At Global Climate Talks, Food Systems Changes Are Kept Off the Table / by Ayurella Horn-Muller

_{^{via Znet}}

At the G7 summit and the annual Bonn Climate Change Conference, talks glossed over big agriculture’s climate impact

_{Reposted from Znet}

Last week, the leaders of the world’s seven biggest economies convened in Italy to discuss several pressing global issues during the annual gathering known as the G7 summit. They agreed to lend Russia’s frozen assets to Ukraine, pushed for a ceasefire in Gaza, and pledged to launch a migration coalition.

Those discussions, which concluded Saturday, came right on the heels of the annual Bonn Climate Change Conference, which sets the foundation for the United Nations’ yearly climate gathering. In Bonn, Germany, an enduring dispute over who should provide trillions of dollars in climate aid to poor nations once again ended with little progress toward a solution, dominating the agenda so much so that dialogues on other issues often reverted back to financial debates.

Government heads at both conferences barely addressed what may be one of the most pressing questions the world faces: how to respond to the immense role animal agriculture plays in driving climate change. This continues a pattern of evasion around this issue on the international stage, which advocates and scientists find increasingly frustrating, given that shrinking the emissions footprint of global livestock production and consumption is a needed step toward mitigating climate change.

“We’re seeing, essentially, the cow in the room being ignored,” said Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re seeing these kinds of vague references to needing to shift diets, but still a refusal to call out animal agriculture as the leading cause, by far, of agricultural emissions, as well as other forms of environmental destruction in food and agriculture systems.”

Although estimates vary, peer-reviewed studies have found that the global food system is responsible for roughly one-third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Animals raised for consumption generate 32 percent of the world’s methane emissions, and agriculture is the largest source of anthropogenic methane pollution. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon, and it’s 80 to 90 percent more powerful than carbon in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. This is why many scientists believe that aggressively curbing humanity’s methane pollution would be the fastest way to slow planetary warming. And methane isn’t the only environmental problem associated with meat and dairy. Even though animal agriculture provides 17 percent of the world’s calories, it accounts for 80 percent of global agricultural land use and 41 percent of global agricultural water use, which translates into an outsize impact on biodiversity.

Despite the mountain of evidence establishing a connection between the food we eat and climate change, the subject has only recently begun to pop up at international conferences. The big breakthrough came at last December’s U.N. climate conference, COP28, where more than two-thirds of countries in attendance, including the U.S. and the European Union, pledged to take steps to reduce the colossal climate footprint of food systems. Around the same time, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, or FAO, unveiled its first-ever installment of a roadmap for transforming the global food system to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

However, the FAO roadmap came under criticism because its slate of proposed solutions almost entirely omitted the need to reduce human consumption of meat and dairy. Some researchers later asked the FAO to retract its report, alleging that it misrepresented their work by minimizing reduced meat intake as a way to cut agricultural emissions.

The failure of delegates at COP28 to directly address the causal relationship between meat consumption and climate change was just repeated by G7 nations and the Bonn climate conference attendees. These failures show how “incredibly politically charged” this issue is in multinational gatherings dominated by countries with very high rates of meat and dairy consumption, said Martin Frick, who heads up the World Food Programme’s Berlin office.

“We are moving in the right direction, but we are not moving fast enough,” said Frick. “Unless we are really serious about food, and look at it from a systems approach, ask ourselves the hard questions and give ourselves the hard answers, I don’t see how we can fix climate change.”

Still, some do see progress.

“Only six months ago, 159 governments at world-leader level made a commitment to incorporate food into their climate plans,” said Edward Davey, senior advisor of the Food and Land Use Coalition based at the World Resources Institute. The COP28 pledge includes incorporating the climate footprint of food into each country’s “nationally determined contribution,” or NDC — a specific emissions target required by the Paris Agreement.

Countries are expected to submit new NDCs by next February, and Davey said those updates will indicate whether those countries are taking the pledge seriously. Read Next

Until then, how the topic surfaces in international gatherings is the next best benchmark. “I wanted to see that food was genuinely getting its moment in the sun in the climate talks,” said Davey. “And I think what we saw was that the Bonn talks were largely focused on finance, and less on particular sectors.”

Food was not entirely absent from the G7 summit agenda. At the gathering in southern Italy, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni announced the launch of the Apulia Food Systems Initiative, a climate and food policy aimed at investing in resilient food systems for poorer countries. It commits an undisclosed amount of funding to strengthen agricultural climate adaptation, with most aid allocated across the African continent, where climate change is intensifying food insecurity. The initiative will back a U.S. State Department-led crop research effort, a project to create more resilient coffee supply chains, and technical support for implementing the COP28 food and agriculture pledge into countries’ NDCs.

Unsurprisingly, it does not include any projects to decarbonize animal agriculture. “Livestock is clearly a very good example of what wasn’t tackled directly, in the sense that there is no mention of livestock, per se,” said Francesco Rampa, head of the think tank European Centre for Development Policy Management’s sustainable food systems team, who assisted the Italian G7 presidency in developing the initiative. Rampa is quick to add that this is because the Apulia plan is structured to help poor nations that have negligible emissions from animal agriculture, and not higher-income countries with sizable contributions — like the G7 countries themselves.

Past G7 food initiatives have faced criticism for limited clarity and accountability around finance pledges, for not reaching small farmers, and for failing to facilitate a transition to more sustainable and equitable food systems in the places they aim to aid. Multiple experts told Grist they don’t expect the new Apulia pledge to buck that trend.

“I’m skeptical of the ability of the international community to act in a way, with the urgency, that this whole issue requires,” said William Dietz, director of research and policy at the Global Food Institute at George Washington University. “We’ve got a generation of leaders like Nero who are fiddling while the world is burning.”

_{Ayurella Horn-Muller is an award-winning journalist who has covered climate justice for Axios and Climate Central. Her work has been published in the Guardian, USA TODAY, and Forbes, and by NPR and PBS NewsHour. Based in Florida, she has received media fellowships from the Society of Environmental Journalists, Metcalf Institute, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Oregon State University.}

Maine AG asks court to dismiss suit alleging lack of action to address climate change / by Evan Popp and AnnMarie Hilton

_{^{“Our lawsuit in a nutshell is to hold the state accountable to its legal obligations to meet its science-driven climate mandates,” said Emily Green, senior attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)}}

_{Reposted from Maine Morning Star}

Attorneys for the state of Maine on Friday filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by youth groups and environmental advocates that argues officials have failed to take the necessary steps to cut carbon emissions as required by law.

The initial lawsuit — filed in April by the Conservation Law Foundation, Maine Youth Action and Sierra Club — alleges that the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is not following a 2019 law that requires the state to cut its carbon emissions 45% by 2030 and 80% by 2050.

