Environmental Developments _ May 2020

Environmental Developments

Compiled by Stephen Sachs

               Hiroko Tabuchi, "Oil and Gas May Be a Far Bigger Climate Threat Than We Knew," The New York Times, February 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/climate/methane-flaring-oil-emissions.html, reported, "Oil and gas production may be responsible for a far larger share of the soaring levels of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in the earth’s atmosphere than previously thought, new research has found.

              The findings, published in the journal Nature, add urgency to efforts to rein in methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry, which routinely leaks or intentionally releases the gas into air.

              'We’ve identified a gigantic discrepancy that shows the industry needs to, at the very least, improve their monitoring,” said Benjamin Hmiel, a researcher at the University of Rochester and the study’s lead author. “If these emissions are truly coming from oil, gas extraction, production use, the industry isn’t even reporting or seeing that right now.'”

              "They found that methane emissions from natural phenomena were far smaller than estimates used to calculate global emissions. That means fossil-fuel emissions from human activity — namely the production and burning of fossil fuels — were underestimated by 25 to 40 percent, the researchers said."

              Andrea Germanos, "Global Rescue Plan to Stop Mass Extinction 'Hopelessly Weak and Inadequate', 'We need an urgent plan to save humanity and this is not it,'" Common Dreams, February 24, 2020, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/24/global-rescue-plan-stop-mass-extinction-hopelessly-weak-and-inadequate?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email, reported, "As global governments gathered at a conference in Rome Monday to advance a framework for protecting the planet's biodiversity, environmental and human rights advocates warned that the draft text that has emerged from meetings so far is "hopelessly weak and inadequate."

The draft document for 'living in harmony with nature,' first unveiled in January, is being considered at the February 24–29 meeting of the Working Group on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. It will form the basis for a 10-year strategy and replace the "Aichi Targets," which expire this year.

              The meeting comes amid increased worldwide concern about the ecological crisis, with recent research warning the climate crisis could wipe out 30% of the world's plant and animal species by 2070, disasters like the recent Australian wildfires taking a devastating toll on wildlife and ecosystems, and more evidence that human activity is driving nature towards collapse.

              Agence France-Presse reported Monday:

              'The 12-page document, which focuses on goals to be met by mid-century and envisages a stock-take in 2030, should be adopted at the COP15 summit on biodiversity in October. [...]

              Negotiators in Rome are focusing on ways to reduce threats to biodiversity, including officially protecting at least 30 percent of land and marine areas and a 50 percent cut in pollution from fertilizers. It also calls for stricter regulation on plastic pollution and acknowledges the role that the preservation of nature can play in the battle against climate change.'

              According to Nele Mariën, forests and biodiversity coordinator at Friends of the Earth International (FOEI), the document leaves much to be desired. 

              'The current draft plan is hopelessly weak and inadequate. It won't prevent the sixth mass extinction or build a fairer and safer future,' she said. 

              Mariën's group sees a number of problems with the plan, including that it calls for even weaker targets than the non-binding targets governments set out in 2010. Specifically, says FOEI, the draft:

            fails to address the root causes of the collapse of nature—the over-consumption of resources by wealthier countries, industrial agriculture, and an economic system that drives further destruction and greater inequality. This requires a just transition everywhere, with obligation for finance from wealthy countries to the global South.

            lacks legally binding mechanisms to enforce an agreed plan. The main failure of the existing plan was that governments mostly ignored it without repercussions.

            introduces weaker targets than the existing plan.

            does not have a plan to halt damaging practices such as mining, commodity crops or pesticide use.

            allows for nature to be destroyed as long as it is saved elsewhere—which would lead to corporations putting a price on nature and offsetting their damage by paying to save it in another place. This will inevitably lead to a financial market in saving and destroying biodiversity and ignores the vital role of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in defending ecosystems.

            fails to put communities—and especially Indigenous Peoples—at the heart of nature protection. Likewise, mentions of justice, equity and poverty reduction are missing, as is any obligation for wealthy countries to provide resources to support the Global South.

              'Time has almost run out. We need an urgent plan to save humanity and this is not it,' said Friedrich Wulf, international nature campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe.

              Human rights organization Forest Peoples Programme also expressed concerns with the document and outlined those issues Monday in a Twitter thread:.

              An improved framework for averting mass extinctions, according FOEI and other groups that form the CBD Alliance, could be forged. Such a plan would have:

            A rights-based approach, full and equal participation for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, global equity and financing.

            Mainstreaming of biodiversity across the “whole government” at national level.

            Accountability, compliance and enforcement measures

            Promotion of agroecology and community-based solutions, integrated into proper conservation plans.

              The advocacy groups' warnings come a week after nearly two dozen former foreign ministers from various countries urged global negotiators urged world leaders to act 'boldly' to avert further loss of nature.

              'The world has a moral imperative to collaborate on strong actions to mitigate and adapt to the current climate change and biodiversity crisis. Ambitious targets for conservation of land and ocean ecosystems are vital components of the solution,' a statement from the diplomats said.

              'Humanity sits on the precipice of irreversible loss of biodiversity and a climate crisis that imperils the future for our grandchildren and generations to come,' they wrote. "The world must act boldly, and it must act now."

                Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License."

              Catrin Einhorn, "Wildlife Collapse From Climate Change Is Predicted to Hit Suddenly and Sooner: Scientists found a “cliff edge” instead of the slippery slope they expected," The New York Times,   April 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/climate/wildlife-population-collapse-climate-change.html, reported, "Climate change could result in a more abrupt collapse of many animal species than previously thought, starting in the next decade if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, according to a study published this month in Nature.

            The study predicted that large swaths of ecosystems would falter in waves, creating sudden die-offs that would be catastrophic not only for wildlife, but for the humans who depend on it."

              International Crisis Group (IGC), Robert Malley, President & CEO, "Climate Change Is Shaping the Future of Conflict," Speech / Climate Change And Conflict  5 May 2020, https://www.crisisgroup.org/global/climate-change-shaping-future-conflict, commented, "Crisis Group’s President & CEO Robert Malley addressed the UN Security Council’s virtual Arria session on climate and security risks on 22 April 2020. Without global action, he said, climate change could prove to be a slow-moving version of the current COVID-19pandemic.

              I am honoured to be joining this Security Council Arria session on climate and security risks. The organisers had the foresight to schedule it to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day; they also had the fortune or misfortune to schedule it to coincide with the outbreak of COVID-19, an apt reminder if one were required of how global challenges necessitate a global response, and of why looming threats necessitate an urgent one. In particular, I want to thank all of today’s co-hosts for calling attention to the growing peace and security implications of climate change. 

              I join you on behalf of the International Crisis Group’s team of conflict analysts around the world. Crisis Group is an independent organisation with a mission to save lives by preventing, mitigating and resolving deadly conflict. We do so through field-based research, impartial analysis and pragmatic advocacy to shape the understanding and alter the behaviour of conflict actors and those who influence them.

              So what brings us to this climate conversation? Quite simply, the conviction that climate change is already shaping and will continue to shape the future of conflict, and that we ignore that relationship at our peril. In that sense, and as today’s meeting illustrates, the climate conversation is at an inflection point. That’s not only because of the latest, alarming facts on the ground. It’s also a reflection of who is now and should be at the table. For years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has documented trends that can instigate or exacerbate violence. Given the rate at which global warming is outpacing projections, the increasing rise in sea levels, the growing scarcity of resources, and the frequency of extreme weather events, it would be a dereliction of our duty if peace and security actors failed to join the diplomats, scientists, activists, and others in taking this challenge seriously.  

              We are relative newcomers to this conversation, and so we approach these issues with humility and have much to learn from you. But I’d like to offer a few thoughts for further discussion. 

              First, we should be careful to neither understate nor overstate the nature of the relationship between climate and deadly conflict. Let me be clear, independent of the links to deadly conflict, climate change is an existential challenge that puts vulnerable populations at increasing risk and requires far more robust action than we have seen so far.

               But as regards the link to conflict, understanding the precise relationship matters because only from that understanding can we derive sound policy prescriptions. By not understating the causal link, I mean acknowledging that climate change is undeniably a conflict threat multiplier. We are by now all familiar with the data suggesting a ten to twenty per cent increase in the risk of armed conflict associated with every half-degree increase in local temperatures, and that could be a conservative estimate.  Researchers will of course debate the precise role of climate-related risks in any crisis, but there's wide consensus that climate change can, for example, increase food insecurity, water scarcity and resource competition, disrupt livelihoods, and spur migration or what have been called environmental refugees. And these are all key factors that, as Crisis Group has documented for over two decades, can in turn play a key role in shaping deadly conflicts – for example, by prompting inter or intra state clashes over resources, discrediting central states, or bolstering the appeal of non-state armed groups and facilitating their recruitment drives. 

              At the same time, the relationship between climate and conflict is not linear; it is complex and nuanced. In some situations, small variations in climate can contribute to significant increases in violent conflict; in others, large variations in climate will not. That’s because what matters in this instance as in so many others is how authorities deal with the problems induced or exacerbated by climate change: how equitably and effectively they allocate and distribute resources; how inclusive and accountable they are; whether there are good inter-community mediation mechanisms or not. And so on. 

              Moreover, climate change does not necessarily trigger resource scarcity. In some instances, it does, in others, it does not: rising temperatures and volatile rainfall mean that many areas have fewer resources, but it also means that some may have more. Greater resources may be a net positive in terms of peace and stability, although as Crisis Group has also documented it can contribute to increased competition and violence if that competition is poorly regulated by the state.

              Finally, the relationship can be inverted, in that deadly conflict and political instability can contribute to climate change – for example, through illegal logging in the Amazon. 

              In other words, the impact of climate change on conflict is context-specific, which is why we believe that marrying the kind of granular, field based political analysis our organisation undertakes with climate expertise could produce the most effective conflict prevention outcomes. 

              The kinds of conflicts I refer to come in two broad categories. First are tensions within states arising from climate-related resource scarcity; these require domestic political responses that the UN may be able to support. Second are tensions between states over scarce resources – especially in the case of water – which require a diplomatic response that the UN may be able to facilitate. Drawing on recent Crisis Group reporting, I will address an example from each category in turn.

              Across the Sahel and even as far south as Kenya, Crisis Group has analysed how climate-related factors have exacerbated intercommunal conflicts between herders and farmers. Peace will require states restoring their ability to peacefully regulate conflicts in those rural areas, especially in relation to disputes over inhabitable land and other resources that are becoming scarcer due to rising temperatures and variable rainfall. 

              To take one specific instance, northern Nigeria has experienced large declines in the length of the rainy season and an increase in desert or semi-desert conditions over recent decades. These changes have dried up many natural water sources, diminishing pastures and farmland. In the northern states most directly impacted, they have exacerbated long-running contests between herders and farmers sharing the same resources. They are also forcing large numbers of herders in search of productive land to migrate south, resulting in increasing conflicts between them and central Nigeria’s growing populations of sedentary crop farmers. This violence has increased Nigeria’s security challenges and stretched the military from a much-needed focus on Boko Haram.

              When states fail to address these intercommunal tensions, then a variety of armed groups – including criminals and jihadists – are able to fill that vacuum and violently exploit the distrust of governments among marginalised rural communities. But while military measures against such groups are necessary, an effective response cannot only be security based: there needs to be a political component, such as the promotion of inclusive dialogues to reduce intercommunal tensions and engage armed groups; an economic dimension, including ways to formalise the grey economy and to reform the livestock sector; and a climate dimension, including prioritising humanitarian assistance to those most affected by environmental changes.

              Moving on to inter-state dynamics, Crisis Group has also looked at the transboundary water conflicts around the Nile river basin, and specifically the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Since 2010, Ethiopia has been building the dam on the Blue Nile River as its highest development priority. Given the Blue Nile is the main tributary of the Nile River, Egypt fears the dam threatens its water supply. 

              A tough negotiation has been made even harder as rising temperatures and falling precipitation trends are likely to lead to increased water scarcity across the Nile Basin. Over the last few years, technical experts from both countries and Sudan, which is also impacted, had neared a consensus about how fast Ethiopia could fill the dam’s reservoir to minimise downstream impacts. Those talks have since run into new obstacles, but what is most striking about this example is not only how a resource-scarcity issue around water rights has been intensified by climate change conditions, but also how the resulting diplomatic negotiations could strengthen regional institutions that can address both climate change and conflict issues in the future. So while these negotiations are far from complete, there is at least some reason to be hopeful that climate-induced urgency will prompt action.

              Nile Dam Talks: Unlocking a Dangerous Stalemate

              We have, of course, much more to learn about links between instability, conflict and climate. For now, and beyond the need to devote increasing attention to the politics of climate-related security risks, I’d propose two steps to make our collective policy response more effective: first, we have to shorten the timeline used to assess climate risks; second, we should prioritise geographies where climate risks intersect with fragile politics.  

              Until recently, the tendency was to discuss climate change on the 10- or 15-year timelines of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. But as you all know, the peace and security community operates on a much shorter timeline. Our goal should be to document closer to real time which areas are experiencing the fastest effects of climate change, when further environmental changes could occur, and what they might look like.

              Second, as I mentioned, just as climate risks vary based on different geographies, so too do conflict risks vary based on different politics. Political decisions matter greatly when it comes to how resources are allocated and who can access them, whether distribution is viewed as equitable and fair or iniquitous, and those issues matter greatly when it comes to conflict risks. So we must ask where among the set of most likely climate crises are existing institutions and state capacity weakest, and recommend appropriate policy steps to strengthen those institutions and the effectiveness of state responses. 

              In closing, I wanted to briefly comment on COVID-19, both generally and with respect to climate specifically. The pandemic clearly presents an era-defining challenge to public health and the global economy. Its political consequences, both short- and long-term, will only gradually become clearer. At Crisis Group, we are paying close attention to places where the global health challenge intersects with political conditions that could give rise to new crises or exacerbate existing ones.

            More specifically, it is worth reflecting on how COVID-19 may impact the politics of climate change. True, there has been a recent reduction in carbon emissions, but it could prove short-lived. Two economic factors are likely to complicate efforts: the price of oil has dropped precipitously, which may slow investments in renewable energy, and there is the risk of a global economic recession, which would constrain the already limited time and resources available to policymakers on many other issues, including climate change. As a result, the policy challenges ahead will be significant in addressing both climate change itself and its relationship to conflict. 

            But there is one overriding political message we should take from COVID-19, which is that without prompt global, collective action, climate change could prove to be the slow-moving version of the coronavirus outbreak, reshaping economic, political and security conditions around the world. 

              We have no alternative but to push forward – and for that effort, I thank all of you and look forward to hearing from you."

             Henry Fountain, "Billions Could Live in Extreme Heat Zones Within Decades, Study Finds," The New York Times, May 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/climate/heat-temperatures-climate-change.html?searchResultPosition=1, reported, "As the climate continues to warm over the next half-century, up to one-third of the world’s population is likely to live in areas that are considered unsuitably hot for humans, scientists said Monday.

              Currently fewer than 25 million people live in the world’s hottest areas, which are mostly in the Sahara region in Africa with mean annual temperatures above about 84 degrees Fahrenheit, or 29 Celsius. But the researchers said that by 2070 such extreme heat could encompass a much larger part of Africa, as well as parts of India, the Middle East, South America, Southeast Asia and Australia.

            With the global population projected to rise to about 10 billion by 2070, that means as many as 3.5 billion people could inhabit those areas. Some of them could migrate to cooler areas, but that would bring economic and societal disruption with it."

              The study is reported in, Chi Xu, Timothy A. Kohler, Timothy M. Lenton,   Jens-Christian Svenning, and Marten Scheffer, "Future of the human climate niche," PNAS, May 4, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910114117.

              The coronavirus pandemic is slowing human activity, and thus the burning of fossil fuels, resulting in less air pollution of many kinds, but especially of greenhouse gasses, world-wide. For at least the next months, and for as long as the slowdown continues, this will slow global warming. The slowdown has reduced oil price to their lowest point in several year, making fracking for oil cost more than the income from it. This has been shutting down a great deal of fracking activity, for the time being. The question is what the long term impact will be. Will the lower oil prices encourage more driving and overall more fossil fuel use, perhaps substituting at least some continued fossil fuel use, reducing the growth of renewable energy? That is possible, at least in the short run. But if demand rises, so will oil and gas prices, ending that effect. It is also possible that a long enough slow down will find more people in the habit of driving less, resulting in emissions from vehicles remaining lower that before the pandemic. (Nadja Popovich, "Watch the Footprint of Coronavirus Spread Across Countries," The New York Times,   March 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/coronavirus-pollution.html).

           As West Texas crude oil prices dipped below $0 a barrel, to -$37, April 20, 2020, Adam Kolton, Executive Director, Alaska Wilderness League reported by E-mail, "Today, Citigroup released an updated energy policy that rules out financing for oil and gas exploration, development and production projects in the Arctic, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."

              Kendra Chamberlain, "Oil and gas, environmentalists in rare agreement over [the New Mexico] State Land Office’s emergency rule on shut down wells," New Mexico Political Report, April 19, 2020, https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2020/04/18/oil-and-gas-environmentalists-in-rare-agreement-over-state-land-offices-emergency-rule-on-shut-down-wells/?mc_cid=321c01177d&mc_eid=826ba2a634, reported, "Representatives from both oil and gas producers and environmental groups found themselves agreeing on the State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard’s emergency rulemaking for oil and gas production on state land during an online tele-hearing. 

            The State Land Office announced earlier in April that it would begin an emergency rulemaking process to allow oil lessees to temporarily stop oil production without penalty for at least thirty days, in hopes of restarting production when the price of oil has recovered some."

               Julia Conley,  "Without 'Transformative Change' to Global Economic Systems, Humans Risk Causing More Deadly Pandemics: 'There is a single species that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic—us... We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones," Common Dreams, April 27, 2020, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/27/without-transformative-change-global-economic-systems-humans-risk-causing-more?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email, reported, "Human activity led to the conditions which allowed the new coronavirus to spread from wildlife to people, a group of biodiversity experts wrote Monday, and humans alone can change the world's economic system to prevent even deadlier pandemics from causing further destruction.

              Writing for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), Professors Josef Settele, Sandra Díaz, and Eduardo Brondizio joined with Dr. Peter Daszak to warn that economic and financial systems which 'prize economic growth at any cost' have led to a world in which 70% of emerging human diseases have come from wild and domesticated animals.

               The article comes a month after the U.N. Environmental Program issued a similar warning, calling the coronavirus 'a clear warning shot' from the natural world. 

              Humans' drive to use all available land for the production of goods has led to rampant deforestation, the expansion of agriculture, mining, and fossil fuel extraction, the authors explain—all of which harm the habitats of animals around the world and drive humans closer together with other species.

              'There is a single species that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic—us,' write the authors, who have previously published planetary status reports from IPBES. "As with the climate and biodiversity crises, recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity—particularly our global financial and economic systems, based on a limited paradigm that prizes economic growth at any cost. We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones."

              Humans have taken over about 85% of the world's wetlands and more than one-third of all land for their own uses, the authors write. In addition, 'the exploitation of wild species [has] created a 'perfect storm' for the spillover of diseases from wildlife to people.'

              The coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, is believed to have spread from animals to humans after originating in bats. 

              Scientists have linked other coronavirus outbreaks, such as the SARS epidemic of 2003, to live animal markets, but theories that COVID-19 "jumped" from an animal to humans at a market in Wuhan are inconclusive, according to University of Iowa immunologist Stanley Perlman.

              Still, the authors say in their report that 'as many as 1.7 million unidentified viruses of the type known to infect people are believed to still exist in mammals and water birds,' leading to likely future pandemics among the human population unless humans drastically change existing systems which rely on encroaching on wildlife habitats. 

              'Future pandemics are likely to happen more frequently, spread more rapidly, have greater economic impact, and kill more people if we are not extremely careful about the possible impacts of the choices we make today,' write the authors.

              The experts offer three key solutions that 'should be central to the multi-trillion-dollar recovery and economic stimulus plans already being implemented"' by policy makers:

            Strengthening and enforcing environmental regulations and including incentives for sustainability within relief packages for businesses.

            'It may be politically expedient at this time to relax environmental standards and to prop up industries such as intensive agriculture, long-distance transportation such as the airlines, and fossil-fuel-dependent energy sectors, but doing so without requiring urgent and fundamental change, essentially subsidizes the emergence of future pandemics,' the authors explain.

Adopting a 'One Health' approach to policy making.

            Humans must recognize the "complex interconnections among the health of people, animals, plants and our shared environment,' the scientists write, recommending that before allowing deforestation to move forward to further the profits of an agricultural and mining company, policy makers must consider the long-term effects the practice could have on human and animal health.

            'The health of people is intimately connected to the health of wildlife, the health of livestock and the health of the environment. It's actually one health,' Daszak told The Guardian.

Properly funding and resourcing healthcare systems around the world.

The scientists add that policy makers must build capacity in emerging disease hotspots to help stop a disease outbreak in its tracks.

            'This is not simple altruism—it is vital investment in the interests of all to prevent future global outbreaks,' they write.

              On social media, environmental researcher Lewis Winks added that economic justice for people in developing countries who have come to rely on wealthy companies' and governments' exploitative practices must also be considered as scientists push for policies to halt the destruction of biodiversity.

The "transformative change" needed to protect biodiversity requires "system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values, promoting social and environmental responsibilities across all sectors," the report's authors write.

              'We can build back better and emerge from the current crisis stronger and more resilient than ever," the report reads, "but to do so means choosing policies and actions that protect nature—so that nature can help to protect us.'

              Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License." 

              Jake Johnson, "Landmark Win in 'Fight for Habitable Future' as Jury Refuses to Convict Climate Activists Who Presented Necessity Defense: 'When citizens are told the truth about the climate crisis—which is the first of Extinction Rebellion's demands—they take appropriate and responsible action, as our jury did, and we thank them,'" Common Dreams, February 28, 2020, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/28/landmark-win-fight-habitable-future-jury-refuses-convict-climate-activists-who?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email, Reported, "Environmentalists celebrated a landmark victory in the 'fight for a habitable future" after a Portland, Oregon jury on Thursday refused to convict five Extinction Rebellion activists—including valve turner Ken Ward—who presented the climate necessity defense at their trial for blockading a train track used by Zenith Energy to transport crude oil."

              Climate change is radically changing conditions and life in the Himalayas. Some areas have more water coming to them from increased glacier melt, while others have become dry, particularly in Nepal, making farming and grazing from very difficult to impossible, forcing an increasing migration from many villages (Bhadra Sharma and Kai Schultz, As Himalayas Warm, Nepal’s Climate Migrants Struggle to Survive: Pushed out of their village by a drought and lack of food, a group of Nepalis are fighting to amplify the voices of those forced to relocate by the planet’s warming," The New York Times, April 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/world/asia/nepal-himalayas-glacier-climate.html).

              Nadja Popovich, "Climate Change Rises as a Public Priority. But It’s More Partisan Than Ever," The New York Times,  February 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/20/climate/climate-change-polls.html, reported, "For the first time in the survey’s two-decade history, a majority of Americans said dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress. That’s a 14 percentage point rise from four years ago,

              Nearly two-thirds of Americans ranked protecting the environment as a leading policy priority, which is almost as many as said economic growth should remain a primary focus.

              But the surge in climate and environmental concern masks a deep partisan divide."

              Christopher Flavelle, "Here’s How Coronavirus Could Raise Cities’ Risk for Climate Disasters," The New York Times, April 24, 2020, "The economic toll of the coronavirus is forcing cities and states to redirect money away from projects that provide climate resilience, in a shift that threatens to tackle one crisis at the expense of another.

            Officials in San Francisco, Miami Beach and New York City have said they are likely to delay climate-related projects like sea walls because of the virus, which has slashed tax revenue and increased demands for emergency services, housing and other immediate needs. Washington State has cut funding for resilience projects, and people who work on climate adaptation in other cities and states said they worried about similar cuts."

              Selam Gebrekidan, "Radical Changes Urged for Huge E.U. Farm Program: A planned overhaul fails to adequately protect the environment and support small farmers, a group of scientists said," The New York Times, March 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/world/europe/radical-changes-urged-for-huge-eu-farm-program.html, reported, "Europe’s $65-billion-a-year farm program needs to change radically if it is to protect the environment and support small farmers, a group of European scientists said in a paper published in the journal People and Nature (https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.10080) on Monday.

              The 21 authors of the paper said a planned overhaul of Europe’s farm policy is inadequate. They said policymakers must stop paying farmers based on the acres they cultivate and instead reward environmentally friendly practices such as organic farming or agroforestry. The scientists also asked the European Union to cut off subsidies that encourage livestock farming, which is linked to a rise in greenhouse gas emissions."

              Somini Sengupta, "Japan's Climate Plan Sends the Wrong Signal," The New York Times, April 1, 2020, https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20200401&instance_id=17252&nl=climate-fwd%3A&productCode=CLIM&regi_id=52235981&segment_id=23527&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2Fdb470071-a8f1-418a-bd9e-ad4a97558a84&user_id=2984790c14170290245238c0cd4fd927, reported, that Japan, the world's fifth largest greenhouse gas emitter made no improvements from its old plan to reduce greenhouse emissions in announcing a new one, which would reduce warming emissions by 26 percent below 2013 levels. This is insufficient to prevent horrendous climate disaster.

              Ivan Penn, "Oil Companies Are Collapsing, but Wind and Solar Energy Keep Growing: The renewable-energy business is expected to keep growing, though more slowly, in contrast to fossil fuel companies, which have been hammered by low oil and gas prices," The New York Times, April 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/business/energy-environment/coronavirus-oil-wind-solar-energy.html, reported that the COPID-19 drop in oil prices has not undercut renewable energy growth as wind and electric energy are increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels for electric generation, including needing significantly less maintenance once in operation,"  In fact, renewable energy sources are set to account for nearly 21 percent of the electricity the United States uses for the first time this year, up from about 18 percent last year and 10 percent in 2010, according to one forecast published last week. And while work on some solar and wind projects has been delayed by the outbreak, industry executives and analysts expect the renewable business to continue growing in 2020 and next year even as oil, gas and coal companies struggle financially or seek bankruptcy protection."

            The growing number of electric cars are now beginning to be joined by electric big rig trucks, in a switch away from diesel (Susan Carpenter, "Big Rigs Begin to Trade Diesel for Electric Motors: Tractor-trailer fleets will take time to electrify, and start-ups and established truck makers are racing to get their models on the road," The New York Times, March 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/business/electric-semi-trucks-big-rigs.html).

            The cost of electric cars has been dropping, even as more and more become available, and by March 2020 had reached about to about the cost of gasoline and diesel powered cars. It appears that equivalent electric cars will soon be cheaper then petroleum powered cars, and need far less repairs and are less expensive to run (Zachary Shahan,  "The Electric Car Cost Tipping Point," CleanTechnica, March 21st, 2020, https://cleantechnica.com/2020/03/21/the-electric-car-price-tipping-point/.

              "City of Houston Surprises: 100% Renewable Electricity — $65 Million in Savings in 7 Years," CleanTechnica, May 2nd, 2020, https://cleantechnica.com/2020/05/02/city-of-houston-surprises-100-renewable-electricity-65-million-in-savings-in-7-years/, reported   announced today [April 30, 2020] that the City of Houston has committed to purchasing 100% renewable energy through a renewed partnership with NRG Energy as the City’s retail electric provider.

            As part of the contract renewal, the City will power all municipal operations with renewable energy and realize $65 million in savings over the seven-year contract. Through the NRG Renewable Select plan, the City will receive 1,034,399 MWh of renewable electricity annually from a new, third-party utility-scale solar facility in Texas that is dedicated to City operations."

              Jessica Corbett, "Milan's Plan to Limit Cars After COVID-19 Lockdown Lauded as 'Excellent Example of #BuildBackBetter': "Of course, we want to reopen the economy, but we think we should do it on a different basis from before," Common Dreams, April 21, 2020, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/21/milans-plan-limit-cars-after-covid-19-lockdown-lauded-excellent-example?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email, reported, "Climate activists from across the globe on Tuesday welcomed an ambitious new plan for Milan that will, according to the Guardian, transform 22 miles of street space currently reserved for cars 'with a rapid, experimental citywide expansion of cycling and walking space to protect residents as COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.'"

              Benjamin Mueller and Mark Landler, "U.K. Court Blocks Heathrow Airport Expansion on Environmental Grounds: The Court of Appeal said the government failed to take its climate change commitments into account, a decision that carries global implications," The New York Times, February 27, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/world/europe/heathrow-airport-third-runway-uk.html, reported, "Britain’s Court of Appeal issued a landmark ruling on Thursday that stymied plans to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport in London, declaring that the government illegally neglected its commitments to reduce carbon emissions and protect the planet from dangerously high temperatures.

              The ruling, among the first in the world to measure a state’s infrastructure plans specifically against its promises under the Paris Agreement on climate change, threw the expansion of Heathrow into doubt and opened up a new frontier for legal challenges to major projects in Britain and around the world."

              The European Union introduced legislation, in March 2020, to require makers of electronics and other equipment to offer repairs and upgrades rather than recycling damaged or older equipment  ("Europe Wants to Emphasize Gadget Repair Over Recycling," The New York Times, March 13, 2020).

              "Amazon's Bezos pledges $10 billion to climate change fight," Reuters, February 17, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-climatechange-idUSKBN20B1XK, reported, "Amazon (AMZN.O) Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos will commit $10 billion to fund scientists, activists, nonprofits and other groups fighting to protect the environment and counter the effects of climate change, he said on Monday. 

              Cutting emissions will be challenging for Amazon. The e-commerce company delivers 10 billion items a year, has a massive transportation and data center footprint, and has faced criticism from within its own workforce."

              The corona virus pandemic has caused the critical U.N Climate talks to be delayed for one year (U.N. Climate Talks Postponed to 2021," The New York Times, April 2, 2020).

              Rick Rojas, "As Mississippi Flood Crests, Full Damage Is Yet to Be Seen: Heavy rains swamped a reservoir and pushed the Pearl River over its banks, forcing evacuations," The New York Times, February 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/16/us/mississippi-flood-jackson.html, reported, "Officials estimated that more than 2,400 structures would be affected by the flooding, but the exact extent of the physical damage remains unclear.

              February’s torrent of rain, which also produced flooding in Tennessee, has led to fears of another spring of raging waters in the nation’s South and Midwest. A spokesman for the Tennessee Valley Authority told The Associated Press that February’s rains have been “400 percent of normal,” and more is expected this week. 

            As the river in Mississippi reached levels on Sunday that had not been seen in more than 35 years, Gov. Tate Reeves repeated a plea that he and other officials started making as soon as the gravity of the flooding became clear: Get moving. 'Protect yourself.'"

              Richard Fausset and Steve Cavendish, "A Tornado Decimated North Nashville. The Rebuilding May Destroy Its Soul: A devastating tornado in 1998 transformed East Nashville and forced many African-American residents to relocate. Now, North Nashville residents fear the same will happen to them," The New York Times, March 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/us/tennessee-tornado.html, reported on a huge set of extremely powerful tornadoes that cut what used to be an extremely long path across Tennessee, including in the city of Nashville, "As this city cleans up from nightmare storms that cut a swath across the central part of the state on Tuesday, killing at least two dozen people across four counties, some residents of North Nashville also worried that the tornado’s destruction would exacerbate the forces that have been diluting their neighborhood’s character and culture."

              Ellen Ann Fentress and Richard Fausset, "Dozens Are Killed as Tornadoes and Severe Weather Strike Southern States: The storm carved a destructive path across six states on Sunday and Monday, causing widespread damage and cutting power to tens of thousands of customers," The New York Times, April 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/us/tornado-storm-south.html, reported on a particularly destructive set of tornadoes, "The devastating weather system started Sunday and barreled across the region into Monday, leaving destruction, blackouts and heartbreak in its path. More than 30 people died — including at least 11 in Mississippi, nine in South Carolina and eight in Georgia — making it one of the most significant natural disasters in the country since government officials began ordering people to stay home and away from one another in an effort to stop the spread of the virus."

              Somini Sengupta and Shola Lawal, "The Original Long Islanders Fight to Save Their Land From a Rising Sea: Shinnecock Indians are using nature-based solutions to calm the waves and restore the beaches that protect their lands," The New York Times, March 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/climate/shinnecock-long-island-climate.html, reported, "A maritime people who once spanned a large swath of the eastern Long Island shore, the Shinnecock Indians have been hemmed into a 1.5-square-mile patch of land on the edge of a brackish bay. Now, because of climate change, they’re battling to hold on to what they have left.

            Rising seas are threatening to eat away at the Shinnecock lands. But the tribe is using everything at its disposal to calm the waves and restore a long, slim beach at the edge of Shinnecock Bay: dredged sand, sea grasses, beach grasses, boulders, oyster shells.

            It’s a forever battle. Climate change is swelling and heating the world’s oceans at an accelerating pace. Inevitably, the Shinnecock will have to bring more sand to replenish what the rising tide keeps washing away. More grass will have to be planted. This spring, Shavonne Smith, director of the tribe’s environmental department, wants to expand the oyster reef designed to dissipate the energy of the waves."

              Christine Hauser, "Heavy Rains Flood Parts of Ohio, Stranding Residents: In central and southern Ohio, hundreds of people have been evacuated from homes and vehicles after a period of intense rain," The New York Times, March 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/ohio-flooding.html, reported, "Heavy rains swamped communities in central and southern Ohio, leading to road closures and rescues of residents by boats and at least one military vehicle, officials said on Friday.

            At least three inches of rain fell in the region overnight and early on Friday, flooding roadways and overwhelming waterways when the ground — already saturated from previous rains — could not hold it all, according to Kathleen Fuller, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Transportation."

              For the central United States, the spring of 2020 has been predicted again to be stricken by floods and soggy grounds, but not to the same extent as in 2019.

              Michael Levenson, Neil Vigdor and Christine Hauser, "Tornadoes Tear Through Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas, Killing at Least 7: Homes were destroyed, two factories were damaged and thousands were left without power," The New York Times, April 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/tornado-oklahoma-texas.html, reported, "A series of powerful tornadoes ripped through Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas on Wednesday evening, destroying homes, flipping cars and killing at least seven people, according to the authorities. Dozens more were injured."

              Andrea Germanos, "Emerging Climate-Fueled Megadrought in Western US Rivals Any Over Past 1,200 Years: Study: 'We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we're on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts," Common Dreams, April 17, 2020, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/17/emerging-climate-fueled-megadrought-western-us-rivals-any-over-past-1200-years-study?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email, reported, "The western United States is likely being gripped by an 'emerging' megadrought partly fueled by the climate crisis, says a study published Friday.

              Researchers claim the region's 19-year drought, from 2000–2018, already rivals that of any over the past 1,200 years.

              'We're no longer looking at projections, but at where we are now, 'said lead author Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in a statement. 'We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we're on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts.'

              For the study, published in the journal Science, Williams and the other researchers looked at nine U.S. states, stretching from Oregon and Montana at the northern and southward through California and New Mexico. The researchers also included a portion of northern Mexico in the study.

              Using tree ring data to infer yearly soil moisture and plot out the pre-modern data, the researchers documented four megadroughts—multi-decade droughts—beginning in 800 AD. 

              The southwest's current drought was worse compared to the ones that took place in the late 800s, mid-1100s, and the 1200s. The most severe megadrought on record began in 1575, though researchers said the difference between that Medieval one and the current was slight.

              And while natural variability played a role in the current drought, the scientists estimate about half the blame—47%—lies with the Earth's heating, as warmer air is able to suck up more ground moisture.

              According to coauthor Benjamin Cook of Lamont and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 'It doesn't matter if this is exactly the worst drought ever' but that 'it has been made much worse than it would have been because of climate change.'

              Natural variability that can drive drought will likely continue, as will global warming, threatening further upheaval for a region already facing groundwater depletion.  

"Because the background is getting warmer, the dice are increasingly loaded toward longer and more severe droughts," added Williams.

              'We may get lucky, and natural variability will bring more precipitation for a while,' he said. 'But going forward, we'll need more and more good luck to break out of drought, and less and less bad luck to go back into drought.'

              Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License."

              Somini Sengupta, "A Crisis Right Now: San Francisco and Manila Face Rising Seas," The New York Times, February 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/13/climate/manila-san-francisco-sea-level-rise.html, "An estimated 600 million people live directly on the world’s coastlines, among the most hazardous places to be in the era of climate change. According to scientific projections, the oceans stand to rise by one to four feet by the end of the century, with projections of more ferocious storms and higher tides that could upend the lives of entire communities.

            Many people face the risks right now. Two sprawling metropolitan areas offer a glimpse of the future. One rich, one poor, they sit on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean: the San Francisco Bay Area (population 7 million) and metropolitan Manila (almost 14 million).

              Their history, their wealth, and the political and personal choices they make today will shape how they fare as the water inevitably comes to their doorsteps."

              Kendra Pierre-Louis and Nadja Popovich, "California Had Its Driest February on Record. Here’s How Bad It Was," The New York Times, March 3, 2020,

 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/03/climate/dry-california.html, reported, "Not a drop of rain fell in downtown San Francisco this February. Or in Big Sur State Park. Or in Paso Robles. February in California was so dry that it is raising concerns that the state, which, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center, only fully emerged from drought last March, may be headed for another one.

              'It was the driest February on record,' said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles.

              Ordinarily, 90 percent of California’s rain falls during the seven-month period between Oct. 1 and April 30, with half of the state’s total precipitation falling during December, January and February. The rains that come in February are part of a seasonal pattern that nourishes plants, replenishes reservoirs and, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, restores the snowpack that provides up to 30 percent of the state’s drinking water."

              Iliana Magra, "Storm Ciara, or Sabine, Leaves 5 Dead in Europe: A powerful winter storm battered Europe on Sunday, leaving power outages, transportation chaos and at least five deaths in its wake," The New York Times, February 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/world/europe/storm-ciara-sabine-germany.html, reported, "Streets were flooded, flights were canceled, traffic was jammed, power was cut and wind-blown trees blocked roads and rails on Monday as a deadly winter storm raged through western and northern Europe.

              Storm Ciara — or Sabine, as the storm is called in German-speaking countries — tore through Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and Poland, unleashing chaos and killing at least five people, according to reports from news agencies and social media.

              Steven Keates, a senior meteorologist in Britain’s Met Office, the country’s national meteorological service, said on Monday that though storms are common in winter, Storm Ciara is 'notable' because of the very strong and widespread winds."

              Raphael Minder, "Sandstorm Wreaks Havoc in Canary Islands: Red sands carried by winds from the Sahara have forced airports to close, leaving thousands stranded," The New York Times, February 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/world/europe/canary-islands-sandstorm-calima.htmlm reported, "Winds from the Sahara continued to send streams of sand drifting over the Canary Islands on Monday, creating chaos as the swirling sands forced planes to be grounded, disrupted traffic and exacerbated wildfires.

              Ángel Víctor Torres, the regional president of the islands, a Spanish archipelago, told Spanish national television that it was the worst such storm to hit the islands in 40 years. He described its arrival as 'a nightmare weekend.'”

              Shola Lawal, "Africa, a Thunder and Lightning Hot Spot, May See Even More Storms," The New York Times, February 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/climate/lightning-africa-climate-change.html, reported, "Africa is experiencing bigger and more frequent thunderstorms as global temperatures rise, according to researchers at Tel Aviv University."

              In the Comoros, off the cost of East Africa, a combination of global warming induced climate change and massive deforestation in an area that receives more rain than Europe has caused many rivers to dry up in the dry season, bringing a water crisis (Tommy Trenchard, "‘There’s No More Water’: Climate Change on a Drying Island: A delicate ecosystem was disrupted in the Comoros, off East Africa, when forests were cleared to make way for farmland. The consequences offer lessons for other parts of the developing world the Comoros, off East Africa April 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/world/africa/comoros-climate-change-rivers.html).

              Shola Lawal, "Hurricane Dorian Ravaged Bahamas’ Reefs, Researchers Find," The New York Times, February 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/climate/hurricane-dorian-reefs-coral.html, reported, "When Hurricane Dorian slammed into the Bahamas in September, it not only leveled entire communities and killed dozens of people, it also destroyed about 30 percent of the coral reefs around the islands, according to a report issued Friday by the Perry Institute for Marine Science."

              Damien Cave, "Fires Are Out, but Australia’s Climate Disasters Aren’t Over: Devastating floods came soon after the bush fires. Scientists call it “compound extremes,” as one catastrophe intensifies the next," The New York Times, February 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/world/australia/climate-change-extremes.html, reported, "Australia’s hellish fire season has eased, but its people are facing more than a single crisis. With floods destroying homes not far from where infernos recently raged, they are confronting a cycle of what scientists call 'compound extremes': one climate disaster intensifying the next."

            Serious flooding from unprecedented rains occurred in the aftermath of the fires, in what seems to be a new, and likely worsening cycle. Many Australians do not know whether or not to rebuild, or even if their property survived the fires, to move.

              Derrick Bryson Taylor, "Antarctica Sets Record High Temperature: 64.9 Degrees: 'This is the foreshadowing of what is to come,' a researcher said. 'It’s exactly in line of what we’ve been seeing for decades,'” The New York Times, February 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/08/climate/antarctica-record-temperature.html, reported, "Antarctica, the coldest, windiest and driest continent on Earth, set a record high temperature on Thursday, underscoring the global warming trend, researchers said.

              Esperanza, Argentina’s research station on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, reached 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 18.2 degrees Celsius, breaking the previous record of 63.5 degrees set on March 24, 2015, according to Argentina’s National Meteorological Service. The station has been recording temperatures since 1961."

            The effects of climate change are long lasting. Jamie Tarabay and Michelle Elias, "‘Like Licking an Ashtray’: Fires’ Invisible Threat to Australia’s Wines: The smoke produced by the blazes that ravaged the country may ruin entire vintages, but detecting contamination is a guessing game,'” The New York Times,  March 6, 2020, , reported, "The bush fires that raged for eight months in southeastern Australia inflicted widespread damage on the vineyards of the Hunter Valley, not directly from flames, but through the invisible taint of smoke.

            Winemakers like Mr. Riggs have abandoned hopes for some 2020 vintages. Grapes that were closest to the fires are being left on the vine. Those farther away are being tested for smoke contamination, though it is an inexact science, and in some cases producers won’t know whether a wine can be sold until it has fermented in tanks."

              Nina Lakhani, "Dakota access pipeline: court strikes down permits in victory for Standing Rock Sioux: Army corps of engineers ordered to conduct full environmental review, which could take years," The Guardian, March 25, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/25/dakota-access-pipeline-permits-court-standing-rock, reported, "The future of the controversial Dakota Access pipeline has been thrown into question after a federal court on Wednesday struck down its permits and ordered a comprehensive environmental review." This may take several years to complete.

              The US army corps of engineers was ordered to conduct a full environmental impact statement (EIS), after the Washington DC court ruled that existing permits violated the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa)."

              Justin Nobel,  "America’s Radioactive Secret: Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of toxic waste a year. An investigation shows how it could be making workers sick and contaminating communities across America," Rolling Stone, January 21, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/oil-gas-fracking-radioactive-investigation-937389/, reported that dangerously radioactive brine is a waste product produced by oil and gas wells at a faster rate than oil or gas. It is a serious health hazard to oil and gas workers, truckers who move the waste water and surrounding communities. But it is not regulated and gas and oil companies neither mention it or take steps to protect worker and others from it.

            Eoin Higgins, "New Report Takes Aim at Five Banking Institutions Backing Amazon Rainforest Exploitation: 'Five of the world's most powerful financial institutions are actively contributing to climate change by providing debt and equity financing for crude oil extraction projects in the Amazon,'" Common Dreams, March 12, 2020, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/12/new-report-takes-aim-five-banking-institutions-backing-amazon-rainforest?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email, reported, "A new report from the group Amazon Watch shows how five of the world's largest financial institutions are funding the exploitation of the Amazon Rainforest for oil—even as those firms claim to be on the side of mitigating the climate crisis.

            'Five of the world's most powerful financial institutions are actively contributing to climate change by providing debt and equity financing for crude oil extraction projects in the Amazon,' reads the report.

              The five banks—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and BlackRock—'have made available tens of billions of dollars for oil companies operating in the Amazon, including GeoPark, Amerisur, Frontera, and Andes Petroleum,' according to the report.

              The five firms have enjoyed good press recently for their stated commitment to curbing the climate crisis and making investment choices around saving the planet.

              But, Amazon Watch said in an accompanying multimedia toolkit, the firms are instead 'pouring money into crude oil extraction in the western Amazon, despite explicit opposition from indigenous groups on the ground and the worsening of the climate crisis that such activity promotes.' 

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License." 

              Maria Varenikova, "Chernobyl Wildfires Reignite, Stirring Up Radiation: Wildfires are common in the so-called Zone of Alienation around the abandoned Chernobyl plant. A larger-than-typical fire is stirring up radiation, though levels remain normal in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital," The New York Times, April 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/world/europe/chernobyl-wildfire.html , repoted, "Firefighters have struggled to control wildfires burning through radioactive forest in the abandoned territory around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, where radiation levels are considerably lower than they were immediately after the 1986 accident but still pose risks.

            Radiation readings near the wildfires, where smoke is swirling about, have been elevated, with the wind blowing toward rural areas of Russia and Belarus for most of the past week. The wind shifted Friday toward Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, but authorities say the radiation level is still normal in the city, whose population is about three million.

              But Saturday’s strong winds could spread the fires to the remnants of the nuclear plant and the equipment that was used to clean up the disaster."

              Hannah Beech, "Damming the Lower Mekong, Devastating the Ways and Means of Life: Thailand funded the first dam on the river in Laos, and it is Thai towns, farms and fisheries that are suffering," The New York Times,

February 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/world/asia/mekong-river-dams-thailand.html#after-story-ad-2, reported that the building of the first of 11 planned dams on the Mekong river has devastated fishing and farming below it, "The lower Mekong, which makes its way through five countries, was one of the world’s few remaining free rivers. But a hydropower boom, coupled with extreme weather patterns attributed to climate change, is radically remaking the waterway.

              In October, the turbines of the first lower Mekong dam, the Xayaburi, began churning upstream from Nong Khai in Laos, after a series of test runs last summer. The effect of the Thai-funded dam was almost immediate, residents said.

              The Mekong ran clear and depleted, appearing an eerie, luminescent blue on sunny days. Algae bloomed, choking nets. Now, a monthslong drought has pushed the water level even lower so that parts of the river are no longer a waterway at all but a desert of dead plants and dried-out crustaceans.

            With about 10 more dams planned for the mainstream Mekong’s lower reaches and hundreds more on its tributaries, a lifeline for 60 million people is being choked. Tens of millions more will be affected as farms and fisheries are compromised, even as the rich and powerful across the region profit from the hydropower business."

              The Oceanic Rescue Center and Awareness (ORCA), https://www.facebook.com/Oceanicrescue/, in early April  2020 reported that in Cambodia the "... Lower Mekong river to remain free flowing as Sambor dam plans abandoned." Cambodia is the last country the Mekong flows through, so if upstream dams are built there will still be a great deal of damage.

              Hannah Beech, "Philippines Dispatch: Adapting to Rising Seas, Schools Move to the Rafters and Cats Swim: On an island in the Philippines, waterlogged for one-third of every year, residents adjust to their sodden existence instead of fleeing," The New York Times, February 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/world/asia/philippines-climate-change-batasan-tubigon.html, reported,

              "In 2013, Batasan was convulsed by a 7.2-magnitude earthquake. Thousands of aftershocks followed, and the local topography was thrown off-kilter. Batasan and three neighboring islands collapsed downward, making them more vulnerable to the surrounding water.

            Now climate change, with its rising sea levels, appears to be dooming a place that has no elevation to spare. The highest point on the islands is less than 6.5 feet above sea level."

              Constant Méheut "In Paris, Cafe Terraces Are an Environmental Battleground: Heat lamps over outdoor tables have become an integral part of Parisian street life. But they are meeting resistance in the face of climate change," The New York Times, March 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/world/europe/paris-terraces-climate-change.html. reported that Parisians have long enjoyed sitting outside in cafes even in cool weather, thanks to gas burning heat lamps, but the once very popular custom is increasingly coming under attack for adding to global warming in the burning of the natural gas.

              Mark Sumner, "Under the cover of the coronavirus, billionaire looters are stealing America's air, water, and soil," Daily Kos,  March 31, 2020, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/31/1932962/-Under-the-cover-of-the-coronavirus-billionaire-looters-are-stealing-America-s-air-water-and-soil?detail=emaildkr, commented,         "In most emergencies, networks seem eager to show images of people looting, but with the coronavirus crisis, those images don’t seem to be reaching our screens. Which is surprising, because the level of looting has been severe; it’s not televisions or sneakers, it’s the air, the water, the soil, and the future.

              Under the cover of the coronavirus, Donald Trump has let polluters know that all bets are off. Anything goes. And the usual suspects are welcoming the opportunity.

              Since taking office, Trump has made destroying environmental rules set in place by President Barack Obama both one of his goals and bragging points. But the rule over limiting emissions from vehicles and requiring higher mileage from vehicles has been something of a sticking point, partly because there is the complication that California and other states have the authority to set their own limits, and partly because not even the automakers want Trump’s sky-blackening proposal.

              But, with all eyes turned to the immediate threat of the virus, Trump’s team has been rushing to complete this smash-and-grab that will, as The New York Times reports, throw a billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Not only will it generate a cost to the environment, it also represents a threat to public health. And automakers don’t like it, because it places the United States far outside the rules being set for other nations, setting the stage for automakers to have to create U.S.-only models in a race to the bottom for the least efficient, highest polluting vehicles."

              Cattle produce significantly large amounts extremely atmospheric heating methane in their digestive process, which has led a number of  scientists and companies to attempt to find dietary modifications that would reduce cattle methane production. One Swiss firm has come up with a cattle feed supplement that appears to have that effect (Adam Satariano, "The Business of Burps: Scientists Smell Profit in Cow Emissions: Cattle produce more methane than many large countries. A solution could be an ecological and financial breakthrough — and a Swiss biotech company may be on the cusp," The New York Times, May 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/business/cow-methane-climate-change.html).

              Coral Davenport, "U.S. to Announce Rollback of Auto Pollution Rules, a Key Effort to Fight Climate Change," The New York Times, March 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/climate/trump-fuel-economy.html, reported, "The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to announce its final rule to rollback Obama-era automobile fuel efficiency standards, relaxing efforts to limit climate-warming tailpipe pollution and virtually undoing the government’s biggest effort to combat climate change. 

            The new rule, written by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation, would allow cars on American roads to emit nearly a billion tons more carbon dioxide over the lifetime of the vehicles than they would have under the Obama standards and hundreds of millions of tons more than will be emitted under standards being implemented in Europe and Asia."

            Lisa Friedman and Coral Davenport, "E.P.A. Weakens Controls on Mercury: The agency is changing the way it calculates the benefits of mercury controls, a move that would effectively loosen the rules on other toxic pollutants," The New York Times, April 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/climate/epa-mercury-coal.html, reported, "The Trump administration on Thursday weakened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, another step toward rolling back health protections in the middle of a pandemic.

              The new Environmental Protection Agency rule does not eliminate restrictions on the release of mercury, a heavy metal linked to brain damage. Instead, it creates a new method of calculating the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution that environmental lawyers said would fundamentally undermine the legal underpinnings of controls on mercury and many other pollutants."

              "The Clean Water Case of the Century: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled to keep the Clean Water Act intact, dealing a major loss to the Trump administration and its pro-polluter agenda. The fate of the nation’s clean water had hung in the balance in County of Maui v. Hawaiʻi Wildlife Fund," EarthJustice, April 23, 2020, https://earthjustice.org/features/supreme-court-maui-clean-water-case?p2asource=email&utm_source=crm&utm_medium=email&utm_term=info&utm_campaign=200423_Info_SCOTUS_Victory&utm_content=HTMLLearnMoreButton&emci=876b9902-8e85-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&emdi=8dc2e176-c385-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&ceid=1379097, reported, "The U.S. Supreme Court's decision leaves in place vital protections for the nation’s oceans, rivers, and lakes.

            The court found that point source discharges to navigable waters through groundwater are regulated under the Clean Water Act. In its decision on County of Maui v. Hawaiʻi Wildlife Fund, the court held that the Clean Water Act “require[s] a permit if the addition of the pollutants through groundwater is the functional equivalent of a direct discharge from the point source into navigable waters.”

            In other words, the Clean Water Act prohibits unpermitted discharge of pollution 'nto navigable waters, or when the discharge reaches the same result through roughly similar means.'

            In doing so, the Court rejected the Trump administration’s polluter-friendly position [that indirect impacts of water pollution wer not covered by the act] in the clearest of terms: 'We do not see how Congress could have intended to create such a large and obvious loophole in one of the key regulatory innovations of the Clean Water Act.'”

              Physicians for Social Responsibility announced, April 22, 2020, https://www.psr.org/blog/2020/04/22/big-win-in-court-psr-lawsuit-overturns-epa-limits-on-scientific-advisory-boards/?emci=346b1ed8-7085-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&emdi=ad7b151a-8f89-ea11-86e9-00155d03b5dd&ceid=33718, Barbara Gottlieb, "Big Win In Court! PSR Lawsuit Overturns EPA Limits On Scientific Advisory Boards," "A court ruling in a lawsuit where PSR was the lead plaintiff has overturned the U.S. EPA’s effort to block some scientists from serving on EPA advisory boards. In other words, we won!

              The case, Physicians for Social Responsibility v. Scott Pruitt, was heard in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. At stake was EPA’s policy barring scientists who currently receive EPA grant money from serving on any EPA science advisory committee, allegedly because the grantees would be biased.  At the same time, EPA imposed no comparable limits on industry representatives who might serve on the advisory bodies.

              PSR’s attorneys, from the environmental law firm Earthjustice, argued that the policy forced highly qualified scientists and medical professionals off of EPA advisory boards; created an imbalance by allowing persons receiving industry funding to serve; and overlooked the well-established rules established within the Office of Government Ethics.

              The integrity of EPA’s science advisory boards is essential to a wide range of public health and environmental policymaking at EPA.

              PSR’s voice was represented in the suit by two PSR members who received EPA grant money and were interested in serving on EPA science committees. They are Deborah Cory-Slechta, Ph.D., Professor of Environmental Medicine, Pediatrics and Public Health Sciences at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and Jonathan I. Levy, ScD, Professor of Environmental Health, School of Public Health, Boston University.

              The court in its opinion stated that while EPA’s earlier policy facilitated the 'critical role played by EPA’s scientific advisory committees,' its new position represented 'a major break from the agency’s prior policy,' under which grantees regularly served on advisory committees.

              Tellingly, the court noted that the EPA’s new policy 'nowhere confronts the possibility that excluding grant recipients—that is, individuals who EPA has independently deemed qualified enough to receive competitive funding—from advisory committees might exclude [the most qualified] candidates.”

              The lawsuit was launched in December 2017.

              The Trump administration, in February, upset a 20 year old, carefully worked out,  win-win deal between ranchers and conservationists for land management in the west that reasonably protects important environmental concerns, and sacred sites in ways that work well for ranchers, recreation and the tourism business. The new plan will allow grazing in the Grand Staircase National Monument in Utah (John Leshy, "Hurting Ranchers and the Land," The New York Times, March 4, 2020).

              Jessica Corbett, "Even 'Worst Fossil Fuel Banker' JPMorgan Chase Will No Longer Fund This Way of Destroying the Planet: 'These are small concessions that leave them the largest funder of the climate crisis—but it proves citizen power can work!'" Common Dreams, February 25, 2020,  https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/25/even-worst-fossil-fuel-banker-jpmorgan-chase-will-no-longer-fund-way-destroying?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email, reported, "Faced with mounting public pressure to take the climate crisis seriously and to end its financing for the fossil fuel industry, the investment bank JPMorgan Chase announced Monday that it will stop backing extraction projects in  the Arctic and phase out loans for coal by 2024 but keep funding oil and gas developments across the globe.

              'Activism works, what do you know,' author and activist Naomi Klein tweeted in response to the news late Monday. 'So much more to do but this is something.'

              JPMorgan is not only the largest bank in the United States, it is also the biggest funder of fossil fuels, according to the latest annual report from Rainforest Action Network (RAN), which revealed last March that the bank poured nearly $196 billion into coal, oil, and gas companies since world leaders adopted the Paris climate agreement in December 2015.

              'In the context of the climate emergency, the biggest fossil bank in the world—by a 29% margin—has a unique responsibility to phase out its climate impact,' RAN climate and energy senior campaigner Jason Opeña Disterhoft said in a statement Monday. 'Today's policy does not meet that responsibility.'

              'That said, the measures that JPMorgan Chase took today are steps forward,' he added. 'For the world's biggest banker of Arctic oil and gas to stop funding new fossil fuel projects in the region adds to the growing signal that the Arctic is a no-go zone for fossil expansion. These measures are a continued credit to the power of the advocacy by the Gwich'in Steering Committee and their allies, who have been organizing for years to defend the Arctic Refuge from fossil fuel development. And Wall Street's biggest coal mining banker setting an aggressive exit date on some major miners will accelerate coal becoming unbankable.'

              Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, welcomed JPMorgan's new approach to the Arctic in a statement Monday that criticized ongoing efforts by President Donald Trump and his administration to open up parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to fossil fuel extraction.

              'The Trump administration is pulling out all the stops to sell off our homelands for drilling, so big banks have a critical role to play in either supporting the destruction of this sacred place or keeping it protected,' Demientieff said. 'We're glad to see America's largest bank recognize that the Arctic Refuge is no place for drilling, and we hope that soon other banks and the oil companies they fund will follow along.'

              The Washington Post on Monday described JPMorgan's new policy as a 'baby step.' Author and activist Bill McKibben, who co-founded 350.org, told the newspaper that the bank's pledges align with those of Goldman Sachs, which unveiled its updated rules for fossil fuels in December 2019.

              'It seems like weak beer to me, basically just copying Goldman,' said McKibben. 'But it shows that even the biggest bank on Earth feels citizen pressure, so we will keep supplying that!' 

              Ben Cushing of the advocacy group Sierra Club suggested in a statement Monday that both banks' policies will put pressure on competitors to follow suit."

              Nick Visser, "‘Tremendous Victory’ For Wildlife: Federal Judge Invalidates Keystone XL Pipeline Permit: 'There’s just no getting around the fact that Keystone XL would devastate communities, wildlife, and clean drinking water,' one group said," Huffington Post, April 16, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/keystone-xl-pipeline-permit-us-district-judge-decision_n_5e97bf35c5b6a92100e1ee52?ncid=newsltushpmgnews&guccounter=1, reported, "A federal judge in Montana on Wednesday overturned a key water crossing permit needed to build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, handing a major victory to environmental groups who said the oil network could imperil endangered species and threaten drinking water.

              Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Morris said in his decision that the Army Corps of Engineers had failed to consider how a 2017 permit allowing the pipeline to cross waterways could harm some species, including the endangered pallid sturgeon."

              Clifford Krauss, "Canada Oil-Sands Plan Collapses Over Politics and Economics: A developer has abandoned a nine-year effort to extend mining, sparing Justin Trudeau a choice between energy interests and environmental concerns," The New York Times, February 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/business/energy-environment/frontier-oil-sands-canada.html, reported on the scrapping of the Frontier mine project in Alberta, "A major effort to expand development of Canada’s oil sands has collapsed shortly before a deadline for government approval, undone by investor concerns over oil’s future and the political fault lines between economic and environmental priorities.

              Nine years in the planning, the project would have increased Canada’s oil production by roughly 5 percent. But it would have also slashed through 24,000 acres of boreal forest and released millions of tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide every year."

            Henry Fountain, "Calculating Air Pollution’s Death Toll, Across State Lines," The New York Times, February 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/climate/air-pollution-health.html, reported, "Here’s further proof that air pollution ignores borders: In most states, about half of the premature deaths caused by poor air quality are linked to pollutants that blow in from other states, a new study found.

              The study investigated the sources and effects of two major pollutants that harm humans, ozone and fine airborne particles, in the lower 48 states from 2005 to 2018. It found that in New York, nearly two-thirds of premature deaths are attributable to pollution from sources in other states. That makes the state the largest “net importer” of early deaths, to use the researchers’ term.

              Ozone and fine particles are a result of fuel burning, so the analysis, published Wednesday in Nature, could have implications for policymakers looking for ways to reduce air pollution, and premature mortality, by regulating so-called cross-state emissions. So far only emissions from electric power generation are regulated in this way, but the study looked at six other sources of pollutants, including other industries, road transportation, aviation and commercial and residential sources like heating for homes and buildings."

            Lisa Friedman, "New Research Links Air Pollution to Higher Coronavirus Death Rates," The New York Times, April 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/climate/air-pollution-coronavirus-covid.html, reported, "Coronavirus patients in areas that had high levels of air pollution before the pandemic are more likely to die from the infection than patients in cleaner parts of the country, according to a new nationwide study that offers the first clear link between long-term exposure to pollution and Covid-19 death rates."

              Green America, https://www.greenamerica.org/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=emaillist&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=bd23cadc-a03d-4c5c-a0be-81347ad7383f, reported, April 21, 2020, "During these difficult times, we could all use some positive news. In celebration of Earth Week, we wanted to spread inspiration by highlighting two major achievements for people and the planet of Crofter’s Organic. Crofters is a certified member of our Green Business Network – businesses that are leaders in building the green economy!

              Crofters has greened the making of jam, from field to jar.

            By creating their own closed-loop water system, Crofters has reduced its water consumption by over 85%.

              Even though the company is located in an area abundant in fresh water in Northern Ontario, Canada, the company recognized the importance of this resource globally. To reduce the amount of water which is wasted due to the nearly constant use of water to clean equipment (jam is messy!) and the need for substantial amounts of water for its cooling tunnel, Crofters built two of its very own wastewater treatment plants right within its facility. These treatment plants take water contaminated with debris and dissolved sugars and return them to a reusable state. (See film on Crofters water work at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j2ctc5e2FA&feature=youtu.be&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=bd23cadc-a03d-4c5c-a0be-81347ad7383f).

              Crofters seeks out and maintains long standing relationships with suppliers that share a mutual interest in a sustainable and equitable food systems. One of the company’s longest standing suppliers, The Green Cane Project in Brazil, has completely upended the norms of sugar cane farming and exemplifies that shared vision for environmental protection and social justice. 

              Together, they are combatting deforestation, restoring biodiversity and soil health, and providing social benefits for employees and families. (A film on the sustainable sugar production work is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iuLo_uUPfU&feature=youtu.be&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=bd23cadc-a03d-4c5c-a0be-81347ad7383f).

              Crofters Organic is a pioneer in the sustainable food movement, adopting organic practices since 1989! Sustainability and social justice have always been at the core of its business."

              Winnie Lau , "To Solve the Ocean Plastics Problem, the World Needs a Plan: Pew and partners launch initiative to reduce costly, destructive pollution, PEW, February 25, 2020, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2020/02/25/to-solve-the-ocean-plastics-problem-the-world-needs-a-plan?utm_campaign=2020-02-25+Latest&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Pew, reported, "            Beaches littered with soda bottles and single-use takeout containers; rivers choked with plastic bags and cups; microplastics found in the deepest part of the ocean. These distressing and all-too-common reports aren’t isolated: About one truckload of plastic waste is dumped into our ocean every minute, according to a 2016 report from the World Economic Forum. And if things don’t change, that number could increase to four truckloads per minute by 2050.

              All of this plastic is having harmful impacts on marine life. A recent report from the Convention on Biological Diversity found that between 2012 and 2016, the number of species documented to have been affected by marine debris, of which plastic is the predominant source, has risento 817; the primary impacts are from ingestion, entanglement, and habitat damage or destruction.

              Plastic pollution is also taking a toll on people and society. According to a report from the United Nations Environment Programme, the estimated cost of ocean plastic pollution on fishing, tourism, and shipping is at least $13 billion annually. And experts do not yet fully understand how all of this pollution is affecting—or will affect—human health.

            Of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic ever produced, approximately only 9 percent has been recycled and an estimated 60 percent has been discarded, with some ending up polluting our rivers and the ocean. The amount of plastic entering the ocean is projected to double in the next five years.

              The enormity of this problem has led The Pew Charitable Trusts to undertake a two-year initiative to identify the most effective strategies to address the marine plastic problem. Working with the global consulting firm SYSTEMIQ, we are conducting a global analysis that will quantify the ocean plastic pollution between 2016 and 2040 under different scenarios. We are also engaging with Duke University on a global plastics policy analysis that considers the responses to this issue by a range of governments around the world. 

            Separately, Pew is working with a broad range of stakeholders to develop an evidence-based global roadmap for reducing marine plastic pollution. We expect to release that roadmap in mid-2020."

              Declan Walsh, "As Egypt’s Population Hits 100 Million, Celebration Is Muted: With little habitable land, deepening poverty and dwindling supplies of water, the future looks bleak. And there is no sign of a slowdown.

February 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/world/middleeast/egypt-population-100-million.html, reported, "Somewhere in Egypt, around lunchtime Tuesday, the country reached a major milestone: its 100 millionth citizen was born."

              "Hitting 100,000,000 marked human plenty, certainly, but also an uneasy moment in a country gripped by worries that its exploding population will exacerbate poverty and unemployment, and contribute to the scarcity of basic resources like land and water."

              Jake Johnson, "'Holy Crap This Is Insane': Citing Coronavirus Pandemic, EPA Indefinitely Suspends Environmental Rules: "The EPA uses this global pandemic to create loopholes for destroying the environment. This is a schoolbook example for what we need to start looking out for," Common Dreams, March27, 2020, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/27/holy-crap-insane-citing-coronavirus-pandemic-epa-indefinitely-suspends-environmental?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email, reported, "The Environmental Protection Agency, headed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, announced on Thursday a sweeping and indefinite suspension of environmental rules amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, a move green groups warned gives the fossil fuel industry a 'green light to pollute with impunity.'

              Under the new policy (pdf), which the EPA insisted is temporary while providing no timeframe, big polluters will effectively be trusted to regulate themselves and will not be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements. The order—applied retroactively beginning March 13, 2020—requests that companies 'act responsibly' to avoid violations.

              'EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment, but recognizes challenges resulting from efforts to protect workers and the public from COVID-19 may directly impact the ability of regulated facilities to meet all federal regulatory requirements,' Wheeler said in a statement. 'This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment.'

Critics, such as youth climate leader Greta Thunberg, accused the Trump administration of exploiting the coronavirus crisis to advance its longstanding goal of drastically rolling back environmental protections.

              'The EPA uses this global pandemic to create loopholes for destroying the environment," tweeted Thunberg. "This is a schoolbook example for what we need to start looking out for.'

              Cynthia Giles, former head of the EPA's Office of Enforcement under the Obama administration, told The Hill that the new policy is "essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future."

              'It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way 'caused' by the virus pandemic,' said Giles. 'And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was.'

              The EPA's order, for which the oil industry aggressively lobbied, represents the latest effort by the Trump administration to usethe coronavirus pandemic to advance right-wing policies that would likely not be permitted—or would at least face greater scrutiny—under normal circumstances.

              As Common Dreams reported last week, the White House is advancing an assault on public-sector unions, xenophobic border policies, and other objectives amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has officially infected more than 85,000 people in the United States as of Friday morning.

              'Outrageous,' tweeted Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in response to the EPA's new policy. "Suspending all environmental regulations indefinitely? This has nothing to do with coronavirus. This has everything to do with protecting Big Business.'

              Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License." 

              WildEarth Guardians, "Settlement Grants Reprieve for Wolves in Idaho: Win for wolves and other wildlife!", reported by E-mail, March 12, 2020, "On Wednesday, WildEarth Guardians reached a momentous settlement agreement with rogue wildlife-killing agency, Wildlife Services, related to its killing of wolves in Idaho. In 2018 alone, Wildlife Services killed nearly 100 wolves in Idaho, through various cruel methods including gunning them down by helicopter and fixed wing planes, strangling them with wire snares, and capturing them in foothold traps. Notably, most of this brutal slaughter was done at the behest of the livestock industry—punishment for wolves daring to be too near sheep or cattle.

              Guardians and our allies have been tenacious in our pursuit of Wildlife Services, questioning and pushing the agency to reform its cruel practices and follow the most up-to-date science in developing wildlife “management” plans. Our settlement agreement with Wildlife Services—the end result of a 5-year legal battle—will give wolves a reprieve from indiscriminate killing.

              Pursuant to our settlement agreement, Wildlife Services must abide by the following conditions related to wolf management in Idaho:

            No wolves will be killed in federally-designated wilderness areas or multiple federal recreation areas;

            No wolves will be killed for ungulate protection;

            No killing on private lands without documented and confirmed evidence of livestock take or wolf attack; and

            No snares may be used in the state.

            Notably, our win for wolves is also a win for other wildlife in Idaho as the settlement agreement provides that sodium cyanide devices (M44s) cannot be used in the state and all traps must be checked at least every 72 hours.

            Wildlife Services must abide by these restrictions until it completes a full environmental review of its predator management plans."

              The Center for Biological Diversity, "A Win for Right Whales Hurt by Lobster Fishing," Endangered Earth, No. 1032, April 16, 2020, https://act.biologicaldiversity.org/onlineactions/nUbqmwP9dEuZL1a51gLGXw2?sourceid=1006640&utm_source=eeo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=eeo1032&contactdata=j0PhtPDKJ57QParTC5YUi21vmE22%2b%2bckxiYPO5Gf8qU49pDR4QXJ665xLecqY9vM8L0I7YnRB9zjWsPIwHrPiqReHdh98oqsrOaCYvmNT1ouaJqw6Icqydlyii8cUDXcSxm7jRR0NbbhGj6JEIdIFwTi8ebt0aWnWhpTykG%2bCS8opzWP698V7Xf6k2S1Jo%2b4T7%2fYxlBGSuEor2SqrE9wEkZMDAGjlHcB9ijZ0Uo2BxU%3d&emci=d679b032-8b7a-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&emdi=4f627cb5-0380-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&ceid=357453, reported, "Right whales — so called because they were once thought the 'right whales' to kill — are the rarest whales in the world. Only about 400 North Atlantic right whales remain.

              The Center for Biological Diversity and allies just won an important victory for this rapidly declining population. A court said the National Marine Fisheries Service acted illegally by not taking steps to protect the whales from entanglement in commercial lobster lines, which cause injuries and death.

            'Right whales have been getting tangled up and killed in lobster gear for far too long," said Kristen Monsell, the Center's oceans legal director. "This decision sends a clear signal that federal officials must protect these desperately endangered animals.'"

              "The Trump administration, In February 2020, finalized plans allowing gas and oil drilling and mining in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah (Utah Lands Officially Open to Oil and Gas Exploration," The New York Times, February 7, 2020).

              China's construction and operation of dams on the Mekong river within China have been shown to have caused record lows on the river in Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, artificially causing the worst drought in the river valley's history, seriously impacting fisherman, farmers and those who rely upon them (Hannah Beech, "China Limited the Mekong’s Flow. Other Countries Suffered a Drought: New research show that Beijing’s engineers appear to have directly caused the record low levels of water in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam," The New York Times, April 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/world/asia/china-mekong-drought.html).

              COPID-19 has led to an increase of poaching of endangered animals in
Africa, as the hiatus in crowds of tourists in preserves has meant that understaffed game wardens must now patrol many more miles empty of potential witnesses in which poachers feel free to operate (Annie Roth, "Poachers Kill More Rhinos as Coronavirus Halts Tourism to Africa: Threatened and endangered animals may become additional casualties of the pandemic," The New York Times, April 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/coronavirus-poaching-rhinos.html).

              However, pandemic restrictions temporarily have blocked a considerable amount of trade in poached and other wild animals, parts and products (Rachel Newer, "Illegal Poachers Are Foiled for Now," The New York Times, May 5, 2020).

            Richard Pérez-Peña, "Australia’s Record Heat Means Another Blow to Great Barrier Reef: For the third time in five years, abnormally warm water has caused a 'mass bleaching' of coral, and some of it will not survive. Scientists say global warming is killing reefs worldwide," The New York Times, March 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/world/australia/bleaching-great-barrier-reef.html, reported, "Record-breaking warm waters have bleached large parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef this year, as they did in 2016 and 2017, scientists reported on Thursday — the latest sign that global warming threatens the health of one of the world’s most important marine ecosystems."

              "Murdering hornets", a very large species of Asian hornet that kills and eats parts of bees, has been sighted in northwest Washington State. It is feared that if these hornets cannot be eliminated there before they spread, they could decimate an already battered bee population in North America (Mike Baker, "‘Murder Hornets’ in the U.S.: The Rush to Stop the Asian Giant Hornet: Sightings of the Asian giant hornet have prompted fears that the vicious insect could establish itself in the United States and devastate bee populations," The New York Times, May 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-washington.html).

              Abdi Latif Dahir, "‘Like an Umbrella Had Covered the Sky’: Locust Swarms Despoil Kenya: At first, villagers thought the dark, dense blot in the sky was a harmless cloud. Then came the terrifying realization that the locusts had arrived," The New York Times, February 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/world/africa/locusts-kenya-east-africa.html, reported, "Kenya is battling its worst desert locust outbreak in 70 years, and the infestation has spread through much of the eastern part of the continent and the Horn of Africa, razing pasture and croplands in Somalia and Ethiopia and sweeping into South Sudan, Djibouti, Uganda and Tanzania."

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DIALOGUING

50 YEARS OF EARTH DAY: WILL WE HAVE 100?

Kimberlee Hurley,*  April 21, 2020

              Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Started in 1970 in the wake of a number of environmental disasters, particularly the Santa Barbara, CA oil spill and burning of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, both in 1969, it has grown into a worldwide movement. Environmental clean-up and recycling efforts have been boosted, legislation (domestic and international) has been enacted, and general public awareness about the critical importance of keeping our environment healthy has been fully embedded.

              In that time, we have accomplished much for our planet, but not nearly enough. Massive pollution still takes place – especially by corporations, including Shell, BP, and Exxon Mobil, which put profit above all else – and rising global temperatures and sea levels put millions of people at risk of losing their livelihoods, their homes, and their lives. The United States – the second largest CO2 contributor in the world – withdrew from the Paris Agreement only two years after its signing. We must take this opportunity to not only look at the progress of the past 50 years, but what still needs to be done in the next 50 years to ensure the safety and survival of our planet.

