a key role in overfishing. The greatest declines in fish stocks are expected to happen in the coastal regions that are most food insecure and more dependent on artisanal fishing for protein.

Developing countries are losing billions of dollars due to IUU fishing, which siphons off revenue through illicit financial flows, according to a new study by the Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC).

The study reveals that the top 10 companies involved in IUU fishing are responsible for nearly a quarter of all reported cases: eight are from China – led by Nasdaq-listed Pingtan Marine Enterprise Ltd – one is from Colombia and another from Spain.

The Spanish tuna giant Albacora SA emerges as Europe’s largest alleged IUU fishing company and has received millions of dollars in EU and other subsidies.

“Illegal fishing is a massive industry directly threatening the livelihoods of millions of people across the world, especially those living in poor coastal communities in developing countries already affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and the impact of climate change,” said Matti Kohonen, one of the report’s authors and the executive director of the FTC.

 Global losses due to IUU fishing are estimated to be up to $50bn (£44bn), according to one study.

Africa is the most affected continent, losing some $11.2bn (£9.76bn) in revenue annually from IUU fishing while concentrating 48.9% of identified industrial and semi-industrial vessels involved in the practice, the FTC report found. Of that total, 40% are in west Africa alone, which has become a global epicentre for IUU fishing.

 Argentina loses between $2bn to $3.6bn (£1.74bn to £3.14bn) in terms of IUU fishing catch per year. Chile estimates its losses at $397m (£346m) and Indonesia’s are at $4bn (£3.49bn) annually, equivalent to the country’s annual net rubber exports, it concluded.

Kohonen said, “…vessel owners continue operating with complete impunity, using complex company structures and other schemes to hide their identity and evade prosecution”. Almost no countries require information about owners when registering vessels or requesting fishing licenses, meaning that those ultimately responsible for these activities are not punished – rather, fines are issued to the captains and crews of the vessels. Fishing vessels flagged to Asia represent 54.7% of reported IUU fishing by industrial and semi-industrial vessels, followed by Latin America (16.1%), Africa (13.5%) and Europe (12.8%).  8.76% of identified illegal vessels use flags of convenience such as Panama and the Cayman Islands, which have lax controls and low or no effective taxes.

Pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions will lead to global heating of 2.5C, a level that would condemn the world to catastrophic climate breakdown, according to the United Nations. Only a handful of countries have strengthened their commitments substantially in the last year, despite having promised to do so at the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow. The plans for emissions cuts countries submitted in Glasgow were inadequate to meet the 1.5C goal so they agreed a “ratchet” mechanism to toughen their targets year on year. However, few governments have updated their plans on emissions in line with 1.5C. Deeper cuts are needed to limit temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, which would avoid the worst ravages of extreme weather.

Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, said: “This does not go far enough, fast enough. This is nowhere near the scale of reductions required to put us on track to 1.5C. National governments must set new goals now and implement them in the next eight years.” He added, “This is not just about words on paper, this is about getting stuff done.” He continued, “At Glasgow last year, all countries agreed to revisit and strengthen their climate plans. The fact that only 24 new or updated climate plans were submitted since Cop26 is disappointing. Government decisions and actions must reflect the level of urgency, the gravity of the threats we are facing, and the shortness of the time we have remaining to avoid the devastating consequences of runaway climate change.”

Taryn Fransen, senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, said: “These reports sound the alarm that progress on climate commitments has slowed to a crawl since the Glasgow climate summit last year…on the whole national climate targets put the world on track to warm 2.4-2.6 C, which is dangerously high.”

Current emissions pledges will lead to catastrophic climate breakdown, says UN | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian