In the midst of an ongoing climate and environmental crisis, why does Business As Usual still continue, week after week after week??
The simple answer is because it's so profitable.
HEADLINE: Exxon and Chevron Announce Record Shareholder Returns in Hottest Year on Record
U.S. oil companies ExxonMobil and Chevron announced their second-highest profits in a decade on Friday, with both companies paying out a record amount to shareholders in 2023, which was the hottest year on record due largely to the burning of fossil fuels.
“In 2023, we returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas than any year in the company’s history,” Chevron chief executive Mike Wirth boasted in a statement.
When there's so much money to be made, nothing else matters. Nothing at all.
One of our sponsors this week on the popular BUSINESS AS USUAL show is Shell Oil. Thank you, Shell!
Last week, that wonderful company shared a few of the secrets of their success with us. We learned that — if you're smart and devious and cynical like they are — you can make yourself look good by "offsetting" some of your CO2 emissions, using dubious and discredited carbon credits.
Shameful: Shell uses carbon credits under investigation to meet climate targets.
The oil and gas giant offset part of its emissions with over a million credits from Chinese projects suspended because of integrity concerns.
When you ask BP what would be the best incentive to get you to maximise your production, this is not in the pubic interest, this is serving the needs of BP to maximise their subsidy from the state.
This was lovely. So well-deserved of its Ursula K. le Guin Prize win (and Philip K. Dick award nomination).
Near-future fiction at its best. I love well-done intertwined short stories like this. It may be a tad too optimistic about us humans, but it's nice to have a smidgen of hope.
With the World Stumbling Past 1.5 Degrees of Warming, Scientists Warn #Climate Shocks Could Trigger Unrest and #Authoritarian Backlash
Most of the public seems unaware that global temperatures will soon push past the target to which the U.N. hoped to limit warming, but researchers see social and psychological crises brewing.
Today, there are around 1.31 billion personal vehicles (cars, trucks, and SUVs) in the world. 🚙 Of those, only about 2% are hybrid or electric. The other 98% are ICE vehicles burning gasoline/petrol.
By 2050, it’s estimated we’ll have about 2.21 billion vehicles in the world. That’s a HUGE number, almost 70% greater than today.
But how many of those will be electric? Instead of only 2%, it’s expected they will increase to around 31% of the total.
That sounds great! 😃 More EVs is a good thing, right?
Well, if 31% are EVs in 2050, that means the other 69% will still be ICE vehicles burning gas/petrol. So the number of cars and trucks and SUVs burning fossil fuels will go UP from 1.28 billion now to about 1.52 billion by 2050.
That’s… not so good. 😠
We don’t need more cars, more traffic, more congestion, more pollution, more road damage, and more CO2 emissions.
What we need is:
❇️ More bicycles
❇️ More electric bikes
❇️ More pedestrians
❇️ More mass transit
❇️ More light rail
Depending on the fuel used to make electricity, in MOST countries, electric vehicles emit more Carbon oxides to the atmosphere than highly efficient internal combustion engines. They just do it some place else and not out of an exhaust pipe.
Electric vehicles must also use electricity for heating the cabin which adds to their inefficiency of doing energy conversion 100s of km/mi away through tons of copper
In 2020, the amount of human-made mass, or anthropogenic mass, exceeded for the first time the dry weight of all life on Earth, including humans, animals, plants, fungi, and even microorganisms.
Over the past century or so, human-made mass has increased rapidly, doubling approximately every 20 years. The collective mass of these materials has gone from 3% of the world’s biomass in 1900 to being on par with it today.
The current rate of accumulation for anthropogenic mass is about 30 gigatons per year. This is equal to each person on Earth producing their own body weight in human-made mass every week.
As accumulation rates increase, the amount of anthropogenic mass is predicted to almost TRIPLE the total amount of global living biomass by 2040. 🧵 1/3
Or at least it SHOULDN'T be a crime. But in our capitalist, neoliberal world, it is.