              In the United States, a great deal of legislation was passed which helped set the country on the path toward a healthier environment. The most significant victory in the wake of the first Earth Day was the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency on December 2, 1970. This agency consolidated research, monitoring, and enforcement of all federal activities involving air, water, and land protection. Under its aegis, protections were enshrined for the country’s air, water, and wetlands; legislation governing toxic, nuclear, and medical waste instituted further safeguards for people and their communities.

              The Clean Air Act of 1970, the first legislation passed under the EPA, has had a significant impact on air quality in the United States. From 1980 to 2018, aggregate emissions have dropped 68 percent; the highest rate of change was in lead emissions, which dropped 99 percent, mostly due to regulations removing lead from fuel. Laws protecting the country’s water, including the Clean Water Act (1972) and Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), prevented further pollution, restored the nation’s waterways, and allowed regulation of public drinking water.

              With these acts and many more, the EPA has instituted demonstrable changes for the better. Medical, nuclear, and toxic waste is no longer wantonly disposed; it is now done safely and with proper notification to local communities, preventing its deleterious effects on people. Contaminated Superfund sites are identified, and significant actions are taken to clean up hazardous materials and other damaging waste, even restoring some of these lands to public use.

              A great deal of international action on the environment has taken place in the last 50 years as well. The first significant piece of legislation was the 1989 Montreal Protocol. With the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer (which shields the Earth from the Sun’s radiation) above Antarctica in 1985, the international community knew that it had to come together to repair the damage. The actions taken with this Protocol have been successful—in 2018, a NASA study showed ozone layer recovery resulting from bans on chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-destroying chemicals, which were the target of the Montreal Protocol. Instead of expanding by 40 percent by 2013, as scientists estimate would have happened without these measures, the ozone hole is expected to heal completely by 2050.

              The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the main United Nations body tasked with assessing the science on climate change. Its work has been momentous, recognized in 2007 with the Nobel Peace Prize, and has delivered critical materials used in the creation of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement (themselves products of the 1994 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). The Kyoto Protocol, while flawed, especially considering the exclusion of mandatory goals for developing countries like China and India, who even at the time of the agreement were massive polluters, showed demonstrable results—emissions from “advanced countries” included in the agreement dropped an overall 22.6 percent compared to 1990 levels.

              The 2015 Paris Agreement is still in its infancy. Its goals, to keep the increase in global average temperature to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C in order to reduce the risks and impacts of climate change, and reach peak global emissions quickly in order to rapidly reduce overall emissions, will be measured in decades. With global goals, this is without question a global effort.

              However, despite these measures, we are still facing a global environmental crisis. In the United States, despite the protections offered by the Safe Drinking Water Act, many cities still provide unsafe drinking water to its residents—most famously highlighted by the 2014 crisis in Flint, MI, which is still ongoing to this day. The National Priorities List of Superfund sites currently sits at 1,335; only 424 have been removed.

              Despite the advancements made under the Kyoto Protocol, global carbon dioxide emissions have only continued to rise since 1990. Forests, which not only purify the Earth’s air and water but provide millions of people with jobs, are being destroyed at an unprecedented rate—18.7 million acres, or 27 soccer fields, every minute. Sea levels continue to rise; countries such as Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States risk losing low-laying cities, while others like Kiribati, the Maldives, and the Marshall Islands risk disappearing under the sea entirely. Wildfires across the globe have been burning longer and more frequently, ending plant, animal, and human lives.

              This fiftieth celebration of Earth Day should serve as a celebration of the work that has been done—our skies, lands, and oceans are significantly cleaner. However, it should also serve as a wake-up call for the work that still needs to be done. Fires and rising sea levels threaten to destroy entire countries; water scarcity is poised to be the biggest cause of wars around the world. This is a critical moment for our planet—we must take this opportunity to continue our work for a healthier globe before it is too late.

*Kimberlee Hurley is a Multimedia Editor at the Alon Ben-Meir Institute. She may be reached at, kimberlee@alonben-meir.com,
 www.alonben-meir.com.

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"50 YEARS OF EARTH DAY: WILL WE HAVE 100?" - A COMMENT

Stephen M. Sachs*

              Ms. Hurley is quite correct that in the last 50 years, at least until 2017, a great deal had been accomplished to protect the environment in many areas, but there was, and is, still a huge set of tasks to accomplish if we are to harmonize adequately with the planet and its vast number of beings sufficiently to avoid major catastrophe. In the United States, and elsewhere, the rate of environmental destruction was slowed in some areas, while in others various levels of improvement were accomplished. But since early 2017, the task has not only been to build much further and faster on what has already been done, but also to stop the Trump administration's efforts to undue a wide range of the essential, but insufficient, gains that had been realized. And Trump and company have not been alone, with perhaps Brazil's current President Bolsonaro the worst culprit. So if we human beings are to have a positive 100th Earth Day, we now have to double our effort.

*Stephen M. Sachs is Coordinating Editor of NCJ, and Senior Editor of Indigenous Policy (IPJ: www.indigenouspolicy.org). He has been teaching, speaking, and writing on environmental issues for more than forty years.

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ARTICLES

HOW HEAT CAN BE USED TO STORE RENEWABLE ENERGY

Antoine Koen and Pau Farres Antunez*

              The effect that fossil fuels are having on the climate emergencyis driving an international push to use low-carbon sources of energy. At the moment, the best options for producing low-carbon energy on a large scale are wind and solar power. But despite improvements over the last few years to both their performance and cost, a significant problem remains: the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. A power grid that relies on these fluctuating sources struggles to constantly match supply and demand, and so renewable energy sometimes goes to waste because it’s not produced when needed.

              One of the main solutions to this problem is large-scale electricity storage technologies. These work by accumulating electricity when supply exceeds demand, then releasing it when the opposite happens. However, one issue with this method is that it involves enormous quantities of electricity. 

              Existing storage technologies like batteries wouldn’t be good for this kind of process, due to their high cost per unit energy. Currently, over 99% of large-scale electricity storage is handled by pumped hydro dams, which move water between two reservoirs through a pump or turbine to store or produce power. However, there are limits to how much more pumped hydro can be built due to its geographical requirements.

              One promising storage option is pumped thermal electricity storage. This relatively new technology has been around for about ten years, and is currently being tested in pilot plants.

              The conversion of electricity to heat happens in the central circuit, then stored in hot and cold tanks. Pau Farres Antunez, Author provided

Pumped thermal electricity storage works by turning electricity into heat using a large-scale heat pump. This heat is then stored in a hot material, such as water or gravel, inside an insulated tank. When needed, the heat is then turned back into electricity using a heat engine. These energy conversions are done with thermodynamic cycles, the same physical principles used to run refrigerators, car engines or thermal power plants. 

Known technology

              Pumped thermal electricity storage has many advantages. The conversion processes mostly rely on conventional technology and components (such as heat exchangers, compressors, turbines, and electrical generators) that are already widely used in the power and processing industries. This will shorten the time required to design and build pumped thermal electricity storage, even on a large scale. 

              The storage tanks can be filled with abundant and inexpensive materials such as gravel, molten salts or water. And, unlike batteries, these materials pose no threat to the environment. Large molten salt tanks have been successfully used for many years in concentrated solar power plants, which is a renewable energy technology that has seen rapid growth during the last decade. Concentrated solar power and pumped thermal electricity storage share many similarities, but while concentrated solar power plants produce energy by storing sunlight as heat (and then converting it to electricity), pumped thermal electricity storage plants store electricity that may come from any source – solar, wind or even nuclear energy, among others.

Easy to deploy and compact

              Pumped thermal electricity storage plants can be installed anywhere, regardless of geography. They can also easily be scaled up to meet the grid’s storage needs. Other forms of bulk energy storage are limited by where they can be installed. For example, pumped hydro storage requires mountains and valleys where substantial water reservoirs can be built. Compressed air energy storage relies on large subterranean caverns.

              Pumped thermal electricity storage has a higher energy densitythan pumped hydro dams (it can store more energy in a given volume). For example, ten times more electricity can be recovered from 1kg of water stored at 100°C, compared to 1kg of water stored at a height of 500 metres in a pumped hydro plant. This means that less space is required for a given amount of energy stored, so the environmental footprint of the plant is smaller.

Long life

              The components of pumped thermal electricity storage typically last for decades. Batteries, on the other hand, degrade over time and need to be replaced every few years – most electric car batteries are typically only guaranteed for about five to eight years. 

              However, even though there are many things that make pumped thermal electricity storage well-suited for large-scale storage of renewable energy, it does have its downsides. Possibly the biggest disadvantage is its relatively modest efficiency – meaning how much electricity is returned during discharge, compared to how much was put in during charge. Most pumped thermal electricity storage systems aim for 50-70% efficiency, compared to 80-90% for lithium-ion batteries or 70-85% for pumped hydro storage.

              But what arguably matters most is cost: the lower it is, the faster society can move towards a low carbon future. Pumped thermal electricity storage is expected to be competitive with other storage technologies – though this won’t be known for certain until the technology matures and is fully commercialised. As it stands, several organisations already have working, real-world prototypes. The sooner we test and start deploying pumped thermal electricity storage, the sooner we can use it to help transition to a low-carbon energy system.

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DRIVE. RIDE. RETHINK.

Mark Trahant*

Republished with authors permission from Indian Country Today, January 12, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/01/06/banning-cars-wont-solve-americas-bigger-transportation-problem-long-trips/?utm_campaign=Metropolitan%20Policy%20Program&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=81703046.

              Innovative transportation policies are essential in the era of climate change

              Last year carbon emissions fell by 2.1 percent in the United States. At least that number reflects a minus sign because just a year ago the trend was moving in the opposite direction.

              It's interesting how we got there, though. A new study by the Rhodium Group says last year’s carbon emissions decline “was due almost entirely to a drop in coal consumption. Coal-fired power generation fell by a record 18 percent year-on-year to its lowest level since 1975.” 

              “Unfortunately, far less progress was made in other sectors of the economy,” the study reports. “Transportation emissions remained relatively flat. Emissions from buildings, industry and other parts of the economy rose, though less than in 2018.

              Rhodium said the U.S. is “at risk” of missing its Copenhagen Accord target of a 17 percent reduction by the end of this year and “a long way off” from the goal of a 26 to 28 percent reduction by 2025. Targets that were pledged under the Paris Agreement. Then that would be the same agreement that the Trump administration officially withdrew from (technically the withdrawal won’t happen for another year beginning in November 2020).

              The Paris Agreement was a grand idea, that world governments could come together and set ambitious climate goals, reducing the amount of carbon emissions and set an overall goal to limit the global temperature increase to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. The stretch goal was 1.5 degrees.

              It’s one thing to reach consensus and close a power plant. Or even to fix a building and make it more carbon neutral. But it’s a much more complicated challenge to change the behavior of millions of people. That is what has to happen in transportation.

              The United Nations reports that fossil fuels make up 80 percent of global energy demand and are the source for some two-thirds of global CO2 emissions. As the UN sustainability project says: “The need to reduce emission does not preclude the use of fossil fuels, but it does require a significant change in direction; business as usual is not consistent with decreasing emissions.”

              The primary goal of any transportation system is simple: Move one person from point A to point B. But what if that basic framework was changed? What if the framework instead was about mitigating climate change first and then moving people? How would that change point A to point B?

              Transportation and climate change is a “big problem” that requires action now, says Olof Persson, former chief executive officer of the Volvo Group. He was co-chair of a UN advisory group on transportation. “We have solutions. That technology is coming very fast and we need to implement those solutions. I definitely believe that the need for transportation is going to increase in the future and we need to make sure that we utilize technology in the best possible way to make sure that we can do that growth in transport.”

              In the United States driving to and from work, to the stores, shipping goods, even flying accounts for 29 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Seventy percent of that number is car and truck traffic. These numbers are big enough so that even a small change by a lot of people could significantly reduce greenhouse gases.

              The New York Times calculated that if people drove 10 percent less, or about 1,300 miles per person, that would cut annual CO2 emissions by 110 million metric tons. That is roughly the same number as shutting down about 28 coal-fired power plants for a year.

              But that’s not happening. Instead, Brookings Institute reports, “we’re continuing to drive a lot, with vehicle miles traveled increasing each year. The country’s drivers now log 3.2 trillion vehicle miles traveled annually, up from 2.9 trillion in 2010 and more than double the 1.5 trillion miles in 1980.” And the per capita numbers are not much better. “We’re each driving almost 9,900 miles annually, up from a recent low of 9,400 miles in 2013 and 6,700 miles in 1981.” The numbers slowed after the recession and then that trend reversed just as soon as the economy recovered.

Stuck in the past

              Our transportation infrastructure is stuck in the past. Consider Phoenix.

              Last month Arizona opened a new freeway. The cost of the Loop 202 was $1.7 billion and it added 22 miles of freeway to give motorists an alternative to Interstate 10 through downtown Phoenix. The state projects daily traffic of 117,000 vehicles in the first year and up to 190,000 vehicles are forecasted to travel the route daily by 2035.

              When the route was planned the Gila River Indian Community filed suit to block the highway expansion. Gov. Steven Roe Lewis said in 2015 that the South Mountain area is one of the tribe’s most important natural resources. "It is a prominent part of the community's oral traditions and ceremonial activities, all of which are tied to the natural environment,” the governor said. "The proposed freeway would destroy parts of three ridges of South Mountain and also would destroy or alter many trails, shrines and archaeological sites that constitute significant cultural resources for the community and its members."

              The Brookings Institute says “car dependence continues to grow. From 2005 to 2018, the total number of vehicles increased from 196.6 million to 221.4 million—a 12.6 percent jump. That’s 25 million extra cars on the road and almost two cars per household, highlighting the magnitude of the national challenge at hand.”

              And yet even more highway expansions are planned. The state’s narrative about highway expansion — including the very term, “free way.” Announcing its new road the Arizona Department of Transportation said: “The Loop 202 South Mountain Freeway is open to traffic, providing a much needed alternative to Interstate 10 through downtown Phoenix while improving the quality of life in a fast-growing region.”

              But the facts of global warming suggest the opposite. And driving a vehicle carries a toll that equals 96 pounds of CO2 per person. 

              On the other hand: An average light rail trip results is more than two thirds less — and a full train saves 85 percent. 

              About 50,000 people a day ride Phoenix’s light rail system (and voters did recently overwhelmingly approve an expansion). Yet the narrative is very different. Uniformed security teams patrol trains and spot check passengers to make sure they’ve paid. The trains tell riders are told: “Valley Metro is a destination-based service. Riders may not remain on board a light rail vehicle after arriving at their destination.”

              The story: Pay. Get on. Get off. And keep quiet. It’s not the freeway.

              But what if the metaphor of “the free way” was applied to transit. Phoenix and many other cities offer a few buses that offer short routes for free. But what if all the incentives were aligned to encourage ridership above all? That’s an idea that is being carried out now in Kansas City and is under consideration in Boston, Houston and other cities.

              The issue is cost. But is it in the public interest to fully fund transit? Or to ask that question in a climate change context, how much will it cost us all to change behavior?

              “What effect would free transit have on ridership?” asks a report by the Transit Center. “Around the world, the verdict is still out on whether going fare free substantially changes people’s travel choices. In Dunkirk, population 100,000, ridership increased by 85 percent immediately after the introduction of fare-free transit. But in Tallinn, population 426,000, ridership has only increased by 3 percent in the five years since transit was made free.”

              That same study says the most important thing that transit systems can do, however, is improve the structure and frequency of mass transit. “Making transit fast, frequent, and reliable. In just a few short years, Seattle has nearly tripled the number of people able to walk to frequent transit, and ridership continues to climb,” the report said.

Rethinking the grid

              Rep. Sharice Davids, Ho Chunk, said transportation and climate change was one of the reasons why she wanted to be on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. She represents Kansas' third district. 

              Davids said “there are so many opportunities for us to really have an impact on climate change.” The Kansas City metro area is having a lot of conversations now about “intermodal” transportation or routes that involve more than one form of transportation.

              “In a place like Kansas City,” she said, “We have the, this mixture of urban, suburban, and rural. And you know, it's not a one size fits all solution for how we can get people places more efficiently to get people places in a more green way. So we have a pilot on for micro transit, which kind of bridges that transit.”

              The Johnson County, Kansas, micro transit works like a public version of Uber. Picking up riders in vans from bus stations and dropping them a short distance away for $1.50. This does two things, moves people at a lower cost and reduces emissions in the air. 

              The system also works with other rural areas.

              “So you know, you can ride the bus and get to a hub in like Mission Kansas, which is in the suburbs, and then call the micro transit using their app and for a lower cost than if you were to call use a ride hailing app,” said Davids. Then “you can get to your, your place of work or home from that, from that hub.”

              The opportunity is to rethink infrastructure and build towards a “bold, green, resilient” system, David says. “It’s not like there's not any other option. I mean that's the way we talked about it is recognizing that climate change is real and that we have to be doing something about it and that our infrastructure is one of the key places.”

              Davids said there is an unique opportunity for tribes because many of the transportation systems are only just beginning — and micro transportation fits into that framework.

              There is a set aside for tribal mass transit programs — most often bus systems. Last year the U.S. The Department of Transportation awarded grants to tribes including the Kenaitze Tribe on the Kenai Peninsula. The Alaska Native Village of Nulato Village received funding for tribal citizens to be able to bus to the airport.

Back to Arizona

              One lesson from rethinking transportation systems is the connection with everything else. If people live near work, then commuting is less of an issue. 

              This is already true for more young people who have made the decision that driving is overrated. A 2017 story in American City and County magazine says: “Millennials – the 83 million people born between 1982 and 2003 – are rejecting cars in favor of alternative modes of transportation. As these young people are the next generation of innovators and up-and-comers in the workforce, it’s no surprise that communities offering viable and multiple alternative transportation options are growing. If our cities want to experience similar growth trends, they are going to have to fundamentally rethink their transportation structures.”

              In fact the data suggests that young people are thinking differently about work, place and transportation.

              One example of that could be communities designed without cars being at the center. That’s exactly what’s happening in Tempe, Arizona.

              Joseph Kane, writing for Brookings Institute, says Culdesac Tempe aims to promote a new type of walkable neighborhood. Residents will not be allowed to have cars or park there. “Instead, Culdesac Tempe will promote ride-sharing, biking, and other flexible transportation options (including a nearby light rail station) that will free up more land for open space and amenities,” Kane writes. “Culdesac Tempe is an important first step, but banning cars in a handful of neighborhoods won’t solve the larger transportation problem in metropolitan Phoenix and many other regions: the need to travel long distances to access economic opportunity.”

