Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) it says. Climate & Capitalism has received review copies of some of these books, but we do not receive any payment for reviews or for reader purchases.
Troy Tassier THE RICH FLEE AND THE POOR TAKE THE BUS How Our Unequal Society Fails Us During Outbreaks John Hopkins University Press Can we make society more resilient to disease outbreaks and avoid forcing the poor and working class to bear the brunt of their harm? Tassier argues that we can leverage lessons learned from historic and recent outbreaks to design better economic and social policies and more just institutions to protect everyone in society when inevitable future epidemics arrive.
Aaron Eddens SEEDING EMPIRE American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa University of California Press From the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the world’s largest biotechnology companies, agribusinesses aims to impose genetically modified crops on millions of small-scale farmers across Africa., Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution.
Adrian Johnston INFINITE GREED The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital Columbia University Press Does innate human selfishness make capitalism inescapable? Johnson argues that the relentless pursuit of profits is not fundamentally animated by human acquisitiveness. Instead, capitalism’s strange “infinite greed” demands that individuals sacrifice their pleasures, their well-being, and even themselves to serve inhuman capital.
David N. Livingstone THE EMPIRE OF CLIMATE A History of an Idea Princeton University Press Livingstone maps the tangled histories of an idea that has haunted our collective imagination from the ancient Greeks to the crisis of global warming today, Climate has been critically implicated in the politics of imperial control and race relations; been used to explain industrial development, market performance, and economic breakdown; and as an indicator of national character and cultural collapse.
Rebecca R. Scott LAND OF EXTRACTION Property, Fracking, and Settler Colonialism New York University Press Scott explores fracking’s dual impact on settler colonial culture and sustainability, unravelling the complex web of relationships between humans, places, and the environment, all bound by the concept of private property. A thought-provoking analysis of how settler colonial culture imposes limits on environmental politics.
Grace Blakeley VULTURE CAPITALISM Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom Simon & Schuster Blakeley exposes the corrupt system that is failing all around us, pulling back the curtain on the free market mythology we have been sold. Corporate and political power brokers have used planned capitalism to advance their own interests at the expense of the rest of us. She argues for democratizing the economy to stop the shift towards monopoly and oligarchy.
At a recent event, New Jerseyans across the labor, climate, and environmental justice movements came together to celebrate, strategize, and learn from each other
At a recent event, New Jerseyans across the labor, climate, and environmental justice movements came together to celebrate, strategize, and learn from each other.
When Lorin Fernandez first heard about plans for a new gas power plant in Woodbridge, NJ, she knew she had to do something to stop it. “I was terrified to learn how much pollution was going to be dumped in the air,” she remembers.
So Lorin, a mother and nurse living in nearby Rahway, joined the Food & Water Action Central Jersey Volunteer team leading the fight against the power plant. In doing so, she became part of a statewide movement for climate action and environmental justice that has grown remarkably in the past few years.
To celebrate and build on this growth, Food & Water Watch hosted the first-ever New Jersey Climate Action Gathering this past April. The event brought together allies in environmental justice and labor organizing, as we work toward a shared goal: a just transition from dirty energy to a bright, clean future where no one gets left behind.
Almost 200 New Jerseyans attended the event, hosted at Rutgers University: organizers, academics, workers, students, and families. Together, we danced and played music; shared meals and stories. In workshops and discussions, attendees detailed their victories and strategies. Leaders from across the movement shared their knowledge and experiences from previous wins, while outlining what’s next for New Jersey and the major obstacles we face.
Afro-Cuban band Zona Oriente kicks off the gathering with live music and dancing.
“Designed to get people into action on several specific in-the-streets campaigns and legislative battles, the Gathering did so by first getting participants moving to lively music and dance instructions provided by local group Zona Oriente… It was fun, it was energizing, and it created a sense of unity and possibility in the standing-room-only crowd that filled the venue.”— Keith Voos, chair of NAACP Metuchen-Edison’s Environmental Justice Committee.
Environmental Justice and a Just Transition Are Key to Climate Action
With 50 organizations, local residents, and volunteers, our campaign against the CPV2 plant achieved victory in October 2023. “We created a unique, unstoppable grassroots movement,” said Lauren at the Climate Action Gathering; one that made clear “that the era for gas plant development in New Jersey is over.” Now, we’re building on this momentum to stop more dirty projects across the state.
In June 2023, Food & Water Watch joined allies to march and rally in Newark, calling on Governor Murphy to stop gas plants proposed in Newark and Kearny.
Many of these projects have been proposed for communities already overburdenedwith pollution, like the gas plant planned for Woodbridge. These environmental justice communities are often majority low-income or majority people-of-color, so that pollution builds on existing economic and racial injustices.
We know that we need to end dirty energy like gas-fired power plants. But we also know there are workers who currently depend on these industries to make a living. That’s why a Just Transition to clean energy is so important.
We need to ensure that as we rapidly phase out fossil fuels, workers get the support they need to transition away, too. At the same time, growing clean energy industries must provide high-paying union jobs.
As we say at Food & Water Watch, we’re building a livable future for all. And that means building a broad, diverse coalition of allies that lifts up environmental and economic justice. Unlike earlier environmental movements, Food & Water Watch and our allies are making sure that climate policy does right by workers, families, and frontline communities.
Moreover, we know that the only antidote to corporate greed and moneyed interests is people power. Politically, a wide coalition is absolutely necessary to fight these interests and build that livable future.
Esta energía limpia que el Gobernador Murphy ha hablado tanto no solamente sea para las grandes corporaciones y millonarios — sino que tambien la comunidad inmigrante pobre tenga acceso a esta energía limpia.
The clean energy that Governor Murphy has talked about so much should not only be for the big corporations and millionaires — the immigrant and poor communities should have access to this clean energy.— Reynalda Cruz Perez, keynote panelist and organizer with New Labor
We’re Fighting False Climate Solutions That Threaten Environmental Injustice
Dirty energy companies know that the movement against them is growing. So they’re creating new strategies to continue profiting from pollution, while claiming to benefit the planet. These include climate scams like carbon capture and storage, which aims to pull emissions from polluting facilities and “store” them underground.
These scams don’t actually fight climate change. Instead, they distract time and resources from the real solutions, like renewables and battery storage. Moreover, these scams are getting billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded support, lining corporations’ pockets.
They also perpetuate environmental injustice by failing to cut pollution at the source. For instance, the carbon capture industry won’t help us end fracking or drilling; in fact, it encourages more fossil fuels, by claiming it can keep emissions out of the atmosphere. That means drilling, fracking, and fossil fuel-power will continue to pollute neighboring environmental justice communities.
“Historically, communities of color have been left behind in our country. Let’s not leave communities of color and low-income communities behind while we fight climate change.”— Dr. Nicky Sheats, keynote panelist and Director of Kean University’s Center for the Urban Environment
Right now, we’re seizing several opportunities in the state legislature to combat these scams and push for real solutions.