Greta Thunberg and four other climate activists were put on trial today after being arrested at a protest outside a gathering of fossil fuel bosses in London last October.
Speaking about this, Thunberg said...
"Even though we are the ones standing here, climate and human rights activists all over the world are being prosecuted, sometimes convicted, and given legal penalties for acting in line with science."
"We must remember who the real enemy is. What are we defending? Who are our laws meant to protect?”
Last November, within the wild space of three weeks, I was in Portland, Oregon, then Toronto, Ontario, presenting papers at two conferences. Both talks have everything to do with change, social and ecological.
> Greta Thunberg and four other climate activists have faced the first day of a two-day trial for a protest which blocked the entrance to an oil and gas conference in London in 2023.
Writing about all this stuff can really be depressing. 😨 But I believe we must know exactly what's happening to our world, and why it's happening.
Anyway, after I post this last one, I'm taking a bike ride to a yoga class where I can recharge my spirit. 🤗
Here's a brief excerpt from an ominous article titled "How overheating in the Arctic Circle will cause the collapse of civilization"...
If we were to pick one aspect of climate change that will catastrophically impact everyone on Earth, what would it be? We are especially looking for an aspect that is approaching like a freight train, in the sense that we can see it coming and its progress seems inexorable.
The overheating in the Arctic Circle is a great choice. We can see the disaster coming, and when it arrives it will be catastrophic.
The imminent disasters include:
❶ Sea level rise from Greenland meltwater and AMOC collapse causing the destruction of coastal cities
❷ Crop failures
❸ Droughts and floods
❹ Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane levels that accelerate global warming even more
❺ Global weather pattern disruptions
❻ Marine die-offs
All these effects combined together, and interacting with each other, will be enough to cause the collapse.
Like a freight train, we call see the effects approaching. Therefore, what can humanity do to save itself?
The obvious thing for humanity to do is to quickly stop burning fossil fuels.
Warning: The article excerpted below contains a great deal of frightening and alarming information.
Human actions are rapidly changing the world’s oceans, whether through overfishing, pollution, or coastal development. But among the most intense pressures placed on the seas right now is humanity’s ongoing burning of fossil fuels, pumping dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which in turn has pushed sea temperatures to record levels.
The global ocean, which covers 70% of the planet’s surface, currently absorbs 90% of the solar heat trapped by humanity’s carbon emissions. This greatly moderates rising atmospheric temperatures and helps temper the intensity of the climate crisis. Put another way, the world would be a lot hotter by now if the ocean wasn’t taking in all this heat.
But the ocean’s absorption of this anthropogenic heat still has serious consequences.
One clear result has been an unprecedented rise in global sea temperatures, which has placed strains on marine life and biological processes, and increased extreme weather on land.
Without urgent action to curb carbon emissions, experts say ocean heat will continue to increase, which will, in turn, impact the very planetary systems necessary for humanity’s survival and for maintaining life on Earth as we know it.
During the first half of 2023, temperatures were 0.1° Celsius (0.2° Fahrenheit) above the 2022 temperatures; over the second half of the year, they were 0.3°C (0.5°F) higher than 2022 temperatures, according to the study.
“We really blew the record off ocean surface temperatures last year,” said John Abraham, professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. “It was just mind-boggling hot.”
In 2023, the oceans absorbed about 287 zettajoules of heat, which Abraham says is the equivalent of eight Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating every second of every day into the ocean.
Alistair Hobday, a research scientist at Australia’s CSIRO Climate Science Centre, warns that even if humanity stopped emitting fossil fuels today, we’re still locked into a period of “committed warming.”
“We’re probably locked into the year 2050 with warming because the methane and carbon dioxide will have a lifetime in the atmosphere,” Hobday said. “So even if you turned off the tap today, they’re still going to have an effect before the ocean can draw down that carbon dioxide or before the methane breaks down.”
