The media has been taken to task for doom-laden climate crisis presentations in a speech at an international workshop — and told to tell the full story.
Former Marshall Islands president Hilda Heine made the comments as the keynote speaker at the recent East West Centre’s international media conference in Hawai’i.
She said the media could sharpen people’s awareness about climate change, but too often the audience was overwhelmed with the problem, while there was little discussion of the solutions.
This could leave the public with an overall sense of powerlessness, she said, and suggested media should also uncover stories about sustainability.
“For example, in the dry and frequently drought-ridden northern Marshall Islands, families there place high value on sun-dried food preservation processes — for seafood as well as seasonal local food plants, including pulp from the pandanus fruit — we call it nogun.”
Pandanus fruit is a staple in Marshall Islands. Image: RNZ
Heine said that when dried over several days nogun becomes a healthy sweet snack that can last for months, and was useful for long ocean voyages across the Marshall Islands.
Sustainable practices were living examples of positive human interaction with the planet, and publicising positive sustainable practices could help change the planet, she said.
“They tell us it is possible to never exploit labour and land. There are numerous other practices, and it takes the media to scale up such practices by widely disseminating the knowledge to others.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
In farming, high crop yields are often associated with the use of human-made fertilizers. But what if these abundant results could instead be achieved by using farming practices that were more environmentally friendly?
An extensive new study of 30 farms in Africa and Europe has shown that the combination of small amounts of fertilizer with natural farming methods like mixing compost or manure with the soil, cultivating a wider variety of crops and cultivating plants like clover or beans that amplify soil’s fertility can result in high crop yields while maintaining the harmony of agricultural ecosystems, a press release from Rothamsted Research said.
The study found that a significant amount of chemical fertilizers could be replaced by adopting these more natural techniques, which would have multiple benefits.
Global food systems are at a breaking point. Not only are they responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, they are also the top contributors to water pollution and biodiversity collapse.
On top of that, many aspects of our food systems are extremely vulnerable to disruptions from climate change and other shocks, as we saw in the first months of the pandemic.
Agroecology — an approach to farming long practiced by Indigenous and peasant communities around the world — could transform our food systems for the better. And agribusinesses in the Global North are actively looking to agroecology to rebrand and build new markets under the banners of carbon farming and regenerative agriculture.
A new report on the economic impacts of climate change faced by the world’s most at-risk countries has found the climate crisis has made vulnerable economies poorer.
The Climate Vulnerable Economies Loss Report has found climate-threatened nations, including those in the Pacific, lost approximately US$525 billion in damage over the last two decades.
It reveals climate change wiped out one-fifth of the wealth of poor countries, which would be twice as wealthy today if not for climate change.
The climate economic loss report. Image: Screenshot APR
Marshall Islands climate envoy Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner said the findings of the report were “staggering”.
She said climate change affected every facet of human society and the effects went far beyond the economic, especially for those in the Pacific.
She said the non-economic damages might not be counted in dollars and cents but they were significant for people and communities.
“I think for us in the Pacific, we’re trying our hardest to make sure that the non-economic losses are just as much highlighted, you know, as some of this more large scale and that slow-onset event such as what we’re seeing in the atoll, nations, like the Marshall Islands, in particular, are also highlighted as really important,” she said.
The study was launched by the Vulnerable 20 Group or V-20, which represents 55 climate-threatened countries from across the world, at the UN climate talks currently taking place in the German city of Bonn.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The global community needs to “be inspired” to defend the world’s oceans ahead of the second United Nations Oceans Conference in Lisbon at the end of the month, a Fijian policymaker says.
Fisheries Minister Semi Koroilavesau said the Pacific could not protect its greatest resource through advocacy and action on its own.
Safeguarding the ocean and its resources against future dangers “to make it truly sustainable” will require the “entire world” to show more commitment, Koroilavesau said.
A former Navy commander and a self-professed marine advocate, he believes Pacific people’s future will be secured if “we will take whatever actions we must take”.
There are “enormous challenges before us and we need to turn our hopes into genuine ambition” to boost ocean action in the Blue Pacific, he told participants attending the World Oceans Day celebrations in Suva on Wednesday.
“As stewards of the Ocean, our task is to lead, to be a beacon of Blue leadership that inspires the world to turn away from the model of development that harms our ocean and threatens to strip off our life given resources,” he said.
This year’s theme for the international day — marked annually on June 8 — is “Revitalisation: Collective Action for the Ocean”.
Collaboration called for
Koroilavesau said it calls for “wider commitment” and urged stakeholders to collaborate to realise the changes necessary to protect the ocean.
“Our shared commitment towards collaboration will inspire and ignite actions that will certainly benefit us and our future generations,” he said, adding “the health and wellbeing of the Pacific Ocean and “the state of our climate are an interconnected system.”
The Pacific Ocean spans approximately 41 million square kilometres and is a fundamental part of the livelihoods and identity of the Pacific people.
Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS) deputy director-general Dr Filimon Manoni said the ocean was at the heart of the region’s geography and its cultures.
“It’s all we have…[and] all we return to in times of need, either for daily sustenance, for economic development, and nation building aspirations,” Dr Manoni said.
“We are inextricably linked to the ocean in all aspects of our everyday life.”
The ocean is home to almost 80 percent of all life on Earth. But its state is in decline, as it faces a range of threats due to human activity.
Critical year for the ocean
“Its health and ability to sustain life will only get worse as the world population grows and human activities increase,” the United Nations has said.
This year 2022, therefore, is regarded as a critical year for the ocean and an opportunity to reset the global ocean agenda at the Portugal conference.
This week, regional stakeholders gathered in Suva during the fourth Pacific Ocean Alliance (POA) meeting convened by the Office of the Pacific Ocean Commissioner (OPOC) to prepare for the UN conference.
The gathering was scheduled to align with the World Oceans Day to drive regional and global awareness of the region’s priorities for global ocean action, according to OPOC.
Over two days, the alliance aimed to identify the collective priorities for ocean action and approaches to drive global support.
Ocean’s Commissioner and Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna said “much has evolved” since the last time the Alliance met in 2019, prior to the covid-19 pandemic.
Puna said the region now finds itself “in a much more contested and challenging environment…faced with heightened geostrategic competition” as it “navigates the impacts of a global pandemic”.
Ocean health still suffers
“Yet the health of our ocean and indeed our planet continues to suffer as a result of climate change and other anthropogenic depressions,” he said.
“This challenging context will place significant pressure on our ability to realise our political and sustainable development aspirations.”
Several high-level ocean-related events have already been held this year with the Our Ocean Conference in Palau in April and the One Ocean Conference hosted by France in May.
Puna is expecting the conversations held during the POA meeting will strengthen the Pacific’s collective vision to conserve and sustainably use the world’s oceans and marine resources.
“I am hopeful that this gathering of the POA will provide an opportunity for us all to share our experiences and reflect on how we can work together, how we can collaborate and engage better, and how we can do more to ensure the health and survival of our ocean,” he said.
The UN Oceans Conference will be held from June 27 to July 1.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Papua New Guinean government can expect to be fined a hefty US$5 million (K17.6 million) each for six illegal shipments (K105 million total) of waste oil being transported to Singapore through Indonesian waters.
A formal notice was issued by Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry last Friday to PNG’s Conservation and Environment Protection Authority.
This is after six shipments of waste oil from two large gold mines and a state utility company in PNG were seized in Singapore and Indonesia.
These shipments were fuel oil delivered as vessel slops, refined oil and fuel oil claimed to be illegally shipped and labelled as fuel oil or refined oil to avoid the costly permit process.
The issue is that these materials require different clean-ups in the event of a spill and could potentially cause significant delays in cleaning up.
A letter from Indonesia’s chief compliance officer Basel Protocol Department Siti Muhammad, the Basel Protocol Department of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (Indonesia) to CEPA, obtained by this newspaper, read that Indonesia was “highly disturbed” that this practice was continuing with no hindrance from the relevant authority (CEPA) in PNG.
Muhammad said that next week their consular-general would deliver initial paperwork for the penalty of US$5 million per shipment to Prime Minister James Marape’s office for payment as they had been tolerant long enough.
No document flow
She claimed several of the shipments were sent with a clearance from CEPA, yet with no document flow as required under the Basel Convention.
“This is highly irresponsible as not even basic analysis samples were provided,” she said.
“Given that we have been absorbing the illegal materials from Papua New Guinea while this process was followed, we are no longer able to do so seeing as there is no actual program in place from PNG to manage their own hazardous materials.”
PNG, as a signatory to the Basel/Waigani Conventions (international agreements) that outline conduct requirements for waste management, should be held liable or comply with strict guidelines regarding the trans-boundary shipments of waste oils in place.
A Hachiko Efficiency Services spokesperson confirmed with the PNG Post-Courier that there were regular shipments of waste oil from PNG being transported to Indonesia and Singapore, and other international destinations.
The spokesperson claimed that while they had been given the export permit by CEPA in 2019, they had not exported since, as their programme was put on hold pending approval from the PNG government.
The Singapore-based company, Hachiko, has been working closely with the Singapore National Environmental Agency (NEA) and the Indonesian Department of Environment and Forestry under a blanket agreement that the refineries in Singapore can take in waste oil from PNG to be recycled using its export permit.
Risk of illegal shipment oil spills
“Until PNG has a formal waste oil management programme in place, it holds the risk of any illegal shipments causing spills and will be liable for any demurrage and cleanup costs (in the case of Singapore this would be US$40 million a day or K140 million),” the spokesperson said.
“This is similar to the Simberi oil spill in Honiara a few years ago.”
Last year, a shipment allegedly carrying Ok Tedi fuel oil shipped from Tabubil to a contractor in November and then left PNG for Malaysia in December.
The containers were trans-shipped through Singapore and were inspected by the NEA as one of them was leaking.
The Post-Courier was informed that the NEA conducted an investigation as the product was shipped in flex bags, which is illegal for fuel oil.
The containers upon testing were found to contain contaminated waste oil (contaminated with glycol, cyanide, water and metal content) and were seized by the Pollution Control Department (PCD) in Singapore.
CEPA acting managing director Gunther Joku said his office had not been informed of this issue and had not signed on any shipments as per the Basel Convention or given export permit to anyone.
Commercial not regulatory issue
He said this was a commercial and not a regulatory issue as the only company CEPA was aware of was Total Waste Management.
Ok Tedi Mining Limited (OTML) in response to these reports said it did not export waste oil directly outside of PNG, maintaining the process was satisfactorily completed from its end before the waste oil was disposed.
“OTML does not export waste oil directly from PNG,” the company said.
“We have a certified contractor that provides this service for us, just as it does for other clients in PNG, which are then all combined and shipped to India, and not Indonesia and Singapore as claimed.
“We have a robust industrial waste management system managed by a dedicated waste management team that ensures any industrial waste material is managed onsite following stringent environmental and health management guidelines before they are disposed.”
According to industry sources, any given year around 15 million litres of waste oil is produced in Papua New Guinea from various industries using high volumes.
Melisha Yafoiis a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has spoken to media to demonstrate to the US market that New Zealand is “open for business”, having arrived in the US yesterday.
Her trip includes meeting members of Congress and the UN Secretary-General, attending a launch event for sustainable meat exports, delivering the Harvard Commencement speech, meeting with California governor Gavin Newsom, and meeting with executives of tech giants like Twitter and Microsoft.
With US President Joe Biden in Japan for the launch, and Ardern having only just recovered from covid-19, the hoped-for meeting between the two is still up in the air, but there is optimism from the New Zealand side it will happen.
Ardern’s first event was a sit down with major American tourism media, as part of the drive to update the US market about New Zealand, and she will later meet meet with representatives of US multinational investment management firm BlackRock.
Ardern said the message of New Zealand being open for business and open for travel was really important at this time.
Travelling with a business delegation and doing as much as possible to open doors on their behalf is important, she said.
“Our high level meeting with BlackRock enabled our business delegation to sit face-to-face with a number of influential individuals in their investor sector from the United States. A really thoughtful, interesting discussion and dialogue which all of our business representatives had the chance to participate in.”
Ardern said the dominant issue discussed was sustainability.
Watch the PM speaking
PM Ardern in the US. Video: RNZ News
One-on-one with UN chief
Ardern also had a one-on-one with the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, where Ukraine was top of the agenda.
Ardern was keen to hear the secretary-general’s perspective on the war in Ukraine and to offer New Zealand’s support in the ongoing diplomatic work.
She said it was a chance to “discuss everything from the conflict in Ukraine to climate change and more broadly, the role that New Zealand can play in UN reform which we’ve long been an advocate and supporter of”.