For the past few years, we’ve worked to improve a Clean Energy Standard bill so it only supports real clean energy. We’ve also been fighting a “Dirty Gas Ripoff” bill that would subsidize mis-named “renewable natural gas” while raising folks’ energy bills.
In November 2023, Food & Water Watch joined allies in Trenton to call for truly 100% real clean energy in New Jersey.
This year, we’re also facing down a bill that would create a “low carbon” fuel standard. While boosters claim it would clean up New Jersey’s transportation sector, it would only really prop up greenwashing scams like factory farm gas.
We’re Building an Inclusive, Intersectional, Irresistible Movement in New Jersey
The Climate Action Gathering didn’t only celebrate victories — we also surveyed the challenges we face and how we can work on them together. For many participants interested in climate action but unsure of where to start, the gathering was an entry point. Others were veteran activists looking to make new allies and connect with other groups.
“This event brought people from many groups together, which is far too rare in New Jersey,” said participant Mark Lesko. “We need to work together.”
At the Gathering’s workshops, participants heard from activists working on different campaigns across the state. Students calling on Princeton and Rutgers to divest from fossil fuels; community organizers fighting power plants, a fracked gas pipeline, a highway expansion, and more. Participants strategized tactics and brainstormed solutions together. They made plans for next steps at future actions and celebrated each other’s wins.
“I think we need to employ a lot of imagination and reject this idea that in order for our causes to win, somebody else has to lose. That’s not true. We can build alliances, we can build solidarity as a coalition.”— Brooke Helmick, keynote panelist and Policy Director at the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance
Panelists speak at the workshop “Front line unity to stop fossil fuels and transform the extraction economy in New Jersey,” sharing their experiences from site fights for environmental justice around the state.
Any grassroots organizing, including climate activism, can be incredibly challenging and sometimes disheartening. The stakes are high and our opponents are powerful. But we’ve seen in New Jersey and across the country that progress is possible. And we know that we gain energy and power when we come together and learn from each other.
“The all-day event was the most inspiring and, I believe, effective that I have attended in a lifetime of anti-war and social and environmental justice activism,” said Keith Voos, chair of NAACP Metuchen-Edison’s Environmental Justice Committee.
With events like this, we’re building the strategies, knowledge, and relationships we need to effect real change. As Food & Water Watch New Jersey Director Matt Smith put it,wwe’re building a movement that is “inclusive, intersectional, joyful, and irresistible.”
Watch the Event!
Check out the opening remarks of the NJ Climate Action Gathering and the keynote panel on “How We Organize to Win a Just Transition Off Fossil Fuels.”
Charlie Kratovil is the founder and editor of New Brunswick Today, and the winner of the Awbrey Award for Community-Oriented Local Journalism.
Mia DiFelice is a writer & editor with experience in publishing, design, research, and social media in environmental and nonprofit spaces.
[Oil Change International] Big oil and gas companies’ climate pledges and plans are dangerously inadequate, and put the world on a path to climate chaos and widespread harm to communities. The case for keeping oil, gas, and coal in the ground has never been stronger, but big oil and gas companies continue to resist and block a fast and fair transition to clean, renewable energy.
Oil Change International’s Big Oil Reality Check report assesses the climate pledges and plans of eight international oil and gas companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies, BP, Eni, Equinor, and ConocoPhillips – against 10 criteria representing the bare minimum for aligning with the Paris Agreement to limit global heating below 1.5°C.
Key Findings:
The Big Oil Reality Check report finds that these oil majors fail to align with international agreements to phase out fossil fuels and to limit global temperature rise to 1.5ºC. Every company is “Grossly Insufficient” or “Insufficient” on a majority of criteria. and three of them (Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil) are “Grossly Insufficient” – the lowest rating – on all criteria.
Combined, these 8 companies’ current oil and gas extraction plans are consistent with more than 2.4°C of global temperature rise,(1) likely leading to global devastation. These companies alone are on track to use 30% of our remaining carbon budget to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C.
Of the 8 analyzed companies, 6 have explicit goals to increase oil and gas production. Even those without such plans are advancing new fossil fuel projects and selling polluting assets rather than shutting them down, masking their actions as contributing to an energy transition while perpetuating climate pollution.
None of the 8 companies have set comprehensive targets to ensure their total emissions decline rapidly and consistently, starting now. Every company intends to rely on carbon capture and storage (CCS), offsets, and/or other methods that delay and distract from ending fossil fuels, and prolong the health and community safety impacts of dirty energy.
All of the companies fail to meet basic criteria for just transition plans for workers and communities where they operate. All of them fail to meet basic criteria on upholding human rights.
While last year the world committed to “transition away from fossil fuels” at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, the report reveals that oil and gas companies are moving in the opposite direction, by doubling down on drilling that unleashes damage to our climate and fuel disasters by poisoning us, our air, land, and water.
If oil and gas companies were serious about the climate crisis, the first way they’d show it would be ceasing to add new fuel to the fire – meaning no new exploration, expansion, or production of fossil fuels. Instead, 6 of the 8 companies (Chevron, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, ConocoPhillips, Equinor, and Eni) have explicit goals to increase oil and gas production.
Even those companies (BP and Shell) that don’t have explicit plans to increase total production are putting forward new fossil fuel projects for approval, while framing themselves as contributing to the energy transition with a different strategy: selling polluting assets to other companies who will almost certainly make sure those fossil fuels are burned. Selling polluting assets can make it look like BP and Shell are heading in a better direction, but unless oil and gas fields are retired, the reality is this strategy protects their bottom lines while climate pollution continues.
The Big Oil Reality Check report reveals that none of the companies we analyzed have set comprehensive targets to ensure their total emissions decline rapidly and consistently, starting now. Instead of phasing out production as rapidly as possible, every company intends to rely on carbon capture and storage (CCS), offsets, and/or other methods that delay and distract from ending fossil fuels, and prolong the health and community safety impacts of dirty energy. All are lobbying against climate action, greenwashing, and otherwise maneuvering to undermine the energy transition.
While many companies have co-opted the language of ‘just transition’ from labor and climate justice movements in recent years, all the companies fail to meet basic criteria for just transition plans for workers and communities where they operate. Five companies score “Grossly Insufficient” and three score “Insufficient.”
On upholding human rights, five score “Grossly Insufficient” and three score “Insufficient”. These companies’ track record when it comes to protecting human rights and Indigenous Peoples’ rights is deeply concerning. Each is experiencing resistance from frontline communities to their projects based on human rights, health, and/or safety concerns.
An Oil Change International investigation in March 2024 revealed that ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, BP, Shell, and Eni are all complicit in facilitating the supply of crude oil to Israel. This is in the context of the Israeli military’s ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and mounting evidence of war crimes. Human rights are non-negotiable and these companies’ apparent disregard for it is yet another reason they should not be trusted to take climate action.