And what are the chances that human industry will "turn off the fossil fuel tap" today, or next year, or anytime soon? Zero, or less.
We, and the ecosystem we depend upon, are condemned to suffer from global heating far into the foreseeable future...
HEADLINE: "Climate change has killed 4 million people since 2000 — and that’s an underestimate"
Four million lives lost due to climate change, a breathtakingly high number, is still an underestimate — probably a big one. This doesn’t include deaths linked to climate-driven surges of the many non-malarial diseases spread by mosquitoes, like dengue and West Nile virus. It doesn’t incorporate deaths caused by deadly bacteria, fungal spores, ticks, and other diseases or carriers of disease that are shifting in range and breadth as the planet warms. It doesn’t examine the impacts of wildfires and wildfire smoke on longevity. It doesn’t look at the mental health consequences of extreme heat and extreme weather and the related increase in suicides that have been documented in recent years.
"‘Grossly irresponsible’: #UK hands out 24 new #NorthSea#oil and #gas licences - The move to grant 17 companies the right to drill for #FossilFuels is ‘a pipe dream’ that will do little for #energy security, say #environmentalists ... The North Sea regulator said 17 oil companies, including #Shell and #BP, were granted licences in the Central North Sea, Northern North Sea and West of Shetland areas to “provide benefits to the local and wider economy”.
The latest licences, which follow an initial tranche of 27 licences offered in October last year, could begin producing oil and gas before the end of the decade, according to the North Sea Transition Authority.
The move has angered MPs and #environmental campaigners who called the move “grossly irresponsible” and accused the government of overstating the economic benefits of the North Sea and sacrificing Britain’s climate leadership for “a pipe dream”."
How a rare earth facility in Canada wants to clean up the dirty side of green energy
The plant in Saskatchewan won't just showcase less environmentally damaging processes. It also wants to take a bite out of a supply chain dominated by China.
Every time someone has a good idea to perhaps reduce humanity's negative impact on the biosphere, the clowns who run our economies and our governments will take that good idea and twist it into the worst possible implementation.
Case in point: If we could get large numbers of people to switch from driving gas/petrol cars to small EVs — or even better to electric scooters or bikes — that could make a real difference in reducing overall emissions.
So what do our "leaders" do instead? They focus on building and selling huge, bulky, monstrously heavy, status-symbol EVs that not only are more damaging to the environment than a lighter gas/petrol car, but also far more dangerous to children, pedestrians, bike riders, and other cars because of their titanic weight and their reduced sight lines.
Emissions keep going up. Extinctions are on the rise. Nothing has changed.
So, is it time now for some of us to take a step over the line? Would you commit a "crime" if you knew that doing so could potentially save thousands of lives?
Those are tough questions, and they are given thought-provoking and perhaps challenging answers in a piece titled "Sabotaging Oil and Gas Infrastructure is an Act of Climate Heroism"...
The environmental movement has offered waves of demonstrations, petition drives, lobbying and other forms of protest. Yet, despite all that, Earth and its inhabitants are losing the war waged against us by capitalism. It follows that a reevaluation of strategy and tactics of the environmental movement is in order, including a closer examination of how nonviolence should be understood and practiced.
In this context, we need to ask ourselves whether the destruction of planet-killing machinery is necessarily an act of violence. The answer should be no, because it prevents violence against nature. But, as a whole, the environmental movement’s dedication to the strict avoidance of property destruction is extreme in comparison to virtually all other social justice movements.
More than 50 scientists and academics from Scientist Rebellion are facing prosecution for having participated in acts of non-violent civil disobedience. Their charges range from vandalism to sabotage, and they risk being sentenced to prison or paying heavy fines.
At the same time, fossil fuel executives – who are the most responsible for the climate emergency – rake in record profits from the destruction of our environment, yet they are allowed to walk free.
Who are the real criminals? Is it the governments and companies who are actively complicit in the planetary crisis, or is it the messengers, the scientists and activists raising their voices to fight for a liveable future?