“A really fruitful discussion but really useful to hear the secretary general’s reflections on the current conflict,” she said.
Ardern said that predominately the focus was on issues of climate sustainability and the war on Ukraine.
“Any reflection on the relationship between China and the United States whilst ultimately that is a matter for them, what we will continue to advocate is for peace and stability in our region, including any discussions around increasing tensions around Taiwan.”
Ardern said NZ would continue to be strong advocates of the US using the CPTPP as its port of call for a meaningful trade option.
‘An alternate framework’
“They have proposed an alternate framework, our mission as a country needs to be to keep our aspirations high but also work with what’s on the table,” she said.
“Ultimately the CPTPP is an existing framework that offers a significant amount from New Zealand’s perspective. However we will also engage with what’s currently on the table.”
Ardern does not yet have an update on a meeting with Biden.
Ardern said that having an independent foreign policy meant New Zealand had been very consistent in maintaining its values of peace, stability, the use of dialogue and the importance of multilateral institutions like the UN as an honest broker in difficult situations.
“There is tension in our region, we have our various periods of time seen escalation in language, we will constantly call, on New Zealand’s behalf and ours, on peace and stability in our region.”
The Chinese foreign minister is doing a tour of a number of Pacific nations. Ardern is not surprised by this.
“It’s not necessarily just presence, it’s the nature of that presence and the intention around it,” she said.
‘We want collaboration’
“From our perspective within our region, we’re very firm that yes, of course, we want collaboration in areas where we have shared concern, issues like climate adaptation and mitigation, we want quality investment and infrastructure in our region, we don’t want militarisation, we don’t want an escalation of tension.
“We want peace and stability so we will remain firm in our values.”
She said the question would continue to be whether some of those engagements were necessary.
Ardern’s day will be rounded off with a repeat appearance on TheLate Show with Stephen Colbert.
Just before departing New Zealand, she virtually attended the launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, an alliance of 13 countries including New Zealand that proposes joint efforts on climate change and digital issues but is widely considered a US attempt to limit China’s economic influence.
Although Fiji was unaffected by the first wave of covid-19, its tourism sector — the lifeblood of the economy — has been devastated by border closure across the world due to the pandemic in the past two years.
Thus, when the Fijian Tourism Expo (FTE) returned after a break of two years, Fiji Tourism’s CEO Brent Hill was in an upbeat mood, especially because they have been able to attract more than 500 participants to the Expo in these competitive times for the travel industry.
But, having experienced the vulnerabilities, sustainability was very much in focus during presentations at the event here.
In 2022, Tourism Fiji comes with a vision to “inspire the world to come and experience Fiji — where happiness finds you” and our purpose is to “ensure that Fiji is promoted and marketed as a tourist destination for the purpose of maximising sustainable and long terms benefits to Fiji”, said Hill, in presenting a brief overview of their past achievements and their two-year strategic plan to the FTE.
The 8th FTE was held on May 11-13 at the luxury Sheraton Beach Golf and Spa Resort near Nadi, the gateway to Fiji where its international airport and many tourist resort islands are located.
The three-day event attracted more than 88 exhibiting companies, 90 buyers and 10 media delegates eager to learn the strategic plan Tourism Fiji has set for the small island nation.
The semi-government agency was supported by Fiji’s Ministry of Commerce, Trade, Tourism and Transport and was declared opened by Minister Faiyaz Koya, who highlighted the negative impact of covid on the tourism industry.
‘Guided by robust policies’
“During this time, we were guided by robust policies that led to our border re-opening,” he said in his opening address.
“Our out-of-work tourism workers were among those supported by half a billion dollars (US$230 million) in direct and indirect assistance paid by the Fijian government. We took the last two years as an opportunity to re-invest.
“From upgrading our tourism facilities and renowned hospitality, to piloting new products.”
Hill’s presentation at the FTE highlighted that during the pre-pandemic period, the tourism sector represented 38 percent of the Fijian economy bringing in 36.5 percent employment making up over 118,000 jobs in a population of just over 896,000.
In 2019, the overseas visitor economy in Fiji was worth F$3 billion (US$1.37 billion) and had attracted 960,000 international arrivals, mainly from Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the United States.
Fast forward two years later into the post-pandemic period, the plan of tourism Fiji is to increase the visitor economy to F$3.37 billion.
Also, a high end goal of attracting 1 million international visitors by 2024 has been set. Hill highlighted that the two year strategic plan, 2022 to 2024, was strategised after consultations were done by meeting with tourism industry and also seeking people’s feedback on what Tourism Fiji’s priorities should be.
Six key priorities
From these consultations, they have pulled out six key priorities for the two year plan.
Sustainability is a key ingredient of the plan that includes shaping perceptions of Fiji, promoting the value of tourism to Fiji and enabling an efficient, high performing and innovative team to take the industry forward.
“For Tourism Fiji, it is very important as an organisation that we set our values. As a team, we really wanted to identify the core of who we are as a true Fijian and I’m very proud of the values that we actually came up with as a team and we want to make a difference,” said Hill.
Citing data from the global benchmarking agency Smith Travel Research (STR), Hill said that in 30 of Fiji’s key hotels that accounts for about 8500 rooms, the occupancy was running at 20 percent levels.
“That is a stunning rebound recovery and not to be sneezed at,” he points out, adding, “I know that there is dozens of tourism organisations around the world that would be begging to have their occupancy at those kinds of levels.”
Many of the exhibition booths at the FTE represented luxury boutique type resorts in small “paradise” islands that surround Fiji’s main islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu.
Many of these islands are so small that it may include just the resort which is usually privately owned (leased from traditional land owners).
Resort occupies whole island
One such resort is Beachcomber Island, just 17 km and 40 minutes by fast ferry from Port Denarau, the site of the Expo.
The resort occupies the whole of the privately owned 8 ha island, where staff works on a 21 day shift followed by 7 days leave to go back to “civilisation”. The resort which is very popular with foreign tourists was closed from 20 March 2020 until April 1 this year.
The resort manager, Nemia Merani, that she had to keep a skeleton staff of 5 during this time to help maintain its facilities, even though they had no income coming.
Pre-pandemic they used to employ 50-60 staff but now they only have 15-20 staff on the island.
“People from overseas are still hesitant to come,” she said. “Things that help us are day visitors not only weekends but weekdays too.
“We are selling to locals everyday. During the weekend we have a surge in numbers and after this we go right down again.”
Ironically, this resort was too expensive for local tourists pre-pandemic but the prices have been reduced for locals now.
‘Overseas visitors slowly picking up’
“Overseas visitors — especially from Australia — are slowly picking up and if that continues we will survive,” Merani said optimistically.
From presentations made at the Expo, the pandemic has also raised awareness among tourism operators here about the sustainability of the industry and the need to tap into local resources much more.
Even the five-star Sheraton hotel where the Expo was held made a special presentation on how they are developing a supply chain of local farmers feeding into their menus.
Since the borders were opened on December 1 last year, according to government figures, 119,000 tourists have arrived in Fiji, with 46,000 coming in April alone.
“I believe that we can work together collectively for providing the value of tourism to Fiji,” argues Hill pointing out the networking that took place here.
“Part of that is that we need to continue to tell the story of tourism and tell the story of what it is that we’re all about.”
Sheryl Lal and Akansha Narayan are final year journalism students at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. This story ror In-Depth News was initially published in USP’s student journalism newspaper Wansolwara. Both IDN and Wansolwara collaborate with Asia Pacific Report.
At Maison Jar – a new grocery store located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in New York City – silos of dry goods line one wall. Dried beans, grains, pasta, nuts, and coffee are beside bins of cooking staples like flour, baking soda, baking powder, and sugar. A refrigerator on the wall opposite holds industrial-sized jars of olives, racks of eggs, and metal trays of fresh produce, and a freezer is stocked with plastic bins of frozen fruit and vegetables. Prepared snacks like dried mangos, wasabi peas, gummy bears, and chocolate-covered nuts fill glass jugs on the center tables.
A West Papuan international student in Aotearoa New Zealand has devoted hundreds of hours to a non-profit organisation and opened a door to a new career.
Arnold Yoman, 19, came to New Zealand in 2019 from the Papuan provincial capital Jayapura on an Indonesian government scholarship and has been studying at Awatapu College in Palmerston North.
The school’s international department had a programme in Manawatū to get students involved in business during their first summer separated from overseas friends and family.
Yoman — a younger son of Reverend Socratez Yoman, president of the Fellowship of Baptist Churches in West Papua, who visited New Zealand in 2016 — started volunteering at Wholegrain Organics when he could not go home because of covid-19 border closures.
“I was welcomed to volunteer by the Wholegrain Organics farm and cafe and liked it so much that I asked to stay on after the holidays were over,” he said.
He volunteered at Wholegrain Organics’ farm during the school holidays and once it became obvious he had a passion and a knack for horticulture, the school started working with Wholegrain Organics so he could continue his work and get National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) credits.
Yoman’s work is through Wholegrain Organics’ hands-on food programme, where he plants, maintains and harvests organic produce for the community.
500 hours by the end
He will have completed more than 500 hours by the end of his voluntary work.
He is in his final year of school and wants to stay in New Zealand to study horticulture at Lincoln University in Canterbury next year.
Wholegrain Organics’ hands-on food programme has been running since 2015, a non-profit scheme working with young people in community programmes like a regenerative vegetable farm and a training kitchen and deli.
The programme’s food technology, nutrition and horticulture educator Gosia Wiatr said they loved having young people involved because it gave them access to quality and inclusive learning opportunities.
“Arnold’s work ethic has been an encouragement for other young people in the programme.
“International students have always been a great part of our programme, so we wanted to support the students who were separated from their families over the holidays.
“We’ve been happy about their success stories, with students finding new career paths, improving their English and enriching their time in New Zealand as a result.”
Republished with permission from Stuff.
Awatapu College student Arnold Yoman (left) and Wholegrain Organics’ Fred Kretschmer inspect a broccoli on one of the non-profit business farms. Image: David Unwin/Stuff
4Mins Read Google has released data that appears to demonstrate a shift towards climate awareness in the U.K. Users of the search engine have been looking for ways to reduce their environmental footprint, with specific methodologies starting to trend. Vintage and recycled clothing has proven to be a popular query, alongside electric vehicle searches. The revelation came […]
The recycling of discarded electronic gadgets must urgently be increased. Mining the Earth for metals to make new gadgets is unsustainable, scientists have said.
A new campaign run by the Royal Society Of Chemistry is drawing attention to the unsustainability of continuing to mine for materials used in consumer technology.
More than the Great Wall of China
One study estimated that the world’s mountain of discarded electronics, in 2021 alone, weighed 57 million tonnes, more than the Great Wall of China.
The society says there now needs to be a global effort to mine that waste, rather than mining the Earth.
It points out that geopolitical unrest, including the war in Ukraine, has caused huge spikes in the price of materials like nickel, a key element in electric vehicle batteries.
This volatility in the market for elements is now causing “chaos in supply chains”.
Combined with the surge in demand, the price of lithium, another important component in battery technology, has increased by almost 500% between 2021 and 2022.
The society warned that some key elements are now simply running out.
‘Highly unsustainable’
Professor Tom Welton, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, said:
Our tech consumption habits remain highly unsustainable and have left us at risk of exhausting the raw elements we need.
It is essential that governments and businesses urgently do more to develop a circular economy which can tackle the world’s growing e-waste crisis and alleviate the strain on supply chains.
New research by the society also revealed a growing demand from consumers for more sustainable technology.
In an online survey of 10,000 people across 10 countries, 60% said they would be more likely to switch to a rival of their preferred tech brand if they knew the product was made in a sustainable way.
Recycling
The survey also suggested that people did not know how to deal with their own e-waste.
Many respondents said they worried about the environmental effect of the unused devices they have in their homes. But they did not know what to do with them or were concerned about the security of recycling schemes.
Currently, less than 20% of e-waste is collected and recycled and is growing by about two million tonnes every year.
Elizabeth Ratcliffe from the Royal Society of Chemistry told BBC Radio 4 that many of us were “unwittingly stockpiling precious metals in our homes”, in old phones and defunct computers. She said:
Manufacturers and retailers need to take more responsibility…
Like ‘take-back’ schemes, meaning people can return their electronics to a retailer and be assured they will be recycled securely.
The society hopes to encourage people to take old and unwanted devices to recycling centres, rather than stuff them into drawers and forget about them.
