ExxonMobil and Chevron as well as American Petroleum Institute are the world’s most obstructive organisations when it comes to governments setting climate policies, according to research by lobbying experts at the thinktank InfluenceMap. 

 It concluded that companies were manipulating governments to take “incredibly dangerous paths” in their approach to climate action, using  the “prolific and highly sophisticated” lobbying ploys.

Oil giants have mounted “intense resistance” to Joe Biden’s green agenda, according to the report, as the US president’s administration attempted to shift the country away from fossil fuels. The report also said corporate lobbying tactics in part explained why regulators in some countries such as Australia have struggled to build support for more ambitious climate policy in the lead-up to Cop26 and were increasingly viewed as “a road block in global negotiations”.

Ed Collins, a director at InfluenceMap, said “The corporate playbook for holding back climate policy has come a long way from science denialism but it is every bit as damaging. What we are seeing is not limited to efforts to undermine regulations directly. It also involves prolific and highly sophisticated narrative capture techniques, leading governments down incredibly dangerous paths.”

US oil giants top list of lobby offenders holding back climate action | ExxonMobil | The Guardian

The Socialist Party has secured an official pitch for a street stall at Royal Exchange Square, right in the heart of Glasgow City Centre, during the COP26 climate summit. 

The stall will be up and running from Monday until Wednesday next week, from 10am until 5pm each day. 

 Comrades are travelling from across the UK in order to help spread the party case for socialism to explain the root cause of the environmental mess we find ourselves in.

The desire to do something about climate change and global warming should not blind us to whether proposed solutions are actually feasible, or might generate unintended consequences.

 Carbon offsetting has been criticised by Tom Goldtooth, a prominent activist within the Indigenous movement, as “part of a system that privatizes the air that we breathe”.

Carbon offsets are a set of schemes that allows companies, but also individuals, to buy credits from different environmental projects – such as tree-planting, or solar and wind farms – to substitute for their own carbon footprints. These schemes can often involve large carbon sinks, such as tropical rainforests, in developing countries.

Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, explained “It allows polluters to buy and sell permits to pollute instead of cutting emissions at the source. It lets governments and corporations pretend they are doing something about climate change, when they are not.” He went on to say, “In our traditional knowledge we know that we cannot own the sky, we cannot trade Mother Earth in a market system.”

Mr Goldtooth, who is Diné and Dakota, has organized around Indigenous issues for the past 40 years. He won the 2015 Gandhi Award and 2016 John Muir Award for his decades of defending Indigenous rights to a healthy environment and combatting fossil fuel projects. He travelled to Glasgow’s COP26 with a delegation representing 15 different Indigenous Nations from Canada, the US including Alaska and Brazil. Mr Goldtooth has attended Cop summits for two decades and says Indigenous peoples still remain at the fringes.

“We’re here and we still don’t have a seat at the table,” he said. “In some areas [of the venue] we don’t have access, and they’re very critical in terms of negotiations. So we’re forced to try to grab people in the hallways.”

Indigenous protesters gathered outside the main turnstiles into the Cop26 venue. The group held up copies of the Financial Times, where they had secured a full-page ad that read: “Carbon offsetting is tearing us apart.”

“We need real reduction, and to keep fossil fuels in the ground,” Mr Goldtooth said. “Carbon offsetting perpetuates the theft of Indigenous people’s land and our territories. Our brothers and sisters have been protecting their lands and forests for thousands of years. Carbon offsets are a new form of colonialism.”

Mr Goldtooth said that the focus on net-zero emissions was “false and clearly dangerous” compared to absolute zero emissions.

“It’s very vague. it hasn’t been clearly defined. It’s got too much risk to it,” he said. He said national governments and corporations continue to push “false solutions” such as carbon capture and storage and solar engineering. “These technical fixes violate the natural laws of the atmosphere, of the sky, of the Mother Earth, all that delicate, harmonious structure,” he said.

He compared the world, particularly the industrialized countries in the North, to a drug addict, and said they were “addicted to the combustion of fossil fuels”.

“I think the world is addicted to energy. It can’t wean itself from this addiction to consumption and also the creation of waste. My fear is that they will continue to burn to the end of the earth,” he added.

“I was hopeful that maybe with this Democratic president [Biden], we might be able to get some things going for ourselves as Indigenous peoples, economically as well,” Mr Goldtooth said. “Around climate policy, I was hoping for something better. He made so many promises on his road to presidency that he was going to tackle climate change and end fossil fuel investments on public lands. He’s lying. He said that he was going to recognize Indigenous rights [but] he’s continued to perpetuate a legacy of broken treaties. Many members of our network that are here don’t trust this person.”