On Friday, lawyers for the Maine Office of the Attorney General said those arguments are baseless.

The motion to dismiss argues that the state did not violate any laws because it was not required to adopt the particular rules that it ended up rejecting, namely the Advanced Clean Cars II Act, which would have required 82% of new vehicles sold in the state to be electric by 2032. The lawyers also argue many of the claims brought by the groups are repetitive and that the proposed remedy — asking the court to direct and accelerate the DEP’s rulemaking efforts — would breach the constitutional separation of powers between branches of government.

The plaintiffs will now have until the beginning of August to respond to the state’s motion.

During a media briefing on the case prior to the state’s filing, Emily Green, senior attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation, said advocates are trying to ensure adherence to the stipulations of the law.

“Our lawsuit in a nutshell is to hold the state accountable to its legal obligations to meet its science-driven climate mandates,” she said.

Green argued that the climate groups are not trying to dictate exactly how Maine will cut emissions but are seeking a court ruling that would require concrete steps to meet the targets outlined in state law.

Green pointed out that impacts of climate change are already being seen, pointing to the warming of the Gulf of Maine, the series of violent storms this past winter and dangerous pests like ticks moving north as temperatures rise.

While she said the state has taken steps to support decarbonization and resilience planning in policy, Maine officials have “failed to develop and implement the enforceable standards necessary to slash carbon pollution as our climate law requires.”

For example, the initial lawsuit points to the Maine Board of Environmental Protection’s decision in March to reject the Advanced Clean Cars II Act.

Board members who voted against the rule cited lingering questions about the policy and also argued that such a significant decision should instead be considered by elected officials.

But critics of that decision say the state hasn’t done enough to address pollution from transportation, which is the largest source of emissions of any sector in Maine.

“We think Maine deserves more than empty promises and Mainers need action that matches the magnitude of the climate crisis,” Matt Cannon of Sierra Club Maine said during the media briefing Wednesday. “State leaders must do all they can to responsibly and equitably reduce emissions, starting with our most significant polluters.”

State leaders insist they are taking significant steps to address the climate crisis. In an April proclamation honoring Earth Day, Gov. Janet Mills said Maine has made “extraordinary progress toward our climate goals” outlined in the state’s climate action plan, Maine Won’t Wait, which is intended as a roadmap for how to reduce emissions at the rate required by law.

The Maine Climate Council — the group that created that plan — met on Tuesday and received draft strategies and recommendations from an array of experts to help “strengthen Maine’s resilience to the effects of climate change and continue its momentum in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” according to a news release from the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future.

The 39-member council, which includes scientists, industry leaders, local and state officials, and citizens, is working to update the climate action plan by December and will be reviewing the strategies and recommendations in the coming months. The public can also provide feedback by filling out a survey on the strategies.

_{Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College. He is part of Maine Morning Star following three years at Maine Beacon writing about statewide politics. Before that, he worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.}

_{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.}

Ecosocialist Bookshelf, June 2024 / by Ian Angus

_{^{Photo: C&C}}

_{Reposted from Climate & Capitalism}

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.

_{Ian Angus is a socialist and ecosocialist activist in Canada. He is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate & Capitalism. He is co-author, with Simon Butler, of Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket, 2011), editor of the anthology The Global Fight for Climate Justice (Fernwood, 2010); and author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, 2016). His latest book is A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017).}

Capitalism Can’t Overcome The Laws Of Physics / by Pete Dolack

_{^{Demonstration at the end of the 4th International Conference on Degrowth, Leipzig, 2014. Image via Wikimedia Commons}}

_{Reposted from Znet}

You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. That should be a commonplace idea. And that inevitably means facing up to the necessity of putting an end to capitalism in favor of an economic system of rationality, sustainability and equity for all the world’s peoples.

It can’t be said too many times that the concept of “green capitalism” is a chimera. Unfortunately, belief in that chimera is not limited to the world’s center-left political parties; it extends to the world’s Green parties. Various “Green New Deal” programs have been floated in recent years, generally revolving around a massive buildout of renewable-energy infrastructure and strengthening the social safety net. On their own, there is no rational argument that such programs, should they materialize, would not provide some benefits. But how transformative are such programs?

Here is where “green capitalism” rapidly falls apart. Liberal assertions that a transition to a green economy will be virtually cost-free are unrealistic. The costs of a transition to a greener economy are much less than the costs will be of continuing business as usual — how much will a three-meter rise in the sea level and massive disruptions to agriculture cost? — but the need to transition millions of employees to new employment, retrofit or replace transportation systems, adjust to new trade patterns and have access to less energy shouldn’t be minimized. And the infrastructure to build solar panels, windmills and all else will use large amounts of resources, including toxic “rare earth” minerals. Renewable energy, although vital if we are to have a future, isn’t a shortcut to reversing global warming.

*^{The power of nature prevails (photo by Hans Kreder)}*

A fundamental problem is that capitalism is dependent on consumerism. Household consumption (all the things that people buy for personal use from toothbrushes to automobiles) constitutes 60 to 70 percent of a typical advanced capitalist economy’s gross domestic product; it is because of this dependency that so much money and effort is put into advertising and marketing, creating “needs” we didn’t know we had, and the pervasiveness of “planned obsolescence.” Consumerism and over-consumption are not “cultural” or the result of personal characteristics — they are a natural consequence of capitalism and built into the system. Problems like global warming and other aspects of the world environmental crisis can only be solved on a global level through democratic control of the economy, not by individual consumer choices or by national governments.

Two statistics that provide perspective on the high cost of new and improved: About 40 percent of U.S. landfill waste is discarded packaging and the cost of packaging constitutes 10 percent to 40 percent of a product’s retail price. No rational system would propagate such waste, but capitalism is not rational; the endless pursuit of profit for a small number of people at the expense of everybody else and indifference to environmental cost are the natural consequences. “Green capitalism” is “doomed from the start” because maximizing profit and environmentalism are broadly in conflict; the occasional time when they might be in harmony are rare exceptions and temporary, wrote Richard Smith in his 2014 paper “Green capitalism: the god that failed.” This is because the managers of corporations are answerable to private owners and shareholders, not to society. Profit maximization trumps all else under capitalism and thereby sets the limits to ecological reform.

What has just been discussed is serious enough. But what if the impossibility of capitalism continuing for the foreseeable future is not only its inherent contradictions and destructive tendencies, as discussed above, but also due to physical limits? Endless growth, and a system that needs endless growth to survive, is not only impossible due to the finite nature of natural resources, the repression and exploitation that fuels it eventually reaching a point of explosion, and the inability to expand because the entire globe is now encompassed by it. It is also impossible in the long run because 100 percent recycling and conservation is a physical impossibility.