Oil Change International (OCI) is a research, communications, and advocacy organization focused on exposing the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitating the ongoing transition to clean energy. Rooted in community solidarity and principled policy analysis, we work within larger movements to build a fossil free future.
Scientists said Maine’s climate is getting warmer and wetter, with significant implications for human health and infrastructure.
Data show the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1998, with 2023 ranking as the second warmest.
Sean Birkel, assistant professor of earth and climate sciences at the University of Maine and Maine’s state climatologist, said it has already led to an increase in extreme weather, with some recent storms in the state topping five inches of rain.
“I think all of us have now experienced heavy precipitation events that cause localized flooding, road damage, and also contributes to other infrastructure damage,” Birkel said.
Birkel noted projected increases in annual precipitation rates range between 5% and 14% by the end of the century, based on the rate of global greenhouse gas emissions. State officials aim to cut emissions by 45% over the next several years, as storms in January alone cost the state roughly $70 million in damages.
Scientists said Mainers accustomed to a more moderate climate will need to adapt to extended warming seasons and prepare for potential health effects.
Rebecca Lincoln, environmental epidemiologist at the Maine Center for Disease Control, said it includes mental health. She pointed out exposure to extreme weather events can exacerbate conditions such as depression, PTSD and anxiety, particularly in young people.
“These findings suggest to us that efforts to expand and improve Maine’s mental health services need to account for the potential mental health impacts of a changing climate,” Lincoln said.
Lincoln emphasized emergency preparedness efforts should account for an increased need for mental health services following climate emergencies. She added a warmer, wetter Maine also means an increase in mosquito and tick populations, which are expanding in northern regions. Nearly 3,000 cases of Lyme disease were diagnosed in 2023, which set a record.
The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found.
A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost.
A 3C temperature increase will cause “precipitous declines in output, capital and consumption that exceed 50% by 2100” the paper states. This economic loss is so severe that it is “comparable to the economic damage caused by fighting a war domestically and permanently”, it adds.
“There will still be some economic growth happening but by the end of the century people may well be 50% poorer than they would’ve been if it wasn’t for climate change,” said Adrien Bilal, an economist at Harvard who wrote the paper with Diego Känzig, an economist at Northwestern University.
“I think everyone could imagine what they would do with an income that is twice as large as it is now. It would change people’s lives.”
Bilal said that purchasing power, which is how much people are able to buy with their money, would already be 37% higher than it is now without global heating seen over the past 50 years. This lost wealth will spiral if the climate crisis deepens, comparable to the sort of economic drain often seen during wartime.
“Let’s be clear that the comparison to war is only in terms of consumption and GDP – all the suffering and death of war is the important thing and isn’t included in this analysis,” Bilal said. “The comparison may seem shocking, but in terms of pure GDP there is an analogy there. It’s a worrying thought.”
The paper places a much higher estimate on economic losses than previous research, calculating a social cost of carbon, which is the cost in dollars of damage done per each additional ton of carbon emissions, to be $1,056 per ton. This compares to a range set out by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that estimates the cost to be around $190 per ton.
Bilal said the new research takes a more “holistic” look at the economic cost of climate change by analyzing it on a global scale, rather than on an individual country basis. This approach, he said, captured the interconnected nature of the impact of heatwaves, storms, floods and other worsening climate impacts that damage crop yields, reduce worker productivity and reduce capital investment.
“They have taken a step back and linking local impacts with global temperatures,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the work and said it was significant. “If the results hold up, and I have no reason to believe they wouldn’t, they will make a massive difference in the overall climate damage estimates.”
The paper found that the economic impact of the climate crisis will be surprisingly uniform around the world, albeit with lower-income countries starting at a lower point in wealth. This should spur wealthy countries such as the US, the paper points out, to take action on reducing planet-heating emissions in its own economic interest.
Even with steep emissions cuts, however, climate change will bear a heavy economic cost, the paper finds. Even if global heating was restrained to little more than 1.5C (2.7F) by the end of the century, a globally agreed-upon goal that now appears to have slipped from reach, the GDP losses are still around 15%.
“That is still substantial,” said Bilal. “The economy may keep growing but less than it would because of climate change. It will be a slow-moving phenomenon, although the impacts will be felt acutely when they hit.”
The paper follows separate research released last month that found average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years compared to what they would’ve been without the climate crisis. Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather are projected to cause $38tn of destruction each year by mid-century, according to the research.
Both papers make clear that the cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels and curbing the impacts of climate change, while not trivial, pale in comparison to the cost of climate change itself. “Unmitigated climate change is a lot more costly than doing something about it, that is clear,” said Wagner.
This article was amended on 17 May 2024 because an earlier version misquoted Gernot Wagner in the last sentence.
Oliver Milman is an environment reporter for Guardian US. Twitter @olliemilman
Dhaka’s greater metropolitan area is home to 18 million residents. Many families live in the city’s most flood-prone areas | Credit: Frank Sedlar
We praise charity efforts to combat climate change in countries like Bangladesh as generous, without critiquing why they are made necessary in the first place.
My country, Bangladesh, is one of several at risk of becoming submerged partially or completely by rising sea levels caused by climate change in the coming decades. 75 percent of the country lies below sea level.
Bangladesh, a tropical country on top of a low-lying delta, is no stranger to flooding, especially during monsoon season. But the extent to which this flooding has taken place in recent years is unprecedented. Flooding in Sylhet and other northeastern districts of Bangladesh between May and June of 2022 displaced an estimated 15 million people – approximately 9 percent of the country – and toppled hundreds of villages in 2022 alone. Flooding and torrential rains in July 2020 led to the submerging of nearly a quarter of Bangladesh.
All of this flooding and damage has taken an undeniable toll on the nation. Data demonstrates that between 2000 and 2019, Bangladesh suffered $3.72 billion dollars worth of economic losses due to climate change. Despite its low carbon output both historically and in the present-day, the country is disproportionately impacted by climate change due to its location.
International and humanitarian organizations have responded to these annual crises as they always do: with donations upon donations upon donations. But using relief and donation requests to combat climate problems is a flawed approach. Humanitarianism stems from noble intentions, but societies have grown complacent with philanthropic interventions during crises, which avoid the duty to deal with structural issues.
We praise charity efforts as generous, without critiquing why they are made necessary in the first place. Take, for example, the members of the Bangladeshi army who gave up a day’s worth of their salary to contribute to flood-related fundraising efforts. Some international organizations are enacting preventative measures for climate disasters. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, for instance, has established different anticipatory action frameworks in what they deem “high risk countries,” which allowed them to allocate relief funds to Bangladesh even before the monsoon flooding started this year. Given the subsequent toll of the floods, it’s clear that even these preventative measures aren’t enough to mitigate these disasters.
