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Perhaps a more alarming way of looking at this, worldwide fossil fuel subsidies last year were $11 million a minute.
Just think what that amount of money could do for mitigating climate change and reversing the damage on the natural world.
Continue reading “Worldwide fossil fuel subsidies last year were $5.9 trillion!”In Brazil, one of the main drivers of deforestation is for pasture for beef. It is therefore completely foolish for those in developed countries to eat Brazilian beef – if we do, we are paying them to do the world (and therefore us) incalculable harm.
Importantly, these people can wait. If we have a moratorium on grazing on newly deforested land, the land owner can wait a few years or a decade then its value jumps. This move was taken after it became clear that “cattle laundering” was going on.
” DO NO HARM” is googles motto, yet they are failing. It is quite true that google cannot police the whole internet. It is also true, that we should not expect it to. However, we can expect it to not advertise or direct traffic to mistruths.
Yet, they have been placing ads next to content promoting climate change denial.
There are 10 fringe publishers who’s content is included in 69% of false posts on the climate – this number is small enough that google should be able to deal with it. It is estimated that google made $5.3 million in just 6 months from google ad revenue (according to the CCDH).
Climate change denial seeks to push off the time when we will have to make the hard changes, yet this makes the ecological disaster we are trying to avoid all the more likely.
In 2019 more than 11,000 scientists from more than 150 countries declared a climate emergency. The problem is that this was followed by the whole world closing down because of COVID. It seems that google has been helping spread misinformation.
When this challenge was put to google, it basically pointed at its policy and then stopped serving adds on the page in question. This is not good enough. Google can well afford a handful of people searching the web for content of this sort, and making sure that they do not profit from it. It is likely that there will always be people who refuse to believe the planet is warming (there are still so called “flat earth” societies around the world)
Mongabay, one of the best websites about the natural world, has had one of its writers sued. This happened after the reporter in question reported on illegal deforestation by a Peruvian cacao company.
For this company, it appears that this is a decision that they have taken, having sued several other outfits in recent times. The suit has been thrown out. The company had also sued the 4 members of the local environment ministry, including the one which lead the prosecution of the company. This suit has been lost, but the company is appealing.
This sounds like extreme wrong-doing. If you are prosecuted and found guilty, clearly those who prosecuted are right.
Increasingly, companies that are involved in illegal acts will sue anyone who uncovers it – wrongful judgements can move them forwards, and even if not, the court process can keep everyone tied up for years – if anything survives of the forest at the end of that, it is surprising. The judgement for the original crime of destroying forest, was clear and final with 3 sentenced to prison for the “crime of illegal trafficking of timber forest products and aggravated obstruction of justice”. They also had to pay fines of over $4 million.
Unfortunately, despite overwhelming evidence all of the sentences were overturned by the supreme court – freeing the way for the attack on Mongabay. Indeed, 4 days after the original publication a notarized letter arrived requesting the article be corrected – in particular, claiming false claims were made in the article. Mongabay Latam published an article refuting each point in turn. Some of the points were absurd, with the company complaining about the turn deforestation being used – as they had not been found guilty of this. More foolishly, despite forest destruction being deforestation by definition, the website had only quoted one of the officials prosecuting.
This back and forth continued, but suffice to say their arguments are stupid: talking about logging and deforestation are completely interchangeable.
Stupid moves in court must be publicized, as only ridicule and financial loss will force companies like this to behave.
Thankfully, this website is not a big enough thorn to have to face similar suits, but that may come.
A Papua court ruling, is a win for local governance and against national governments. All over the world, most remaining wildernesses are not devoid of human population to the contrary, most of these areas are inhabited by indigenous people.
What does indigenous people mean? Well in most contexts it means people who arrived and settled before European colonisation. What has become increasingly clear is that the explorers that we learn about are rarely the first humans to arrive in newly discovered countries. Indonesians and Norwegians are both known to have crossed large oceans and settled on newly discovered lands.
Often these native people have lived in harmony in the local ecosystem for thousands of years.
This is why indigenous rights are so important. It is however important that this is done right – indigenous lands becoming places with casinos is not the idea.
In this instance, two palm oil companies sued after their lease was invalidated. The combined area is not small, being bigger than New York city. This clears the way for Indigenous groups who used to live within this area, to reclaim their former lands.
Indonesia has a particularly hard path to walk. Made up of thousands of different islands, with vast areas of rainforests, it is hard for the central government to make good decisions.
We as consumers need to make this easier, by reducing our consumption and therefore requiring less resources
It has been recognised in many circles but fossil fuels have been a problem for a very long time. Generally the argument has gone, there is nothing that can replace them.
What should we do about companies who were pushing the idea that was nothing to replace fossil fuels, while at the same time working to stop electric cars ever coming to market?
Some people might argue that in a free market society, you can do nothing. That has to be wrong. Exxon bought the lithium ion battery patent back in 1966, and then completely suppressed it -this is why the Sony Walkman only arrived in 1991, precisely 25 years after the patent was given when it expired. Chevron Texaco did something similar in 1999, when they bought the right to certain battery chemistry, and a particular type of battery plug in the hope of stopping that technology ever coming to market in the form of a battery for a car.
Car and fossil fuel companies cannot be allowed to get away with this. Indeed it has to be illegal.
Indeed if it isn’t, the free market system must change otherwise these companies will have the ability to make the fight against climate change that much harder.
There needs to be a way to inflict significant damage on a company which intentionally fights against the long-term human interests in order to maximize short term profits. Perhaps the only way to handle this is to fine the share holders? If the share holders know that they are going to be financially liable for any bad behaviour, this will force the value of the company down when ever they misbehave.
I simply don’t understand the number of people who argue that we shouldn’t be doing anything about global warming.
In 2019 Philip Hammond argued that the cost of getting the British economy 2 net zero would be more than 1 trillion pounds. Then in 2021 the obr estimated the cost to be 1.4 trillion pounds.
This only sounds like an expensive deal if you don’t look at the costs as runaway global warming. Melting of all the ice sheets on earth could raise sea levels by 100m. This would flood vast areas of land and leave the mainland UK as an archipelago. Apart from this huge costs would be paid in failures of crops and the huge amount more electricity with need for air-conditioning.
The simple fact is as many have argued before, fossil fuels are a finite resource. The human race will have to learn to live without them someday, let’s do that before we destroyed the plan completely.
A company owned by the Pahang states royal family plans to mine iron ore from a forest reserve that currently hosts a variety of important mega fauna, including tigers elephants sun bears and leopard.
In past governments indigenous land was out of bounds, yet under Bolsonaro there is currently 1265 requests to mine in Indigenous territories pending. This behaviour is prohibited by the Brazilian constitution, which shows how bad this is. If the mining is illegal what is the ned for it to even be looked at?
Given in these cases this land has been given over to the tribes, it is not the governments to hand over to miners.
The big concern is that even if Bolsonaro is voted out after just one term, he may have destroyed most of the countries remaining forests and indigenous areas, meaning there will be little for his replacement to save.
One of the companies wrote to Mongabay after the article was originally published, they claimed that they did not know anything about it. Unfortunately the record of the request is clear, and it is worth noting that while denying the existence, they did not cancel any of the requests at all
Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters are getting frustrated. The whole world can see that the direction the country is taking is extremely dangerous. Rather than changing tack they have decided to silence the detractors.
Whether environmental researchers, academics or officials, it seems that no one is safe. Increasing numbers of these professions are being forced to seek safety abroad to avoid threats to their lives.
This is not the behaviour of a democracy leader, and it wont work