Laws of thermodynamics versus limitless expansion

An interesting paper just published in the Real-World Economics Review, “How entropy drives us towards degrowth,” lays this out in six succinct pages. Written by Crelis Rammelt, a professor of environmental geography and international development studies at the University of Amsterdam, the author concludes that global capitalism “annihilates its own habitat” and “devours the equivalent of an entire Mount Everest’s worth of resources every 20 months.”

That’s a whole lot of resources! The number of months will be fewer in the future because, structurally, capitalism must expand. This is the dynamic of the system that is often obscured. The rigors of competition force all capitalists to reduce costs and find new customers to successfully compete; failure to do so means going out of business. With all competitors forced into this endless treadmill, the entire system is dependent on expansion and the creation of new markets. Now that capitalism has conquered virtually every space on Earth, there can be no more geographic expansion. Thus the pressure of competition only becomes more acute, as does the need to extract more natural resources, which will inevitably be more difficult and expensive to obtain as easily reached materials are exhausted.

Thus, Dr. Rammelt wrote, the search for short-term fixes intensifies. “This system demands continued accumulation of capital and falters when hindered in this process,” he wrote. “The typical response to the ecological crisis is therefore not to restrict economic growth but to pin all hope on efficiency, circularity, dematerialization, decarbonization, and other profit-driven green innovations within capitalism. In this exposition, I argue that this hope is false because entropy always looms. Entropy serves as a physical measure of disorder, and we observe its inexorable increase all around us: everything decays, rots, disintegrates, and falls into disorder.”

*^{Photosynthesis in action (photo by Rcaravit)}*

Energy changes form but does not disappear, he notes, but the second law of thermodynamics states that thermal energy (heat) flows from the hotter body or location to the cooler. In parallel with this law of entropy, energy flows from a place of high concentration (such as a battery) to a place of low concentration (such as a toy), thus resulting in a loss of energy for the battery. Entropy also shows itself in the degradation of everyday objects: food spoilage, metal erosion and clothing wear and tear. Something external has to provide supplemental energy to keep a system from complete degradation. For the Earth’s natural system, that external is the Sun. “The biosphere taps into solar power to perform ‘useful work,’ namely concentrating dispersed energy and matter into” new forms. “A healthy and well-functioning biosphere thus stands as the only force on Earth capable of counterbalancing the rise in entropy.”

Nature, however, cannot regenerate without limits. Although new food sources are created, sufficient for a natural biosphere and the life that inhabits it, “the metabolism of the destructive beast called capitalism expands too fast for the biosphere to keep up.” The metabolism of capitalism outstrips the ability of nature to regenerate itself. (Humanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than Earth’s biocapacity can regenerate). “Ecosystems have evolved over millions of years to optimize energy consumption in ecological food webs and to delay and reduce entropy through biodiversity,” Dr. Rammelt wrote. “Tragically, growth-oriented economies do the exact opposite by pushing against this natural order and increasing entropy at a devastating rate.”

It’s a physical world no matter what we wish

Substituting one-crop monocultures for more varied agriculture, irrigation, more intensive use of fertilizers and finally genetically engineering crops are among the ways that capitalism attempts to evade limits. But soil degradation, the creation of dust bowls, chopping down forests and pollution persist and become more dangerous. “Capitalism, in its pursuit of relentless growth, damages the very biosphere it relies on to mitigate its entropy-amplifying activities.” It is not a physical possibility to overcome environmental stresses by becoming more efficient or devising more ways to recycle more. Nature has its limits, Dr. Rammelt writes:

“Can we not combat entropy through frugal and circular production? The typical response to the ecological crisis isn’t to slow down growth but to rely on dematerialization and circularity. However, ‘green capitalism’ cannot maintain itself, let alone grow, by merely reusing its own waste and byproducts. Just as monkeys require fresh bananas from the forest and can’t survive on their own feces, production systems require new input of low-entropy matter and energy to function. The same goes for a forest that depends on solar energy from space and can’t survive solely on falling leaves. Shifting to biomass as a raw material for production also won’t save green growth as it will intensify pressure on land, water, and soil.”

At first glance, the fact that the global economy recovers less than 10 percent of waste materials and retains only 28 percent of global primary energy consumption after conversion would seem to indicate a vast potential for improvements in the efficiency of resource usage. But a closed system that loses nothing is simply impossible, because not everything is recyclable and because transmission losses are inevitable:

“[E]ven though we are far from achieving 100% circularity and efficiency, the laws of nature will always obstruct us from attaining such a goal. To counteract all unavoidable losses and inefficiencies, we require a constant influx of fresh, low-entropy matter and energy. This requirement holds true for circular economies and other green growth models as well. The encouraging news is that the biosphere can convert certain types and quantities of waste back into raw materials. However, we should not anticipate the biosphere to sustain this service at the same accelerating pace at which our economies increase entropy.”

^{Socialism or Barbarism? (Image by Michael Coghlan via Flickr)}

That humanity can dominate nature “is an illusion.” The laws of thermodynamics remain in place. “Consequently, a growth-centered capitalist economy finds itself trapped in futile attempts to completely decouple itself from nature — aiming for a 100% circular, service-oriented and zero-waste existence. This obsession stems from an incapacity to imagine an economy that does not grow, where both the quantity and quality of its metabolism remain within secure ecological and planetary boundaries.”

Therefore, the conclusion is inescapable that an economy that requires continual growth must reach a physical limit; reaching such a limit is nothing less than global environmental collapse. Dr. Rammelt advocates a “radically different pathway”: degrowth. He defines degrowth as “a socio-economic transformation aimed at reducing and redistributing material and energy flows, with the goal of respecting planetary boundaries and promoting social justice.” Although he does not give a name to a post-capitalist system other than one of “degrowth,” such a sustainable system would have to be one that not only stays within the planet’s physical limits but provides enough for everybody. The material basis for everybody to have enough to eat and a place to live comfortably already exists; such a distribution is impossible under capitalism, where, again, production is performed for a small number of people to accumulate massive amounts of money with little left for everybody else.

Once again, Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis that either socialism or barbarism is our future stares us in the face.

_{Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet, and photographer. He has been involved in various activist organizations, including Trade Justice New York Metro, National People’s Campaign, and New York Workers Against Fascism, among others. He has authored the books “It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment,” which examines attempts to create societies outside of capitalism and explores their relevance to the present world while seeking a path to a better future and “What Do We Need Bosses For: Toward Economic Democracy,” which analyzes past and present efforts to establish systems of economic democracy on a national or society-wide basis. He authored the book “It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment,” which examines attempts to create societies outside of capitalism and explores their relevance to the present world while seeking a path to a better future.}

How We’re Building a Movement for Climate Justice in New Jersey / by Charlie Kratovil and Mia DiFelice

_{^{Image: F&WW}}

At a recent event, New Jerseyans across the labor, climate, and environmental justice movements came together to celebrate, strategize, and learn from each other

_{Reposted from Food & Water Watch}

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.