4Mins Read California’s Stanford University has revealed that a new school will be opening at the start of the 2022 fall semester. The Doerr School of Sustainability has come about thanks to a $1.1 billion donation from John and Ann Doerr, plus gifts from other philanthropists. The focus of the school will be to identify and mobilise […]
Over 85 investment firms, academic organizations, and environmental groups from across Canada and the globe, representing nearly 3-million members, have called on the government to step up and pass policies that align the financial sector with climate action. Canada’s financial sector needs to invest in climate solutions, but most of our banks, pension funds, and insurers continue to fund climate chaos.
Recent reports have highlighted that Canadian banks significantly invest in oil, gas, and coal despite the clear science that fossil fuels worsen climate change. Redirecting the financial sector is key for Canada to succeed on climate action. As a result, Environmental Defence in partnership with 88 other organizations called on the government to implement policies that reroute the financial sector to help limit global warming below 1.5-degrees, and keep the world liveable.
Our call to action supports independent Senator Rosa Galvez’s Bill S-243, the Climate-Aligned Finance Act. Senator Galvez tabled this ambitious piece of legislation on March 24th, 2022. If implemented, it would require the financial sector to reduce carbon emissions and build resilience in the real world. The bill’s policies would ensure that all financial institutions align with Canada’s commitments on climate action, including avoiding carbon lock-in and respecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples. This legislation would help Canada become a leader in delivering a climate-aligned, low carbon financial system. We need policymakers to take the lead and implement these policies into law.
Although financial institutions have independently taken baby steps to advance climate-aligned finance, voluntary initiatives alone are not spurring action at the level needed to keep the planet liveable. Other countries are recognizing this and implementing climate finance policies in response. For example, New Zealand requires companies to report on their emissions and climate business strategies, and the European Union introduced regulations that would require investors to report the adverse impacts their investments have on environment and social justice. But Canada’s climate finance regulations still lag behind international best practices.
The Climate-Aligned Finance Act moves beyond just disclosure, or reporting, to ensure the financial sector actually cuts carbon and builds resilience. Canadian policymakers should implement this to ensure finance becomes truly sustainable – not just in name.
This united call for action – signed from across the climate and finance spectrum – proves that Canadian policymakers have left a big policy gap on climate finance. We call on both Canada’s Senate and House members to implement the provisions of Bill S-243 into law. This bill would ensure Canada’s financial sector helps to mitigate climate change. It would move us towards a stable environment and a stable economy.
Plans to establish “food estates” were announced by the Indonesian government at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic because, it said, it wanted to ensure Indonesia’s food security.
But as AwasMIFEE! and TAPOL show in their new report released today, Pandemic Power Grabs: Who benefits from Food Estates in West Papua?, these plans would seem to benefit agro-industrial conglomerates and oligarchs with close connections to figures in the government.
Based on previous and current plans, food estates could lead to ecological ruin and further sideline the indigenous population in West Papua, says the report.
The report details planned food estates and the involvement of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.
A second linked report will examine in more detail the involvement of the Ministry of Defence and the military in food estates.
Pandemic Power Grabs argues that the strong support for corporate plantation agriculture by the government in southern Papua and in other areas of Indonesia has the potential to increase corruption.
The Minister of Environment and Forestry has also seemingly backed off commitments to stop deforestation in Indonesia made at the COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021.
Long-term impacts of Merauke failure
In the same week that the Indonesian government banned palm oil exports in the face of a global shortage of cooking oils, the report shows that while plans in southern Papua from 2007 for a Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) failed, MIFEE had serious long-term impacts.
As the report states, MIFEE became a “major enabling factor behind the growth of oil palm plantations in the area which have severely impacted [on] West Papuan communities socially, economically and ecologically.”
The report includes:
A chronology of past top-down agricultural development plans in West Papua
How plans for food estates could potentially lead to the flourishing of corruption
How this potential corruption is being facilitated by new legislation which gives new powers to the central government to grab land for food estates, also circumventing environmental safeguards
That the growth of the plantation industry in West Papua over the last decade has highlighted many of the potential negative consequences indigenous people are likely to suffer under the current plans
That it is not only indigenous communities’ livelihoods that are threatened by food estates but also their culture.
‘Enduring land grabs’
TAPOL chairperson Steve Alston commented: “Communities in southern Papua province have for more than 15 years had to endure land grabs and clearances for massive plantations.
“We have supported local NGOs to campaign for indigenous peoples’ rights and AwasMIFEE! has publicised and tirelessly reported on the situation.
“But despite it being within its power to review and halt food estates, the Indonesian government has failed to listen to local communities. They have been promised jobs on plantations but then sidelined as transmigrants from other parts of Indonesia have replaced them.
“The food security reasoning for food estates is actually very thin, what we’re seeing instead is cultivation of cash crops for exports, with the government taking a role to support this goal.
“In a time of global crisis for food production, we urge the government to act now to halt plans for food estates which dispossess Papuans of their land, lead to deforestation and will eventually ruin the land of Papua.”
‘World Localization Day’ will be celebrated on 20 June. Organised by the non-profit Local Futures, this annual coming together of people from across the world began in 2020 and focuses on the need to localise supply-chains and recover our connection with nature and community. The stated aim is to “galvanize the worldwide localization movement into a force for systemic change”.
Local Futures, founded by Helena Norberg-Hodge, urges us to imagine a very different world, one in which most of our food comes from nearby farmers who ensure food security year round and where the money we spend on everyday goods continues to recirculate in the local economy.
We are asked to imagine local businesses providing ample, meaningful employment opportunities, instead of our hard-earned cash being immediately siphoned off to some distant corporate headquarters.
Small farms would be key in this respect. They are integral to local markets and networks, short supply chains, food sovereignty, more diverse cropping systems and healthier diets. And they tend to serve the food requirements of communities rather than the interests of big business, institutional investors and shareholders half a world away.
If the COVID lockdowns and war in Ukraine tell us anything about our food system, it is that decentralised, regional and local community-owned food systems based on short(er) supply chains that can cope with future shocks are now needed more than ever.
Localization involves strengthening and rebuilding local economies and communities and restoring cultural and biological diversity. The ‘economics of happiness’ is central to this vision, rather than an endless quest for GDP growth and the alienation, conflict and misery this brings.
It is something we need to work towards because multi-billionaire globalists have a dystopian future mapped out for humanity which they want to impose on us all – and it is diametrically opposed to what is stated above.
The much-publicised ‘great reset’ is integral to this dystopia. It marks a shift away from ‘liberal democracy’ towards authoritarianism. At the same time, there is the relentless drive towards a distorted notion of a ‘green economy’, underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
The great reset is really about capitalism’s end-game. Those promoting it realise the economic and social system must undergo a reset to a ‘new normal’, something that might no longer resemble ‘capitalism’.
End-game capitalism
Capital can no longer maintain its profitability by exploiting labour alone. This much has been clear for some time. There is only so much surplus value to be extracted before the surplus is insufficient.
Historian Luciana Bohne notes that the shutting down of parts of the economy was already happening pre-COVID as there was insufficient growth, well below the minimum tolerable 3% level to maintain the viability of capitalism. This, despite a decades-long attack on workers and corporate tax cuts.
The system had been on life support for some time. Credit markets had been expanded and personal debt facilitated to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages were squeezed. Financial products (derivatives, equities, debt, etc) and speculative capitalism were boosted, affording the rich a place to park their profits and make money off money. We have also seen the growth of unproductive rentier capitalism and stock buy backs and massive bail outs courtesy of taxpayers.
Moreover, in capitalism, there is also a tendency for the general rate of profit to fall over time. And this has certainly been the case according to writer Ted Reese, who notes it has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s.
The 2008 financial crash was huge. But by late 2019, an even bigger meltdown was imminent. Many companies could not generate enough profit and falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent. In effect, economic growth was already grinding to a halt prior to the massive stock market crash in February 2020.
Fabio Vighi, professor of critical theory, describes how, in late 2019, the Swiss Bank of International Settlements, BlackRock (the world’s most powerful investment fund), G7 central bankers, leading politicians and others worked behind closed doors to avert a massive impending financial meltdown.
The Fed soon began an emergency monetary programme, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars per week into financial markets. Not long after, COVID hit and lockdowns were imposed. The stock market did not collapse because lockdowns occurred. Vighi argues lockdowns were rolled out because financial markets were collapsing.
Closing down the global economy under the guise of fighting a pathogen that mainly posed a risk to the over 80s and the chronically ill seemed illogical to many, but lockdowns allowed the Fed to flood financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Vighi says that lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.
Using lockdowns and restrictions, smaller enterprises were driven out of business and large sections of the pre-COVID economy were shut down. This amounted to a controlled demolition of parts of the economy while the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook) and the online payment sector – platforms which are dictating what the ‘new normal’ will look like – were clear winners in all of this.
The rising inflation that we currently witness is being blamed on the wholly avoidable conflict in Ukraine. Although this tells only part of the story, the conflict and sanctions seem to be hitting Europe severely: if you wanted to demolish your own economy or impoverish large sections of the population, this might be a good way to go about it.
However, the massive ‘going direct’ helicopter money given to the financial sector and global conglomerates under the guise of COVID relief was always going to have an impact once the global economy reopened.
Similar extraordinary monetary policy (lockdowns) cannot be ruled out in the future: perhaps on the pretext of another ‘virus’ but possibly based on the notion of curtailing human activity due to ‘climate emergency’. This is because raising interests rates to manage inflation could rapidly disrupt the debt-bloated financial system (an inflated Ponzi scheme) and implode the entire economy.
Permanent austerity
But lockdowns, restrictions or creating mass unemployment and placing people on programmable digital currencies to micromanage spending and decrease inflationary pressures could help to manage the crisis. ‘Programmable’ means the government determining how much you can spend and what you can spend on.
How could governments legitimise such levels of control? By preaching about reduced consumption according to the creed of ‘sustainability’. This is how you would ‘own nothing and be happy’ if we are to believe this well-publicised slogan of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
But like neoliberal globalization in the 1980s – the great reset is being given a positive spin, something which supposedly symbolises a brave new techno-utopian future.
In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulated neoliberal globalisation agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, driving home the primacy of ‘free enterprise’, individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the role of state, trade unions and the collective in society.
Today, we are seeing another ideological shift: individual rights (freedom to choose what is injected into your own body, for instance) are said to undermine the wider needs of society and – in a stark turnaround – individual freedom is now said to pose a threat to ‘national security’, ‘public health’ or ‘safety’.
A near-permanent state of ‘emergency’ due to public health threats, climate catastrophe or conflict (as with the situation in Ukraine) would conveniently place populations on an ongoing ‘war footing’. Notions of individual liberty and democratic principles would be usurped by placing the emphasis on the ‘public interest’ and protecting the population from ‘harm’. This would facilitate the march towards authoritarianism.
As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by economic impulses. Neoliberalism privatised, deregulated, exploited workers and optimised debt to the point whereby markets are now kept afloat by endless financial injections.
The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of personal ownership under the guise of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘saving the planet’. Where the WEF is concerned, this is little more than code for permanent austerity to be imposed on the mass of the population.
Metaverse future
At the start of this article, readers were asked to imagine a future based on a certain set of principles associated with localization. For one moment, imagine another. The one being promoted by the WEF, the high-level talking shop and lobby group for elite interests headed by that avowed globalist and transhumanist Klaus Schwab.
As you sit all day unemployed in your high-rise, your ‘food’ will be delivered via an online platform bought courtesy of your programmable universal basic income digital money. Food courtesy of Gates-promoted farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be engineered, processed and constituted into something resembling food.
Enjoy and be happy eating your fake food, stripped of satisfying productive endeavour and genuine self-fulfilment. But really, it will not be a problem. You can sit all day and exist virtually in Zuckerberg’s fantasy metaverse. Property-less and happy in your open prison of mass unemployment, state dependency, track and chip health passports and financial exclusion via programmable currency.
A world also in which bodily integrity no longer exists courtesy of a mandatory vaccination agenda linked to emerging digital-biopharmaceutical technologies. The proposed World Health Organization pandemic treaty marks a worrying step in this direction.
This ‘new normal’ would be tyrannical, but the ‘old normal’ – which still thrives – was not something to be celebrated. Global inequality is severe and environmental devastation and human dislocation has been increasing. Dependency and dispossession remain at the core of the system, both on an individual level and at local, regional and national levels. New normal or old normal, these problems will persist and become worse.
Green imperialism
The ‘green economy’ being heavily promoted is based on the commodification of nature, through privatization, marketization and monetary valuation. Banks and corporations will set the agenda – dressed in the garb of ‘stakeholder capitalism’, a euphemism for governments facilitating the needs of powerful global interests. The fear is that the proposed system will weaken environmental protection laws and regulations to facilitate private capital.
