The term “carbon bombs”, coined by a team of scientists in a study published in May 2021, refers to the largest fossil fuel extraction projects in the world. “These are all coal, oil and gas infrastructures that could emit more than one billion tonnes of CO2 over their lifetime,” says Kjell Kühne, the study’s lead author.

Although scientists keep insisting that the planet needs to move away from its dependence on oil, gas and coal to effectively combat climate change and several countries, cities and NGOs calling for a non-proliferation treaty on fossil fuels multinational corporations are planning to open new gas and oil production sites.

 Qatar Energy, Gazprom, Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Petrobras, Turkmengaz, TotalEnergies, Chevron and Shell  intend projects that alone could put a strain on the effects of global warming.

 The US NGO Oil Change International revealed that new fossil fuel projects approved, or in the process of being approved between 2022 and 2025, could lead to 70 billion tonnes of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere over the course of their operation.

 Projects approved in 2022 alone are responsible for 11 billion tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of China’s annual emissions. 

One of the projects is TotalEnergies’ oil extraction in Uganda, which is due to be operational by 2025. The French company plans to drill 400 wells and export the oil through the huge EACOP pipeline. These two projects combined will be responsible for emitting more than 34 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

According to the latest IPCC report, to prevent global temperatures from rising above the fateful 1.5°C mark, coal consumption must be reduced by 95 percent, oil by 60 percent and gas by 45 percent by 2050, compared to 2019 levels. In 2021, the International Energy Agency called for an immediate halt to investment in new oil and gas facilities. 

“Unfortunately, fossil fuels still account for 80 percent of the world’s energy mix today. We are not successfully accelerating the energy transition,” says Jean-Marie Bréon, a climatologist at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory. “And every new fossil fuel project takes us further off course and reduces our chances of staying below 1.5°C.”

“The climate scientists tell us that we only have three years left to reverse the trend, so we have to act now,” says Lucie Pinson, director of the NGO Reclaim Finance and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, the so-called Nobel Prize for Ecology. “We know that using all the fossil fuel reserves already in production would take us beyond 1.5°C of warming. Not only must no new gas, oil and coal projects be built, but we must also start phasing out existing sites.”

Kühne identified a total of 425 “carbon bombs” in 48 countries — 195 oil and gas projects and 230 coal mines. The following countries have more than 10: China, Russia, the US, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Australia, India, Qatar, Canada and Iraq. 

“They are single-handedly driving us towards climate disaster,” he says. “Taken to their logical conclusion, they represent twice our global carbon budget.” These include huge coal mining projects in China, oil sands projects in Canada, the Red Hill project in Australia, the Hambach and Garzweiler mines in Germany and the EACOP project in East Africa.

Multinationals opening new gas sites, despite climate change warnings (france24.com)

A lifesaving prostate cancer drug, enzalutamide, brand name Xtandi, costs $189,800 a year in the United States, or up to five times more than its price in other countries.

More than 250,000 new cases of prostate cancer will have been diagnosed in the U.S. over the next 12 months and more than 33,000 men will have died in that time. 

 Discovered by scientists Charles Sawyer and Michael Jung at the University of California, Los Angeles with grants from the NIH and the U.S. Department of Defense, enzalutamide was approved in 2012 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of late-stage prostate cancer. Two companies—Japan-based Astellas and Medivation Inc., a San Francisco biotech firm—developed Xtandi. When Pfizer paid $14 billion to acquire Medivation in 2016, the pharma giant’s then-CEO, Ian Read, said that “the value of Xtandi and its future growth potential was the principal driver” of the deal.

Astellas controls the price of Xtandi and has raised its cost by nearly 90% since 2014. The drug has already generated more than $10 billion in sales from Medicare alone.

Patients Push Biden HHS to Act as Pharma Firm Charges $190K for Lifesaving Prostate Cancer Drug (commondreams.org)

  Wage stagnation for Britain’s workers for two decades. 

The Resolution Foundation said on Friday that the dire economic outlook meant that real wages were not expected to return to 2008 levels until 2027.

 If pay had continued to grow at the same rate as before the financial crisis hit in 2008, then by 2027, workers would be £292 a week – or £15,000 annually – better off.

Hunt’s budget will mean 19 years of wage stagnation, warns thinktank | Autumn statement 2022 | The Guardian

In his statement today the Chancellor has stolen all Labour’s clothes. 

Nearly everybody will be worse off but the less well-off will suffer less. 

What more could Labour have done? 

“Dividend allowances will be cut.

The annual exempt allowance for capital gains tax will also be cut.

The threshold for the 45p additional rate of tax will be cut from £150,000 to £125,140.

Windfall taxes will raise £14bn, including a new temporary 45% levy on electricity producers.

The government’s energy price guarantee will be kept for a further 12 months at an average of £3,000 for a typical household, up from £2,500 at present.

New one-off payments of £900 to households on means-tested benefits, £300 to pensioner households, and £150 for individuals on disability benefit.

There will be an additional £1bn funding to enable further extension to household support fund.

Social housing rents will be capped at 7% next year, to avoid rent hikes of up to 11%.

The “national living wage” will rise by 9.7% next year to £10.42 an hour.

Benefits will rise in line with September’s inflation rate, by 10.1%, costing the government £11bn.

The benefit cap will be increased with inflation next year.

The pensions triple lock will be kept.”

Via ALB

A third (1.3 billion tons) of all the food produced is wasted.

It accounts for a tenth of the greenhouse gases that are contributing to global warming, in particular, methane, which is about 80 times more potent than CO2.