Cop26: Carbon offsetting ‘a new form of colonialism,’ says Indigenous leader | The Independent

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF, warned that surging losses of land and income will drive growing migration with “people trying to get to places where they can have more security”.

“Climate refugees are already part of the flow of people moving outside of Africa – and the numbers are going up,” she said.

So far, global pledges to reduce emissions add up to between a third and two-thirds of what is needed to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the less-ambitious aim of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, she said. That is translating into swiftly rising costs to adapt to extreme weather and higher seas, with

Shifting course would require global financial changes to drive emissions cuts, Georgieva said – from ending an annual $600 billion in direct fossil fuel subsidies to more countries putting a price on carbon to ensure the costs of climate damage are factored into products. Huge amounts more private investment are also required to boost clean energy, strengthen climate resilience and other needed changes, she said. Last year, climate-related investment rose by 50% globally – but still amounted to only a quarter of 1% of a total $49 trillion in investment funds, she said.

 The U.N. Environment Programme estimating $140 billion-$300 billion will be needed annually by 2030 for developing nations to cope with impacts. 

At least $30 billion-$50 billion of that is needed just for sub-Saharan Africa, according to IMF estimates, Georgieva said.

Sea level rise and worsening floods are already costing $3.8 billion a year in West Africa, with total losses across the continent running at about $7-8 billion a year, said Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank Group. That includes $2 billion in damage in southern Africa from cyclones in recent years, as well as losses of a million hectares of crops to locusts and other damage from floods in East Africa and more land becoming desert in the Sahel, he said.

President Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the current head of the African Union, said finding funding to help Africa cope with the rising harm was crucial. “The fight against climate change cannot be won unless it is won in Africa,” he told an event on accelerating African adaptation at COP26.

Georgieva urged all countries to act as fast as possible to tackle climate threats and speed up efforts to reduce emissions. 

“Rich countries have to do more, emerging markets have to do more, poor countries have to be helped to do more,” she said. “If we don’t take charge of our own destiny in this decade, it doesn’t matter how beautiful our plans for 2050 are – they will not materialise,” she added.

IMF head says faster emissions cuts can curb big adaptation needs (trust.org)

 The energy charter treaty (ECT) is an international agreement that allows energy corporations to sue governments over policies that could hurt their profits. Signed in 1994, the treaty was intended to protect western companies investing in the oil- and gas-rich countries of the former Soviet Union. Only foreign investors, rather than domestic ones, can use the system, prompting longstanding complaints of privileged access. Campaigners now fear it could stymie the green transition.

Coal and oil investors are already suing governments for several billions in compensation for lost profits over energy policy changes. For example, the German energy company RWE is sueing the Netherlands for €1.4bn (£1.2bn) over its plans to phase out coal. Another German utility, Uniper, is reported to be seeking between €850m and €1bn for the early closure of its Maasvlakte coal-fired power plant near Rotterdam.  While Rockhopper Exploration, based in the UK, is sueing the Italian government after it banned new drilling near the coast.

“It’s a real threat. It’s the biggest threat I am aware of,” said Yamina Saheb, a former employee of the ECT secretariat. She has estimated that foreign investors could sue governments for €1.3tn until 2050 in compensation for early closure of coal, oil and gas plants – a sum that exceeds what the EU hopes to spend on its green deal in the next decade. As compensation to companies is paid by public funds, governments would have less money to pay for new technology to make buildings, transport and industry greener. Saheb argued these payments could endanger the green transition. 

Analysis of the treaty showed a 269% increase in cases in 2011-20 compared with the previous decade. “We are going to see in future many more cases,” said Lucía Bárcena, of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, who compiled the data. Since 2013, two-thirds of the cases have been brought against western European governments.

“The energy charter treaty … has no cohesion at all with EU climate policies,” Bárcena said. “Trade and investment agreements are binding on states, which means if they break the contract then they have to pay huge amounts of money, while there is no other mechanism that binds countries to the goals that they are setting at Cop26.”

 Cornelia Maarfield, a senior trade and investment policy coordinator at the Climate Action Network Europe, explained, “Our main concern is that once governments start taking decisions to phase out coal, gas and oil, they will run into difficulties with the investment protection chapter of this agreement.”

Investors are known to have filed 142 cases against governments since the ECT came into force in 1998. But these are only the known cases. Even the ECT’s Brussels-based secretariat acknowledges it does not have a complete picture, because investors are not obliged to reveal legal action under the ECT.