              He said it’s one way to get people thinking differently about work and place. 

              “No single strategy, or development, will obviate our need to travel long distances,” Kane says. “But plans focused on improving walkability and connectivity — across different neighborhoods and whole regions — should become the norm if we’re to address the inefficiencies and inequities in our legacy transportation systems.”

*Mark Trahant is editor of Indian Country Today. He is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. Follow him on Twitter - @TrahantReports.

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CAN CORONAVIRUS BE A CATALYST FOR THINKING GLOBALLY?

IN AN AGE OF PANDEMICS AND CLIMATE CRISIS, COUNTRIES’ HEALTH, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND DEVELOPMENT POLICIES ARE GLOBALLY IMPORTANT.

Imani Countess and William Minter*

Republished under a creative commons license from Foreign Policy in Focus  (FPIF), March 26, 2020, https://fpif.org/can-coronavirus-be-a-catalyst-for-thinking-globally/?emci=ffd7a05b-5574-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&emdi=9ef81b28-d174-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&ceid=3984446. This article builds on a multipart essay series entitled Beyond Eurocentrism and U.S. Exceptionalism. It was originally published in Organizing Upgrade.

              The COVID-19 pandemic is global, but national responses have spanned a wide spectrum. After initial denial, China mobilized massively and appears to be winning its battle against the virus. Several close neighbors of China — Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea — reacted quickly and decisively, taking advantage of systems set up to counter earlier epidemics.

              But Italy and other European countries, as well as Iran, were slow to respond, and the United States is even more laggard, making all these countries vulnerable to exponential rates of infection.

              African countries, with the help of the World Health Organization, responded quickly, and the case count at this writing still mainly consists of imported cases from Europe. But the rapid growth that is almost inevitable in Africa could quickly overwhelm poorly resourced health systems. And social distancing is impossible for the majority of Africa’s population.

              On March 23, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown intended to curb the virus, with plans to mobilize national resources to protect South African formal and informal workers as well as businesses. His speech, available on YouTube and as a transcript, was detailed and determined. But implementation will be extraordinarily difficult.

              Much of Latin America and South Asia is in a similar situation, along with many countries in other regions. And, as in the United States, investments in public health institutions have been eroded by austerity policies in countries around the world.

The Trigger, Not The Cause

              At national and global levels, the pandemic has already led to drastic economic consequences, for the stock market and for the real economy. But the disease is the trigger rather than the only cause of these problems, notes Marxist economist Michael Roberts in an extended blog post. “That’s because,” he explains, “the profitability of capital is low and global profits are static at best, even before COVID-19 erupted. Global trade and investment have been falling, not rising.”

              Households and government institutions at all levels face challenges that are coming fast, and a fast learning curve is imperative if we are to survive. At an individual level, we are learning rapidly that social distancing, which is really physical distancing, is essential. Along with reaching out to our families and personal networks, we know we must mobilize support for essential health workers, grocery workers, and others who are required to work on the frontlines despite personal risks. One among many such creative efforts is a project in New York City that organizes unemployed gig drivers to deliver meals to vulnerable seniors.

              At national level, the pandemic is revealing the failures of our institutions and testing their capacity to adapt. Policy debates show sharp contrasts between those who would use the crisis to blame others and accentuate inequalities and those who are questioning entrenched assumptions about the role of government in defending common interests.

              Resistance to learning lessons is most firmly entrenched in the Trump administration and the Republican Party. But the pressure to bail out the rich and neglect the most vulnerable is widespread, despite calls for a different course, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren´s conditions for corporate bailouts, or this proposal to follow Denmark’s ambitious stimulus example.

              At the global level, it is past time both for mutual learning and for solidarity. And on both counts, the United States is behind the curve.

Global Learning

              Within specialized scientific communities, scientists from China, the United States, and other countries are in contact regularly to share research about the virus. “Preprint” articles appear daily on sites such as medRxiv. Although these articles have not been formally peer reviewed or published, they are an important means of airing new ideas and receiving scientific feedback. When one such article in early February sparked the viral spread of a conspiracy theory on Twitter, pushback was immediate, and the faulty article was withdrawn within days of its release.

              At the policy level, however, ingrained institutional and cultural biases block rapid learning. This is particularly true in the United States, with its longstanding hubris and belief in U.S. exceptionalism.

              Mainstream commentators, such as foreign policy veteran Dennis Ross, are already lamenting the U.S. failure to provide global leadership. But their emphasis is on how the United States is “losing” geopolitical ground to China rather than on the missed opportunity to learn from other countries´ experiences, including South Korea as well as China. Such learning is happening, but the pace is still limited by assumptions of U.S. exceptionalism and the lack of established bilateral channels at the level of governmental institutions.

              There is also the need for more fundamental questioning of the models of industrial agriculture that analysts say have fueled the rise of zoonotic diseases, as natural habitats are invaded by human populations. According to a new report from the African Centre for Biodiversity:

              “Most pandemics in fact, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more, have their roots in environmental change and ecosystem disturbances. These infectious zoonotic diseases originate from animals, wild and domesticated. These diseases are magnified through the erosion of ecosystem health, deforestation, biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction and the removal of essential, natural, protective barriers.”

              The point is also developed in a recent interview with Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu. Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Walden Bello argues that both Western and Chinese models of capitalism share this extractivist orientation.

Global Solidarity

              With the United States struggling to confront the coronavirus at home, the country’s capacity to provide solidarity to other countries is very limited. Help will have to come from elsewhere when, as expected, the global pandemic and its economic impact land with full force on Africa and other vulnerable regions. If the United States wanted to help efficiently, it could immediately provide additional financial support to multilateral agencies such as the World Health Organization, UNICEF, as well as a UN special fund being launched.

              The UN Secretary General on March 19 eloquently called for global solidarity:

              “We are facing a global health crisis unlike any in the 75-year history of the United Nations — one that is spreading human suffering, infecting the global economy and upending people’s lives. A global recession — perhaps of record dimensions — is a near certainty.”

              Saudi Arabia, the current chair of the G-20 group of major economic powers, has called a virtual summit for this week at the urging of India. Although the potential for agreement on common action is uncertain, it is very likely that China will play a major role, and that the United States will be irrelevant at best.

              Already China is taking the lead, not only in dealing with the virus at home, but also in providing supplies and expertise to other countries. Initiatives are coming both from the Chinese government and from the Chinese private sector. Billionaire Jack Ma, for example, has provided 500,000 test kits and 1 million masks to the United States. He has also shipped 1.1 million testing kits and 6 million masks to Ethiopia to be distributed by Ethiopian Airlines around the African continent.

              Cuba is not a member of the G-20, but it has continued its decades-long tradition of medical solidarity. When a British cruise ship in the Caribbean was denied entry by the United States and other countries, Cuba accepted the almost 1,000 passengers, including 50 with symptoms of coronavirus, and provided secure transport to meet chartered planes to fly them back to Britain. And last week, Cuba sent more than 50 doctors to northern Italy to join the battle there against coronavirus. A Facebook video of their arrival on March 22 gained almost 4 million viewers within 24 hours.

              Like the climate crisis and economic inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic may not at first glance seem to be a “foreign policy” issue. But it powerfully points up the need to forge a global perspective — and global alliances — without delay. Progressives must lead the way, and the coronavirus is an immediate opportunity to change the way we think to always recognize domestic and global realities as intertwined. Both self-interest and moral values make this imperative.

*Imani Countess is an Open Society Fellow focusing on economic inequality. William Minter is the editor of AfricaFocus Bulletin.

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HOW COVID-19 COULD IMPACT THE CLIMATE CRISIS

FAR-RIGHT GOVERNMENTS ARE ROLLING BACK ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS, WHILE INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE TALKS STALL AMID THE CRISIS. BUT CLIMATE ACTIVISTS SEE OPPORTUNITY.

Daniel Wilkinson, Luciana Tellez-Chavez*

Republished from Foreign Policy In Focus - A project of the Institute for Policy Studies, Foreign Policy In Focus - A project of the Institute, for Policy Studies, April 16, 2020,  https://fpif.org/how-covid-19-could-impact-the-climate-crisis/, under a Creative Commons Attribution license.  

              Satellite images showing dramatic drops in air pollution in coronavirus hotspots around the globe have circulated widely on social media, offering a silver lining to an otherwise very dark story. But they are also a graphic reminder of the climate crisis that will continue when the pandemic passes.

              When the lockdowns are lifted and life returns to what it once was, so too will the pollution that clouds the skies and with it the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming.

              In fact, the rebound could be even worse.

              In the initial aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production decreased by 1.4 percent, only to rise by 5.9 percent in 2010. And the crisis this time could have a longer-term impact on the environment — at far greater cost to human health, security, and life — if it derails global efforts to address climate change.

              This was supposed to be a “a pivotal year” for those efforts  to address climate change, as UN Secretary General António Guterres put it at a recent briefing on the UN’s annual climate summit, which was scheduled to take place in Glasgow in November.

              Ahead of the summit, 196 countries were expected to introduce revamped plans to meet the emission reduction goals established under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Yet on April 1, in the face of the spreading coronavirus pandemic, the UN announced that it was postponing the summit until sometime next year.

              It was only the latest sign that the casualties of COVID-19 may include global efforts to address climate change. Other international meetings related to climate — on biodiversity and oceans — have also been disrupted. While the need to mobilize governments to act on climate has never been more urgent, the inability to gather world leaders to address the issue could make it all the more difficult to do so.

              The coronavirus crisis also threatens local efforts to meet the climate commitments that have already been made.

              The European Union has come under pressure to shelve crucial climate initiatives, with Poland callingfor a carbon trading program to be put on hold and the Czech Republic urging that the EU’s landmark climate bill be abandoned, while airline companies have pressed regulators to delay emissions-cutting policies. China has already announced such delays, extending deadlines for companies to meet environmental standards and postponing an auction for the right to build several huge solar farms.

              In the United States, after a powerful oil lobby petitioned the Trump administration to relax enforcement, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would not penalize companies that fail to comply with federal monitoring or reporting requirements if they could attribute their non-compliance to the pandemic. And in recent days it announced a rollback on car emissions rules that were a central piece of U.S. efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

              In Brazil, the federal environmental agency announced it is cutting back on its enforcement duties, which include protecting the Amazon from accelerating deforestation that could lead to the release of massive amounts of greenhouse gases that are stored in one of the world’s most important carbon sinks.

              Governments have a human rights obligation to protect people from environmental harm — and this includes a duty to address climate change.

              They might conceivably have valid reasons to temporarily relax the enforcement of some environmental rules as they scramble to contain the pandemic and salvage their economies. But these measures could do permanent damage if used to advance the broader anti-environmental agendas of leaders like President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who oppose global efforts to address climate change.

              The real impact of the coronavirus crisis on climate could depend ultimately on choices made regarding how governments want their economies to look when they recover—and, in particular, how much they will continue to rely on fossil fuels. Meeting the Paris Agreement’s central goal of limiting global warming will require reducing this reliance.

              And here the crisis might offer some grounds for hope.

              Many see the efforts to contain the economic fallout of the pandemic as an opportunity to accelerate the shift to cleaner energy alternatives, such as solar and wind. Options could include ensuring that economic stimulus programs prioritize investments in cleaner energy, or  conditioning assistance to businesses, especially in carbon-intensive sectors, on drastic cuts in emissions. Similarly, financial industry bailouts could require banks to invest less in fossil fuel fuels and more in climate change mitigation and resilience efforts.

              In the U.S., congressional Democrats pushed for such measures when negotiating the recent stimulus package. In response, President Trump threatened a veto, tweeting “This is not about the ridiculous Green New Deal.” The proposed measures did not survive, though Democrats did manage to block $3 billion that Republicans sought to buy up oil for the strategic reserve.

              In Europe, the prospects for green stimulus are more promising. In response to one European leader’s call to abandon climate measures, an EU spokesperson was categorical: “While our immediate focus is on combating COVID-19, our work on delivering the European Green Deal continues. The climate crisis is still a reality and necessitates our continued attention and efforts.

              The struggle to ensure that human rights protections and climate commitments are not COVID-19 collateral will continue in the US, the EU and elsewhere as governments face the task of restarting their economies in the weeks and months to come. The outcome will define our capacity and will to mitigate what threatens to be a global catastrophe far greater even than the viral pandemic.

*Daniel Wilkinson is environment and human rights director and Luciana Tellez-Chavez is an environmental researcher, both at Human Rights Watch. 

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THE CORPORATE FOOD SYSTEM IS MAKING THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS WORSE

COVID-19 IS SO DANGEROUS TO FOOD SECURITY BECAUSE THE GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN WAS INSECURE TO BEGIN WITH.

COULD WE REMAKE IT?

Walden Bello*

Republished from Foreign Policy In Focus - A project of the Institute for Policy Studies, April 22, 2020, https://fpif.org/the-corporate-food-system-is-making-the-coronavirus-crisis-worse/?emci=fa385768-7085-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&emdi=7549e778-7185-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&ceid=3984446, under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

The global food system has been very much front and center in the COVID-19 story.

              Everyone, of course, is aware that hunger is closely tracking the virus as its wreaks havoc in both the global North and global South. Indeed, one can say that, unlike in East Asia, Europe, and the U.S., in South Asia, the food calamity preceded the actual invasion by the virus, with relatively few infections registered in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as of late March of 2020 — but with millions already displaced by the lockdowns and other draconian measures taken by the region’s governments.

              In India, for instance, internal migrants lost their jobs in just a few hours’ notice, leaving them with little money for food and rent and forcing them to trek hundreds of kilometers home, with scores beaten up by police seeking to quarantine them as they crossed state lines. Estimated at as many as 139 million, these internal migrants, largely invisible in normal times, suddenly became visible as they tried to reach their home states, deprived of public transportation owing to the sudden national lockdown.

              With people dying along the way, a constant refrain in this vast human wave was the desperate cry: “If coronavirus doesn’t kill us, hunger will!”

              But the food question has been a key dimension of the pandemic in two other ways. One is the connection of the virus with the destabilization of wildlife. The other is the way the measures to contain the spread of the virus have underlined the extreme vulnerability of the global food supply chain.

COVID-19 and Wildlife: The Virus and Ecological Destabilization

              The story of how the novel coronavirus leaped from its animal host to humans in a wet market in Wuhan still has to be told in detail — and with the ruling Communist Party in China so sensitive about its bungling first efforts to contain the disease, this may never come to pass.

              One hypothesis making the rounds is that the original host was a bat, while the intermediary host between the bat and humans was a pangolin or scaly anteater. Bats were also the original hosts for the coronavirus that caused SARS, the disease that hit humans in the early 2000s, and MERS or “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome” that made its appearance nearly a decade later. The intermediate hosts, however, differed, with the masked civet serving as the intermediate host for SARS and the dromedary camel in the case of MERS.

              Virologists and biologists still have to come to a definitive conclusion as to the intermediate host of the Novel Coronavirus that leaped to some humans at the Wuhan Wholesale Seafood Market. What interests us here is the likely backstory. That background is likely to have involved ecological destabilization caused by the expansion of large-scale commercial poaching, industrial agriculture, residential expansion, and other forms of human invasion of the natural habitat of wildlife.

              It is not surprising that the passage from pangolins to humans occurred in China — both in the case of the Novel Coronavirus and that of SARS, which started in Foshan municipality in Guangdong Province, for China is the global center of the wildlife trade, much of it illegal. As food systems expert Mahendra Lama points out, China hosts “scores of both licensed and illegal commercial breeding centers supply tigers, porcupines, pangolins, bears, snakes and rats.” A study by the Chinese Academy of Engineering stated that, in 2016, there were more than 14 million people working in the wildlife-related industry that fetched $74 billion.

The Global Food Supply Chain: The Weak Link

              The other food-related dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic of critical importance is the vulnerability of the global food supply chain.

              With the COVID-19 pandemic poised to make its assault on South Asia and Africa, which health specialists thought to be the continent most vulnerable to the virus, the heads of the World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, and the Food and Agriculture Administration made a joint declaration in late March that since “millions of people around the world depend on international trade for their food security and livelihoods,” governments had to refrain from taking measures that would “disrupt the food supply chain.”

              FAO chief Qu Yongdu warned, “Don’t let the COVID-19 crisis become a hunger game.”

              What the international agencies feared was a repeat of the 2007-2008 food price crisis, when disruptions of the global food supply chain triggered by export restrictions by key grain supplying countries like China, Argentina, Vietnam, and Indonesia forced food prices to skyrocket — adding 75 million people to the ranks of the hungry and driving an estimated 125 million people in developing countries into extreme poverty.

              But the current threat to the global supply chain is not just a potential one. The chain is already breaking down at one of its most critical links: migrant labor.

              The pandemic has exposed the degree to which farming is dependent upon migrant workers, with more than 25 percent of the world’s farm work done by these itinerant laborers. In an excellent survey, Jean Shaoul tells us that some two-thirds of these 800,000 difficult and backbreaking jobs, whose main features are low pay and long hours, are filled in the harvest season in Europe by workers from North Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. But the Schengen area, comprising 26 European states, has banned external visitors for 30 days and closed many borders.

              “Labor is going to be the biggest thing that can break” in the United States food supply chain as well,  Karan Girotra, a supply-chain expert at Cornell University told the New York Times. “If large numbers of people start getting sick in rural America, all bets are off.”

              Indeed, belonging to an essential industry, farm workers and workers in the downstream food processing and food retail sectors are in the frontlines of the struggle to contain COVID-19. But many of them are deprived of the most basic protective gear, like facemasks, and work in crowded conditions that make a mockery of social distance rules.

              But the global supply chain is not only threatened by problems at the production and processing ends, but by transportation bottlenecks, especially at key hubs. An FAO report vividly captures a developing problem in Rosario, Argentina, the world’s largest exporter of soymeal livestock feed:

              Recently, dozens of municipal governments near Rosario have blocked grains trucks from entering and exiting their towns to slow the spread of the virus… Soybeans are therefore not being transported to crushing plants, affecting the country’s export of soybean meal for livestock. Similarly, in Brazil, another key exporter of staple commodities, there are reports of logistical hurdles putting the food supply chains at risk. Internationally, if a major port like Santos in Brazil or Rosario in Argentina shuts down, it would spell disaster for global trade. 

              There is no doubt that making sure the global food chain is free of disruptions is a short-term priority to prevent starvation and food riots. What is disturbing though is that FAO and other multilateral agencies can’t seem to get it into their heads that the global food supply chain is magnifying the COVID-19 fiasco — that its having displaced local and regional food production systems and making countries less self-sufficient in food has made many of them more vulnerable to pandemics and other emergencies.

              Indeed, ships and planes loaded with food supplies have themselves become some of the most effective transmitters of the disease over long distances.

