“Energy imbalance” refers to the difference between how much of the Sun’s “radiative energy” is absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere and surface, compared to how much “thermal infrared radiation” bounces back into space. “A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up,” Nasa said

Scientists from Nasa, the US space agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), reported in a new study that Earth’s “energy imbalance approximately doubled” from 2005 to 2019. The increase was described as “alarming”. The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, according to new research, described as an “unprecedented” increase amid the climate crisis.

The study found that this doubling is the result, in part, by an increase in greenhouse gases and water vapor, as well as decreases in clouds and ice.

 Unless the rate of heat uptake slows, greater shifts in climate should be expected.

Earth is trapping ‘unprecedented’ amount of heat, Nasa says | Climate change | The Guardian

 At least 1.5 billion people have been directly affected by drought since 2000.

Changing rainfall patterns as a result of climate breakdown is a key driver of drought, but the report also identifies the inefficient use of water resources and the degradation of land under intensive agriculture and poor farming practices as playing a role. Deforestation, the overuse of fertilisers and pesticides, overgrazing and over-extraction of water for farming are also major problems, it says.

Mami Mizutori, the UN secretary general’s special representative for disaster risk reduction, said: “Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic and there is no vaccine to cure it. Most of the world will be living with water stress in the next few years. Demand will outstrip supply during certain periods. Drought is a major factor in land degradation and the decline of yields for major crops.”

Roger Pulwarty, a senior scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a co-author of the report,  pointed to the Danube in Europe, where recurring drought in recent years has affected transport, tourism, industry and energy generation. 

The report, entitled Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction: Special Report on Drought 2021, 

“We need to have a modernised view of drought,” he said. “We need to look at how to manage resources such as rivers and large watersheds.”

‘The next pandemic’: drought is a hidden global crisis, UN says | Drought | The Guardian

 Boris Johnson secretly met Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, the country’s prime minister, and his senior officials to discuss a free trade deal with the Gulf states and agreed to “further strengthen our economic, security and diplomatic cooperation”.

 Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, a director of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (Bird), said: 

“If Britain is truly seeking a free trade deal with a regime that holds political prisoners as hostages, tortures children and throws even mild critics in jail, it is imperative that human rights issues are at the core of any future trade relationship.”

Reprieve, the campaign group against the death penalty, pointed to the cases of Mohammed Ramadhan and Husain Moosa – two men that have been facing execution since at least 2017 for what they “confessed” under torture. In a joint report coinciding with the visit, Reprieve and Bird said: “Between 2011 and 2020, Bahrain has sentenced at least 51 people to death. Between 2001 and 2010, the decade before the Arab spring, the number executed was seven.” They claimed that per head of the population, Bahrain’s record was not substantially better than Iran’s.

Liberal Democrat peer Lord Scriven said:

 “I am dismayed but unfortunately not surprised that the prime minister rolled out the red carpet and put trade over torture with his meeting with the crown prince today. Even the official press release fails to mention human rights abuses.”

Boris Johnson criticised for meeting Bahrain’s crown prince | Human rights | The Guardian

According to Silver Spoon Oligarchs: How America’s 50 Largest Inherited-Wealth Dynasties Accelerate Inequality, a new report out Wednesday from the Institute for Policy Studies, the country’s 50 wealthiest familie from 1983 to 2020 had amassed $1.2 trillion in assets. By comparison, the bottom half of all U.S. households—an estimated 65 million families—shared a combined total wealth of just twice that, at $2.5 trillion.

The fortunes of dynastic families increased at 10 times the rate of ordinary families. 

For the 27 families that were on both the Forbes 400 list in 1983 and the Forbes Billion-Dollar Dynasties list in 2020 their combined assets have grown by 1,007% over those 37 years. This is an increase from $80.2 billion to $903.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. In contrast, between 1989 and 2019, the wealth of the typical family in the U.S. increased by just 93 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars.

The five wealthiest dynastic families in the U.S. have seen their wealth increase by a median 2,484% from 1983 to 2020.

In 1983, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and his children were worth just $2.15 billion (or $5.6 billion in 2020 dollars). By the end of 2020, Walton’s descendants had a combined net worth of over $247 billion, an inflation-adjusted increase of 4,320%.

The Mars candy dynasty has seen its wealth increase 3,517% over the past 37 years, from $2.6 billion in 1983 (in 2020 dollars) to $94 billion by 2020. The family has also spent large sums on public policy advocacy to change tax laws.

Cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder and her descendants have seen their wealth grow from just $1.6 billion in 1983 (in 2020 dollars) to $40 billion in 2020. This is a growth rate of 2,465%.