The banking sector will engage in ‘green profiling’ and issue ‘green bonds’ and global corporations will be able to ‘offset’ (greenwash) their environment-degrading activities by, for example, protecting or planting a forest elsewhere (on indigenous people’s land) or perhaps even investing in (imposing) industrial agriculture which grows herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that are misleadingly portrayed as ‘climate friendly’. Imperialism wrapped in green.
Relying on the same thinking and the same interests that led the world to where it is now does not seem like a great idea. This type of ‘green’ is first and foremost a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining pockets and part of a strategy that may well be used to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.
The future needs to be rooted in the principles of localization. For this, we need look no further than the economics and the social relations that underpin tribal societies (for example, India’s indigenous peoples). The knowledge and value systems of indigenous peoples promote long-term genuine sustainability by living within the boundaries of nature and emphasise equality, communality and sharing rather than separation, domination and competition.
Self-sufficiency, solidarity, localization and cooperation is the antidote to globalism and the top-down tyranny of programmable digital currencies and unaccountable, monopolistic AI-driven platforms which aim to monitor and dictate every aspect of life.
As a child, Efika Kora remembers watching planes glide over her remote village in the Pacific.
Transfixed, she imagined that one day she would be the one flying them.
Now, just two semesters away from completing a diploma of aviation at an Adelaide school, the 24-year-old has been told by Indonesian authorities she must return to her home country.
It came as a complete shock to Kora, who is among a group of more than 140 Indigenous West Papuan students in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States who had their Papuan government scholarships terminated without warning.
It means they would have to return home part way through their degrees or diplomas, a situation that has been described as highly unusual.
“To be honest, I cried,” Kora said.
“In a way, [it’s] like your right to education has been stripped away from you.”
16 students ordered home
In Australia, 16 students have been told to return home.
A letter to the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, dated February 8, from the Papuan provincial government said the students were to be repatriated because they had not finished their studies on time.
The letter said they had to return to West Papua by February 15, but it wasn’t until a month later — on March 8 — that the students were first told about the letter in a meeting with the Indonesian embassy.
“I was very, very shocked. And my mind just went blank,” Kora said.
The Indonesian Embassy and the Papuan provincial government have not responded to the ABC’s questions, including about the delay in relaying the message.
Students told ‘you have to take turns’ When the students asked for more details, they were told by the Indonesian Embassy that the five-year duration of their scholarships had now lapsed.
The ABC has seen text messages from an embassy official to one of the students, saying the decision was final.
“There will be no extension of the scholarship because there are still many Papuan students who also need scholarships. So you have to take turns,” one message read.
Like Efika Kora, Jaliron Kogoya (right) was told to return home to Papua, even though his scholarship is guaranteed until July this year. Image: ABC Pacific Beat
Kora said she wasn’t aware of a five-year limit to her scholarship.
“We never had like a written letter [saying] our scholarship will be going for five years,” she said.
She said she was told, verbally, she had been awarded the scholarship in 2015, and began her aviation diploma in 2018 after completing language studies.
A number of students have told the ABC they were also not given a formal offer letter or contract stipulating the conditions and duration of their scholarship.
Some students signed contract
Some students said they signed a contract in 2019 — well after their scholarships had commenced — which outlined durations for certain degrees, but Kora said she didn’t sign this document.
Business student Jaliron Kogoya said he also didn’t sign any such agreements.
A sponsorship letter from the Papuan government, issued in 2020, guarantees funding for his degree at the University of South Australia until July this year.
He has also been cut off.
“They just tell us to go home and then there is no hope for us,” Kogoya said.
The University of South Australia said it had been working closely with the students and the Papuan government since they began studying at the university two years ago.
“We are continuing to provide a range of supports to the students at this challenging time,” a spokeswoman said.
About 84 students in the United States and Canada, plus 41 in New Zealand, have also been told by the Papuan government that their scholarships had ended and they must return home.
Programme plagued with administrative issues While the Papuan government scholarship aims to boost education for Indigenous students, the programme has been plagued with administrative problems.
Several students told the ABC their living allowances, worth $1500 per month, and tuition fees, were sometimes paid late, meaning they could not enrol in university courses and struggled to pay rent.
Kora said late payments held back her academic progression.
West Papuan students hope to gain new skills by studying in Australia and New Zealand.Image: ABC Pacific Beat
Her aviation degree takes approximately four semesters to complete, but Kora said there were certain aspects of her training that she could not do because of unpaid fees.
The ABC has seen invoices from her aviation school, Hartwig Air, that were due in 2018 but were not paid until two years later.
Fees for her current semester, worth $24,500, were paid more than three months late, in October last year.
Kora said there were moments when she felt like giving up.
‘What’s the point?’
“What’s the point of even studying if these things are delaying my studies?” she said.
Kora believes she may have been able to graduate sooner if her fees had been paid on time.
Hartwig Air would not comment on her situation.
But an academic report issued by the school in February this year said Kora was “progressing well with her flying” and getting good results on most of her exams.
Kora said it did not make sense to send her home now because her fees for the current semester had already been paid.
“It’s a waste of investment,” she said.
“If we’re not bringing any qualifications back home, it’s a shame not just for us, but also for the government in a way.”
Students turn to food banks, churches In the United States, Daniel Game has faced similar struggles.
He was awarded a Papuan government scholarship in 2017.
Game said he was told the scholarship would last five years but did not receive a formal offer letter or contract at the time.
After completing a general science degree, he was accepted into Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Oregon, to begin studying aeronautical science in 2019.
It is a prestigious institution and he was proud to get in.
But, when it came time to enrol, he couldn’t because the government did not issue a sponsorship letter to guarantee his funding.
Game sent multiple emails and made calls to the government’s human resources department requesting the document.
The letter never came
He said he was told the letter would be issued, but that never happened.
During this time, Game continued to receive a living allowance from the Papuan government and was told his scholarship was still valid.
In 2020, Game paid for his own flight back to West Papua in the middle of the pandemic to try to resolve the issue in person.
When he visited the department office, his sponsorship letter was issued immediately.
The ordeal set Game’s studies back more than 18 months.
Papuan student Daniel Game in the United States is fulfilling his dream of flying, despite setbacks over his scholarship. Image: ABC Pacific Beat
His sponsorship letter, seen by the ABC, guarantees his funding until July 2023 but now he’s also been told to return home.
“Most of us, we spend our time and energy and work really hard … it’s not fair,” Game said.
Staying in the US
With just a few months until he’s due to graduate, Game has decided to stay in the US.
His family are funding his university tuition, but without a living allowance, Game said he was struggling to make ends meet.
“It’s really hard, especially being in the US,” he said.
“For food, I usually go out searching local churches and food pantries where I’ll be able to get free stuff.”
‘It doesn’t make sense’
Back in Australia, students are also in financial strife.
Kora has started picking fruit and vegetables on local farms to make ends meet since her living allowance was cut off in November last year.
Tried to find part-time jobs
“We tried to find part-time jobs here and there to just cover us for our rent,” she said.
She and other students are hoping to stay in Australia and finish their degrees.
From a low-income family, Kora cannot rely on her parents, so she is calling on Australian universities and the federal government for support.
“I just want to make my family proud back home to know that actually, someone like me, can be something,” she said.
The Australian West Papua Association of South Australia has launched a fundraising campaign to pay some students’ university fees and rent.
Kylie Agnew, a psychologist and association member, said she was concerned for their wellbeing.
“Not being able to finish your studies, returning to a place with very low job prospects … there’s a lot of stress that the students are under,” she said.
Perplexing decision
Jim Elmslie is co-convenor of the West Papua Project at the University of Wollongong, which advocates for peace and justice in West Papua.
He said the decision to send students home so close to finishing their degrees was perplexing.
“After having expended probably in excess of $100,000, or maybe considerably more, in paying multiple years’ university fees and living allowances … it doesn’t make sense,” Dr Elmslie said.
In a text message to one student in Australia, an Indonesian Embassy official said the students could seek alternative funding for their studies, but they were “no longer the responsibility” of the Papuan provincial government.
The text message also said the students would receive help to transfer to relevant degrees at universities in Indonesia when they returned home.
But Dr Elmslie said the alternatives were not ideal.
“If you start a degree course in Australia, to me, it’s much better … to finish that degree course,” he said.
“And then you have a substantial academic qualification.”
President of the Council of International Students Australia Oscar Ong said the situation was highly unusual.
He said that, while some international students weren’t able to graduate within the duration of their scholarship, for so many to be recalled at once was unprecedented.
Legislative change and redistribution of funding The Papuan provincial government did not respond to the ABC’s detailed questions about the scholarship program.
Local media reports suggest the issue may be linked to a redistribution of funding.
The scholarship programme was set up by the Papuan provincial government, with money from the Indonesian central government under a Special Autonomy Law.
Passed in 2001, the bill granted special autonomy to the West Papua region, following a violent and decades-long fight for independence.
The old law expired in November and new legislation was passed, with an overall boost in finance to the region but with certain funds, including support for education, going towards districts and cities instead of provincial governments.
That revised law has sparked protests in West Papua, with critics claiming it is an extension of colonial rule that denies Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination.
An Interior Ministry official from the Indonesian government is quoted in local media as saying there needed to be a joint conversation between the Papuan provincial government and the region’s districts and cities about the future of scholarship funding.
The ABC has been unable to independently verify whether the students’ scholarship terminations are linked to this legislative change.
Additional reporting for Pacific Beat by Hellena Souisa and Erwin Renaldi. Republished with permission.
In a recent article (Weekend Herald, April 16) John Roughan wrote that the covid-19 pandemic has been an anticlimax in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Surprisingly, he acknowledges covid-19 has killed about 25 million people worldwide, so hopefully he was referring to New Zealand’s 600 deaths. He goes on to ask how many lives we in New Zealand have saved and states that it’s “not the 80,000 based on modelling from the Imperial College London that panicked governments everywhere in March 2020”.
I beg to differ. It is because governments panicked everywhere that the number of deaths so far is “only” about 25 million.
A recent comprehensive assessment of the covid-19 infection fatality proportion — the proportion of people infected with covid-19 who die from the infection — found that in April 2020, before most governments had “panicked”, the infection fatality proportion was 1.5 percent or more in numerous high-income countries. Included were Japan, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.
Without stringent public health measures, covid-19 is likely to have spread through the entire population, and an infection fatality proportion of 1.5 percent multiplied by 5 million (New Zealanders) equals 75,000.
That’s close to the estimated 80,000 New Zealand lives likely to have been saved because our “panicking” government, like many others, introduced restrictive public health measures.
Public health successes are invisible
What Roughan fails to appreciate is that public health successes are invisible. Unlike deaths, you cannot see people not dying.
Without the initial public health measures and then the rapid development and deployment of highly effective vaccines (unconscionably largely to high-income countries) there would have been far more deaths.
Roughan asks “is this a pandemic?” He states that 25 million covid deaths are only 0.3 percent of the world’s population (“only” 16,000 New Zealand deaths).
How many deaths make a pandemic? In 2020, covid-19 was the number one killer in the UK, responsible for causing about one in 10 deaths in every age group, with each person who died losing on average about 10 years of life expectancy.
In the US, more than 150,000 children have lost a primary or secondary caregiver to covid-19.
So, has our pandemic response been proportionate?
Stringent public health measures were highly effective pre-omicron, but are unsustainable long term.
New Zealand is incredibly fortunate
We are incredibly fortunate that highly effective vaccines were developed so rapidly.
Even the less severe omicron variant is a major killer of unvaccinated people, as demonstrated in Hong Kong, where the equivalent of 6000 New Zealanders have been killed by omicron in the past couple of months, due to low vaccination rates.
Unfortunately, despite our high vaccination rates, we are unlikely to be out of the woods, and it is likely a new covid-19 variant will be back to bite us. The only certainty is that the next variant will need to be even more contagious to overtake omicron.
As long as covid-19 passes to a new host before killing you, there is no selection advantage to a less fatal variant. We are just lucky that omicron was less virulent than delta.
Pandemics over the centuries have often taken several generations to change from being mass killers to causing the equivalent of a common cold.
What response will we accept as proportionate to shorten this process with covid-19 without millions of additional deaths?
As immunity from vaccination or infection wanes, we will need updated vaccines to prevent regular major disruptions to society.
A sustainable proportionate response
Unlike the flu, which has a natural R-value of less than two (one person on average infects fewer than two others), omicron appears to have an R-value of at least 10. That means in the time it takes flu to go from infecting one person to two, to four, to eight people, omicron (without a proportionate response) could go from infecting one to 10 to 100 to 1000 people.