All of this considered, it’s no surprise that numerous Bangladeshi politicians, who formerly took on active roles during national humanitarian crises, took a back seat.
We talk about Bangladesh’s climate crisis as if it was inevitable, as though Bangladesh is simply a victim of its location.
But the reality is much more sinister. Developed nations are largely responsible for the state of Bangladesh’s climate catastrophes.
Between 1765 and 1938, Britain plundered almost $45 trillion from the Indian subcontinent. Within this looting was “the financial bleeding of Bengal”, filled not only with the ransacking of its treasuries and towns for money, but the exploitation of its workers and artisans for complex and raw materials alike. It’s no surprise that British colonization and imperialism goes hand in hand with its industrialization, considering that the Industrial Revolution demanded cheap raw materials and money in order for factories to produce and over-produce and pollute. Essentially, it’s not inaccurate to say that a major reason for Bangladesh’s climate and flooding crisis is its colonization under the British Raj.
When we talk about CO2 emissions and responsibility, we need to focus on cumulative historical emissions, as those are the causes of the ongoing climate crisis. The data shows that 23 rich, developed countries, including the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France are responsible for half of all historical CO2 emissions, with more than 150 countries responsible for the other half.
Up until 1950, more than half of historical CO2 emissions were emitted by Europe, with the vast majority of European emissions being emitted by the UK. While the UK’s carbon imprint has lessened since then, should it not take responsibility for the consequences of its past actions? And today, rich countries like the U.S., Germany, and the UK are among the top 5 CO2-emitting countries. Why should Bangladesh have to suffer for the past and present extravagances of its colonizers?
Developed countries are primarily responsible for our current climate crisis, but it is developing countries that are the most vulnerable to its effects. Global warming, which has increased the economic inequality gap between the Global South and Global North by a whopping 25 percent, punishes the economically vulnerable over the rich, the colonized over the colonizers, and it’s clear, therefore, that this climate crisis isn’t just an environmental issue: it’s about colonialism and imperialism and poverty and every systemic structure that has inequality enshrined in its foundations.
Developed countries must take responsibility for the climate crisis they initiated by paying reparations for developing countries. And there’s a number of ways they could do this.
One very tangible way for developed countries to pay reparations is the reallocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). SDRs are supplementary foreign exchange reserve assets maintained by the International Monetary Fund. Certain numbers of them are distributed to banks and treasuries around the world, allowing financial institutions fallback options when they need to dip into their financial reserves during crises. However, SDRs are currently allocated by quota, which means that low-income developing countries like Bangladesh receive 1.4 percent, high-income developing countries like China receive 22 percent, and rich countries such as the US and the UK receive over 60 percent. Of course, rich countries rarely, if ever, need to dip into their SDRs, whereas low-income countries often rely upon theirs. Ending this quota system and reallocating SDRs to the countries most vulnerable to climate change is a feasible way to dedicate existing resources to climate change mitigation. Considering that they don’t even use their SDRs, developed countries have no incentive not to do this.
In the same vein, countries could assist developing countries in undertaking various climate mitigation and adaptation projects. Climate mitigation refers to actions that involve reducing the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, either by reducing the point source pollution (eg. the burning of fossil fuels for electricity) or by enhancing the sinks that store these gases (eg. forests).
Currently, around 63 percent of Bangladesh’s energy comes from natural gas. While the government is exploring alternate renewable energy sources, the country is already enduring a massive energy crisis leading to widespread load-shedding. Bangladesh can’t just simply make the switch from one energy source to another. However, developed nations could funnel resources towards Bangladeshi projects to develop renewable, well-explored sources of energy such as tidal and wind, stopping a bad situation from getting worse.
Climate adaptation is just as necessary as climate mitigation. Developed countries could aid in numerous climate adaptability projects, including working with local farmers to develop new agricultural practices less vulnerable to the floods, strengthening coastal tracts of land, preventing the salinization of already scarce drinking water, or building “climate-friendly towns.” While NGOs have aided Bangladesh in these ventures, developed countries should also use their own resources in this transformation.
But climate change devastation simply can’t be avoided through mitigation and adaptation techniques alone: frontline countries need financial support to repair from inevitable disasters. The economic costs among developing countries for these losses and damages is expected to reach $200-580 billion by 2030. The Glasgow Dialogue was established by the 2021 UN Climate Change conference (or colloquially, COP26) in response to calls from developing nations regarding assistance during environmental climate crises. Zoha Shawoo, scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, outlines different principles the UN and developed nations could use for financing loss and damage, like providing a needs-based finance on a country-by-country basis or ensuring that national systems are used to distribute the funds.
All countries owe climate refugees recognition and safe harbor. Over 21.5 million people across the world have already been displaced due to climate change. However, many countries, including the US, don’t actually recognize climate refugees as “refugees”. Those who face persecution not from other people but from human-induced environmental threats are often unable to apply for asylum or access shelter, food, or basic necessities. This neglect causes climate refugees to, as NPR puts it, “fall between the cracks”.
Developed nations act less concerned about climate change because, in the next few decades, at least, disasters and sea-level changes won’t entirely disrupt or affect them (and also because corporations profit off environmental degradation). But we fail to recognize how global and interconnected our world is now. Bangladesh, for instance, is among the top exporters of textiles in the world. When it goes underwater, that void can’t easily be filled by some other developing country taking up the burden. While climate change losses may seem relatively small now, the positive feedback loop of global warming means each and every one of them will have massive global ramifications in the future.
At its core, climate change is a form of genocide — not only human and environmental genocide, but cultural genocide too. With every inch of Bangladesh that goes under, every village that’s lost, every province flooded, a part of Bengali culture disappears with it: customs forgotten, ancestral homelands abandoned and submerged. Those of us from developing and formerly colonized countries have already lost so much, have already had so much of our histories erased through the imperialism and dehumanization of our peoples. We are strong—undergoing colonization necessitated that strength—but how much more can we bear?
If Bangladesh sinks – when Bangladesh sinks – it won’t be an abstract environmental loss, but the last breath of a people that started dying the minute the British landed on Indian soil. Developed countries created this climate disaster. Now they need to fix it.
Tapti Sen is an Inequality.org Next Leader at the Institute for Policy Studies
Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed.
Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.
Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.
“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” said Gretta Pecl, at the University of Tasmania. “[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”
But many said the climate fight must continue, however high global temperature rose, because every fraction of a degree avoided would reduce human suffering.
Peter Cox, at the University of Exeter, UK, said: “Climate change will not suddenly become dangerous at 1.5C – it already is. And it will not be ‘game over’ if we pass 2C, which we might well do.”
