Video: New York Times debunks corporate climate lies

I never look to the New York Times for my climate news, but this popped up in my Youtube feed, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. The concept of “Net Zero” long predates the current corporate vogue, but I think it has always acted to protect the unrealistic notion of continuing fossil fuel use, and just “cancelling it out” through various forms of carbon capture, and other things declared to be “offsets”. Basically, it’s the foolish hope – a hope that I held before gaining a better understanding of the world – that we can somehow solve this problem while keeping our society more or less the same as it was at the end of the 20th century. I will always be in favor of pulling excess carbon out of the air, but we can’t afford to fall for capitalist misdirection and misinformation. We haven’t the time.

Carbon capture is a distraction we cannot afford.

I’m in favor of carbon capture as a general concept. I’ve written before about using plants for that purpose, and I continue to think that we should be doing that.

But.

Without eliminating fossil fuel use, carbon capture is a distraction we cannot afford.

A new report from Imperial College London has outlined the degree to which carbon capture worked between 1996 and 2020, as well as the degree to which it has been over-estimated:

The researchers compared estimations of stored carbon with official reports, and found that the reports lead to overestimates of actual carbon stored by 19-30 per cent.

They calculated 197 million tonnes of carbon were captured and stored between 1996 and 2020, which represents a significant achievement in climate change mitigation. However, the researchers say the lack of consistent reporting frameworks mean current reported rates of carbon capture are overestimated, giving an inaccurate picture of the technology’s contribution to fighting climate change. This, the researchers say, disempowers us in meeting climate mitigation strategies like the Paris Agreement and risks hiding issues that could otherwise be easily solved, such as inefficiencies in facility technology and transport.

Lead author Yuting Zhang, PhD candidate at the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: “Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is rightly a cornerstone of climate change mitigation, but without a centralised reporting framework we approach climate change on the back foot when we need to be more proactively tackling the issue with robust and accurate reporting.

I’m sorry, but in light of this report, I have to disagree with the lead author. If this is an example of what carbon capture and storage has to offer, then we cannot rely on it at all. Once again – 197 million tonnes of carbon captured and stored over a period of 24 years. For comparison, we emitted 36.3 billion tonnes in 2021 alone. The decrease in emissions from the 2020 lockdowns was 2 billion tonnes, which is over ten times what was captured during that 24 year period.

Taking this seriously as “a cornerstone of climate change mitigation” feels like declaring a toddler with a bucket to be a cornerstone of our firefighting strategy. This is not the first time I’ve wondered whether industrial carbon capture is anything more than a greenwashing campaign, fueled by a willful detachment from reality. As always, I’m glad for this research. It’s good to have numbers on how carbon capture has been going (as badly as all the rest of our climate “action”), and how the propaganda surrounding it has over-sold its usefulness.

The study authors suggest centralizing the process of tracking and reporting on carbon capture and sequestration. That’s fine. It seems like a good idea. I also think it’s worth noting that it’s not like any of our other climate mitigation efforts have been going any better, so it’s possible that if we ever take the issue seriously (you know, before it kills us all), carbon capture will make a huge difference. Even so, if that happens, it won’t matter if we’re still generating so much carbon dioxide. Carbon neutrality is not enough. It shouldn’t need saying, but freezing CO2 levels where they’re at right now is still a catastrophe – it’s just a slower one.

Carbon capture and storage is rightly a cornerstone of climate mitigation, but without a rapid elimination of fossil fuel use, it will do little more than help our rulers deflect blame for the horrors they have wrought.

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Americans are eating so much excess meat, their pee is poisoning the water.

I’ve known for a while that the American diet tends to have too much protein. A lot of emphasis is placed on meat, in our culture, and the focus on making U.S.ians lose weight has often guided people to eat fewer carbohydrates, but as much protein as we want. For me, that was compounded by the knowledge that muscle burns more calories than fat, so in my mind, anything I could do to ensure my body could build muscle easily, would also help me burn calories.

The reality is that we humans tend to be fairly efficient creatures, and when we consume too much protein, our body just pisses it away.

Literally.

 Balancing how much protein you eat with the amount your body needs could reduce nitrogen releases to aquatic systems in the U.S. by 12% and overall nitrogen losses to air and water by 4%, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

Protein consumption in the United States, from both plant and animal sources, ranks among the highest in the world. The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, said that if Americans ate protein at recommended amounts, projected nitrogen excretion rates in 2055 would be 27% less than they are today despite population growth.