Since 2019, Food & Water Watch has worked with incredible volunteers and allies to stop several other fossil fuel projects, including the Williams NESE Pipeline project and an NJ TRANSIT power plant.

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 overburdened with 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.}

Oceans face ‘triple threat’ of extreme heat, oxygen loss and acidification / Oliver Milman

_{^{‘Oceans aren’t just a nice backdrop for your selfies in summer, we rely upon them for our lives,’ said one scientist. Photograph: hdere/Getty Images}}

Third of world’s ocean surface particularly vulnerable to threats driven by burning fossil fuel and deforestation, new research finds

_{Reposted from The Guardian}

The world’s oceans are facing a “triple threat” of extreme heating, a loss of oxygen and acidification, with extreme conditions becoming far more intense in recent decades and placing enormous stress upon the planet’s panoply of marine life, new research has found.

About a fifth of the world’s ocean surface is particularly vulnerable to the three threats hitting at once, spurred by human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, the study found. In the top 300 meters of affected ocean, these compound events now last three times longer and are six times more intense than they were in the early 1960s, the research states.

The study’s lead author warned that the world’s oceans were already being pushed into an extreme new state because of the climate crisis. “The impacts of this have already been seen and felt,” said Joel Wong, a researcher at ETH Zurich, who cited the well-known example of the heat “blob” that has caused the die-off of marine life in the Pacific Ocean. “Intense extreme events like these are likely to happen again in the future and will disrupt marine ecosystems and fisheries around the world,” he added.

The research, published in AGU Advances, analyzed occurrences of extreme heat, deoxygenation and acidification and found that such extreme events can last for as long as 30 days, with the tropics and the north Pacific particularly affected by the compounding threats.

Climate scientists have been alarmed by the relentless onward rise of heat in the ocean, which has hit extraordinary heights in recent months. “The heat has been literally off the charts, it’s been astonishing to see,” said Andrea Dutton, a geologist and climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was not involved in the new research. “We can’t fully explain the temperatures we are seeing in the Atlantic, for example, which is part of the reason why hurricane season is such a concern this year. It’s quite frightening.”

But on top of the heat, which forces fish and other species to move, if they are able, to more suitable climes, the oceans are also paying another heavy price for soaking up huge volumes of heat and carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions that would otherwise further warm the atmosphere for people on land. The extra CO₂ is making seawater more acidic, dissolving the shells of marine creatures, as well as starving the ocean of oxygen.

“This means that marine life is being squeezed out of places it is able to survive,” said Dutton. “This paper makes clear that this is happening now and that these compound threats will push organisms past their tipping points. People have to recognize that oceans have been buffering us from the amount of heat we have been feeling on land as humans, but that this hasn’t been without consequence.”

Dutton said that the combination of dropping oxygen levels, rising acidification and soaring ocean heat was also seen at the end of the Permian period about 252m years ago, when Earth experienced the largest known extinction event in its history, known as the Great Dying.

“If you look at the fossil record you can see there was this same pattern at the end of the Permian, where two-thirds of marine genera became extinct,” she said. “We don’t have identical conditions to that now, but it’s worth pointing out that the environmental changes going on are similar.

“Oceans aren’t just a nice backdrop for your selfies in summer, we rely upon them for our lives, it’s very important to recognize this,” Dutton added.

_{Oliver Milman is an environment reporter for Guardian US.}

Maine among 21 states joining Biden administration in bid to modernize nation’s aging grid / by Robert Zullo

_{^{An aerial view shows high voltage power lines on May 16, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Florida. Twenty-one states are joining a push by President Joe Biden’s administration to modernize the nation’s aging electric grid, which is under pressure from growing demand, a changing mix of power generation and severe weather. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)}}

_{Reposted from Maine Morning Star}

Maine is among 21 states joining a push by the Biden administration to modernize America’s aging electric grid, which is under pressure from growing demand, a changing power generation mix that includes lots of wind and solar and severe weather.

The administration, which has set a goal of a carbon-free power sector by 2035, announced Tuesday that the states had joined what it called the “Federal-State Modern Grid Deployment Initiative,” which is intended to “help drive grid adaptation quickly and cost-effectively to meet the challenges and opportunities that the power sector faces.”

In exchange for federal technical and financial assistance opportunities, participating states will “prioritize efforts that support the adoption of modern grid solutions to expand grid capacity and build modern grid capabilities on both new and existing transmission and distribution lines.”

That means in part focusing on ways to get more out of existing transmission lines, since building new ones can take a decade or more in some cases.

“There are technologies we can use to optimize the current infrastructure we have,” said Verna Mandez, director of transmission at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy trade group.

Those include reconductoring existing lines to handle more juice as well as so-called grid-enhancing technologies, a suite of tools that include sensors, power-flow controls, software and hardware that can better deliver real-time weather data, among other technologies.

In many cases, those technologies have been adopted in other countries but uptake has lagged here, in part because utilities aren’t incentivized to adopt them and generally don’t face consequences as a result of grid congestion, which costs electric customers billions of dollars each year.

“Most transmission providers get more money when they build transmission projects,” Mandez said.

The White House said in a news release that adopting newer technologies “means that renewables and other clean sources of power can be integrated sooner and more cost-effectively than waiting for new transmission construction, which will address load growth challenges more rapidly, create good-paying jobs and lower Americans’ utility bills.”

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has also in several orders prodded utilities and grid operators to consider more use of grid-enhancing technologies.

And some states are taking action on their own. Virginia, which did not join the initiative announced Tuesday, passed legislation signed by GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin that requires utilities to consider grid-enhancing technologies in their planning. Last year, Montana passed legislation aimed at increasing use of advanced reconductoring. Minnesota’s legislature also voted this month to add grid-enhancing technologies to the state’s transmission planning process and require some utilities to evaluate the tools for highly congested lines.

‘More tools than ever’

To get a more reliable and cleaner electric grid, as well as accommodate electric demand that’s growing for the first time in more than a decade, the U.S. needs lots of new transmission capacity, experts agree.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy found that almost all regions of the country would benefit from more transmission lines and a National Renewable Energy Laboratory study estimated that getting to 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035 could require anywhere from 1,400 to 10,100 miles of new high capacity transmission lines per year starting in 2026.