There is no way that endemic covid will be as manageable as endemic flu.
The only sustainable proportionate response to covid-19 is for New Zealanders to embrace universal vaccination.
It is likely that vaccine passes will be required again if we want to live more normally and for society to thrive. It cannot be difficult to make the use of vaccine passes more seamless.
Almost every financial transaction today is electronic and it must be possible to link transactions to valid vaccine passes when required.
Almost 1 million eligible New Zealanders haven’t had their third vaccine dose, yet few are anti-vaccination.
Rather, thanks to vaccination and other public health measures, the pandemic has been an anticlimax for many New Zealanders and the third dose has not been a priority.
As already demonstrated, for the vast majority of New Zealanders, a vaccine pass is sufficient to make vaccination a priority.
Professor Rod Jackson is an epidemiologist with the University of Auckland. This article was originally published by The New Zealand Herald. Republished with the author’s permission.
In their new report titled, “The right track for Green Jobs” Possible, Autonomy UK and Safe Landing present scenarios for showing that cuts to aviation can more than compensate for job losses to the aviation sector. No more excuses, green jobs are possible especially when people are willing to fly less. Speaking particularly to the impact on jobs from less flying, We Are Possible, Autonomy UK and Safe Landing just released a new report in which they model different scenarios for reducing demands for flying while maintaining the ability to travel domestically via trains or low-emissions ferries and the impacts these shifts would have on the UK’s job market.
Without shrinking energy demand, reducing emissions rapidly by the end of this decade to keep warming below 1.5C will be almost impossible, the key UN body’s report said.
Even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2C this century.
At this point, only severe emissions cuts in this decade across all sectors, from agriculture and transport to energy and buildings, can turn things around, the report said.
IPCC vice-chair Dr Andy Reisinger told RNZ Morning Report the world was “pretty much out of time” to limit warming to 1.5C as agreed in Paris in 2015 and subsequently.
“What our report shows is that the emissions over the last decade were at the highest level ever in human history.
“But on the positive side, that level of emissions growth has slowed and globally we’ve seen a revolution in prices for some renewable energy technologies.” That had led to a rapid uptake of solar and wind energy technologies, he said.
“Also policies have grown. About half of global greenhouse gas emissions that we looked at in our report are now covered by some sort of laws that address climate change.”
The report said the world would need “carbon dioxide removal” (CDR) technologies – ranging from planting trees that soak up carbon to grow, to costly and energy-intensive technologies to suck carbon dioxide directly from the air.
Governments had historically seen these technologies as a “cop out” but they were needed alongside reducing emissions,” Reisinger said.
“The time has now run out. If we don’t achieve deep and rapid reductions during this decade, much more so than we’re currently planning to collectively, then limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is out of reach.
“And the world collectively has the tools to reduce emissions by about a half by 2030.”
Climate Change Minister James Shaw … “Our country has squandered the past 30 years.” Image: James Shaw FB page
NZ has ‘squandered 30 years’, says Shaw Climate Change Minister James Shaw says Aotearoa New Zealand has the political will to tackle climate change but it would have been a lot easier if it had begun decades ago.
“We are one of the highest emitting countries in the world on a per-capita basis and what that means is we’re now in a situation where having essentially fluffed around for three decades the cuts that we need to make over are now far steeper than they would have been.”
“Our country has squandered the past 30 years,” Shaw told Morning Report.
He said the Emissions Reduction Plan to be published next month would set out how the country would reduce emissions across every sector of the economy.
“I think what’s different about the plan that we’re putting out in May is that it’s a statutory instrument”, he said, and was required under the Zero Carbon Act. It would have targets to reduce emissions to the year 2025, 2030 and 2035.
New Zealand’s agricultural emissions had not reduced, he said. This was the year when final decisions would be made on whether agriculture was brought into the Emissions Trading Scheme, and the whole sector was involved in the process.
There were farms up and down the country doing a terrific job on emissions but like every sector there was a “noisy group” which was dragging the chain.
“I think the charge that Groundswell are laying that we are not listening to farmers is ‘total bollocks’, he said.
Shaw noted the IPCC report said 83 percent of net growth in greenhouse gases since 2010 had occurred in Asia and the Pacific — and that New Zealand, Australia and Japan, as a group, had some of the highest rates of greenhouse gas emissions per capita in 2019.
Cut consumer demand While past IPCC reports on mitigating carbon emissions tended to focus on the promise of sustainable fuel alternatives, the new report highlights a need to cut consumer demand.
Massey University emeritus professor Ralph Sims, a review editor of the IPCC report, said one of the overarching messages is that people needed to change behaviours.
Despite New Zealanders having an attitude that our impact was small, in fact the country had some of the highest carbon emissions per capita, he said.
“We need people to look at their lifestyles, look at their carbon footprints and consider how they may reduce them.”
One of the easiest for the individual was to avoid food waste, he said.
Sims was involved in the transport chapter and said it was a key area for New Zealand.
“It’s the highest growing sector, and makes up for 20 percent of the country’s emissions.”
Faster electric vehicles change
He did not believe the country was transitioning fast enough to electric vehicles, and government assistance needed to be ramped up.
Electric vehicle prices would also reduce over time and a second hand market would make them more affordable, he said.
Sims said New Zealand needed to “get out of coal” and some companies were already reducing their coal demand.
Though New Zealand’s coal industry was small, exploration was still on the table and just last year the Southland District Council granted exploration at Ohai, he said.
Methane emissions need to reduce by a third by 2030, which Sims said is “a major challenge, and highly unlikely” to be achieved in New Zealand.
Victoria University of Wellington professor of physical geography James Renwick said curbing greenhouse gas emissions was still possible, with immediate action.
“The advice from the Climate Change Commission does show that we can peak emissions in the next few years and reduce and get down to zero carbon dioxide hopefully well in advance of 2050,” he said.
“It’s impossible to overstate the dangerous threat we face from climate change and yet politicians and policy makers and businesses still don’t act when everything’s at stake. I haven’t really seen the political will yet but we really need to see action.”
Technologies available at present to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere were not able to operate at the scale needed to make a difference to the climate system, he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
We live in an era of mass overproduction. Offices, apartments, cars, ships, aeroplanes, mobile phones, laptops, batteries, televisions, furniture, air fryers, hot tubs, elevators and escalators. A countless multitude of objects that belong to the anthroposphere – a term for everything that people have made and how it all interacts with the planet. Many of these products end up as waste, buried in landfill, incinerated or dumped – with catastrophic environmental consequences. At the same time, mining companies continue to pollute the planet, exploit local communities and produce huge CO2 emissions in the drive to make more products. But what if there was a way to use what we already have, instead of mining for more raw materials? Could this alternative system reduce the need for ore, while avoiding the extractivist violence and exploitation that characterize the mining industry?
Jamie Alexander wanted Google to sign onto an ad in The New York Times earlier this year, calling on the federal government to “ACT NOW” on the climate crisis.
After all, Google was an original partner of Alexander’s group, Drawdown Labs. It’s part of a larger movement to harness the power and influence of corporations that have positioned themselves as leaders on climate change. The idea: Companies must go beyond reducing their own carbon footprint and go all-in on solutions to the climate crisis.
Indeed, when the group launched in 2020, a mix of small and large companies enthusiastically jumped in. Google’s chief sustainability officer, Kate Brandt, said: “We’re proud to support Drawdown Labs and to join this coalition of companies. Together, we can work toward a more sustainable future for everyone.”
So in January, after Alexander got word that Congress needed some cajoling to pick its climate agenda back up, she shot off an email to Google asking it to simply add its logo to a plea for Congress to do something – really, anything – on the climate crisis. Google’s response: No.
The ad ran in February with 25 corporate logos. But the group’s big-name partners – Google, Netflix, General Mills and LinkedIn – all were conspicuously absent. Faced with their reluctance, Alexander reached out to others, including Salesforce, eBay and Lyft, which did sign on even though they weren’t part of the coalition.
The refusals proved to be a turning point for Alexander. She’s now speaking out and reevaluating the premise her group set out to test: that some of the largest companies will go above and beyond to combat climate change. If companies that tout themselves as climate leaders won’t endorse a generic call to action, what are they willing to do?
“It was very surprising,” Alexander told Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting in an interview. “The large corporations in our own coalition failed my own barometer for climate leadership. Which is a hard pill to swallow. It’s definitely something that I lose sleep over.”
It wasn’t as if an ad in The New York Times was the be-all and end-all of climate advocacy. In fact, without any mention of specific legislation or policy in it, the ad seemed like a fairly minimal, noncontroversial step – a “no-brainer,” Alexander said.
As brand-name companies try to outdo one another in proclaiming themselves Earth’s best friend forever, the ad’s backstory illuminates the clear limits of relying on corporations to take the lead in averting the ravages of global warming. And it offers a rare moment of transparency in an ecosystem of advocacy organizations that are often too scared to talk openly about corporate partners for fear of pushing them away.
“It’s all a pretty damning critique of these companies’ climate commitments,” she said.
While more companies promise to zero out carbon emissions by some target far in the future, climate advocates worry those commitments are inadequate at best and take the steam out of transformational change at the government level by creating the illusion that it isn’t necessary. Last month, Reveal reported that Amazon – which has made a major public relations campaign out of its climate efforts – drastically undercounts its carbon footprint, watering down its climate pledges.
Alexander is the latest leader in the corporate sustainability world to become disillusioned by the lack of progress behind the promises. She designed Drawdown Labs as something of an experiment to see how companies large and small could set a new bar for climate leadership. It is part of the nonprofit organization Project Drawdown, and many of the corporate partners contribute money and collaborate on projects, such as creating resources for individuals, employees and small businesses to take climate action. Among other projects, the group organized a sign-on letter to support climate legislation last fall – also missing the corporate logos of Drawdown’s biggest partners.
The ad in The New York Times aimed to nudge Congress to reach into the wreckage of President Joe Biden’s collapsing Build Back Better legislation and salvage the climate parts of the bill. Those provisions were huge: $555 billion in funding, providing financial incentives to individuals and businesses to boost electric vehicles, wind and solar power, and other low-carbon fuels. Environmentalists say it’s a make-or-break opportunity to drive down emissions before the point at which scientists agree climate catastrophe will set in.
Fierce opposition from business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce helped doom the Build Back Better legislation. Showing businesses’ support for the climate provisions is key to building momentum in Congress, said Jamal Raad, executive director of Evergreen Action, an advocacy group that works with Drawdown Labs. The ad, he said, “certainly got attention.”
Around the same time as the ad, a slate of major corporations joined a letter praising the climate provisions of Build Back Better and urging congressional leadership to “overcome the present impasse and see these historic climate and clean energy investments are realized.”
Even oil companies Shell and BP America endorsed that one. It was organized by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which asked members of its Business Environmental Leadership Council to sign on. Among the member companies that didn’t sign: Google.
The Drawdown ad didn’t even mention Build Back Better or any part of it. To make it more palatable, Alexander assured the companies she asked to sign on that it wouldn’t mention any specific legislation. It would merely show that the business community backed some kind of federal action and investment on climate issues. She didn’t ask them to help pay for it either.
Brandt, the Google leader who hailed Drawdown Labs originally, referred questions to a company spokesperson, Mara Harris, who declined to directly answer them. “Sustainability has been a core value for us since Google was founded over 23 years ago,” Harris said, and pointed to Google’s sustainability webpage.
Netflix spokesperson Bao-Viet Nguyen said, “We support Drawdown and their efforts,” but didn’t explain the company’s position on the ad.
General Mills spokesperson Jessica Stevens pointed to the company’s emissions reductions goals and said: “While we cannot possibly sign on to the thousands of requests we receive annually, our dedication to driving urgent climate action is clear.”
LinkedIn didn’t answer repeated inquiries.
The responses to Alexander’s plea showed how cautious businesses can be even on an issue they supposedly support. Some wanted to know who else had signed on before they would – a “game of chicken that’s often played,” Alexander said. Some of the corporate sustainability leaders she contacted made it clear that it wasn’t their call – that public policy officials at their companies would have to sign off and didn’t. Some declined by saying they were involved in hidden behind-the-scenes efforts.
Google and Netflix already had expressed support in subtler ways. Last fall, toward the bottom of a company blog post, Brandt wrote that Google supports the climate parts of Biden’s signature bill. Netflix wrote a supportive LinkedIn post last year.
But Alexander says companies know that not many people will see those things. “That’s just the bare minimum of what they could do if they really were committing to getting this thing passed,” she said. She had pitched companies on several other ways to use their influence – writing op-eds, meeting with legislators – and come up empty.