The Guardian approached every contactable lead author or review editor of IPCC reports since 2018. Almost half replied, 380 of 843. The IPCC’s reports are the gold standard assessments of climate change, approved by all governments and produced by experts in physical and social sciences. The results show that many of the most knowledgeable people on the planet expect climate havoc to unfold in the coming decades.
The climate crisis is already causing profound damage to lives and livelihoods across the world, with only 1.2C (2.16F) of global heating on average over the past four years. Jesse Keenan, at Tulane University in the US, said: “This is just the beginning: buckle up.”
Nathalie Hilmi, at the Monaco Scientific Centre, who expects a rise of 3C, agreed: “We cannot stay below 1.5C.”
The experts said massive preparations to protect people from the worst of the coming climate disasters were now critical. Leticia Cotrim da Cunha, at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said: “I am extremely worried about the costs in human lives.”
The 1.5C target was chosen to prevent the worst of the climate crisis and has been seen as an important guiding star for international negotiations. Current climate policies mean the world is on track for about 2.7C, and the Guardian survey shows few IPCC experts expect the world to deliver the huge action required to reduce that.
Younger scientists were more pessimistic, with 52% of respondents under 50 expecting a rise of at least 3C, compared with 38% of those over 50. Female scientists were also more downbeat than male scientists, with 49% thinking global temperature would rise at least 3C, compared with 38%. There was little difference between scientists from different continents.
Dipak Dasgupta, at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, said: “If the world, unbelievably wealthy as it is, stands by and does little to address the plight of the poor, we will all lose eventually.”
The experts were clear on why the world is failing to tackle the climate crisis. A lack of political will was cited by almost three-quarters of the respondents, while 60% also blamed vested corporate interests, such as the fossil fuel industry.
Many also mentioned inequality and a failure of the rich world to help the poor, who suffer most from climate impacts. “I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the global south,” said a South African scientist, who chose not to be named. “The world’s response to date is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools.”
About a quarter of the IPCC experts who responded thought global temperature rise would be kept to 2C or below but even they tempered their hopes.
“I am convinced that we have all the solutions needed for a 1.5C path and that we will implement them in the coming 20 years,” said Henry Neufeldt, at the UN’s Copenhagen Climate Centre. “But I fear that our actions might come too late and we cross one or several tipping points.”
Lisa Schipper, at University of Bonn in Germany, said: “My only source of hope is the fact that, as an educator, I can see the next generation being so smart and understanding the politics.”
Damian Carrington is an environment editor at the Guardian
Professor Jason Hickle | credit: Progressive International
Thank you to PI for organizing this event, and thank you to our Cuban hosts, who have kept this revolution alive against extraordinary odds. The US blockade against Cuba, like the genocide in Gaza, is a constant reminder of the egregious violence of the imperialist world order and why we must overcome it.
So too is the ecological crisis. Comrades. I do not need to tell you about the severity of the situation we are in. It stares every sane observer in the face. But the dominant analysis of this crisis and what to do about it is woefully inadequate. We call it the Anthropocene, but we must be clear: it is not humans as such that are causing this crisis. Ecological breakdown is being driven by the capitalist economic system, and – like capitalism itself – is strongly characterized by colonial dynamics.
This is clear when it comes to climate change. The countries of the global North are responsible for around 90% of all cumulative emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary – in other words, the emissions that are driving climate breakdown. By contrast the global South, by which I mean all of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are together responsible for only about 10%, and in fact most global South countries remain within their fair shares of the planetary boundary and have therefore not contributed to the crisis at all.
And yet, the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown are set to affect the territories of the global South, and indeed this is already happening. The South suffers 80-90% the economic costs and damages inflicted by climate breakdown, and around 99% of all climate-related deaths. It would be difficult to overstate the scale of this injustice. With present policy, we are headed for around 3 degrees of global warming. At this level some 2 billion people across the tropics will be exposed to extreme heat and substantially increased mortality risk; droughts will destabilize agricultural systems and lead to multi-breadbasket failures; and hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes.
Climate breakdown is a process of atmospheric colonization. The atmosphere is a shared commons, on which all of us depend for our existence, and the core economies have appropriated it for their own enrichment, with devastating consequences for all of life on Earth, which are playing out along colonial lines. For the global South in particular, this crisis is existential and it must be stopped.
But so far our ruling classes are failing to do this. In 2015 the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees or “well below” 2 degrees, while upholding the principle of equity. To achieve this goal, high-income countries, which have extremely high per capita emissions, must achieve extremely rapid decarbonization.
This is not occurring. In fact, at existing rates, even the best-performing high-income countries will take more than 200 years to bring emissions to zero, burning their fair-shares of the Paris-compliant carbon budget many times over. Dealing with the climate crisis is not complicated. We know exactly what needs to be done, but we are not doing it. Why? Because of capitalism.
If I wish to get one point across today, it is this: the climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better. Let me briefly describe what I mean.
The core defining feature of capitalism is that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. Yes, many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect candidates from time to time. But when it comes to the economic system, the system of production, not even the shallowest illusion of democracy is allowed to enter. Production is controlled by capital: large corporations, commercial banks, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets… they are the ones who determine what to produce and how to use our collective labour and our planet’s resources.
And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or achieve social objectives. Rather, it is to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. So we get massive investment in producing things like fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef, cruise ships and weapons, because these things are highly profitable to capital.
But we get chronic underinvestment in necessary things like renewable energy, public transit and regenerative agriculture, because these are much less profitable to capital or not profitable at all. This is a critically important point to grasp. In many cases renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels! But they have much lower profit margins, because they are less conducive to monopoly power. So investment keeps flowing to fossil fuels, even while the world burns.
Relying on capital to deliver an energy transition is a dangerously bad strategy. The only way to deal with this crisis is with public planning. On the one hand, we need massive public investment in renewable energy, public transit and other decarbonization strategies. And this should not just be about derisking private capital – it should be about public production of public goods. To do this, simply issue the national currency to mobilize the productive forces for the necessary objectives, on the basis of need not on the basis of profit.
Now, massive public investment like this could drive inflation if it bumps up against the limits of the national productive capacity. To avoid this problem you need to reduce private demands on the productive forces. First, cut the purchasing power of the rich; and second, introduce credit regulations on commercial banks to limit their investments in ecologically destructive sectors that we want to get rid of anyway: fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, etc.
What this does is it shifts labour and resources away from servicing the interests of capital accumulation and toward achieving socially and ecologically necessary objectives. This is a socialist ecological strategy, and it is the only thing that will save us. Solving the ecological crisis requires achieving democratic control over the means of production. We need to be clear about this fact and begin building now the political movements that are necessary to achieve such a transformation.
Now, it should be obvious to everyone at this point that for the global South, this requires economic sovereignty. You cannot do ecological planning if you do not have sovereign control over your national productive forces! Struggle for national economic liberation is the precondition for ecological transition, and it can be achieved with the six steps that my comrade Ndongo Samba Sylla outlined yesterday.