That’s why the Biden administration has been pushing hard to remove roadblocks to new transmission lines, which can take a decade or more to develop in some cases, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission published a landmark new rule on regional transmission planning and cost allocation. Last month the administration also announced a public-private partnership to upgrade 100,000 miles of transmission lines over the next five years and the Department of Energy has identified 10 potential “national interest” electric transmission corridors, a designation that would help expedite the projects and give developers access to federal financing.

“The power sector, which is responsible for a quarter of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, now has more tools than ever – including unprecedented financial support, efficient permitting, and long-term regulatory certainty – to reduce pollution and upgrade the grid to support more factories, electric vehicles and other growing sources of electricity demand,” the White House said.

The states joining the effort are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai‘i, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin.

_{Robert Zullo is a national energy reporter based in southern Illinois focusing on renewable power and the electric grid. Robert joined States Newsroom in 2018 as the founding editor of the Virginia Mercury.}

Sustainable Aviation Fuel Investment Actively Undermines Climate Goals / by Omar Ocampo

_{^{Inequality.org}}

A new report from our team punctures the myth of an environmentally sustainable private jet industry

_{Reposted from Inequality.org}

In 2021, the aviation industry made a very commendable pledge. It decided to join the climate fight and developed a strategy to decarbonize the sector with the aim of net zero emissions by 2050.

The sustainability program is highly dependent on the development of jet fuels made from renewable feedstocks. Indeed, sustainable aviation fuels, or SAFs, are expected to do much of the heavy lifting in reducing the industry’s carbon footprint — it is estimated to account for two-thirds of their emission reduction plan.

On the surface, the choice to rely on SAFs for green aviation makes all the sense in the world. Unlike hydrogen- or battery-powered aircraft, SAFs can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure of air transport and support long-haul flights of six hours or more.

But there are two fundamental problems with this approach.

The first is that the aviation industry has an unreliable record of meeting SAF production targets. The International Air Transport Association (IATA), for example, announced in 2007 its goal to produce close to 9 billion gallons of SAFs by 2017. But this proved to be wishful thinking, and IATA proceeded to adjust its production targets lower and lower with each passing year to no avail. Even the aim of 2 percent production share by 2025 is still too grand. SAFs currently represent a negligible 0.2 percent of total jet fuel supply, causing a majority of airline executives to be skeptical about their ability to meet their self-declared climate goals by midcentury.

Part of the challenge in bringing more SAFs to market is the costs associated with its production. SAFs are more than twice as expensive as their petroleum-based counterparts. The aviation industry, producers of alternative energies, and their representative bodies are depending on the government to play a more active role in making the price of SAFs more competitive and expanding its availability on the international market through subsidies and tax incentives.

But this ignores the second problem: the rapid expansion of SAFs actively undermines the goal of achieving net zero.

That is because biogenic and biomass feedstocks are needed to immediately increase SAF production, requiring land-use changes and the destruction of nature-based solutions to climate change. In other words, agricultural land would prioritize the energy demands of an ever-growing aviation sector instead of growing crops to feed the planet. It will also disincentivize the regrowth of trees that remove and store carbon from our atmosphere.

Research and analysis of a dozen different roadmaps for aviation decarbonization through the large-scale adoption of SAFs demonstrate a negative environmental outcome. It paradoxically sabotages its own aspirations for achieving net zero due to the decades-long lag in biological carbon sequestration.

Even putting those concerns aside, research and expert opinion dispute the ability of SAFs to meet the growing needs and demands of the aviation industry.

This puts the Biden administration’s SAF production target of 3 billion gallons per year by 2030 – from the current 24.5 million gallons produced in 2023 – into a new perspective. The World Resources Institute has condemned the administration’s new guidance for allowing the inclusion of crop-based biofuels like ethanol to qualify as a SAF feedstock. Corn-based ethanol is not sustainable and its inclusion directly undermines the government’s stated climate goals. And since the administration is preparing to grant lavish subsidies and tax credits to SAF producers, this has the potential to be a massive misallocation of public resources.

The best and most effective way to lower the carbon footprint of the aviation sector is simply to fly less. This is especially true for private aviation; a mode of transportation that fully epitomizes carbon inequality. It is the ultrawealthy who fly in luxury private jets and, as a result, emit 10 times more pollutants per passenger compared to commercial air travelers.

A more efficient use of our public resources is to invest in the decarbonization of other vital sectors of the economy. The electrification of our bus fleet and the construction of green public transportation are low-hanging fruit. Those are some of the many steps we need to take to usher in the much-needed green transition and save our planet from climate catastrophe.

Omar Ocampo is a researcher at the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought – report / by Oliver Milman

_{^{Wildfires near Pournari, in Magoula, 25km south-west of Athens, Greece, on 18 July 2023. Photograph: Spyros Bakalis/AFP/Getty Images}}

A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product, researchers have found

_{Reposted from the Guardian}

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}

Menace on the menu: The financialisation of farmland and the war on food and farming / by Colin Todhunter

_{^{Photo via Countercurrents}}

_{Originally published: Countercurrents}

_{Reposted from MR Online}

Between 2008 and 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world and tripled in Central-Eastern Europe. In the UK, an influx of investment from pension funds and private wealth contributed to a doubling of farmland prices from 2010-2015. Land prices in the U.S. agricultural heartlands of Iowa quadrupled between 2002 and 2020.

Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold between 2005 and 2018 and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with U.S. investors having doubled their stakes in farmland since 2020.

Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers, driving steep and sustained land price inflation.

Top-down ‘green grabs’ now account for 20% of large-scale land deals. Government pledges for land-based carbon removals alone add up to almost 1.2 billion hectares, equivalent to total global cropland. Carbon offset markets are expected to quadruple in the next seven years.

These are some of the findings published in the new report ‘Land Squeeze’ by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES), a non-profit thinktank headquartered in Brussels.

The report says that agricultural land is increasingly being turned into a financial asset at the expense of small- and medium-scale farming. The COVID-19 event and the conflict in Ukraine helped promote the ‘feed the world’ panic narrative, prompting agribusiness and investors to secure land for export commodity production and urging governments to deregulate land markets and adopt pro-investor policies.

However, despite sky-rocketing food prices, there was, according to the IPES in 2022, sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages. Despite the self-serving narrative pushed by big agribusiness and land investors, there has been no food shortage. The increased prices were due to speculation on food commodities, corporate profiteering and a heavy reliance on food imports.

At the same time, carbon and biodiversity offset markets are facilitating massive land transactions, bringing major polluters into land markets. The IPES notes that Shell has set aside more than $450 million for offsetting projects. Land is also being appropriated for biofuels and green energy production, including water-intensive ‘green hydrogen’ projects that pose risks to local food production.