The study is the first to estimate how much protein consumption contributes to excess nitrogen in the environment through human waste. It also indicates that coastal cities have the largest potential to reduce nitrogen excretions headed for their watersheds.

“It turns out that many of us don’t need as much protein as we eat, and that has repercussions for our health and aquatic ecosystems,” said lead author Maya Almaraz, a research affiliate with the UC Davis Institute of the Environment. “If we could reduce that to an amount appropriate to our health, we could better protect our environmental resources.”

The human body requires protein. But when a body takes in more protein than it needs, excess amino acids break it down into nitrogen, which is excreted mostly through urine and released through the wastewater system. This brings additional nitrogen into waterways, which can result in toxic algal blooms, oxygen-starved “dead zones” and polluted drinking water.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that eating too much protein can also cause health problems. Kidney stones are first on the list, which makes sense, given what our bodies do with the excess, but when it comes to eating red meat, too much can also increase your risk of colon cancer. We already know that cows in particular are major methane emitters, and livestock in general are more energy-intensive to raise, simply by virtue of being animals, and not plants.

In fact, for all I downplay individual action in favor of systemic change, this is one case where there’s almost certainly no downside. The exception to mention up front is that some people simply need meat to be healthy. That’s one reason I want it to be available, even in my “ideal world”, and why food in general should be free at the point of access, so that those with uncommon restrictions don’t have to pay more just to live. That said, eating less meat would benefit the health and the finances of most U.S. residents.

This is one of those times where a country that valued human life would be funding a PR campaign to this end, but at the very least we can spread the word on our own. This is an easy answer, and honestly it’s one we’ve known for a very long time. As with all dietary advice, your exact needs are going to vary person to person, and the whole reason I like this as a form of individual action is that it’s something that will make people’s individual lives better, and possibly more affordable. That would be nullified if you were to make your diet less healthy.

I also want to say that as someone who’s struggled with his weight for his entire life, I get that changing your diet – especially eating less food – is not always an easy ask. Our bodies make us suffer for losing weight, even if doing so makes us more healthy, and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about that beyond developing ways to cope.

But personally, I’ve found the combination of environmental impact and overall concern for my health to be a pretty good motivator in getting me to eat less protein in general, and less meat in particular.

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A little good news, for a change

California governor Gavin Newsom has announced that California will be producing its own insulin. This hasn’t been done, yet, but apparently Newsom has committed to spending $100,000,000, split evenly between building new insulin manufacturing facilities, and “the development of low-cost insulin products”. This is good. This could be the crack in the dam that ends the hostage situation pharmaceutical corporations currently have with people whose lives depend on medication.

Video: Let’s talk about the end of any pretense to democracy in the United States

If this court decides that this doctrine should be in effect, then your vote no longer matters. That is not an overstatement.
-Beau of the Fifth Column

At this point, I don’t think anyone worth consideration will pretend that the United States was a free and democratic society before 1964 or so. The existence of explicit, legislative racial segregation makes the very suggestion absurd. I would also argue that we haven’t have democracy (even the representative sort) since then, both in terms of general participation in governance, and in terms of the government’s responsiveness to the wants and needs of the people. Intentional hold-overs from the Segregation era, like redlining and white supremacist policing, combine with gerrymandering and capitalism to keep power in the hands of the same people who’ve always held it in this society.

I think that some form of direct democracy is what we need. Representative democracy has shown itself to be far too vulnerable to the abuses of the upper class, and looking at history, I think that was by design. It was a way to protect the privilege and power of those at the top. It let some new people into the club and complicated the process of ruling, as did the adoption of capitalism, but that was a price worth paying for making sure the club retained its benefits.

That said, representative democracy – even the vicious parody of it that we’ve had in my lifetime – is better than what may soon be in store for the United States.

At issue is the “independent state legislature theory” (ISLT), which the Brennan Center for Justice describes as a “baseless” concept “making the rounds in conservative legal circles” that posits congressional elections can only be regulated by a state’s lawmakers, not its judiciary—or even its constitution.

Prominent purveyors of former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen”—most notably, Ginni Thomas, a right-wing activist and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas—have invoked the dubious theory when pushing state lawmakers to help overturn President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

“In Moore, North Carolina lawmakers argue they essentially get a ‘free pass’ to violate state constitutional protections against partisan gerrymandering when drawing districts which undeniably hurt voters,” said Riggs. “We will vigorously fight these claims and instead advocate on behalf of North Carolinians to prove what the ‘independent state legislature theory’ has been all along—a fringe, desperate, and anti-democratic attack by a gerrymandered legislature.”

Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at University of Kentucky, called Moore an “extremely dangerous case in that it could take away state constitutional limits on state legislatures when they enact restrictive voting rules.”

Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, a plaintiff in the Moore, said in a statement that “in a radical power grab, self-serving politicians want to defy our state’s highest court and impose illegal voting districts upon the people of North Carolina.”

“We must stop this dangerous attack on our freedom to vote,” he added.

I would say this looks like a return to the Segregation era – and it may well mean that in some states – but I think it’s likely to be both different, and worse in a number of ways. With climate catastrophe looming, and global ecosystems already collapsing, the stakes are getting higher every year. When I look at what’s happening, and at the multi-generational effort that has gone into making all this happen, I have to assume that they’re also thinking about how to prevent their power grab from being undone.

As always, I think Beau’s take on this is worth considering.

In some ways, this doesn’t change anything. We still need to organize. We still need to work to bring about real democracy, for the sake of our survival. This is another symptom of the systemic problems that we’ve been trying to solve all along. It’s also a new level of bad when it comes to the amount of work that needs doing, and the danger of doing that work. The biggest reason I write about this sort of thing is that I want to provide tools that can help persuade people of the need for action that goes far beyond the boundaries of what our liberal society told us was “acceptable.

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Abolish the police

Is that too much for you?

Do you honestly think cops do more good than harm? Based on what? We need first responders, but we don’t need cops any more than we need the ruling class the cops defend. So many of the crises of our time come from the failed experiment of putting our political power in the hands of “representatives”, in the hopes that they will use it wisely.

They haven’t.

Police are just the tip of the bloody iceberg, but they’re a horror show all by themselves. Police lie, constantly. Police murder family pets. Police steal more from Americans than burglars do. Police kill people every day, and for every one they kill, many more are traumatized, injured, maimed, or have their lives ruined by a bullshit arrest on their record, or by cops making them late for something important. Cops also have open contempt for the constitution, if you happen to care about that thing. They exist to uphold and defend the current power structure, and nothing more.

We spend obscene amounts of money on the police, and that doesn’t go towards keeping us safe. It goes towards keeping the ruling class in power, and keeping them safe from us, even as they drive us towards extinction. Start with defunding them, and redistributing that money to things that actually help the communities, and reduce the incentives for crimes that actually cause harm. As with so much else, we know how to make a better world – we just can’t actually do it while we’re governed by those who would lose their power in making that world.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Be on the lookout for people spreading the propaganda of a fascist terrorist

I don’t have a lot to say about the Chicago shooting. It’s yet another act of terrorism by a white American fascist. These will continue to happen until some time after the fascists feel certain that they have no open support from the general public or from the ruling class. My proposed course of action hasn’t changed. There is, however, one thing that I believe is important to highlight:

This seems like a pretty clear-cut attempt to add fuel to the fire of American transphobia. There’s already an effort underway to erase trans people from U.S. society, and to paint them as every kind of villain, evidence be damned. I’ve seen headlines focusing on the fact the shooter “wore women’s clothes”, but they all seem to be claiming that the clothes were an attempt to blend in.

I suppose it’s possible that there’s some truth to that, but given the nature of online fascist discourse, I think Erin Reed’s reading in the above tweet is more than reasonable. It’s also playing on a pretty common trope in media. Everyone is in danger from this fascist movement, but the amount of danger depends on what stage we’re at, and whether you’re seen as an ally to the victims of the moment. Fascists have always preferred targets with little to no political power, and trans people are pretty much always at the top of that list. Pointing out propaganda can help defuse it, and I think more people should be on the lookout for this sort of thing.

And right now the most important thing you can do, is figure out how to join and/or support anti-fascist activity. I’m all in favor of rehabilitating fascists, but that must come after they have no power to hurt anyone. The top priority has to be stopping them.

Reminder: Making real progress on climate change would cost less than 1% of global GDP, but we’re still not doing it.

The world needs to quadruple its annual investment in nature if the climate, biodiversity and land degradation crises are to be tackled by the middle of the century, according to a new UN report.

Boy, that sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? We need to quadruple what we’re currently investing! What does that look like in terms of what economists call “real numbers?

Investing just 0.1% of global GDP every year in restorative agriculture, forests, pollution management and protected areas to close a $4.1tn (£2.9tn) financial gap by 2050 could avoid the breakdown of natural ecosystem “services” such as clean water, food and flood protection, the report said.