So that is the horizon. But at the same time we must advance our multilateral bargaining positions. This is what we need to do:
First, we need to push for universal adoption of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. This treaty overcomes the major limitation of the Paris Agreement in that focuses squarely on the objective of scaling down the fossil fuel industry on a binding annual schedule. The objective here is to do this in a fair and just way: rich countries must lead with rapid reductions, global South countries must be guaranteed access to sufficient energy for development, and those that are dependent on fossil fuel exports for foreign currency must be provided with a safe offramp that prevents any economic instability.
Second, global South negotiators must collaborate to demand much faster decarbonization in the global North, consistent with their fair-shares of the remaining carbon budget.
Third, we must demand substantial resource transfers to the global South. Because the global North has devoured most of the carbon budget, it owes compensation to the global South for the additional mitigation costs that this imposes. Our research shows that this is set to be about $192 trillion between now and 2050, or about 6.4 trillion dollars per year. Conveniently, this amount can be provided by a 3.5% yearly wealth tax targeting the richest 10% in the global North.
Of course, we should be clear about the fact that Western governments will not do any of this voluntarily. And it is not reasonable for us to place our hope in the goodwill of states that have never cared about the interests of the South or the welfare of its people.
The alternative is for global South governments to unite and collectively leverage the specific forms of power that they have in the world system. Western economies are totally dependent on resources from the South. In fact, around 50% of all materials consumed in the global North are net-appropriated from the South. This is a travesty of justice but it is also a crucial point of leverage. Global South governments can and should form commodity cartels to force the imperialist states to take more radical action toward decarbonization and climate justice.
And, by the way, speaking of South-South solidarity, global South governments should negotiate access to renewable energy technologies by establishing swap lines with China so that these can be obtained outside of the imperialist currencies.
Comrades. We stand at a fork in the road. We can stick with the status quo and watch helplessly as our world burns… or we can unite and set a new course for human history. The Southern struggle for liberation is the true agent of world-historical transformation. The world is waiting. This is the generation. Now is the moment. Hasta la victoria siempre.
Dr. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Chair Professor of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. He is Associate Editor of the journal World Development, and serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, the Rodney Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health.
Maine youth and environmentalists are suing the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for what they allege is a failure to take action on cutting carbon emissions.
Conservation Law Foundation, Maine Youth Action and the Sierra Club filed a petition in the Maine Superior Court against the DEP for not following a 2019 law that requires the state to cut its carbon emissions 45% by 2030 and 80% by 2050.
“Our generation will inherit a state overwhelmed by carbon emissions and climate change — with damage to the environment, to marine life, and to our own health — if we can’t start making these changes now,” said Cole Cochrane, co-founder and policy director of Maine Youth Action.
The DEP declined to comment about the suit. However, Gov. Janet Mills put out a proclamation Monday in honor of Earth Day saying the state has made “extraordinary progress toward our climate goals,” referring to the state’s climate action plan, Maine Won’t Wait, that is intended to act as a roadmap for businesses and communities to urgently take action.
However, the environmental groups bringing the lawsuit claim the state has failed to take any significant steps to lower emissions since the law was enacted five years ago.
For example, the lawsuit includes the Board of Environmental Protection due to its recent rejection of a rule that would have required clean, electric vehicles to make up the majority of new car sales by 2030. The board rejected that rule last month in part because of what it said were lingering questions about the policy, as well as because they believed such a large decision would be better placed in the hands of elected officials.
With transportation contributing nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions in Maine, climate advocates supported the rule as a means to curb pollution while expanding vehicle options for consumers.
“The failure in curbing emissions from cars and trucks — Maine’s biggest source of pollution — has been stark,” said the release about the lawsuit.
The lawsuit argues that Maine citizens represented by the groups have suffered harms related to the lack of action to address climate change, including “property and financial impacts due to sea level rise and other climate change effects; impacts on winter recreational activities that are snow- or ice- dependent; negative health impacts from elongated and worsened allergy seasons; and consumer harm from lack of choice of affordable zero emission vehicles in Maine.”
“Defendants’ failure or refusal to fulfill their obligations causes these harms by failing to mitigate and protect Maine residents from the worst effects of climate change,” the suit states.
Emily K. Green, senior attorney for Conservation Law Foundation Maine, said the parties don’t want to have to go to the courts to pursue climate action. “Environmentalists, health advocates, concerned young people — all of us want to work with the state to cut these emissions, curb climate change, and improve respiratory and heart health,” Green said. “We shouldn’t have to sue to make that happen.”
Though not directly named in the suit, a proposed constitutional amendment that would grant Mainers the right to a clean and healthy environment has also faced inaction in the Maine Legislature. The bill, LD 928, was tabled by the Maine House of Representatives in April 2023 and remained untouched. With the close of the legislative session, that bill will die without a floor vote.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to note the DEP declined to comment on the suit.
AnnMarie Hilton grew up in a suburb of Chicago and studied journalism at Northwestern University. Before coming to Maine, she covered education for newspapers in Wisconsin and Indiana.
Climate activists with Stop the Money Pipeline held a rally in New York City to urge Wall Street banks to stop funding fossil fuel projects on April 17. 2021 | Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
If Amazon and Apple and Microsoft wanted to avoid a world where, by century’s end, people had 60% less money to spend on buying whatever they plan on selling, then they should be putting pressure on their banks to stop making the problem worse.
A new study released today in Nature examines data from 1,600 regions of the earth for the last 40 years, and concludes that by 2050 climate change will be causing economic damage worth $38 trillion every single year. That seems like… a lot. The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year. $38 trillion is 150 Bezoses (which is sick in its own way).
If those numbers seem impossible to comprehend, then let Bloombergbreak it down for you, “planetary warming will result in an income reduction of 19% globally by mid-century, compared to a global economy without climate change.”
This is the largest study of this kind I know of; it comes from the Potsdam Institute in Germany, and as James Murray, writing in BusinessGreen points out, it’s more “granular and empirical” than past efforts. It concludes that these losses are already locked in, thanks to the carbon and methane we’ve already poured into the air.
“Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected,” said PIK scientist and co-author of the study, Maximilian Kotz.
“These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure… We find that economies across the world are committed to an average income loss of 19% by 2049 due to past emissions. This corresponds to a 17% reduction in global GDP.”
If anything, as Murray points out, the numbers are quite likely conservative:
The projected damages are mainly the result of rising average temperatures and changes in rainfall and temperature variability. But other weather extremes that are harder to model, such as storms or wildfires, could result in higher economic costs. The study also assumes that over time economies start to adapt to more intense climate impacts, serving to curb the resulting negative economic impacts. As climate scientists have repeatedly warned, there are plausible scenarios where some regions find it near impossible to adapt and development is thrown into reverse. Such outcomes would trigger huge geopolitical risks that could impact the entire global economy.