 As in many of the mega-cities around the world Karachi in Pakistan is “re-developing” its slum areas. Pakistan’s supreme court backed the bulldozing of hundreds of homes, legalising the eviction of thousands who live along narrow waterways – nullahs – that criss-cross Karachi. At least 8,000 houses are being knocked down along the nullahs. The work, which began in February, is in response to the 2020 Karachi floods that saw choked up nullahs overflow and swamp the city along with improvements to Karachi’s water and sewage systems which are being financed by the World Bank.

When this exercise is completed (before this year’s monsoon, according to the plan), at least 100,000 people would perhaps have been rendered homeless. As many as 21,000 children would be out of school and without a home.

Architect and urban planner Arif Hasan says the government had no “proper plan”.

 “They are not doing it merely to stop the flood but to make long roads along the nullahs connecting the Lyari expressway with the northern bypass, displace poor and benefit the rich.” 

‘Where should we go?’: thousands left homeless as Karachi clears waterways | Global development | The Guardian

Many of us were brought up under the dark threat of nuclear war mushroom clouds. After the fall of the Soviet Union regime, many thought that the ominous possibility of an atomic war holocaust had passed. How wrong they all were, according to a new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The world’s nine nuclear armed states may have downsized their military arsenals, but made up for their loss by increasing the number of weapons on high operational alert. As a result, the world is increasingly within striking distance of nuclear weapons—either by accident or by design.

 The nine countries collectively possessed an estimated 13,080 nuclear weapons at the start of 2021,  a decrease from the 13, 400 that these states possessed at the beginning of 2020 since some of these weapons have gone into “retirement”.

Despite this overall decrease, the estimated number of nuclear weapons currently deployed with operational forces increased to 3,825, from 3,720 last year.  2,000 of these—nearly all of which belonged to Russia or the US—were kept in a state of high operational alert ready for a strike.

The US and Russia continued to reduce their overall nuclear weapon inventories by dismantling retired warheads in 2020, both are estimated to have had around 50 more nuclear warheads in operational deployment at the start of 2021 than a year earlier. Russia also increased its overall military nuclear stockpile by around 180 warheads, mainly due to deployment of more multi-warhead land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).

The  International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), warned that nuclear-armed states spent $72.6 billion on their nuclear weapons – even as the pandemic spread in 2020, an increase of $1.4 billion from 2019. Its report, Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending, shows how during the pandemic, which had devastating health and economic consequences last year, governments were increasingly channeling tax money to defence contractors, which in turn increased the amounts to lobbyists and think tanks to encourage a continued increase of spending.

Out of the $72.6 billion that countries spent on nuclear weapons in 2020 globally, $27.7 billion went to less than a dozen defence contractors to build nuclear weapons, which in turn spent $117 million lobbying and upwards of $10 million funding most major think tanks writing about nuclear weapons.

“The climate and Covid emergencies are showing us what we really need for our security and safety as human beings, and it’s not nuclear weapons,” said Dr Rebecca Johnson of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy. “The UN system is struggling because its efforts to build cooperative peace and security are constantly undermined and strangled by aggressive nation states. Most people can see we need cooperation and sharing to solve global challenges, from vaccines to sustainable resources,” she told IPS.  A minority of governments with nuclear dependencies and militaristic economies create the most dangers for everyone, said Dr Johnson. “With their aggressive posturing, new types of weapons and corrupt selling practices they arm rivals, feed insecurity and wars, and undermine international security, law and human rights, she warned.

Professor M. V. Ramana, Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security, and Director, Liu Institute for Global Issues, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, told IPS the report documents the power of the political control wielded by companies involved in nuclear weapons production and maintenance is. These companies profit enormously from their involvement in making these weapons of mass destruction and use a share of these profits to lobby for and shape the decision-making process in ways that further their profits, and loosen any semblance of democracy in this sphere, he said.

Global spending on nuclear weapons:

• United States: $37.4 billion

• China: $10.1 billion

• Russia: $8 billion

• United Kingdom: $6.2 billion

• France: $5.7 billion

• India: $2.4 billion

• Pakistan: $1 billion

• North Korea: $667 million

The top 5 companies profiting from nuclear weapon contracts were:

• Northrop Grumman ($13.6 billion)

• General Dynamics ($10.8 billion)

• Lockheed Martin ($2 billion)

• Raytheon Technologies ($449.5 million)

• Draper ($342 million)

A French think-tank REN21’s report Renewables 2021 Global Status Report (pdf) says that fossil fuels accounted for 80.3% of energy consumption in 2009, compared with 80.2% in 2019. Over that period, “modern renewables” only grew from 8.7% to 11.2%.