LinkedIn’s parent company, Microsoft, sent its president to a White House meeting in support of Biden’s bill, including its climate provisions, in January. It’s unclear why LinkedIn decided not to join the ad.
Both Netflix and LinkedIn tout their participation with Drawdown Labs as part of their sustainability efforts.
Alexander says she doesn’t blame the sustainability professionals working inside these companies. They may be spending their political capital to push their employers in other ways, and maybe this ad just didn’t make the priority list at the moment, she said.
Bill Weihl knows these calculations well. As a former “green energy czar” at Google and director of sustainability at Facebook, he said requests to take a stand were routinely shot down, often by the public policy team. “I saw that time and again,” he said. “Some executive saying why it’s not our job to take sides on something like this. It’s not our job to save the world.”
Companies don’t see much benefit to sticking out their necks, Weihl said, and worry about antagonizing lawmakers and their own trade associations, which might be helpful on other issues more core to their businesses. And they assume nobody will call them out when they say no.
Still, Weihl said, it seemed odd and disappointing that Google and others wouldn’t join a relatively tame statement from one of their own partners. A single ad or letter doesn’t even matter much, Weihl said. He wants to see serious lobbying muscle dedicated to the fight.
Weihl left Big Tech’s corporate sustainability teams and became a thorn in their side as the founder of ClimateVoice, which pressures companies to do more on climate advocacy – and gives them lousy scores for failing to do so. He said that in the grand battle over climate legislation, fossil fuel interests and their allies are aggressive – playing what he called “three-dimensional chess with tanks.” On the other side, he said the self-proclaimed pro-climate companies are playing “two-dimensional checkers with paper airplanes.”
As the head of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry trade group, told CNN last fall, “We’re leaving everything on the field here in terms of our opposition to anti-energy provisions.”
What aggravates Alexander is that federal investment in clean energy would help these same companies hit their own public climate commitments. A cleaner electrical grid, for example, would drive down emissions for all the companies that rely on the grid. So why wouldn’t firms that promise to slash emissions do everything they can to get there?
“That’s the part that makes me question the whole authenticity of these long-term, nonbinding climate commitments,” Alexander said.
Of course, 25 companies did come through for the ad, including a bunch of smaller ones like wool shoemaker Allbirds, scooter-sharing firm Lime and eco-retailer Grove Collaborative.
The experience has made Alexander rethink her experiment and ponder the way forward. “Should we be making a different bet about the companies that are going to be leading us to the future we need?” she wonders. She doesn’t claim to have the answer.
This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.Feature photo courtesy Jamie Alexander.
3Mins Read Provenance, a sustainability marketing tech outfit based in London, has announced the closure of a $5 million investment round. Led by Working Capital Innovation Fund and NordicEye, other participants included musician Peter Gabriel, The Brandtech group, and Digital Currency Group. The investment will be used to continue software development of Provenance’s flagship e-commerce platform that confirms […]
This blog is co-authored by Julie Segal, Senior Program Manager, Climate Finance and Alienor Rougeot, Program Manager, Climate and Energy at Environmental Defence.
The term “just transition” is now front and centre in the business mainstream, following in the footsteps of “sustainability” and “net-zero”. Financial institutions promote their alignment with a “just transition” in marketing documents, strategies, and conference panels – but they seem to miss the real meaning. Just transition isn’t just another buzzword, so financial institutions who use the term have to live up to what it really means.
What’s a “just transition,” again?
Canada needs a strategy to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, which must include phasing out high-carbon sectors like the fossil fuel industry. But it’s not fair to close down industries without a plan for the workers, families and communities who are directly impacted. We need to ensure that no worker or community is left behind in the climate transition. This means creating new job opportunities, ending industry-related environmental racism like tailing ponds, building new roots for economic stability, and protecting communities that are vulnerable to climate related disasters like floods and wildfires. All of this must happen while, at the same time, implementing strategies for climate solutions.
A just transition means that as we pivot away from high-carbon industries, solutions are proactively put in place to protect communities and ensure that all community members have employment opportunities – so that in the transition to low-carbon, no one is left behind.
The Government of Canada has promised a Just Transition Act, which is an important step towards solutions that workers and communities need. But private finance also needs to support a climate transition that puts people first. Local workers and communities need to be on board for the energy transition, and vulnerable regions need to be supported to invest in mitigation and resilience. This buy-in from workers and communities is essential for a quicker and smoother transition to a safe climate.
Why should the financial sector care? Climate change poses a risk to the financial system – reducing climate related damage will reduce the risks to the financial system. And even scientists agree that climate justice is essential to climate action. The financial sector seems to get this, since it repeatedly uses “just transition” language. But it is critical that finance aligns with what this truly means. The financial sector should lead by listening, and then respond by putting money in the right place.
Why must Canadian financial institutions do better when approaching the “just transition”?
Investors are picking up the language but missing the meaning. Many investors talk about a just transition while, in the same breath, endorsing the industries that are causing the climate crisis. For example, investors used the premise of transitioning high-carbon industries to draft guidelines that greenwash new fossil fuel investments and false solutions like carbon capture. This is not the way to support workers, industry, and communities in Canada. Right off the bat, the financial sector’s purported efforts miss the two core principles of a just transition:
Those most affected must be at the table crafting transition plans, and
A just transition requires early action to end reliance on fossil fuel related infrastructure.
Although financial institutions are the ones moving capital, they must learn the proper definition of a just transition from those most affected: workers and communities whose livelihoods are still tied to high-carbon industries.
Furthermore, a just transition means reducing the economy’s dependence on carbon-intensive activities. Without sufficient planning, the people who currently rely on work from the fossil fuel industry would be left in a precarious position – having to pack up their bags without any fair warning. By prioritizing a just transition away from high-carbon industries, people can have a heads up and a head start.
Lucky for the financial institutions, we were able to collate some key principles that should guide investing for a just transition.
How should Canadian financial institutions approach the “just transition”?
Many parts of Canada’s economy have a future in a low-carbon world. Even though we must move off high-carbon fossil fuels, we still need food to eat, electric buses to ride, and buildings to live in. It’s therefore productive to reduce emissions in sectors like agriculture, clean energy, transportation, and cement. We also need to invest in infrastructure that is resilient to climate damages. For financial institutions who actually align with a just transition , here are some minimum factors for investing in companies (based on common perspectives from environment and labour groups):
First, a company should work towards reducing the economy’s reliance on fossil fuels, demonstrated by:
Third, a company should respect local communities by:
Budgeting to clean up any waste from stranded assets, prioritizing clean up costs over shareholder distributions,
Supporting new economic activities in communities that previously relied on a single fossil-related industry,
Engaging groups and individuals that have historically been marginalized from economic opportunities, such as by respecting UNDRIP, and
Investing in local infrastructure that is resilient to climate damage, when applicable.
Throughout each of these steps, investors must prioritize engaging with workers and communities – the most important stakeholders in a just transition. Our friends in the labour movement often say: “If you’re not at the table, there’s a good chance you’re on the menu”. Financial institutions need to bring the labour and environmental community to the table.
The financial sector can, and should, contribute to the just transition strategy. However, to avoid stranding physical assets (like pipelines) and stranding people, financial institutions must stop supporting a carbon-reliant economy. Instead, it is time they mindfully listen to workers and communities and put their money where the future is: a transition plan that gets us to a green and just economy.
An Auckland nurse says a lucrative incentive payment has not fixed the city’s dire hospital staffing shortage in Aotearoa New Zealand’s current covid-19 outbreak.
Nurses, midwives and others employed by the region’s district health boards (DHBs) have been entitled to an extra $500 on top of their normal pay for extra shifts overnight.
The scheme is being reviewed today and the clinical director in charge of co-ordinating the city’s health response, Dr Andrew Old, said it would continue if it was needed to address staffing shortages.
Dr Old said going into the pandemic Auckland’s hospitals had about 15 percent staff vacancies across the board which meant starting from a challenging position.
“So you then layer on top of that the challenge of Covid and it really has stretched the city.”
A nurses’ union delegate at Waitematā DHB, Di McCulloch, said while the $500 incentive scheme was popular, it had not been good for nursing overall because it led to exhausted workers and did not fix the staffing problems.
She said the nursing situation was dire.
Influx of unwell patients
“We continue to have an influx of unwell patients that normally enter the hospital and this has been compounded by omicron.”
She said once the subsidy ends the nursing shortages will continue and the DHBs will continue to redeploy non-clinical staff to fill the staffing gaps in wards.
Dr Old acknowledged how tired hospital staff in Auckland are.
“You know this has been going on for two years and the intensity has really stepped up in the last couple of weeks and I think certainly the city and the country are incredibly well served by the professionalism of the health workforce.”
Dr Old said the $500 payment was being reviewed today and there was the potential for it to be extended.
It aimed to ensure staff were available, particularly for hard to fill shifts such as overnights, he said.
“Look, we recognise people are tired, we’re asking them to go above and beyond and it’s just a recognition of the fact that actually everyone is really stretched.”
Hospitals just managing
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Sarah Dalton described the current situation as a crisis and said hospitals were only just managing.
“People are going above and beyond, they’re doing everything they can to keep it safe for patients, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a crisis, it doesn’t mean that the entrenched short staffing that we were trying to deal with before covid hasn’t made this almost impossible to deal with.”
It was not just Auckland and a lot of surgery and outpatient appointments were being cancelled around the country, she said.
McCulloch said the border closure had made the nursing shortages worse because in the past there had been a reliance on internationally qualified nurses (IQN).
“So it’s become an ongoing issue, this has been going on for years within nursing and the nursing voice are saying that we are tired, we are exhausted, we are short-staffed daily on the ground.”
But McCulloch said that had “not been heard by the powers that be”.
In terms of dealing with New Zealand’s ongoing nursing shortage, McCulloch said New Zealand needed to keep its new nursing graduates working here.
She said that could mean bonding newly qualified nurses to working in New Zealand for a minimum of two years.
Auckland hospitals put care on hold Auckland hospitals have put all but the most urgent care on hold to allow them to focus on covid-19 patients.
At the same time they are managing with 25 percent fewer staff as covid-19 cases continue to rise.
Dr Old said the region was grappling with peak hospitalisations and staff shortages due to the omicron outbreak.
“We’re in the eye of the storm now, so with cases thankfully coming down a bit but peak hospitalisations coinciding with near peak staff needing to be off to support their own family or off with covid themselves.”
But Dr Old said the number of staff vacancies due to covid-19 was starting to come down as coronavirus numbers start to drop and he was hopeful that things would improve this week.
He said there had been some limited cases of covid-19 positive staff working at Auckland hospital’s as the region dealt with the peak.
Serious challenges
“Those have been people where without them coming back we would have had serious challenges keeping those services going and so yes, coming back into environments where they’re only dealing with covid positive patients.”
Dalton said it was appalling to be in a position where in limited circumstances employers are encouraging staff unwell with covid-19 to go back to work.
“What they’re saying is they’re only doing that in covid settings and where otherwise there would be risk to life and limb effectively, so it’s a life preserving service.
“But to think that we’re in such a fragile state in terms of staffing that that has to be part of cover at the moment is really distressing.”
Dr Old stressed that urgent care was still available at the region’s hospitals.
“But anything that can be deferred essentially over the last couple of weeks really has been, so that’s pretty much all out-patient activity … and almost all planned surgery as well.”
Challenging to get support to South Auckland families Auckland Pacific health and social service provider The Fono said it was run off its feet keeping up with the demands of a community struck by covid-19.
Chief executive Tevita Funaki said the service was looking after more than 900 active cases at one time.
“It’s not just the health challenges but also the whole welfare support and food and also other needs of the families.”
The service also had a number of staff getting sick or isolating due to covid-19.
The Fono had been using the network of churches in the Pacific community to distribute what was needed for families, Tevita said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — IPCC — has issued its direst warning of all-time: “Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly.” Additionally, they readily admit to overly conservative predictions: “Many impacts will be more severe than originally predicted.” 1
The crowning blow of this heavy-hitting report is a chilling statement: “There is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages.”
Moreover, the IPCC claims that even at current levels dangerous widespread disruptions threaten devastation of swathes of the natural world: “Many areas will become unlivable.”
Interestingly enough, the world is fully aware that climate change is on a collision course with life. At some level people know this. This is true because of media exposure of organized climate marches and protests across the globe for decades now. It’s doubtful that you could find one person that has not heard about global warming and climate change, although almost all chose to ignore the details. Indigenous people live with it on a daily basis. The climate change/global warming story is decades old.
However, what is different now is the emphasis and tone of the IPCC. Clearly, climate scientists are running scared of what the future holds. There’s no more time to waste. The window to do something is rapidly closing.