In addition, much-needed agricultural land is being repurposed for extractive industries and mega-developments. For example, urbanisation and mega-infrastructure developments in Asia and Africa are claiming prime farmland.

According to the IPES report, between 2000 and 2030, up to 3.3 million hectares of the world’s farmland will have been swallowed up by expanding megacities. Some 80% of land loss to urbanisation is occurring in Asia and Africa. In India, 1.5 million hectares are estimated to have been lost to urban growth between 1955 and1985, a further 800,000 hectares lost between 1985 and 2000, with steady ongoing losses to this day.

In a December 2016 paper on urban land expansion, it was projected that by 2030, globally, urban areas will have tripled in size, expanding into cropland. Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities, and this land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe.

This means that, as cities expand, millions of small-scale farmers are being displaced. These farmers produce the majority of food in developing countries and are key to global food security. In their place, we are seeing the aggregation of land into large-scale farms and the spread of industrial agriculture and all it brings, including poor food and diets, illness, environmental devastation and the destruction of rural communities.

Funds tend to invest for between 10 and 15 years and can leave a trail of long-term environmental and social devastation and serve to undermine local and regional food security. Returns on investments trump any notions of healthy food, food security or human need.

The IPES notes that, globally, just 1% of the world’s largest farms now control 70% of the world’s farmland. These tend to be input-intensive, industrial-scale farms that the IPES says are straining resources, rapidly degrading farmland and further squeezing out smallholders. Moreover, agribusiness giants are pursuing monopolistic practices that drive up costs for farmers. These dynamics are creating systematic economic precarity for farmers, effectively forcing them to ‘get big or get out’.

Factor in land degradation, much of which is attributable to modern chemical-intensive farming practices, and we have a recipe for global food insecurity. In India, more than 70% of its arable land is affected by one or more forms of land degradation.

Also consider that the Indian government has sanctioned 50 solar parks, covering one million hectares in seven states. More than 74% of solar is on land of agricultural (67%) or natural ecosystem value (7%), causing potential food security and biodiversity conflicts. The IPES report notes that since 2017 there have been more than 15 instances of conflict in India linked with these projects.

Nettie Wiebe, from the IPES, says:

Imagine trying to start a farm when 70% of farmland is already controlled by just 1% of the largest farms—and when land prices have risen for 20 years in a row, like in North America. That’s the stark reality young farmers face today. Farmland is increasingly owned not by farmers but by speculators, pension funds and big agribusinesses looking to cash in. Land prices have skyrocketed so high it’s becoming impossible to make a living from farming. This is reaching a tipping point—small and medium scale farming is simply being squeezed out.”

Susan Chomba, also from the IPES, says that soaring land prices and land grabs are driving an unprecedented ‘land squeeze’, accelerating inequality and threatening food production. Moreover, the rush for dubious carbon projects, tree planting schemes, clean fuels and speculative buying is displacing not only small-scale farmers but also indigenous peoples.

Huge swathes of farmland are being acquired by governments and corporations for these ‘green grabs’, despite little evidence of climate benefits. This issue is particularly affecting Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The IPES notes that some 25 million hectares of land have been snapped up for carbon projects by a single ‘environmental asset creation’ firm, UAE-based ‘Blue Carbon’, through agreements with the governments of Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zambia and Liberia.

According to the IPES, the ‘land squeeze’ is leading to farmer revolts, rural exodus, rural poverty and food insecurity. With global farmland prices having doubled in 15 years, farmers, peasants, and indigenous peoples are losing their land (or forced to downsize), while young farmers face significant barriers in accessing land to farm.

The IPES calls for action to halt green grabs and remove speculative investment from land markets and establish integrated governance for land, environment and food systems to ensure a just transition. It also calls for support for collective ownership of farms and innovative financing for farmers to access land and wants a new deal for farmers and rural areas, and that includes a new generation of land and agrarian reforms.

Capital accumulation based on the financialisation of farmland accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. However, financialisation of the economy in general goes back to the 1970s and 1980s when we witnessed a deceleration of economic growth based on industrial production. The response was to compensate via financial capitalism and financial intermediation.

Professor John Bellamy Foster, writing in 2010, not long after the 2008 crisis, states:

Lacking an outlet in production, capital took refuge in speculation in debt-leveraged finance (a bewildering array of options, futures, derivatives, swaps, etc.).

The neoliberal agenda was the political expression of capital’s response to the stagnation and involved four mechanisms: the raiding and sacking of public budgets, the expansion of credit to consumers and governments to sustain spending and consumption, frenzied financial speculation and militarism.

With the engine of capital accumulation via production no longer firing on all cylinders, the emergency backup of financial expansion took over. Foster notes that we have seen a shift from real capital formation in many Western economies, which increases overall economic output, towards the appreciation of financial assets, which increases wealth claims but not output.

Farmland is being transformed from a resource supporting food production and rural stability to a financial asset and speculative commodity. An asset class where wealthy investors can park their capital to further profit from inflated asset prices. The net-zero green agenda also has to be seen in this context: when capital struggles to make sufficient profit, productive wealth (capital) over accumulates and depreciates; to avoid crisis, constant growth and fresh investment opportunities are required.

The IPES report notes that nearly 45% of all farmland investments in 2018, worth roughly $15 billion, came from pension funds and insurance companies. Based on workers’ contributions, pension fund investments in farmland are promoting land speculation, industrial agriculture and the interests of big agribusiness at the expense of smallholder farmers. Workers’ futures are tied to pension funds, which are supporting the growth and power of global finance and the degradation of other workers (in this case, cultivators).

Sofía Monsalve Suárez, from the IPES, states:

It’s time decision-makers stop shirking their responsibility and start to tackle rural decline. The financialisation and liberalisation of land markets is ruining livelihoods and threatening the right to food. Instead of opening the floodgates to speculative capital, governments need to take concrete steps to halt bogus ‘green grabs’ and invest in rural development, sustainable farming and community-led conservation.

Unfortunately, ordinary people cannot depend on ‘decision-makers’ and governments to bring about such change. Ordinary people themselves have always had to struggle for change and improvements to their lives. Groups across the world are fighting back, and the IPES report provides some inspiring examples of their achievements.

Readers can read the IPES report here.

_{Colin Todhunter specializes in food, agriculture and development issues and his two recent books on the global food system can be read here.}

World’s largest CO2 removal plant opens in Iceland / by Cristen Heminway Jaynes

_{^{Mammoth, the world’s largest direct air capture and storage plant, in Hellisheiði, Iceland. Climeworks}}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

Swiss company Climeworks has opened the biggest operational direct air capture (DAC) plant in the world to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The Mammoth plant, located in Iceland, is nearly ten times bigger than Orca, its second-largest plant.