I did badly in calculus. Honestly, most math after basic geometry and algebra was pretty rough for me. I’m saying this because maybe my numbers are off here. It sure seems like what this article is saying, is that in response to a crisis that scientists are increasingly telling us could destroy our civilization within just a few decades, the world is investing 0.025% of its GDP? Am I reading that right?

Seriously, though, I’m not surprised. I should say that this article is from last spring, but this isn’t the first time numbers like this have come up, and I think it’s something worth remembering from time to time. It’s not just that we’re not doing enough, it’s that we’re not even doing the bare minimum. I think that estimation of what would be required is far too low, but we haven’t even tried it. It’s not just that our leaders are too greedy and deluded do use their power to make the world better for everyone, it’s that they can’t even be bothered to decrease their pathological hoarding by even a fraction of a percent. Being rich isn’t enough, they have to be constantly getting richer, and they need to do that faster than anyone else. What’s really mind-boggling to me is that if they did invest their collective trillions in really dealing with climate change, they would become international heroes, and they would still almost certainly be obscenely wealthy. They’d still be rich even if they met my standards, and ended poverty around the world, too.

At this point, I think that the fact that they still haven’t done that means that they’re actually incapable of doing it. That means that it will not happen unless their hand is forced, either by total disaster, or by the masses. They really do seem to be aiming for a world in which they rule a shattered wasteland from their high-tech fortresses. Why else would we still be on this path when it would take so little for them to change our course?

The State of Finance for Nature report, produced by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative (ELD), said a total investment of $8.1tn was required to maintain the biodiversity and natural habitats vital to human civilisation, reaching $536bn a year by 2050, projected to be about 0.13% of global GDP.

More than that, this analysis backs up one of the points I’ve been hammering for a while now (and I’m far from alone). We need to invest in the protection and stewardship of biodiversity.

More than half of global GDP relies on high-functioning biodiversity but about a fifth of countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing due to the destruction of the natural world, according to an analysis by the insurance firm Swiss Re last year. Australia, Israel and South Africa were among the most threatened.

The Unep report, which looked at terrestrial nature-based solutions, urges governments to repurpose billions of dollars of damaging agricultural and fossil fuel subsidies to benefit nature and integrate the financial value of nature in decision-making. By 2050, governments and the private sector will need to spend $203bn on the management, conservation and restoration of forests around the world.

“The dependency of global GDP on nature is abstract but what we really mean are livelihoods, jobs, people’s ability to feed themselves, and water security,” said Teresa Hartmann, the WEF lead on climate and nature. “If we don’t do this, there are irreversible damages. The four-trillion gap we describe cannot be filled later on. There will be irreversible damages to biodiversity that we can no longer fix.”

The report follows a warning by leading scientists in January that the planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” because of ignorance and inaction.

“The way that we use natural resources for food, textiles, wood, fibre and so on, that needs to change,” Hartmann said. “Everybody’s talking about an energy transition at the heart of everybody’s understanding of climate change. Nobody’s talking about a land-use change transition. We cannot afford to continue exploiting and producing as we do now.”

About $133bn is invested in nature every year, often by national governments. Nearly two-thirds of that is spent on forest and peatland restoration, regenerative agriculture and natural pollution-control systems.

The report’s authors said nature and climate should be high on government lending conditions as part of the expansion of investment, also citing the example of Costa Rica’s tax on petrol, which is used to finance its reforestation programme. Private investment in nature-based solutions accounts for only about 14% of the current total, according to the report, which said it needed to be scaled up through carbon markets, sustainable agricultural and forestry supply chains, and private finance.

Ivo Mulder, head of Unep’s climate finance unit, said: “At the moment, emission levels are equal or par to pre-Covid levels. So despite what everybody’s saying, both businesses and governments have been building back as usual.
“The question is: how serious are we about investing in nature-based solutions, both from a government and business perspective? Failing to do so will probably stop us from meeting the Paris climate agreement and deplete biodiversity further.”

This is the flip side of the “we know what we need to do, and how to do it; what’s missing is a desire to do it on the part of those people in whose hands we’ve concentrated most of our species’ collective power. That means that we need to take back that power if we want anything to change, and that – as always – comes down to organizing. I was talking to a friend recently about the frustrations of trying to motivate comfortable people to direct action, and while I still have very little experience myself, it seems like we really do need to start a new kind of political system from scratch. It’s going to be painfully slow, especially as we watch our rulers destroy the world around us, but I don’t see another way forward. The one bit of encouragement I can offer from this is that even if this analysis is far too optimistic about the investment that’s needed, building a better world is still well within our material capacity.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!