All of which leads to the conclusion that the warning, as dreadful as it sounds, by one of the most noteworthy institutions in the world, may not be enough to change the course (curse) of climate change soon enough. For example, some things never change, the climate change/global warming issue has been a storyline for far too long, and worn thin, and not taken as seriously as the situation warrants. It is a hackneyed complexity that people easily brush off.
Oh sure, people will talk about it on the radio and comment about how horrible things are, yadda-yadda-yadda (Greta Thunberg effectively used that phrase in reference to all of the ‘hot air’ at climate conferences). And, she was right to couch it that way because greenhouse gases far outpace any kind of mitigation efforts by nation/states. In reality, greenish tokenism is all that’s been accomplished.
According to an International Energy Agency (IEA) Paris July 2021 press release: “Global electricity demand is growing faster than renewables, driving strong increase in generation from fossil fuels… notably coal, threatening to push CO2 emissions from the power sector to record levels in 2022.”
Meanwhile, surging demand has fossil fuels at $100/barrel and headed in that direction well before Russia invaded Ukraine. Spending for oil and gas exploration is on the rise as CO2 rises in tandem, knocking on the door of 420 ppm for the first time in human history, lo and behold, it’s accelerating! Does this mean that nobody is serious enough about mitigating the impact of CO2?
It sure looks that way as the most recent year over year change in CO2 emissions from February 2021 @416.51 ppm to February 2022 @ 419.63 ppm equals +3.12 ppm, or 28% above the last 10-year average.
CO2 growth, or ppm/year data for 60 years from the Keeling Curve demonstrate decadal average annual rates registered at Mauna Loa Observatory (est. 1965) elevation 11.135 feet on the north flank of Mauna Loa Volcano on the Big Island, Hawaii:
Average annual rate of CO2 (ppm) over past 60 years:
Past 12 mos+3.12 (as of February 2022)
2011-2020 + 2.43
2001-2010 + 2.04
1991-2000 + 1.55
1981-1990 + 1.56
1971-1980 + 1.35
1961-1970 + 0.91
Over the past 60 years CO2 has increased every decade, and of even more concern, acceleration has picked up steam since the turn of the 21st century. Recent CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa are at all-time new record highs. Furthermore, today’s rate is 250% above its average annual rate of +0.91 ppm from 50-60 years ago.
As of March 2022, there is no evidence that mitigation efforts have slowed down the rate of increase of CO2 even though scientists and the IPCC have been warning of excessive levels of CO2 in the atmosphere for decades. In fact, Dr. James Hansen (Columbia University, but with NASA at the time) warned the US Senate of threatening greenhouse gases way back in the 1980s, a warning that made NYT headlines.
A perspective on the growth rate of CO2 is provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography: “Today’s rate of increase is more that 100 times faster than the increase that occurred when the last ice age ended.”
Which means what? It means urgent mitigation must be employed, or buckle up.
Here’s what 100 times faster looks like, according to Dr. Katey Walter Anthony, Aquatic Ecosystem Ecologist and Professor, Water and Environmental Research Center, University of Alaska/Fairbanks: “It was 14,000 years ago, as the climate warmed, when permafrost thermokarst lakes flared up on the landscape, bringing 4°C warming over a period of 8,000 years.” Nowadays, according to Dr. Anthony, a similar 4°C warming will likely occur over only 80 years, which is 100-times faster than 14,000 years ago. 2
When will 4C happen? Answer: Nobody knows for certain, but Dr. Anthony suggests, unless strong mitigation efforts are taken, this century. Is 4C above pre-industrial a killer, lights out? Indeed, humanity is playing with fire.
Already, the IPCC warning contains a long list of potential horror stories, especially if global temperatures are allowed to exceed 1.5C pre-industrial versus 1.2C today from (1) shortages of food and water owing to climate change, and even at current levels of temperatures, (2) to mass die-offs of species, including die-offs of trees and corals, (3) as key ecosystems, like rainforests, lose carbon sink capacity, becoming sources of carbon emissions directly into the atmosphere in concert with cars, trains, planes, and cows in a powerhouse CO2-fest. Under those circumstances Earth’s innate beauty becomes unrecognizable.
The degree of danger has become so unbearably conclusive to climate scientists that they are letting it all hang out, for example: “Dave Reay, the director of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, said: ‘Like taking a wrecking ball to a set of global dominoes, climate change in the 21st century threatens to destroy the foundations of food and water security, smash onwards through the fragile structures of human and ecosystem health, and ultimately shake the very pillars of human civilization,” 3
A feature story in the February 28th edition of The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine by Megan Lowry is entitled: “Latest IPCC Report Says Impacts of Climate Change Are Irreversible and Widespread; Urges Efforts to Cut Emissions and Adapt”:
In a statement released today, IPCC chair Hoesung Lee said, ‘This report is a dire warning about the consequences of inaction. It shows that climate change is a grave and mounting threat to our wellbeing and a healthy planet. Our actions today will shape how people adapt and nature responds to increasing climate risks.
The IPCC’s report also finds that nations are not doing enough to reduce emissions and protect themselves from climate hazards and few countries escape unscathed.
Based upon several unnerving descriptions in the IPCC report, one would expect the world community to convene an emergency all-hands-on-deck meeting with checkbooks in hand to fund a rapid transition to a fossil-free world.
Otherwise, IPCC warnings of destruction of the core sources for life on this planet will materialize and maybe sooner than expected. In the chilling words of the authors of the report: “The assessment report is the sixth since the IPCC was first convened by the UN in 1988, and may be the last to be published while there is still some chance of avoiding the worst.” 4
Repeating that IPCC statement: “… while there is still some chance of avoiding the worst” is a message of foreboding that reverberates across land and sea, all of which, for the first time since humans gathered around fires, depends upon humanity to defend, protect, and husband. Will it happen, soon enough?
Here’s what the failure of countries to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions has wrought. New York Times March 1st headline: “These Climate Scientists Are Fed Up and Ready to Go on Strike”. According to the article: “Evidence on global warming is piling up. Nations aren’t acting. Some researchers are asking what difference more reports will make.”
Climate scientists on strike!
Who can blame the scientists for frustration and anger when record-setting CO2 emissions follow in the footsteps of 26 COPs (Conference of the Parties) and six Assessment Reports, all starting in 1988, and decades of warnings to leaders of the world foretelling what has now become so obvious.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report, 2022.
“Thawing Arctic Permafrost-Regional and Global Impacts”, National Academy of Sciences, May 11, 2020.
Ibid.
“IPCC Issues ‘Bleakest Warning Yet’ on Impacts of Climate Breakdown”,The Guardian, February 28, 2022.
Grassroots organizations in Mexico are promoting inclusive recycling by helping usher trash pickers, or pepenadores, into the salaried workforce. In the endeavor, they draw on positive experiences around the developing world. What’s more, Mexican environmental activists have devised unique ways to attract community participation in reducing and recycling domestic waste.
This is how Amazon washes its hands of the climate impact of most of the things it sells: It simply decides to play by different rules than its peers.
For example, for all the packs of Pampers parents grab off the shelf at Target, the big-box retailer tallies the emissions that go into making those diapers as part of its carbon footprint. And when customers order Samsung TVs on Target.com, the company tacks on not only the carbon that went into making them, but also the emissions that will end up in the atmosphere when people plug in and use them.
But when shoppers click “Buy Now” on those same products on Amazon, the nation’s largest online retailer doesn’t count those carbon emissions. Amazon takes responsibility for the full climate impact only of products with an Amazon brand label, which make up about 1% of its online sales.
And so the company, named after a river twisting through a rainforest already damaged by climate change, vastly undercounts its carbon footprint, accepting less responsibility for global warming than even smaller competitors.
Over the past two decades, under pressure from investors and activists, thousands of companies have agreed to disclose their carbon footprints to a nonprofit organization named CDP (originally known as the Carbon Disclosure Project).
Amazon had been shamed with an F grade for failing to disclose until this past year, when it submitted to CDP’s questionnaire for the first time. But unlike the majority of companies pressured by investors to disclose, Amazon asked that its report not be shared publicly.
Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting obtained Amazon’s report, and the detailed accounting within illuminates how such a massive company manages to boast such a small carbon footprint.
The report also highlights the pitfalls of relying on self-disclosures and voluntary commitments from companies that have a vested interest in underestimating their own accountability. Amazon has positioned itself as a climate change leader, promoting a “Climate Pledge” to zero out emissions by 2040. But by not counting all of its emissions, it isn’t on the hook for cutting them.
Reveal’s Will Evans is covering corporate accountability and climate change. If you have information to share with him on this topic, like documents, data or tips, you can contact him securely through Signal at 510-255-0865.
Let’s break down the ways that Amazon manages to downplay its carbon footprint.
Amazon’s Biggest Climate Gap
Usually, the biggest chunk of a retailer’s carbon footprint comes from all the products it sells. And that’s where Amazon has the biggest gaps.
Just take all the greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere from manufacturing the things a retailer sells. For everything with a plug, add in the electricity they eat up when they’re on. Then tack on the emissions from eventually throwing them away.
For that lifecycle of consumer products, Target’s report, which it makes public, showed triple the amount of carbon emissions that Amazon’s did. That represents 37.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide more than Amazon, the equivalent of just over 8 million cars driven for a year.
And that’s for a year Amazon racked up well over $100 billion more in sales than Target. How is that possible? Well, Amazon counts only products labeled with its private brands – the Echo Dots, Kindles and AmazonBasics staples, for example. Those, the company has told Congress, total 1% of its online sales.
There’s another 39% of sales that Amazon should be counting if it were using the same accounting as its peers. These are the products that Amazon buys from manufacturers and sells directly to the customer. They’re made by other companies – think Levi’s, Nintendo, Frigidaire – but their product listings say “ships from” and “sold by” Amazon.com. Target and Walmart stock these same brands. But unlike Target and Walmart, Amazon doesn’t count the emissions that go into making these products – or those that come out of them.
So these products might even be labeled “Climate Pledge Friendly” on Amazon – like a box of Kleenex tissues. But the company doesn’t actually count them toward its Climate Pledge.
A product listing for Kleenex tissues at Amazon.com bears a “Climate Pledge Friendly” label, even though Amazon does not count emissions related to products it sells with non-Amazon brands. Credit: Amazon.com screen shot
(The remaining 60% of Amazon’s sales come from third-party vendors who use Amazon as an online marketplace; Amazon doesn’t count those emissions either, but that’s more of a gray area. Amazon spokesperson Luis Davila said third-party sellers “control their own carbon emissions accounting.” Walmart, which also has third-party sellers hawking wares on its website, says it does count those products in its carbon footprint. Target wouldn’t comment on whether it counts third-party sales.)
CDP uses what’s known as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which lays out how companies should be measuring emissions. Amazon says it follows that protocol and has committed to getting its goals validated by the Science Based Targets Initiative, a partnership of CDP and other groups that certifies corporate plans to reduce emissions and requires using the protocol.
But the protocol doesn’t allow companies to count only their own private brand products. Under the protocol, retail companies should be counting all the products they sell directly to consumers, said Alberto Carrillo Pineda, managing director of the Science Based Targets Initiative.
“Everything you purchased should be included, and everything that you sell should be included,” he said.
(Carrillo Pineda said his organization will have to get a third party to evaluate Amazon because it received $18 million from Amazon’s founder through the Bezos Earth Fund.)
It’s true that these indirect emissions from a company’s supply chain, called Scope 3 emissions, are notoriously difficult to tally, and many companies use guesstimates. But they often represent the majority of a company’s impact on the environment, and counting them forces companies to put pressure on suppliers to clean up their act, too.
There’s another thing Amazon isn’t counting that its peers do. It’s not a large part of Amazon’s footprint – maybe more of a toenail – but it sets the company apart from its rivals.
With triple the number of employees of Target in 2020, Amazon counted 29% fewer emissions from their commutes.
That’s because while Target, Walmart and The Home Depot estimate the gas their workers burn while driving to and from work, Amazon counts emissions only from its own corporate shuttles. Asked about the discrepancy, Amazon’s Davila said: “Employees can use public transportation to get to the office, and if they live nearby, they can walk or bike.”
What It All Adds Up To
So with quadruple the revenue of Target in 2020 and a sprawling global empire that Target doesn’t have, Amazon actually reported fewer overall emissions than Target that year: the equivalent of about 61 million metric tons of carbon dioxide for Amazon vs. 67 million metric tons for Target.
And that can have real-world consequences.