“Starting operations of our Mammoth plant is another proof point in Climeworks’ scale-up journey to megaton capacity by 2030 and gigaton by 2050,” said Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks co-founder and co-CEO, in a press release from Climeworks.

The DAC process sucks carbon from the air and stores it, most often underground, where it can no longer contribute to global heating.

With global efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions inadequate to prevent the worsening effects of climate change, United Nations scientists have estimated that carbon dioxide in the billions of tons will need to be removed to meet climate targets, reported Reuters.

Climeworks’ new DAC plant has an annual carbon capture capacity of 36,000 metric tons. The Mammoth plant, begun in 2022, will be completed by the end of this year.

The company’s first commercial DAC project was also in Iceland — the Orca plant — and has an annual capacity of 4,000 metric tons.

“Mammoth has successfully started to capture its first CO₂. Climeworks uses renewable energy to power its direct air capture process, which requires low-temperature heat like boiling water. The geothermal energy partner ON Power in Iceland provides the energy necessary for this process,” Climeworks said. “Once the CO₂ is released from the filters, storage partner Carbfix transports the CO₂ underground, where it reacts with basaltic rock through a natural process, which transforms into stone, and remains permanently stored.”

Critics of carbon capture technology argue that it uses an enormous amount of energy, is expensive and that focusing on the removal of carbon from the atmosphere could encourage companies to continue burning fossil fuels rather than lowering their emissions. Many critics also emphasize that its effectiveness has not been proven.

Speaking about carbon capture in general, Lili Fuhr, Center for International Environmental Law’s fossil economy program director, said the technology “is fraught with uncertainties and ecological risks,” as CNN reported.

The total carbon removal capacity on Earth can only remove roughly 0.01 million metric tons per year of the 70 million tons that would need to be removed by the end of the decade to meet worldwide climate goals, the International Energy Agency said.

Climeworks — which does not have ties to fossil fuel companies — said it is looking to lower the costs of DAC technology to $400 to $600 per ton by the end of the decade and $200 to $350 a ton by 2040, reported Reuters.

Development is currently in the works for megaton Climeworks hubs in the United States, the press release said.

_{This article was reposted from EcoWatch.}

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{Cristen Hemingway Jaynes covers the environment, climate change, oceans, the Arctic, animals, anthropology, astronomy, plastics pollution, and politics. She holds a JD and an Ocean & Coastal Law Certificate from the University of Oregon School of Law.}

‘Capitalism won’t save the planet’ / by Simon Pirani

_{^{Creative Commons 4.0}}

Review of ‘The Price is Wrong: why capitalism won’t save the planet’ by Brett Christophers.

_{Reposted from the Ecologist}

Wind and solar power projects, that for so long needed state backing, can now provide electricity to wholesale markets so cheaply that they will compete fossil fuels out of the park. It’s the beginning of the end for coal and gas. Right? No: completely wrong.

The fallacy that ‘market forces’ can achieve a transition away from fossil fuels is demolished in The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, a highly readable polemic by Brett Christophers.

Prices in wholesale electricity markets, on which economists and analysts focus, are not really the point, Christophers argues: profits are. That’s what companies who invest in electricity generation care about, and these can more easily be made with coal and gas.

Zeitgeist

Christophers also unpicks claims that renewables projects are subsidy-free. Even with renewably-produced electricity increasingly holding its own competitively in wholesale markets, it’s state support that counts: look at China, which is building new renewables faster than the rest of the world put together.

The obsession with wholesale electricity prices, and costs of production – to the exclusion of other economic factors – emerged in the 1980s and 90s as part of the neoliberal zeitgeist, Christophers explains.

The damage done by fossil fuels to the natural world, including climate change, was priced at zero; all that needed correcting, ran the dominant discourse, was to include the cost of this ‘externality’ in prices.

This narrative became paramount against the background of neoliberal reforms: electricity companies were broken up into parts, typically for generation, transmission, distribution and supply; private ownership and competition in markets became the norm.

But prices do not and can not reflect all the economic factors that drive corporate decision-making.

Smooth

The measure that has become standard, the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE), is the average cost of a unit of electricity produced by different methods. But for renewables, 80 per cent-plus of this cost is upfront capital investment – and the fate of many renewables projects hinges on whether banks and other financial institutions are prepared to lend money to cover that cost. And on the rates at which they are prepared to lend.

The volatility of wholesale electricity markets does not help: project developers and bankers alike have to hedge against that. “We don’t like to absorb power price volatility”, one of the many financiers that Christophers interviewed for the book said. “We’ll take merchant price risk – right now we often don’t have a choice – but we’ll charge three times more for it. […] No bank in the world will take power price risk at low returns”.

Christophers writes in an exemplary, straightforward way about markets’ complexities. He details the hurdles any renewables project has to get over before it starts: as well as securing finance, it needs land and associated rights and licences, and – increasingly a problem in many countries including the UK – a timely connection to the electricity grid.

If we confront, confound and supercede capitalism a future in which electricity is used equitably and within bounds set collectively with a view to avoiding catastrophic climate change is surely plausible.

Corporate and financial decision-makers are concerned not so much with costs, compared to those of fossil fuel plants, as with “an acceptable rate of financial return”. Does the project meet or exceed that rate?

“The conventional transition model […] assumes an effortlessly smooth trade-off between fossil fuels and renewable electricity sources, just as stick-figure mainstream economics more widely assumes all manner of comparable smooth trade offs, not least between present and future goods.

“But real world processes of production and consumption involving real world businesses do not come even close to approximating to such smooth trade-offs.”

Revival

The clearest illustration of the argument that profit is the main driver of investment, not price, is the big oil companies’ behaviour.

Christophers writes: “[T]he returns ordinarily associated with wind and solar power are much lower than those to which fossil fuel companies are accustomed in their core businesses.”

He adds: “The big new hydrocarbon projects still being initiated by the international oil majors in the 2020s, in the face of widespread public fury and dismay, promise significantly higher rates of return – and, of course, on a significantly greater absolute scale – than renewables ever do.”

So tiny renewables businesses are used solely to greenwash the companies’ continuing investment in fossil fuel production. Shell, which in 2020-22 dabbled in slightly larger renewables investments, found that the rate of return for shareholders was the lowest of all its businesses.

“Chastened by Wall Street’s savage indictment of his company’s erstwhile turn – effectively – away from profit, [Shell chief executive Wael] Sawan spent the first half of 2023 pivoting Shell back to oil and gas. Hence the horrific spectacle of a significant revival in upstream exploration activity on the part of the European majors, with Shell to the fore. […] At the same time, Shell and its peers were busily scrapping projects (including in wind) with ‘projections of weak returns’.”