What might cause even deeper problems? Just for fun, read another European study from last week, on the rapid slowdown in the Atlantic Ocean circulation and the possible looming shutdown of the entire system.
Oh, and if we don’t take strong action now to limit the rise in temperature, then the economic losses just keep growing—that 19% at mid-century becomes 60% by 2100, when people currently being born will still be alive, and cursing us.
There are a couple of things to say here.
One, some of you may remember the famous Limits to Growth report from the early 1970s. It predicted that without serious efforts to change our demands on the planet, economic growth would begin to suffer right about now. We thought about it as a society and then, with the election of Ronald Reagan, rejected it; we are now harvesting that bitter fruit. If we don’t act now then our children may wish they still had bitter fruit to harvest.
These people are supposed to care about money, and for once it would help us if they actually did.
Two, capitalism—which regularly acts homicidally—is acting truly suicidally. Having been warned for years now, it resists every effort to rein in its excesses. As Exxon’s CEO helpfully explained earlier this year, it’s not that you couldn’t make good money from renewable energy—you just couldn’t make “above average returns” because sunshine is free. So instead we’ll tank the world, and with it the world economy (which is a subset of the first, not the other way round).
In Europe, for instance, climate protest has finally persuaded regulators to start slowing loans to the fossil fuel industry—but new data this week makes it clear that the slack is being taken up by American banks, and not just the mighty money center banks that are already most deeply implicated in this immoral trade. Now regional banks are taking it up too:
Some of the U.S. regional banks stepping up oil, gas, and coal lending are based in states that have either passed or are reviewing anti-ESG laws. In Oklahoma, which enforced its Energy Discrimination Elimination Act in late 2022, local bank BOK Financial recently soared up the league table to become one of the world’s 30 busiest dealmakers in fossil fuels.
Marisol Salazar, senior vice president and manager for energy banking at BOK Financial, says the bank is now seeing “much more opportunities” in the fossil-fuel industry.
“We’re not just picking up customers,” she said. “We’re also picking up talent, we’re picking up engineers, we’re picking up investment bankers, we’re picking up experienced relationship managers.”
All of this makes even more important the release of the Carbon Bankroll 2.0 report earlier this spring. You’ll recall the first version of this report a year ago, which made it clear that for many companies—Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and on and on—the bulk of their carbon emissions came from the cash they kept in the bank, where it got lent out to build more fossil fuel infrastructure. That’s because, as the new report makes clear,
If the largest banks and asset managers in the U.S. were a country, they would be the third-largest emitting country in the world, behind China and the U.S.
So let’s think about this for a moment. If Amazon and Apple and Microsoft wanted to avoid a world where, by century’s end, people had 60% less money to spend on buying whatever phones and software and weird junk (doubtless weirder by then) they plan on selling, then they should be putting pressure on their banks to stop making the problem worse. They should also be unleashing their lobbying teams to demand climate action from Congress.
These people are supposed to care about money, and for once it would help us if they actually did. Stop putting out ads about how green your products are—start making this system you dominate actually work.
This is not a radical proposition. A radical—and probably wise, if unlikely—proposition would be get past capitalism. But for the moment this is where we are, and the people who dominate it have an obligation to make it work, if only out of their own sad self-interest.
Here’s how the unradical Todd Stern—longtime American climate negotiator at international talks—put it in a quite powerful speech he gave last week in the U.K.:
“We are slowed down by those who think of themselves as grownups and believe decarbonisation at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic.”
“They say that we need to slow down, that what is being proposed [in cuts to greenhouse gas emissions] is unrealistic,” he told The Observer. “You see it a lot in the business world too. It’s really hard [to push for more urgency] because those ‘grownups’ have a lot of influence.”
Stern says that the ‘grownups’ will only listen when the rest of us push:
The original Earth Day in 1970 happened in a societal moment that isn’t easily replicated, but it does teach that there is still more to do in filling the streets and campuses with young people and people young at heart who see the danger of climate change for what it is.
What that original Earth Day represented was not just norm change but a sociopolitical tipping point in environmental concern—the kind of positive tipping point we need to reach on climate change as well. And it will come. But it has to be our collective mission to make it come sooner.
Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?.” He also authored “The End of Nature,” “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet,” and “Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.”
When you live far from the sprawling fields befitting utility-scale solar and wind farms, it’s easy to feel like clean energy isn’t coming online fast enough. But renewables have grown at a staggering rate since 2014 and now account for 22 percent of the nation’s electricity. Solar alone has grown an impressive eightfold in 10 years.
The sun and the wind have been the country’s fastest growing sources of energy over the past decade, according to a report released by the nonprofit Climate Central on Wednesday. Meanwhile, coal power has declined sharply, and the use of methane to generate electricity has all but leveled off. With the Inflation Reduction Act poised to kick that growth curve higher with expanded tax credits for manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, the most optimistic projections suggest that the country is getting ever closer to achieving its 2030 and 2035 clean energy goals.
“I think the rate at which renewables have been able to grow is just something that most people don’t recognize,” said Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was not involved in preparing the report.
In the decade analyzed by Climate Central, solar went from generating less than half a percent of the nation’s electricity to producing nearly 4 percent. In that same period, wind grew from 4 percent to roughly 10. Once hydropower, geothermal, and biomass are accounted for, nearly a quarter of the nation’s grid was powered by renewable electricity in 2023, with the share only expected to rise thanks to the continued surge in solar.
The vast majority of the nation’s solar capacity comes from utility-scale installations with at least one megawatt of capacity (enough to power over a hundred homes, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association). But panels installed on rooftops, parking lots, and other comparatively small sites contributed a combined 48,000 megawatts across the country.
“One thing that surprised a lot of different people who’ve read the report in our office was the strength of small-scale solar,” said Jen Brady, the lead analyst on the Climate Central report.
With residential and other small arrays accounting for 34 percent of the nation’s available capacity, “it lets you know that maybe you could do something in your community, in your home that can help contribute to it,” Brady said.
Still, the buildout of utility-scale solar farms continues to set the pace for how rapidly renewable energy can feed the country’s grid. According to Sam Ricketts, a clean energy consultant and former climate policy advisor to Washington Governor Jay Inslee, solar’s growth was driven by production and investment tax credits that President Barack Obama extended in 2015 and President Joe Biden expanded through the Inflation Reduction Act or IRA. Beyond these federal incentives that allow energy developers to claim tax credits equivalent to 30 percent of the installation cost of renewables, state policies that proactively drive clean energy or promote a competitive market in which the dwindling price of renewables allows them to outshine fossil fuels have been critical to ratcheting up growth. Yet, even with the accelerating expansion seen in the last decade, more investments and incentives are needed.
“As rapid as that growth has been, how do we make it all go that much faster?” Ricketts asked. “Because we need to be building renewables and electricity at about three times the speed that we have been over the last few years.”