Extending the Chain

              The 2007-2008 food crisis and the 2008-2009 global financial crisis should have shown the multilateral agencies the fragility of global supply chains — of the food system in the case of the first and the industrial system in the case of the second, when the financial crisis led to a global recession that closed down many global industrial subcontractors in China.

              These developments should have triggered a serious interrogation of the resiliency of the global supply chain paradigm that had become the “business model” of western transnational corporations. Instead of being phased out, however, the food supply chain stretched farther and farther, and local and regional food systems withered even more.

              The FAO estimates that global agricultural trade more than tripled in value to around $1.6 trillion from 2000 to 2016. More and more, local and regional food systems that used to provide most of domestic production and consumption of food have retreated in the face of these chains, which are dominated by large processing firms and supermarkets, are capital-intensive, and have relatively low labor inputs compared to smallholder agriculture. These international and regional giants now constitute roughly 30 to 50 percent of the food systems in China, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, and 20 percent of the food systems in Africa and South Asia.

              Vertical integration and consolidation at the buyer end of export chains, says one influential study, “are strengthening the bargaining power of large agro-industrial firms and food multinationals, displacing decision-making authority from the farmers to these downstream companies, and expanding the capacity of these companies to extract rents from the chain to the disadvantage of contracted smallholder suppliers in the chains.”

              What changes to the global food system does the COVID-19 debacle urge on us?

Destabilization of the Wildlife Habitat Must be Halted

              First of all, China must stop destabilizing wildlife habitats.

              It must be emphasized that China’s exotic culinary practices involving the illegal commercial poaching of wildlife have now produced two pandemics in less than two decades — SARS and COVID-19. Thus Beijing has a responsibility to ensure that China does not become a source for a third.

              Acknowledging Wuhan’s illicit wildlife connection, China’s top law-making body, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of the Communist Party of China, has now banned the wildlife trade. Also, Beijing is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and has imposed wildlife crime penalties of $29,441 and life imprisonment.

              However, as Mahendra Lama, tells us, the “wildlife trade continues unabated, and the use of more sophisticated e-commerce platforms with highly coded messaging keeps vigilance at bay.” Serious enforcement, involving high-tech methods and not just legislation, must be Beijing’s priority, “so that wildlife traders, supply chain managers, and global storehouses are treated akin to global terrorism actors, booked and dealt severely with when caught.” China, Lama rightfully stresses, “must realize that its status as a global actor has now become inextricably intertwined with local culinary and commercial practices in the wet markets of many of its cities.”

              But there is an even bigger challenge that China has to meet, and that is, it must seriously rethink and possibly shelve its flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A massive trillion-dollar program of building roads and railways and constructing hydroelectric and coal power plants, and setting up mining ventures, BRI projects threaten over 1,700 critical biodiversity spots and 265 threatened species, according to the World Wildlife Federation.

              One of these is Sumatra’s Batang Toru forest highlands, one of Indonesia’s most biodiverse regions, where a $1.6 billion hydroelectric power plant poses a danger to the rare Tanapuli orangutan and the critically endangered Sumatran tiger and Sunda pangolin. In the Philippines, the BRI-funded Kaliwa Dam in mountainous Eastern Luzon island is projected to displace some 20,000 indigenous people living in 230 hectares of dipterocarp forests,  as well as pose a threat to rare species of flora and fauna in the area — including the white-winged flying fox, slender-tailed cloud rat, civet cats, wild boar, Philippine eagle, and Philippine deer.

              Many of these wildlife are hosts to viruses, like those causing SARS and COVID-19, and they are strongly suspected of transmitting them from bats to humans. Thus many projects connected with the BRI will destabilize local ecologies, posing the threat of triggering future pandemics.

              Viral transmission is not the only threat posed by the BRI. According to one study, BRI’s network of roads, railways, and pipelines could introduce more than 800 alien invasive species — including 98 amphibians, 177 reptiles, 391 birds, and 150 mammals — into several countries along its many routes and developments, destabilizing their ecosystems.

              The Chinese government must seriously rethink the BRI and radically modify, if not totally eliminate, many of the projects connected with it for public health and ecological reasons.

Adopt Food Sovereignty as the Paradigm for Food Production

              Probably the most important measure that we propose is to move food production away from the fragile, corporate-controlled globalized food supply chain based on narrow considerations such as the reduction of unit cost to more sustainable smallholder-based localized systems. While, in the short term, global supply chains must be kept running to ensure people do not starve, the strategic goal must be to replace them, and some measures can already be taken even as the pandemic is at its height.

              There are solid reasons for reversing the trend towards the globalization of food production and moving towards more food self-sufficiency. However, the rationale goes beyond just ensuring food self- sufficiency to fostering values and practices that enhance community, social solidarity, and democracy.

              The movement towards an alternative food system has gained momentum over the last few decades owing to the growing realization that the way we produce our food is one of the keys to overcoming the alienation of human beings from one another and the alienation of the human community from the planet.

              Led by peasants and smallholders, who still produce some 70 percent of the world’s food, this movement proposes the alternative paradigm of “food sovereignty,” the cornerstone principles of which include the following:

·        Local food production must be delinked from corporate-dominated global supply chains, and each country should strive for food self-sufficiency. That means the country’s farmers should produce most of the food consumed domestically, a condition that is subverted by the corporate concept of “food security” that says that a country can also meet a great part of its food needs through imports.

·        The people should have the right to determine their patterns of food production and consumption, taking into consideration “rural and productive diversity,” and not allow these to be subordinated to unregulated international trade.

·        Localization of food production is good for the climate, since the carbon emissions of localized production on a global scale are much less than that of agriculture based on global supply chains.

·        Traditional peasant and indigenous agricultural technologies contain a great deal of wisdom and represent the evolution of a largely benign balance between the human community and the biosphere. Thus the evolution of agrotechnology to meet social needs must take traditional practices as a starting point rather than regarding them as obsolete.

              To be sure, there are many questions related to the economics, politics, and technology of food sovereignty that remain unanswered or to which its proponents give varying and sometimes contradictory answers. But a new paradigm is not born perfect. What gives it its momentum are the irreversible crisis of the old paradigm and the conviction of a critical mass of people that it is the only way of surmounting the problems of the old system and opening up new possibilities for the fulfillment of values that people hold dear.

              As with any new form of organizing social relationships, the unanswered questions can only be answered, and the ambiguities and contradictions can only be ironed out, through practice, since practice has always been the mother of possibilities.

              It has been said that one should never let a good crisis go to waste. The silver lining of the COVID-19 crisis is the opportunity it spells for food sovereignty.

*Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Walden Bello is an associate of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, which sponsored the study on which this article is based. He is also senior analyst at the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South.

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WE NEED A CORONAVIRUS TRUCE

INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION NEEDS TO TAKE PRIORITY RIGHT NOW, AND COUNTRIES MUST STOP THEIR WARS AGAINST ONE ANOTHER AND AGAINST THEIR OWN POPULATIONS.

John Feffer*

Republished under a creative commons license from Foreign Policy in Focus  (FPIF), April 1, 2020, https://fpif.org/the-coronavirus-truce/?emci=ffd7a05b-5574-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&emdi=9ef81b28-d174-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&ceid=3984446.

              During World War I, soldiers all along the Western front held a series of informal truces in December 1914 to commemorate Christmas.

              It was early in the war, and opposition had not yet hardened into implacable enmity. The military command, caught by surprise, could not impose complete battlefield discipline. An estimated 100,000 British and German soldiers participated. They exchanged smokes, sang together, and even, on at least one occasion that has since been widely mythologized, played a game of soccer.

              Imagine how different the world would look today if that truce had held, if it had turned into a lasting ceasefire, if Europe had not burned itself to the ground in a fit of nationalist pique. There might not have been a global flu epidemic spread by soldiers in 1918. The Nazis might not have seized power and precipitated the Holocaust. World War II might never have happened and nuclear weapons never used.

              At the very least, nearly 20 million people would not have perished in that first world war.

              We are now in the early stages of another world war, call it World War III, this time against the common enemy of pandemic. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres last week called on all countries to observe a global ceasefire to focus all resources on beating back the coronavirus. “The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war,” he concluded.

              Meanwhile, eight countries that have been suffering under economic sanctions — China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela — have appealed for an end to the economic sanctions that are hampering their efforts to battle the disease.

              And a number of civil organizations are pressing for the release of political prisoners, jailed journalists, and as many nonviolent offenders as possible to reduce the crowding that makes prisons a potential killing ground for the coronavirus.

              Not surprisingly, there has been pushback to the idea of even temporarily ending these three expressions of state power: military conflict, war by economic means, and mass incarceration. But this pandemic, for all of its ongoing horrors, can serve as a jolt of smelling salts. International cooperation needs to take priority right now, and countries must stop their wars against one another and against their own populations.

              Bombs, sanctions, and prisons are not effective tools in the fight against the coronavirus. Indeed, by aiding and abetting the enemy, they will only make the war worse.

Silencing the Guns?

              There has been much talk of repurposing the U.S. military to fight the coronavirus. Two Army field hospitals have been sent to New York and Seattle. Some soldiers have already been deployed, the National Guard has been activated in three states, and the Pentagon has been authorized to call up former soldiers to help in the fight. But the military is, to use an apt simile, like a large battleship that is not easily turned. The Pentagon hasn’t even allowed immigrant doctors in its ranks to help against the pandemic.

              In the meantime, the Pentagon continues to pursue its prime directive: planning war and killing people. On March 12, the United States conducted air strikes against Iran-backed militias in Iraq, in response to attacks that killed two U.S. service personnel. It was billed as a “proportional” response. Yet the Pentagon has been pushing a far more ambitious plan to go to war against Iranian proxies and, ultimately, Iran itself.

              “Some top officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser, have been pushing for aggressive new action against Iran and its proxy forces — and see an opportunity to try to destroy Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq as leaders in Iran are distracted by the pandemic crisis in their country,” write Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt in The New York Times.

              In nearby Afghanistan, the United States and the Taliban signed a peace deal at the end of February. But any end to the war in Afghanistan will require a truce among the factions within the country, indeed within the government itself. After a disputed presidential election that once again pitted President Ashraf Ghani against chief rival Abdullah Abdullah, even the threat of reduced U.S. aid didn’t persuade the two sides to unify.

              The fighting continues on the ground, with air strikes against the Taliban most recently on March 24as well a series of Taliban attacks in the last week against Afghan soldiers and policemen. In the leadup to the signing of the peace agreement, the United States conducted the second highest number of air attacks for the month of February since 2009. And last year, Afghanistan sustained the most U.S. aerial attacks since 2006.

              Wars grind on in other parts of the world, pandemic be damned. All sides declared a truce in Syria in early March, but Turkey exchanged attacks with “radical groups” in Idlib province on March 19. This week, Israeli war planes targeted a Syrian military base near Homs. And the Islamic State has indicated that it sees the coronavirus as an opportunity to step up attacks — like a recent massacre at a Sikh temple in Kabul — because the last thing the “crusaders” want is “to send additional soldiers to regions where there is a chance for a spread of the disease.” However, COVID-19 will most harm Syrian refugees, particularly the recent wave of nearly a million people who fled Idlib and Aleppo in December.

              In Libya, both sides of the civil war agreed to a humanitarian truce that evaporated after only a day and now the fighting there has even intensified. Whoever wins Tripoli will take over a capital with an already ravaged infrastructure and a collapsed economy. The Pyrrhic victor will then have to address a mounting health emergency with ever diminishing resources.

              Meanwhile in Yemen, which is on track to becoming the poorest country in the world because of its five-year-long war, the combatants agreed to a truce last week. As in Libya, it hasn’t lasted long. The Houthis have since launched some easily intercepted ballistic missiles at Saudi Arabia, which retaliated by once again bombing Sana’a, the capital of Yemen.

              Conflicts throughout Africa — in Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, Mozambique, Mali — also continue despite pleas for a truce. Neither has al-Shabaab stopped its suicide bombings nor the United States ceased its drone attacks in Somalia.

              Elsewhere in the world, there’s no pandemic pause for a series of equally deadly cold wars.

Weaponizing Sanctions

              For years, the United States has tried to shut down North Korea’s economic relations with the outside world as a way to force the government to negotiate away its nuclear weapons program. North Korea devised a variety of methods to get around U.S. and UN sanctions, including illicit transfers of oil from foreign ships to North Korean vessels in the middle of the ocean.

              But the most lucrative source of goods and revenues continued to be China, which has been responsible for upwards of 95 percent of North Korea’s trade. Washington has intermittently put pressure on Beijing to shut down this trade to pressure Pyongyang to return to the negotiating table. It hasn’t worked.

              Then the coronavirus hit. By the end of January, North Korea had shut its borders with China to minimize the risk of infection. It even issued a directive to guard posts to put a stop to flourishing smuggling operations. What sanctions couldn’t accomplish in years, the virus managed to achieve in weeks.

              Despite these precautionary measures, the coronavirus has no doubt reached North Korea. There have been reports of probable coronavirus-related deaths in the North Korean military. Thousands of people have been quarantined. Even as the North Korean government insists that the country remains pandemic-free, it has quietly appealed to other governments for assistance in addressing the disease.

              The United States has so far held firm. Even though sanctions are holding up the delivery of critical humanitarian aid, Washington has refused to reconsider sanctions. Secretary of State Pompeo continues to talk as if a pandemic isn’t raging outside: “The G-7 and all nations must remain united in calling on North Korea to return to negotiations and stay committed to applying diplomatic and economic pressure over its illegal nuclear and ballistic missile programs.”

              Pompeo has been even more ruthless toward Iran, an early pandemic hotspot. Tehran initially fumbled its response to a disease, which was quickly spreading through the populace as well as the political and religious leadership. As Human Rights Watch has meticulously detailed, U.S. economic sanctions have only made a bad situation worse.

              Yes, the U.S. government formally permits humanitarian aid to the country. But its sanctions regime — which includes the threat of secondary sanctions against entities that engage Tehran — ensures that banks and companies steer clear of Iran. Pompeo’s take: “Things are much worse for the Iranian people, and we’re convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime.”

              That’s also pretty much the U.S. strategy toward Venezuela, which is in an even more vulnerable position. Though it only has a little more than 130 confirmed cases, COVID-19 will likely ravage the weakened country. “Only a quarter of Venezuela’s doctors have access to a reliable supply of water and two-thirds are without soap, gloves or masks,” reports The Guardian. “There are 73 intensive care beds in the whole country.”

              This week, the Trump administration conditioned any reduction in sanctions on a political deal that requires President Nicolas Maduro to step down in favor of a transitional council that includes the political opposition. The current government has rejected this regime-change option.

              These maximum pressure tactics toward North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and others recently led Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl, who is no softy on foreign affairs, to conclude that Pompeo’s “pandemic performance will ensure his place among the worst ever” secretaries of state.

Emptying the Prisons

              Egypt freed 15 prominent oppositionists on March 21. A few days earlier, Bahrain let go nearly 1,500 detainees, but no prominent human rights activists or political oppositionists. Iran has released 85,000 prisoners, but only temporarily. Turkey is planning to release 90,000 prisoners, but none of them political.

              Prisons are the perfect breeding ground for the coronavirus: poor sanitary conditions, overcrowding, minimal medical facilities. Many countries, including the United States, are looking into ways of reducing the population behind bars.

              The Committee to Protect Journalists is mobilizing support to pressure governments to release the 250 journalists who are currently in prison worldwide. UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has urged countries to reduce the numbers of people in detention, with a special emphasis on political prisoners. “Now, more than ever, governments should release every person detained without sufficient legal basis, including political prisoners and others detained simply for expressing critical or dissenting views,” she said last week.

              Those behind bars are frequently the victims of various government campaigns: against a free press, against political dissent, against drugs. But when a major war threatens the homeland, prisoners are sometimes drafted into military service. That happened during the French colonial period and by different sides in World War II.

              In World War III, we need everyone on our side. If countries don’t significantly empty out their prisons during this COVID-19 crisis, the inmates as well as the guards will likely be drafted by the enemy. This foe only gets stronger as our petty conflicts continue and the stiffest sanctions remain in place.

              It’s time for a truce on all fronts — or else we will surely lose the larger war.

*John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

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INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY IN A TIME OF CRISIS

WHILE POLITICAL LEADERS SCAPEGOAT, OVERREACH, AND UNDERPERFORM, PROGRESSIVE ORGANIZERS ARE DEVELOPING AN INTERNATIONALIST RESPONSE TO THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC.

Negin Owliaei*

Republished under a creative commons license from Foreign Policy in Focus  (FPIF), April 1, 2020, https://fpif.org/international-solidarity-in-a-time-of-crisis/?emci=ffd7a05b-5574-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&emdi=9ef81b28-d174-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&ceid=3984446. Originally published in Inequality.org.

              The spread of coronavirus should be a reminder that the most pressing crises of our times know no borders.

              But while the death toll continues to climb in the United States, political leaders, including Donald Trump, are taking advantage of this moment of crisis to heighten xenophobia and racism. Meanwhile his administration helps funnel billions of dollars towards a corporate slush fund with the new stimulus package, all while frontline healthcare workers are left without necessary protective equipment.

              Addressing all the various crises exposed by the coronavirus pandemic — from austerity-driven cuts to healthcare to ramped up racism and xenophobia to economic inequality — requires a holistic response dependent on international cooperation. Justice is Global, a project of the grassroots organizing network People’s Action, convened a digital gathering to plot out a progressive internationalist response to the global pandemic.

              Andrea Chu, an organizer with Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago, pointed out how highly impacted the Asian American community has been by coronavirus, which includes many of the frontline workers hit hardest by public health concerns. “A lot of us are fighting COVID-19 along with the rampant hate that Trump has fueling with his anti-China rhetoric.”

              Xenophobia has continued to rise as coronavirus spreads. Asian Americans reported more than 650 racist attacks over the course of a single week in mid-March. A House resolution sponsored by Rep. Grace Meng calls on all congressional representatives to condemn anti-Asian sentiment.

              “We know anti-Asian racism doesn’t help us during this crisis,” Chu went on to say, “but global cooperation does.”

              Deborah Burger of National Nurses United stressed the same. “This virus knows no borders, and it recognizes no nationality, no race, no ethnicity, and certainly no immigration status or economic status,” Burger said.

              National Nurses United helped lead the formation of Global Nurses United seven years ago, bringing together global healthcare worker unions on all continents to talk about shared issues — attacks on public health, austerity, privatization, and the climate crisis. Now, COVID-19 has united them more than ever before. Through a webinar, nurses from around the world told stories from the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic, shared advice from successful campaigns, and came together to demand higher standards for protective gear from the World Health Organization.

              But despite advance warning, the United States was far from prepared to meet those standards. “The COVID-19 response team from the Trump administration and our corporate healthcare employers has been an utter disaster,” Burger announced, pointing out that the U.S. had three months to prepare for the pandemic.