Investment

***_{The Price Is Wrong, published by Verso.}***

Despite all this, renewable electricity generation is expanding. Christophers forensically dissects the economics, showing that ‘market forces’ have played little or no part in this.

Many renewables projects only go ahead when they have signed long-term sales agreements (power purchase agreements or PPAs), that shelter sellers from choppy markets and provide good PR (“green” credentials) for buyers.

In many countries, PPAs with utility companies that provide electricity to households are being superceded by those with corporate buyers of electricity, and above all big tech firms that wolf down electricity for data centres and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.

And then there is state support – not only overt subsidies such as the tax credits offered by the US Inflation Reduction Act, but also schemes such as feed-in tariffs and contracts for difference, market instruments that shelter projects’ income from volatility.

China’s new megaprojects are “about as far from being market-led developments as is imaginable”, Christophers writes. So too are those in Vietnam, mammoths given the total size of the economy, that soared with a special feed-in tariff in 2020, and slumped to zero in 2021 when it was withdrawn.

“That investment plummets when meaningful support for renewables investment is substantially or wholly removed demonstrates precisely how significant that support in fact, and also just how marginal – or even downright unappealing – revenue and profitability prospects, in the absence of such support, actually are.”

Pretences

Christophers concludes that the state has to champion rapid decarbonisation, and “extensive public ownership of renewable energy assets appears the most viable model”. But this should not be done in a fool’s paradise, where it is presented as a means for taking profits from renewable electricity generators (what profits?!) and returning them to the public purse.

This is how the Labour Party is portraying its proposed state-owned renewable electricity generator, Great British Energy. Labour’s claims that GBE will benefit the state and taxpayers “betray a deep and perilous misunderstanding of the economics of renewable energy, and of the weak and uncertain profitability that actually plagues the sector”.

By way of contrast, Christophers points to the Build Public Renewables Act, passed by the US state of New York in 2021 in response to years of campaigning by climate action groups – which rests on the assumption that it is precisely the market’s failure to produce renewable energy projects on anything near to the timescale suggested by the climate emergency that necessitates state intervention.

All this prompts the question: don’t we need to challenge the whole idea of electricity being a commodity for sale, rather than a requirement of 21st-century living that should be provided as a public service?

Yes, we do, Christophers writes in his conclusions, with reference to Karl Polanyi’s idea of “fictitious commodities”, that under capitalism are bought and sold, but only in markets that are fashioned by “props, rules, regulations and norms”, and are therefore essentially pretences. The description fits the electricity markets ushered in by neoliberalism well.

Monopoly

The commodification of electricity, and other energy carriers, raises the prospect that, with a perspective of confronting and superceding capitalism, it should be decommodified.

Renewables technologies have opened up this issue anew, since they have hastened the trend away from centralised power stations and made it easier than ever for people – not only through the medium of the state but as households, community organisations or municipalities – to source electricity from the natural environment, without recourse to the corporations that control the market. How this potential can be torn from those corporations’ hands is a central issue.

The analysis by Christophers of the “props, rules, regulations and norms” used to bring renewables to neoliberal markets certainly convinced me. So too did his point that the returns from developing oil and gas, relatively higher historically, “are not ‘natural’ economic facts” either.

On the contrary, government economic support has always characterised the oil and gas business: in fact the line between state and business is often blurred.

In many countries they are “the selfsame entities, actively assembling monopolistic or oligopolistic constrol specifically in order to subdue volatility, stabilise profits and encourage investment”; indeed these “established institutional architectures of monopoly power” that scaffold oil and gas are a key distinction between it and renewables.

Corporate

We badly need a comparative analysis of state support for renewables and for fossil fuels – not just the bare numbers, which are available in many reports, but an understanding of the social dynamics that drive it, and that are deliberately obscured by oceans of greenwash manufactured by the political class everywhere.

Themes that Christophers touches on, such as governments’ failure to phase out fossil fuel plants, even as they make plans to expand renewables need to be developed. The appallingly slow progress of renewables and the weight of incumbency that favours fossil fuels can not be separated.

This understandable book, which brings dry capitalist realities to life so well – and is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the transition away from fossil fuels is so disastrously slow – raised some questions in my mind about electricity demand.

Take the steep increase in demand for renewably generated electricity from big tech. Amazon is the world’s biggest buyer of solar and wind power under corporate PPAs, and an even bigger promoter of its own “green” image. But its carbon footprint continues to grow, Christophers points out, especially that of its “energy-gorging cloud-computing Web services business”.

A big-tech-dominated fake energy transition? “It would be difficult to conceive of a more ironic statement on the warped political economy of contemporary green capitalism.”

Trashing

Which is reason to interrogate the way society uses electricity – and the way that capitalist social relations turn use – to fulfil needs, to make people’s lives good into demand – an economic category no less ideologically-inflected than other ‘market forces’.

Amazon and the rest are sharply increasing their electricity demand, which in the US and elsewhere has led to shutdowns of coal-fired power station being postponed – while hundreds of millions of people in the global south still have no electricity at all.

Furthermore: the “green transition” envisaged by most politicians will see the economic sectors in the global north that gulp down the greatest quantities of fossil fuels – road transport, the built environment, and industry – switching many processes to electricity. The classic example is the shift from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles. And this will increase electricity demand.

Christophers takes no view on these issues: “[R]ight or wrong, good or bad, electrification largely is what is happening and what will continue to happen”.

While I agree that, under capitalism, the dominant political forces take this for granted, I think that we should not. To stick with the example of road transport, none of the scenarios that assume swapping petrol vehicles one-for-one for electric vehicles can happen without trashing meaningful climate targets.

Catastrophic

The economic transformations that tackling climate change implies must include reshaping – for collective social benefit, and with a view to rapidly reducing emissions – the huge technological systems, like road transport, that account for the largest chunks of fossil fuel use. Simply electrifying them is not enough.

Moreover, with the current level of technology, including the prospects opened up by decentralised renewables, there is potential to establish completely new relationships between production and use – which are currently controlled by big capital, but need not be.

Hopes of energy conservation implied in the International Energy Agency’s latest net zero report “border on the Pollyannaish”, Christophers writes. Yes, granted – if the perspective is limited to one dominated by capital.

But insofar as it is possible to confront, confound and supercede capitalism, a future in which electricity is used less wastefully, more equitably, and within bounds set collectively with a view to avoiding catastrophic climate change, is surely plausible.

That is where hope lies – outside the matrix of profit-driven relationships that Christophers skewers so exquisitely.

_{Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham and writes a blog at peoplenature.org.}