Saheb argues the treaty is beyond reform because central Asian member states will veto any weakening of protection for fossil fuels. “The EU countries should withdraw altogether as one,” she said. “If we withdraw altogether we could agree to cancel this clause and then we could move on with our energy transition.”

Secretive court system poses threat to Paris climate deal, says whistleblower | Energy | The Guardian

 As humanity has evolved, it has had to alter the natural landscape around it. Even hunter-gatherer societies have had a profound effect on their immediate surroundings. For instance, the stark heather moors of the Scottish Highlands were once the thickly wooded Caledonian Forest.

The central climate question is not about renewable technology. Instead, it’s all about economics and politics. Increasingly numbers of studies and reports reflect the scientific consensus that we have to drastically cut CO2 emissions, and that is not happening sufficiently or soon enough. Demonstrations and protests by activists in the streets to pressure government action are good, but not enough. Greenhouse gas emissions remain a serious threat to mankind and capitalist society declines to slam on the brakes. While ecological necessity seeks a sound sustainable system, the commodified exchange economy needs growth. 

Partial reforms can be fought for and some will be won. Such campaigns pit the people against powerful capitalist interests, and can lead to the understanding that the system itself must be changed, echoing a slogan that has become increasing heard within the environmental movement: ‘System Change, Not Climate Change’.

Many activists accept the idea that much of our environmental problems are due to humanity itself. They have chosen to call today’s times, the Anthropocene epoch, differing from previous eras being referred to by more appropriate names such as Stone,  Bronze, Iron Industrial Ages. Now it is blame-the-people and not use a more relevant term, capitalocene, to describe the state of our world.

Hunger around the world is not attributed to the type of our economic system being based upon production for profit but, rather, because the population is growing too quickly claims Paul Ehrlich or according to Garrett Hardin, our age-old culture and tradition of sharing the land and water in common, does not work:  

1. Modern high-tech intensive agriculture has not eliminated hunger.

 

2. It undermines its own productive base through erosion, disappearing soil fertility and increased salinisation, shortage of water sources and depletion of diversity.

 

3. It changes land-use patterns, encouraging deforestation, draining wetlands and planting crops according to market criteria even in unsuitable climates. It promotes a loss of crop diversity by specialisation and commercial seed production and reduces overall biodiversity through its chemical inputs and extensive monocultures.

 

4. It increases vulnerability to nature, especially to climate and microclimate change, pest outbreaks and atmospheric and water pollutants. This is because of large scale monoculture, the selection of varieties for maximum yield under optimal conditions and the loss of beneficial fauna and flora.

 

5. It makes farming increasingly dependent on inputs from off the farm. This means that cash flow becomes increasingly important as fertilisers replace natural nitrogen fixers, irrigation replaces the broken hydrological flows and storage of water, and also because pesticides replace natural enemies of pests and hybrid seeds must be bought. Dependence on external inputs increases the vulnerability to price instability and politically motivated trade policies.

 

6. It debases food quality as regional specialisation increases storage and transport time and crops and techniques are chosen for quantitative yield. Specialisation makes even farmers dependent on buying food.

 

7. It increases the gap between rich and poor. The rich are able to buy or get credit to buy, the new inputs, establish the marketing connections and average their returns across years. The poor, however, need to be successful every year. Modern agriculture especially undermines the economic independence and empowerment of women. The new technologies are usually given to men, even in places where women traditionally do most of the farming. The new technologies make the domestic chores of women, such as gathering firewood and fetching water, more time-consuming. Women’s diverse activities in the home conflict with the extreme seasonality of commercial monoculture.

 

8. It poisons people, first the farmworkers who handle pesticides, then their family members who handle the pesticide soaked clothing and drink water where pesticides and fertilisers have run into groundwater. Finally, it reaches those who eat the crops produced with pesticides and animals raised with antibiotics and growth hormones.

 

9. It also poisons other species, and the environment as a whole such as our waterways from fertiliser run–off, accumulation of pesticides in the body tissues of fish and birds.

Despite its technical complexity, modern agricultural technology has a narrow intellectual base susceptible to surprise. The final conclusion, therefore, is that commercialised, export–oriented, chemical-heavy agriculture is non-sustainable.

Only with world socialism will the benefits of science be given to all of the people of the world. Human society, when we get it, will be a free association of social individuals.

 Following the example of China’s Xi Jinping in advocating “common prosperity”, the Japanese Prime Minister Fumip Kishida promises to bring a redistribution of wealth by a policy described as “new capitalism”.

Kishida said he believes a more equal distribution of wealth is needed to prevent the world’s third-largest economy from sinking into stagnation.