The 2019 breakdown in the renewables category—based on data from the International Energy Agency (IEA)—was: 1% biofuels for transport; 2.4% wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and ocean power; 3.6% hydropower; and 4.2% biomass, solar, and geothermal heat.

“We are waking up to the bitter reality that the climate policy promises over the past 10 years have mostly been empty words,” said REN21 executive director Rana Adib. “The share of fossil fuels in final energy consumption has not moved by an inch,” Adib added. “Phasing them out and making renewables the new norm are the strongest actions we can take.”

“2020 could have been a game-changer,” the think tank noted in a statement (pdf). “Economies worldwide were ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic. Primary energy demand fell by 4%.” However, Group of 20 (G20) countries, “the planet’s biggest polluters, barely met or even missed their unambitious renewable energy targets.” 

The statement added, the new report “shows that we are nowhere near the necessary paradigm shift towards a clean, healthier, and more equitable energy future.”

“Unfortunately the harsh lesson from the pandemic is that most governments did not use the unique opportunity to further curtail carbon pollution and break the resistance of the fossil fuel incumbents,” said Stephan Singer, a senior adviser at Climate Action Network International. “What counts for them is corporate profit—neither the climate nor people’s health.”

The climate advocacy group 350.org declared that “rich governments are doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what they need to do” and emphasized the need to not only invest in renewables but also urgently end the use of fossil fuels.

Share of Fossil Fuels in Global Energy Mix ‘Has Not Moved by an Inch’ in a Decade | Common Dreams News

 An expedition involving 300 scientists from 20 countries led by Markus Rex said that the researchers had found that Arctic ice is retreating faster than ever before. The international expedition to the North Pole warned that the point could have already been reached at which irreversible global warming is triggered.

The expedition returned to Germany after 389 days drifting through the Arctic, bringing home devastating proof of a dying Arctic Ocean and warnings of ice-free summers in just decades. The ice was only half as thick and temperatures measured 10 degrees higher than during the Fram expedition undertaken by explorers and scientists Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen in the 1890s. Because of the smaller sea ice surface, the ocean was able to absorb more heat in the summer, in turn meaning that ice sheet formation in the autumn was slower than usual.

Rex said scientists found that the Arctic Ocean ice had retreated “faster in the spring of 2020 than since the beginning of records” and that “the spread of the sea ice in the summer was only half as large as decades ago.”

“The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far,” he said. “And one can essentially ask if we haven’t already stepped on this mine and already set off the beginning of the explosion.”

Global warming may have already passed irreversible tipping point | Climate News | Al Jazeera

In the American political process, the financial sector spent a record sum of nearly $3 billion on campaign contributions and lobbying during the 2019-2020 election cycle.

Wall Street has one goal: to maximize profits and uses the power of its wealth as leverage over the electoral and legislative processes. The wealthy have their own priorities, which are typically opposed to the needs of most Americans. The wealthy seek policies that make them richer, creating a cycle of political and economic inequality.

For Wall Street, spending massive sums on lobbying and campaign contributions is a highly calculated decision. Wall Street wants to derail financial regulation and keep low tax rates. It needs friendly legislators to do it, and it has something they want: money. Wall Street’s priorities have become Congress’ priorities. 

The financial sector’s political spending skyrocketed by 50 percent between the 2015-2016 and 2019-2020 election cycles, culminating in $2.9 billion spent in the past year, according to a recently released report from Americans for Financial Reform. The highest spender on Wall Street, Blackstone CEO Steven Schwarzman, spent more than $33 million alone on campaign contributions during the last election cycle.

With individual donations and PAC contributions, corporations and Wall Street donate to win influence. It is also the third-highest industry spender on lobbying activities, with nearly $1 billion on lobbying in 2019-2020.

During the past two decades, around 90 percent of House elections were won by the candidate in the race who spent the most money.

 91 percent of Americans believing it is important to regulate financial services. Over two-thirds of Americans support a wealth tax on billionaires, 75 percent of Americans support eliminating the disparity between the tax rate for earned and unearned income, and 70 percent of the public wants to increase corporate taxes by eliminating deductions. Yet none of these policies have become law. Instead of prioritizing economic justice, over the past several decades, Congress has passed tax cuts for the wealthy and bailed out Wall Street.

Between 2007-2009, six out of the eight corporations that spent the most money on lobbying saw a seven percentage point decline in their tax rate compared to the 0.2 percent decline the median spending company received. 

Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Nathan Loewentheil write that these large corporations saved an “estimated $11 billion — which, if entirely due to lobbying, would indicate a return on investment of over 2,000 percent.” 

Opinion | Wall Street’s $3 Billion Bargain Basement Purchase of the US Political Process | Elisa McCartin (commondreams.org)