Achieving that rate of buildout is critical for achieving two of President Biden’s climate goals: cutting emissions economy-wide by at least half by 2030 and achieving 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035.
To realize those goals, the nation must reach 80 percent clean energy by 2030. “I dare say it’s even more important, for the time being than 100 percent clean by 2035,” Ricketts said. Hitting that benchmark, he said, will require more federal and state policy pushes. Levin agrees.
“The IRA does a lot,” she said, “but it is not likely to do everything.”
The IRA has the ability to push renewable energy from roughly 40 percent of the nation’s energy mix, when nuclear is included, to more than 60 percent — or, in the most optimistic of scenarios, 77 percent.
But for the growth in capacity to be integrated into the system and utilized, the grid needs to be able to transmit electrons from far-off solar fields and wind farms to the places where they’re needed. While the transmission conversation most often revolves around building new lines and transmission towers, Levin notes that recent technological advances have made it possible to address half of these transmission needs simply by stringing new, advanced power lines on existing infrastructure that can handle bigger loads with fewer losses, in a process called “reconductoring.”
The other challenge that comes with building out clean energy is learning how to handle the way wind speeds and sunshine fluctuate. While this is often levied as an argument against their reliability, Levin points out that a host of solutions exist — from expanding battery storage to adjusting loads when demand spikes — to ensure they’re reliable. The challenge is adopting them.
“Utilities are risk averse,” she said, “and their commissions can also be risk averse. And so it’s getting them to be comfortable with thinking about the way that they provide electricity and the way that they manage their system a little differently.”
Syris Valentine is an essayist, journalist, and fiction writer focused on illuminating solutions in a time of crisis. Through freelance reporting and independent writing for Just Progress, their blog and newsletter, Syris explores concurrent crises of ecology and economy we’re living through. They use their writing as a means to share the questions (and occasional answers) they encounter through their exploration.
July 2023 was the hottest month in 100,000 years, followed immediately by extreme floods and storms. In the UK and across the world, extreme weather, bad harvests and altered ecosystems are changing how and where we live. People have always moved, yet as the climate crisis worsens, and the impacts on people in marginalised communities become more severe, more people have to leave their homes.
Yet, rather than investing in policies that will benefit all of us, governments in the Global North increasingly view border controls, walls and surveillance as a way to control the impacts of the climate crisis. They spend billions propping up the border and surveillance industry that profits from the abuse of migrants.
The Transnational Institute finds that the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are spending, on average, 2.3 times as much on arming their borders as they are on climate finance. This figure is as high as 15 times as much for the worst offenders.
The UK has spent approximately $2.7 billion on border militarisation per year between 2013 and 2018, and just $977 million on climate financing for countries most affected by the crisis.
2023 saw a rise in state violence towards people on the move by those in positions of power in the UK. From a laundry list of horror comes the establishment of unsafe detention accommodation, eye-watering visa fee hikes which will tear families apart, to the recent passing of the Government’s inhumane Rwanda Bill.
British political leaders are using cruelty to line corporate pockets, to find scapegoats for their own policy failures and to pander to far-right nationalists. We cannot allow this. Whether people are in search of safety due to climate or conflict, or are on the move for stability or love, safe pathways should always be the answer.
Calls for action
Given the choice, most people hope to not have to leave their homes and communities, but the dangers of climate breakdown can leave no other choice. For example, when faced with drought, people in rural areas may need or want to move to find work to protect their incomes.
Some people will see migration as the best option for coping with climate impacts. Others will need to move simply to protect their lives and livelihoods. They should be able to do this safely and legally, without fear or intimidation.
The ability to move ensures that people are able to adapt to the changing environment around them. Migration must be part of the solution to the climate crisis.
At the same time, it is up to rich, polluting countries in the Global North to support countries and communities to mitigate against the crisis that they have typically done the least to cause. In this light, climate and migrant organisations are coming together internationally to campaign around two key principles: The right to stay – to defend communities from the impacts of climate breakdown – and the right to move safely and with dignity when staying isn’t possible.
These principles help to guide positive action on climate and migration in different national and international arenas. At the UN climate talks (COP28) that took place in Dubai during December 2023, national and international action on climate change had been in the spotlight.
Activists both at the negotiations and around the world are fighting for an immediate transition away from fossil fuels that is centred in justice for refugees, migrants, Indigenous and First Nations people.
In the UK, over 125 climate and migrant groups have called on the government to recognise how climate change is impacting people’s lives and work to protect them. Their open letter laid out a set of demands to parliamentary party leaders to ensure legal rights for people on the move; provide climate finance for adaptation and loss and damage to affected communities, and ensure the fair and equitable phase out of fossil fuels.
What was the impact at COP28?
As with every UN climate talk, much has been made of the agreement reached at the end of the event. Focus has predominantly been on the stated commitments to transition away from fossil fuels, and whether the agreement is sufficient.
In order to protect communities from the impacts of climate change, this must happen immediately. It must be done in a way that is fair, funded, and led by those responsible for the climate crisis. However, the agreement made no explicit mention of ‘phasing out fossil fuels’.
In fact, it encourages countries to burn more ‘transition fuels’ like natural gas, relying on unproven carbon capture technologies to offset the pollution. This indicates the overwhelming influence of over 2,400 fossil fuel lobbyists who attended the conference, as well as vested interests in Global North states to continue to profit from the status quo.
Furthermore, the agreement does nothing to provide meaningful financing to enable countries in the Global South to transition from fossil fuels, to adapt to the effects of climate breakdown nor cover the loss and damage caused. Commitments to the loss and damage fund currently cover less than 0.2 per cent of what is needed globally, with the UK pledging just £60m.
Additionally, little progress was made on climate and migration at COP28. Whilst there are other multilateral spaces where these issues are negotiated (eg. Platform on Disaster Displacement), the UN climate talks will have a role in financing relocation projects and compensating communities who have to move because of climate impacts.
Currently, International law provides incomplete and patchy protection for people moving due to the impacts of climate change. Many people crossing borders due to climate driven disasters will fall between the cracks of existing international legal frameworks.
Migration must not only be recognised as a positive tool for climate adaptation – with mechanisms for safe pathways made into international law – but also welcomed by countries, particularly in the Global North.
Building from the ground up
In the face of powerful lobbies, climate delay and crisis, climate justice and migrant justice movements are coming together to fight for a positive future. One centred on the right to stay and the right to move, supporting each other and building solidarity across movements.
In the UK, this means supporting groups that resist the hostile environment locally, protecting migrants of any kind from the rapid escalation of dehumanising rhetoric, policies and abuse.
We must stand together and make the case for migration as a positive tool for climate adaptation in national and international policy. This must be rooted in solidarity with those most impacted by racist border systems both here and globally.
There is no climate justice without migrant justice.
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 