That so few countries have so far committed to reducing food waste in national climate targets is symbolic of a lack of “political will,” said Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of Food Tank, a US-based NGO devoted to sustainable food systems. This is despite the fact it is “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to cutting national emissions.

One major cause of food loss in developing countries is poor preservation due to lack of cold storage for agricultural produce.

 Inadequate refrigeration and an ineffective “cold chain” resulted in the loss of around 526 million tons of food production — or 12% of the food produced globally — in 2017, according to a UNEP and FAO report released this week at COP27.

This is enough extra food to feed around one billion people. 

Some 811 million people currently face hunger globally.

Food waste has actually increased since 2015 in countries like the US, Australia and New Zealand, which already waste the most.

Climate-killing food waste addressed at UN talks – DW – 11/16/2022

 Ukrainian forces have ‘recaptured’ Kherson. This, however, is the result not of a battle for the city but of a decision by the new Russian commander to withdraw from areas west of the River Dnieper. Russian supply lines had become too extended and were too vulnerable to attack. Although the withdrawal was in response to real military achievement on the part of Ukrainian forces, talk of Ukraine ‘winning the war’ bears no relation to reality. On the contrary, Ukraine now faces a sharp deterioration in its position.

During the first stage of the war, now drawing to a close, Ukraine’s impressive performance has been facilitated by the combination of two factors. On the one hand, the old Russian command complacently overestimated Russian superiority, undermined as it was by poor force management, corruption, and low morale, and adopted an overambitious war plan. On the other hand, Ukraine derived enormous benefit from a generous supply of advanced Western weaponry, including ‘game changers’ like  the ‘iconic’ shoulder-fired precision-guided Javelin antitank missile, the 155-millimeter long-range (up to 40 km) M777 howitzer, and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). 

This supply is now running down. US stocks have fallen to levels that the Pentagon is determined to reserve for other contingencies, such as war with China or in Korea. New production on the scale needed to support a long conventional proxy war with Russia would take up to four years to develop and require the US economy to be put on a wartime footing. For the time being at least, Ukraine will have to make do with smaller quantities of less powerful weapons – for instance, the 105-millimeter howitzer, with smaller payload and shorter range (11 km).[1]

It no longer seems realistic, if it ever was, for Ukraine to aim at the reconquest of the Donbass, Crimea, or the land bridge connecting the two – areas where powerful Russian forces are concentrated and deeply entrenched. It is these areas that Russia will surely insist on keeping in the ‘realistic’ negotiations for which foreign minister Sergei Lavrov is calling. 

The explosion in Poland – a NATO member state — on November 15 reminds us of the ever-present risk of the war in Ukraine escalating to nuclear Armageddon by accident or mistake. The restrained response of Western leaders is reassuring (NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has acknowledged that the blast is likely to have been triggered by Ukrainianair defense systems). But the risk cannot be eliminated altogether.[2] Alternatively, prolongation of the war into 2023 may lead to Armageddon by stages, with pressure building up for a ‘no fly zone,’ the open and direct deployment of NATO ground troops (initially, no doubt, as trainers and advisers), and the battlefield use of tactical nuclear weapons.     

Winter is approaching. The weather will impose a pause in hostilities. Let us hope that good sense prevails and the pause will be used to end the war.                

Notes

[1] Natasha Turak, 9/28/22. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/28/the-us-and-europe-are-running-out-of-weapons-to-send-to-ukraine.html

[2] The growing risk of nuclear Armageddon cannot be ignored. Ali Abunimah with Rania Khalek, 10/26/22. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/growing-risk-nuclear-armageddon-cannot-be-ignored

Stephen Shenfield

War in Ukraine: latest developments – World Socialist Party US (wspus.org)

 Mothers in the UK are three times more likely to die around the time of pregnancy compared with those in Norway. 

Researchers found that Slovakia had the highest maternal death rate among the countries studied. The UK had the second highest.

The rates of death among mothers in pregnancy and up to 42 days after the birth of their children varied from 2.7 per 100,000 live births in Norway to 10.9 in Slovakia. In the UK, there were 9.6 maternal deaths for every 100,000 babies born.

UK has second highest maternal death rate in eight-country European study | Women’s health | The Guardian

 Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate denounced world leaders for continuing to support new coal, oil, and gas projects despite overwhelming evidence that extracting and burning more fossil fuels will exacerbate deadly climate chaos.

“The focus for many leaders is about making deals for fossil fuel lobbyists, surviving the next election cycle, and grabbing as much short-term profit as possible,” Nakate said in Sharm El-Sheikh. “You are sowing the wind and frontline communities are reaping the whirlwind,” said Nakate. “You are sowing seeds of coal, oil, and gas while frontline communities are reaping havoc, devastation, and destruction.”

 Nakate said that oil and gas representatives are turning COP27 into “a sales and marketing conference for more pollution and more destruction and more devastation.” 

She was alluding to the presence of more than 630 fossil fuel lobbyists at the meeting, which is being held in a heavily policed and expensive resort city.

Nakate told Democracy Now, “My worry is that the environment and biodiversity is going to be destroyed. We are going to find ourselves in an accelerated climate crisis, and profits are going to end up in pockets of already-rich people.”

Nakate detailed how the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency is intensifying suffering in the Global South, including by reducing access to clean water and food and increasing disease transmission and displacement.

Vanessa Nakate Slams World Leaders for Perpetuating Deadly Fossil Fuels (commondreams.org)