Both Amazon and Target have committed to going “net zero” by 2040, slashing carbon emissions and compensating for what’s left with carbon offsets. So because of what Amazon fails to count, it’s on the hook for eventually canceling out fewer emissions than Target, despite its far bigger impact on global temperatures.
If Amazon were counting its footprint like some of its competition, it would have to get rid of tens of millions more tons of carbon emissions – by radically transforming its business, forcing suppliers to change their own operations, paying for enormous amounts of controversial carbon offsets or maybe even confronting whether The Climate Pledge is compatible with Amazon’s business model after all.
Davila didn’t directly address why the company doesn’t account for the climate impact of most of the products it sells, but reiterated its commitment to cutting emissions, including ordering a fleet of electric delivery vans and buying renewable energy for its electricity needs.
“Amazon is also finding, investing in, and building new solutions to meet the urgency of the climate crisis,” Davila said in a statement.
Amazon Trumpets Itself as a Climate Leader
Amazon is certainly not the worst carbon lowballer. Costco, for example, doesn’t count lifecycle emissions for any of the things it sells. The company, whose internal slogan is “do the right thing,” is facing blowback, as shareholders voted to make it own up to all of its emissions and set concrete targets to cut them. Costco, which allows its CDP report to be public, is scheduled to disclose an action plan by the end of the year.
But Amazon has heralded itself as a leader of the pack on climate change, a company others must follow to save the planet. “We want to use our scale and our scope to lead the way,” founder Jeff Bezos said in announcing The Climate Pledge in 2019, positioning his company as “a role model for this.” The pledge now has more than 200 signatories, and Amazon boasts a $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund and a Seattle sports stadium named the Climate Pledge Arena.
Photographers (left) film the “living wall” inside Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle. Left: Ted S. Warren/Associated Press, right: Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
There’s a backstory to the company’s climate marketing. It’s faced intense pressure from a group of inside agitators, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. Bezos’ announcement came on the eve of an employee walkout protesting the company’s lack of action. Less than a year later, two of the group’s organizers were fired in what the National Labor Relations Board determined was illegal retaliation, leading to a settlement last year.
A group spokesperson, Eliza Pan, is actually a former employee. She speaks for the group because current employees are worried Amazon would exact vengeance if they spoke out.
When Reveal spoke to Pan about the report, she expressed “frustration and anger that Amazon has hidden so much behind PR.”
“It seems like Amazon is misleading employees and the public,” she said, “or even being straight-up deceptive about how well it’s doing against its climate goals.”
Amazon’s Headed in the Wrong Direction Anyway
Even with the holes in Amazon’s accounting, the company that promises to get to zero by 2040 is going in the wrong direction. Its reported carbon footprint increased just over 36% from 2018 to 2020.
Faced with that inconvenient data point, Amazon argues publicly that its “carbon intensity” – the amount of carbon it emits per dollar it makes – improved 16% in 2020.
“This year-over-year carbon intensity comparison reflects our early progress to decarbonize our operations as we also continue to grow as a company,” Amazon’s public sustainability report states.
But privately, Amazon’s CDP report shows a less impressive figure. CDP asks companies to measure carbon intensity based on their most direct impact and the hardest area to fudge: emissions from their own energy consumption and operations.
Looked at that way, Amazon’s improvement was 3.9% in 2020 and didn’t stack up well against competitors. Amazon calculated a rate of about 39 metric tons of carbon emissions per $1 million of revenue, compared with 29 for Walmart and 20 for Target. Asked about the comparison, Davila said, “We can’t speak for other companies.”
To avoid increasingly catastrophic ravages of climate disaster, scientists warn that the Earth needs to reach “net zero” by midcentury. Humans are not on track, and many environmentalists worry that corporate promises to save the world risk lulling the public into dangerous complacency.
A report from the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, two European environmental organizations, gave low marks to most of the large companies it looked at, including Amazon and Walmart. “The change that we require from corporates in the situation that we’re in right now will not come from consumers or shareholders,” said Eduardo Posada, an institute analyst. “We need watchdog initiatives and regulators to hold them to account.”
Amazon, though, stays positive. “We are relentlessly optimistic about the future,” Kara Hurst, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide sustainability, wrote in last year’s public sustainability report.
But the end of the report includes a boilerplate disclaimer: “No assurance can be given that any plan, initiative, projection, goal, commitment, expectation, or prospect set forth in this report can or will be achieved.”
In other words, don’t hold us to it.
This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
The dormant Bougainville Copper Limited share value has more than doubled overnight on the Australian Stock Exchange following a resolution to reopen the rich but controversial Panguna copper mine.
Landowners from the mine area and the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) signed a joint resolution last Friday to reopen the mine, causing the leap in its share price.
The ABG’s current 36.4 percent (146,175,449 shares) shareholding was worth K146.2 million (NZ$63 million) when the shares were worth 40 cents each on Thursday.
On Friday afternoon, however, the share value was worth K325.2 million (NZ$152 million) when they increased and closed at 89 cents, a jump of 122.5 per cent.
That is an increase of K179 million (NZ$89 million).
It shows what a little bit of good news and perhaps a demonstration of confidence in Bougainville can do.
ABG President Ishmael Toroama acknowledged and congratulated the five clans and their respective leadership for taking the bold stand to reopen the mine.
Facilitate reopening process
Toroama said that following the signing of the joint resolutions, the ABG through the Department of Mineral and Energy Resources and other relevant departments, would now work together with the landowner groups to facilitate the process towards the reopening.
The ABG government is confident that the mine reopening would be a major boost for Bougainville’s economic future and at the same time guarantee Bougainville’s political independence.
“Today marks the ending and the beginning of a new chapter, a chapter to realize Bougainville’s independence,” Toroama said.
BCL general manager and secretary Mark Hitchcock said the significant increase in the volume of BOC’s securities traded from 10 February 2022 to 11 February 2022 and the article published on the Autonomous Bougainville Government website entitled “Panguna Landowners and ABG agree to reopen Panguna Mine” dated 11 February 2022 contributed to the latter.
“We understand the article published relates to resolutions passed during a Panguna landowner summit that was supported by the ABG,” he said.
“The landowners appear to have agreed to work co-operatively with the ABG to reopen the Panguna Mine.
“According to the article the resolutions were endorsed by the chiefs of the five major Panguna clans and the ABG will now work with landowners to facilitate a process towards reopening.
Fair representation of events
“If the article is a fair representation of the events, then this would appear to demonstrate unity amongst the landowners and, would also boost confidence in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville as it pursues economic independence.
“Bougainville Copper Limited is engaged in investment activities.
The company’s assets include the Panguna mine and associated facilities on Bougainville, and equities listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.
“There is no change in the status of the shareholdings of the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) and PNG shareholdings in BOC.
The PNG government’s commitment to transfer their shares to the ABG remains pending and both governments continue to hold 36.4 percent each of the shares in BOC.
“The judicial review of the ABG’s decision not to renew the exploration licence over Panguna remains in process and we anticipate proceedings to commence in the first quarter of 2022.”
The ABG has a 36.4 percent ownership stake in BCL, which is set to become a 72.8 percent majority share with the PNG national government committed to transferring over its 36.4 percent share.
Active presence on the ground
Hitchcock said BCL had long had an active presence on the ground in Bougainville with a locally engaged team.
It had continued supporting community projects and other initiatives.
Bougainville Copper’s board has strong levels of local representation with four prominent Bougainvillean directors – Sir Mel Togolo, David Osikore, James Rutana and Kearnneth Nanei.
Other board members are Sir Rabbie Namaliu, Sir Moi Avei, Dame Carol Kidu and Peter Graham.
“Over time, BCL has transformed into a truly local company,” Hitchcock said.
It was once one of the world’s largest and most profitable copper and goldmines and still contains an estimated 5.3 mllion tonnes of copper and 19.3m ounces of gold, which would make the reserves worth about $60 billion at today’s prices.
In 1989, amid rising community anger at the environmental damage and the inequitable division of the mine’s profits, locals forced closure of the mine, blowing up Panguna’s power lines and sabotaging operations.
The PNG government sent in troops against its own citizens to restart the foreign-owned mine, sparking a bloody, decade-long civil war. A peace settlement was brokered by New Zealand in 2001.
Gorethy Kennethis a senior PNG Post-Courier journalist. This article is republished with permission.
Some time ago Jeremy Grantham (83), a renowned value investor who runs the $65 billion asset fund GMO, called the stock market a “super bubble.”1
Nowadays, a lot of the air has come out of hot stocks of the covid era, losing 30%-40%-50%, or more, in only a couple of months; e.g., Netflix falling from $700 down to $390/share within 3 weeks. That’s a lot of hot air wheezing out quickly. As Joe Granville, market technician 1923-2013, famously said: They (investors) are “bag-holders.”
The title of the Bloomberg Grantham article refers to more than overvalued stocks, wherein he claims a Goldilocks period over “the past 25 years is ending, and the world needs to prepare for a future of inflation, slower growth, and labor shortages,” as stated in the Bloomberg Front Row interview.
Beyond the scary world of overvalued stocks, Grantham also launched into some biting commentary about the scary real world, the tangible earthy world, saying what few on Wall Street care to admit, as follows: “Climate change is coming with heavy floods, serious droughts and higher temperatures – none of these make farming easier. So, we’re going to live in a world of bottlenecks and shortages and price spikes everywhere.”
The octogenarian Wall Streeter went on to discuss more than climate change, floods, droughts and temperatures, he also claimed: “The growth of the past century in pursuit of ever-higher standards of living left depleted soils, poisoned ecosystems and a changing climate… That’s why wildlife is disappearing, biodiversity is in jeopardy and human reproductively is slowing.”2
Pointedly, Grantham said: “We have simply shot way beyond the long-term capacity of the planet to deal with us… Nature is beginning to fail. And in the end, if we don’t fix that, we begin to fail as well.”
Of course, Grantham’s referring to the Great Acceleration since WWII as population tripled in only a few decades, thus, according to the Global Human Footprint Network utilizing 14,000 data points to determine that humanity is using 1.75 Earths to support life whilst “failing to husband its resources.” The lines first crossed to a deficit in 1977, meaning the year when humanity started using more resources than Earth can naturally replenish in any given year. We’re already 45 years on borrowed time. By definition, that’s an on-going formula for disaster.
In harmony with thoughts about the state of the planet, the Grantham Foundation has venture capital investments in renewable energy and carbon capture. Good luck with that, as the scale required for carbon capture to make a serious dent in greenhouse gases is, in a word, enormous!
According to renowned physicist Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, in order to stay abreast of current emissions: “If you built a hundred million trailer-size units you could actually keep up with current emissions.” 3 Ergo, one hundred million (100,000,000) 55-foot units end-to-end would circumnavigate the planet 42 times.
Assuming Grantham’s statements about the sorry state of the planet are on target, the bigger issue is what can be done about a worsening condition that appears to be tumbling apart in several ecosystems, like the Far North where the world’s primary fisheries are threatened by global warming. Yes, global warming reaches all the way down into the sea, as the oceans have been absorbing 90% of the planet’s heat and a third of fossil fuel CO2. 4
It is doubtful that the current socio-economic game plan of neoliberal capitalism in harmony with the rapaciousness of Wall Street’s slam-dunk investors will be of much help. After all, that’s the primary cause of the sorry state of the planet in the first instance by advocating growth to the moon at any costs as long as profits hit the bottom line, and not to worry about Earth’s ecosystems, which are there for the taking. After all, seemingly, although he did not say as much, that’s what led to Grantham’s rant. Maybe they need to try a different approach, like Amsterdam’s experiment with doughnut economics.5
Mr. Grantham has nailed a problem, actually a series of problems, that have the potential to make a vicious bear market on Wall Street look like a walk in the park. Maybe it’s true that what goes down on Wall Street comes back up, but ecosystems that go down stay down and do not come back up. Major ecosystems of the planet are listing/heeling right now on the precipice, like the Great Barrier Reef, Amazon rainforest, the Arctic, Antarctica, Siberia, Greenland, worldwide drought; e.g., the Hoover Dam at its 1937 level when it was first filling up and Brazil’s 62% hydro power at risk of cut offs.
The planet is in deep trouble and rising stock prices aren’t going to fix it nor will falling stock prices, which only serve to piss off a bunch of people who jumped on the bandwagon as it was nearing the end of the parade route.
Hopefully, Mr. Jeremy Grantham’s precocious words will cause others to stop and think through how best to navigate the most challenging times since Homo sapiens first huddled together in caves.
But, what if degrowth is the only possibility? Umm….
Erik Schatzker, “Jeremy Grantham Has an Even Scarier Prediction Than His Crash Call”, Bloomberg, January 26, 2022.