“I’ll be seeking to bring about a new form of capitalism that creates a virtuous cycle of growth and wider wealth distribution.” Japan’s new Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki said.

“We don’t know for sure what he plans to do, but we know his approach will not be that different from ‘Abenomics,’ ” said Hideaki Tanaka, a professor of public policy at Meiji University in Tokyo.

“When the ruling party picked Kishida, they were voting for the status quo,” said economist Masamichi Adachi at UBS Securities. “I have my doubts about what they’re pitching as new policies.” 

It sounded a lot like Abenomics in a slightly different language. 

He announced plans to tax profits on investments, part of his promised effort to distribute wealth more evenly in the country. He has since back-track on his “new capitalism” tax, when the stock market slumped, saying he would hold off until Japan’s economy is stronger. 

Although the Bank of Japan’s bond-buying and aggressive monetary easing has been criticized in some corners as widening the wealth gap because it rewards stock owners so heavily,  the administration wants the bank to stay the course.

He now says he will drive growth by cutting corporate taxes — which Abe also did — in the classic “trickle-down” strategy of encouraging companies to raise wages. That approach failed, however, as companies hoarded their earnings. Instead, a growing share of workers are employed part-time or on contracts that don’t provide full benefits. 

Despite the Nikkei tripling in value in the last 10 years, Japan’s average wages remain among the lowest of the G7 nations, at $38,500 a year compared to $69,400 in the US. Although the disparity of wealth is greater statistically in the U.S. than in Japan, Americans have access to more generous social welfare programs. That means poverty is a growing problem in Japan, especially among single mothers struggling to make a living wage.

“Nature-based solutions” are popular answers as a means of fighting climate change while protecting biodiversity. One technique is familiar: planting trees, the original “carbon capture hubs”. They absorb atmospheric CO2 while boosting wildlife habitats — critical to stemming biodiversity loss and protecting against flooding and soil erosion.

But experts say that reforestation, while essential, is far from a silver bullet against climate crises. Experts say nature-based solutions are important but not enough in themselves.  Trees take time to grow and, when trying to lock away carbon indefinitely, they remain vulnerable to logging, land clearance or wildfires fuelled by a deteriorating climate. Scientists worry too about the huge land and water requirements for this tree-planting tactic.

Two of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel producers, Russia and Saudi Arabia, have promised in recent weeks to go carbon neutral by 2060. Both Moscow and Riyadh plan to offset much of their carbon emissions from fossil fuels by planting millions of trees.  And they are not alone. Boris Johnson wants to make tree planting a priority.  Planting trees and expanding green spaces are not new ideas

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which coined the term, defines nature-based solutions as “actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural and modified ecosystems”. 

Protecting and expanding forests is central to this approach.

“Forests, and in particular tropical forests, absorb about a third of the greenhouse gases emitted every year,” explained Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which works with the UN on protecting biodiversity. “They could do much more if we stopped deforestation and invested more in forest management and the protection of these ecosystems.”

Mangrove restoration is often cited as a key example, as these unique ecosystems act as natural barriers against coastal erosion and flooding. 

Simply planting trees, though, isn’t enough. 

For all the promise they hold, nature-based solutions should not be seen as a miracle cure for the climate. The natural world constantly shifts and evolves, and researchers must adapt accordingly. Planting along shores and waterways, for example, has its limits.

“While we’ve mastered the design methods for civil engineering based on mechanical and physical properties, the same isn’t true for plant engineering, which brings into play living materials whose properties are much harder to control,” said André Evette at France’s National Institute of Agronomic Research.

Friends of the Earth fear that nature-based solutions can “disguise climate-trashing business as usual”. 

“Under the guise of Nature Based Solutions, big business and governments continue to expand … industrial agriculture and fossil fuel extraction, while claiming to address their climate impacts through investment in activities such as mass tree planting,” Friends of the Earth wrote.

Larigauderie likewise also warns against putting too much stake in it.

“Nature will not be able to absorb a frantic increase in our consumption,” she cautioned. “The number one message is that we must reduce our energy consumption, and rethink our lifestyles and agriculture. Nature can do a lot for us, but we must also correct ourselves.”  

Why planting trees is no silver bullet against climate change (france24.com)

 The World Meteorological Organisation in its ‘The State of the Climate report for 2021′ highlights a world that is “changing before our eyes” where extreme weather events – including powerful heat waves and devastating floods – are now the new normal.

The study finds that the past seven years including this one are likely to be the warmest on record as greenhouse gases reached record concentrations in the atmosphere. The accompanying rise in temperatures is propelling the planet into “uncharted territory” says the report, with increasing impacts across the planet.