              “It is incredibly frustrating that we as a nation can make beanie babies, and we can make fidget toys, and we can make pet rocks overnight. Yet we can’t get masks that we need for our healthcare workers.” Burger said. “That is criminal and war profiteering.”

              As OxFam’s Ana Avendano noted, a true internationalist response must also take into account the 11 million undocumented immigrants who live without any legal or practical protections during this crisis. The situation is especially concerning for those caged in detention centers under conditions that were horrifying long before the spread of the virus. Rather than being freed, the only morally acceptable response, people detained at centers run by private prison giant GEO Group have been pepper sprayed simply for asking questions and expressing their fears about the pandemic, Avendano added.

              Private prison operators tear-gassing asylum seekers is only one example of continued aggressive U.S. militarism, even amidst crisis, as Khury Petersen-Smith of the Institute for Policy Studies shared. Many celebrated as the Navy sent a hospital ship to New York Just days before, the U.S. deployed two aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea, ramping up hostilities with Iran as that country manages its own crushing coronavirus outbreak.

              Right-wing figures are also using the virus to ramp up hostility towards China — a bipartisan maneuver, Petersen-Smith noted, with historic roots that include the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. “As Trump and the right wing, and some Democrats in power, pursue anti-Chinese hostility, they’re really drawing on a deep well of hostility and racism. And the results are disastrous.”

              “If we’re going to survive this,” Petersen-Smith said, “we really are all in this together and we need international cooperation, rather than hostility and racism and competition.”

              Justice is Global’s Tobita Chow echoed the call for cooperation. Some countries have stepped up to share masks, medical staff, and other resources across borders. Within the United States, Chinese-American associations collected supplies to send to China when the country was hardest hit by the crisis. That flow of resources has now reversed. International cooperation is built from the ground up, including through programs like sister city relationships as well as unions like National Nurses United, Chow noted.

              “I think this moment of global pandemic is showing us very clearly that all human life is interrelated, which means that none of us is safe until all of us are safe.”

*Negin Owliaei is a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Inequality.org.

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Environmental Activities

Compiled by Stephen Sachs

             

            350.org remains extremely active with numerous climate change related actions. Its main thrust in winter-spring 2020 has been, "Stop Fossil Fuels. Build 100% Renewables. We are standing up to the fossil fuel industry to stop all new coal, oil and gas projects and build clean energy future for all.

            Some of the other campaigns have been:

            "Tell ECB: Rebuild for People: Tell Europe's Central Bank that coronavirus recovery must center people, not polluters."

            "5 principles for a #JustRecovery: We must put human need before corporate greed and ensure a just recovery towards a safer, healthier and fairer future in the wake of COVID-19. Sign the open letter."

            " No Coal Japan: Support the climate activists in Japan targeting their banks' coal financing through online actions and call-ins their banks."

            "Stand with Climate Defenders: Human rights violations by fossil fuel companies are getting worse with the climate crisis. Read the Climate Defenders report now."

            "Don't fund the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline! Tell Standard Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) not to fund a new crude oil pipeline through Tanzania and Uganda."

            "Uprising at Davos: Campaigners were at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland with calls to end fossil fuel finance."

(at: http://350.org)’s For details go to: http://act.350.org/).

               The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), actions in winter and spring 2020 to attempt to keep public decision making consistent with good science have included:

            "UCS and the Coronavirus: The Union of Concerned Scientists is actively monitoring the coronavirus pandemic and its implications for scientific integrity."

            "Social Distancing, Contact Tracing, and Herd Immunity Matter: Infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Beth Linas discusses how we move forward after flattening the curve of the coronavirus.

              "In Support of Sustainable Eating: This policy brief makes the case for incorporating recent research on dietary patterns and sustainability into the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans."

              "Voting Rights and Environmental Justice: Disenfranchisement through voter suppression and gerrymandering prevents overburdened communities from fighting back against threats to their well-being."

              "The White House Scrapped the Science on Trichloroethylene—So We’re Urging the EPA to Investigate."

              "Even With Negative Oil Prices and COVID-19 Global Standstill, ExxonMobil, Chevron Must Still Commit to Net Zero Emissions."

               For more information visit: www.ucsusa.org.

              Ian Austen, "Pipeline Protests Cause Widespread Travel Delays Across Canada: A small protest in Ontario supporting an Indigenous effort to block a pipeline thousands of miles away has created large-scale disruption in Canada," The New York Times, February 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/world/canada/gas-pipeline-protests.html,

reported, "A dilapidated snow plow, three tents and some barrels sit beside the snowy tracks of the Canadian             National Railway in Tyendinaga, Ontario, a protest in support of Indigenous leaders trying to stop the construction of a gas pipeline thousands of miles away, in British Columbia.

            The blockade, set up by the Mohawks of Tyendinaga, may not look imposing. But the barricade, and similar ones erected at transport points across the country, has disrupted travel for Canadians since last week — and drawn attention to the pipeline dispute."

              "Sign the petition to protect Indigenous Sovereignty: Demand fossil fuel profiteers JPMorgan Chase and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. defund the Coastal GasLink pipeline," Friends of Earth  Action, Mach 13, 2020, https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/sign-the-petition-to-protect-indigenous-sovereignty-demand-fossil-fuel-profiteers-jpmorgan-chase-and-kohlberg-kravis-roberts-co-divest-from-coastal-gaslink-pipeline?source=20200303_WetsuwetenSolidarity_FOE&referrer=group-friends-of-the-earth-action, stated, "Right now in British Columbia, Canada, Indigenous Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs and land defenders are resisting the construction of the TC Energy Coastal GasLink pipeline slated to cut through their territories.

            The Wet’suwet’en have been fighting to stop this pipeline for just over five years. The Hereditary Chiefs have re-asserted their right to jurisdiction over their own lands, their right to determine access and prevent trespass under Wet’suwet’en law, and the right to Free Prior and Informed Consent as guaranteed by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — but TC Energy will not listen.
              On February 6, militarized police conducted a five-day military raid of the resistance camps on Wet’suwet’en land and illegally evicted hereditary chiefs, land defenders, and matriarchs. The police came with assault rifles, snipers, dogs, sound cannons, and helicopters while Indigenous elders and youth stood by.
              Protests against the Coastal GasLink project have since spread and have included: rail blockades, port shutdowns, government office occupations, and sit ins at banks investing in the illegal pipeline project. Now, the fight is coming to the U.S., right to the doorstep of the largest banker and investor of the Coastal GasLink pipeline — JPMorgan Chase and KKR. 

              JPMorgan Chase, the world’s biggest banker of fossil fuels, is helping funnel more than $5 billion in loans to the company behind Coastal GasLink. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), a New York City based investment firm with over $200 billion in assets, has plans to purchase 65% of the pipeline with Alberta Investment Management Corp (AIMCo). Companies like Chase and KKR actively perpetuate the destruction of stolen Indigenous lands to fuel the climate crisis. 

              The upside is KKR’s plans to invest in the pipeline aren’t final. There’s still time to interrupt their plans. We must hold them accountable before it’s too late.
              Sign the petition and rise up with the Wet'suwet'en people: Demand Chase and KKR defund the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
     Participating Organizations:
     198 methods
     Climate Hawks Vote
    Corporate Accountability
    Daily Kos
    Endangered Species Coalition
    Friends of the Earth Action
    Greenpeace USA
    Rainforest Action Network
    Rising Tide North America
    Seeding Sovereignty
    Stand.earth
    Women's Earth and Climate Action Network
    XR San Francisco Bay Area
   Supporting Organizations:
   Showing Up for Racial Justice
   SumOfUs"

              "Cancel KXL: Rural & Tribal Communities Call on TC Energy to Cancel Keystone XL Pipeline Activity Due to Coronavirus Public Health Threat," 350.org, April 1, 2020, https://nokxlpromise.org/covid-19/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=actionkit#sign, stated in a petition, "For the health and safety of workers, and residents of ill-equipped rural and Tribal communities along the route of TC Energy (TransCanada’s) proposed Keystone XL pipeline, all 'pre-construction' activity should be immediately halted in the face of the public health threat from the novel coronavirus.

            TC Energy must cancel all plans to move forward on construction, and in particular halt at once the establishment of any 'man camps' that would bring thousands of out-of-state workers into rural communities, where rural hospitals and under-funded Indian Health Services cannot be expected to be burdened with any additional strain on their already limited capacity to provide care to those infected by the coronavirus. Man camps also generally bring into communities increased crime and sexual violence — especially targeting Indigenous women.

              A national emergency has been called. A growing number of cities and companies are cancelling construction projects. We call on TC Energy to immediately halt all activity and cancel its planned construction on the Keystone XL pipeline project, as well as provide ongoing unemployment aid for all their potentially affected workers."

            Seeding Sovereignty announced via E-mail, January 30, 2020 "Seeding Sovereignty is raising the volume about continued media silence on the escalating climate crisis and Indigenous history by organizing the Indigenous contingent of the Des Moines Climate Crisis Parade on the eve of the Iowa caucus. The parade will take place this Saturday on February 1st, 2020 at noon.

              We are also pleased to announce that we have paired with First Seven Design Labs (@f1rstse7en) to carry out a moving art exhibit and create an installation for the Parade to uplift Indigenous community engagement in Iowa during this high profile event! We are asking for you to join us in elevating the voices of Indigenous folx not only in the midwest, but across the world in a united outcry to include and center Indigenous voices in the ongoing climate crisis dialogue."

              "Additional details can be found on our Eventbrite page: https://nativestothefront.eventbrite.com.

              In Solidarity,

              The Seeding Sovereignty Collective: seedingsovereignty.org."

             

              Seeding Sovereignty states in an E-mail, May 3, 2020, "Despite COVID-19, TC Energy is still building the Coastal GasLink pipeline without Wet'suwet'en consent on their land, putting communities and their workers at even more risk! On May 7th, people around the world are gathering virtually to rise up in solidarity for those fighting on the frontlines of the COVID-19 and climate crises. Join us for a #ShutDownKKR virtual rally and communications blockade on May 7th. RSVP at: https://www.facebook.com/events/230185041566924/.

              Adam Nossiter, "One of Europe’s Most Polluted Towns Stages a Noisy Revolt: Residents of Fos-sur-Mer accepted a trade-off for decades: good jobs for foul air. But when the health costs became impossible to ignore, they went to court, a groundbreaking move in France.," The New York Times, April 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/world/europe/france-pollution-fos-sur-mer.html, reported, "For years, the inhabitants of Fos-sur-Mer, France, accepted their illnesses — for example, a cancer rate that is double the national average [and there is a high rate of asthma]  — in exchange for jobs in the nearly 200 factories, warehouses, gas terminals and industrial sheds that surround them."

            "But enough got to be enough. Citizens in this otherwise sun-dappled corner of the Mediterranean, just west of Marseille, decided not long ago that they would take action, whatever their misgivings about losing their jobs."

            The residents of Fos-sur-Mer have taken their concerns to court with filing a criminal complaint charging the steel, oil and petrochemical companies in the region of risking their lives, and indeed many have become sick and a good many died from pollution.

              "COVID-19 and the Dangerous Trade in Wildlife," Center for Biological Diversity, March 26, 2020, via E-mail, stated. "Even as we isolate ourselves, COVID-19 reminds us how connected we are to each other — and to wildlife, the likely source of the current pandemic.

            That's why this week the Center for Biological Diversity joined more than 100 other organizations urging Congress to tackle wildlife trade and habitat destruction. Our letter noted that 60% of known infectious diseases in people can be transmitted from animals, and 75% of emerging "zoonotic" infectious diseases originate in wildlife. These emergent diseases have quadrupled in the past 50 years.

            'The solution couldn't be clearer: One crucial way to reduce disease risk is to curb wildlife exploitation,' wrote Tanya Sanerib, legal director of our International program, in an op-ed in The Hill this week. "China, to its credit, slapped a moratorium on live markets and a temporary trade ban earlier this year. But much stronger, broader action is needed around the planet."

              Read Tanya's op-ed  (https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/489299-coronavirus-shows-exploiting-wildlife-poses-risks-to-human-health?utm_term=Wildlife&emci=40181372-d36e-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&emdi=9bc4ef24-816f-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&ceid=357453) and learn more about our letter to Congress (https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/100-groups-urge-congress-address-covid-19-causes-wildlife-trade-habitat-destruction-2020-03-24/?utm_source=eeo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=eeo1029&utm_term=Wildlife&emci=40181372-d36e-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&emdi=9bc4ef24-816f-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&ceid=357453). More than 1,400 members and supporters joined our call on these important issues last night. You can listen to it at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01ZwGO7XVyE&feature=youtu.be&emci=40181372-d36e-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&emdi=9bc4ef24-816f-ea11-a94c-00155d03b1e8&ceid=357453.

Carbonfund.org Foundation (carbonfund.org) Continues to support and fund projects that reduce carbon emissions and advance carbon capture.

              Global Citizen stated in an E-mail, March 13, 2020, "It’s Never Been Clearer: We Are All Global Citizens," stated, "With coronavirus cases now present in more than 100 countries and the spread declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), it’s never been clearer: we are all Global Citizens, and must fight for a world with good health for all.

              That's why we are launching an urgent campaign with actions you can take to help beat this disease — click here to take action (https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/campaign/stand-together-to-beat-coronavirus/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=US_Mar_13_2020_action_covid19).

              Last night, I had a phone call with Dr. Tedros, the Director General of the WHO. He asked for our urgent help. The WHO works globally to tackle health threats, especially in lower income countries where health systems are less able to cope. It provides medical experts, trains doctors and improves vital disease monitoring response systems — ultimately saving lives.

              The disease, which has the potential to put millions at risk, is an especially large threat to those living in low income countries. Without adequate access to healthcare or systems that are able to withstand an outbreak occurring, people in the poorest communities could be most vulnerable to coronavirus and unable to stop its spreading.

              Pandemics like coronavirus can be beaten. But to save as many lives as possible world leaders need to join forces make sure the WHO and Dr. Tedros have the funds they need. Click here to tell world leaders: let’s stand together to end this threat.

              With thanks and hope,

              Hugh and the Global Citizen team."

United for Peace & Justice work continues to encompass a wide range of issues. Recent efforts have included:

              "Abolition 2000 Statement Addressing the Threats to Planetary Survival

              This 50^th anniversary of Earth Day finds the planet facing existential threats like never before in human history. On this historic anniversary, the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons has issued a Statement Addressing the Threats to Planetary Survival.

              The threat from climate change is manifesting itself more and more strongly as the years go by through extreme weather events, forest fires on a vast scale, the bleaching of coral reefs, and receding glaciers, among others. This year also sees the world facing a pandemic which, as we speak, is costing thousands of lives every day and seems likely to have an impact on our civilization for years, if not decades to come.

              Alongside these threats to human existence, however, is the lesser-considered, but more dangerous threat from nuclear technology that has the possibility to inflict a more devastating blow to the planet in 10 days than climate change will have in 100 years."

Read the Statement and add your name: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-3Lt_rfkMpVWgKUhQa-xAGnSXX2ADKDKhGLz1fUjFoM/viewform?edit_requested=true.

https://kairoscenter.org/stop-the-war-on-the-poor-intro/.

            Online World Conference 2020: Abolish Nuclear Weapons; Resist and Reverse Climate Change; For Social and Economic Justice

             Humanity faces two existential threats: increasing dangers of nuclear war and climate disruption, with its impact on world health. Human beings created these threats, which can only be reversed by mass popular actions.

In the context of the suffering and changes being wrought by the pandemic, the two-hour world conference will focus on the continuing urgent need to abolish nuclear weapons and its relationship to stanching the climate emergency and challenging injustices which have left so many people marginalized and vulnerable. 

              To accommodate people across the world the conference will be held from 9 – 11 am EDT (3 – 5 pm in Central Europe; 10 pm – 12 am in East Asia) with simultaneous interpretation. The conference will be held in concentric circles with up to 500 people in the conference itself and simultaneous live streaming so everyone can join by listening in."

For more information go to: www.unitedforpeace.org/.

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UPCOMING ENVIRONMENTAL EVENTS

A limited partial list

Summer School in a variety of courses with different beginning dated from June through July, include some on sustainability  at Central European University, Budapest, Nádor u. 9, 1051 Hungary.  For information go to" https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/.

Stony Point Center 11th Annual Summer Institute: Farm the Land, Grow the Spirit has been postponed until 2021, possibly in June, at Stony Point Center, Stony Point, NY, in June 2020. For details go to: https://www.peace-ed-campaign.org/event/stony-point-center-10th-annual-summer-institute/.

The 9h World Sustainability Forum (WSF2020) will be June 1-6, 2020. The conference will cover areas like the globe, extreme poverty and hunger have been reduced, and infant, child, and maternal mortality have decreased. For details, visit: https://10times.com/world-sustainability-forum.

Thirteenth Global Studies Conference, 2020 Special Focus—Globalization and Social Movements: Familiar Patterns, New Constellations?  is June 4-5, 2020 at Concordia University, Montrael, Canada. For detail go to: http://onglobalisation.com.

The 17th Annual Global Solutions Climate Change, Pandemic and Climate Change: What We Need to Do is now virtual,  June 21-29, 2020, at the United Nations in New York and Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, PA.  Participants, from around the world, will be briefed by, interact with and question UN experts (from the UN Development Program, UN Environmental Program, UNESCO, UNICEF, WHO, FAO and other UN agencies) and then, working collaboratively in small teams, develop designs, programs and strategies that deal with one of the critical problems facing our world. The participants present their work to a group of UN corporate and foundation leaders. After this their work is published in a book.

              The Global Solutions Lab is a structured learning experience that fosters creativity, disruptive innovations, global perspectives and local solutions. It is intense, fast-paced, and for many, transformative.

              For information visit: Global Solutions Lab:  www.designsciencelab.com.

World Resources Forum (WRF) 20  will take place in Accra, Ghan, June 23-25, 2020. For information visit: https://www.wrforum.org.

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), RESCHEDULED: American Climate Leadership Summit is in Washington, DC, at the Kimpton Carlyle Hotel Dupont Circle, August 26-27, 2020. For details go to: https://www.psr.org/get-involved/upcoming-events/.

8th Annual Sustainable Development Conference​​ will be in Autumn 2020. Our Sustainable Development Conference - Green technology, Renewable energy and Environmental protection, annually held in Bangkok is a perfect place to meet world’s leading professionals, scholars and governmental representatives form all over the world in the fields of sustainable development, green energy and environmental protection. For information go to: www.sdconference.org.

13th International Conference on the Environmental Management of Enclosed Coastal Seas (EMECS 12) is September 7, 2020, at University of Hull, Kingston upon Hull, U.K. For details go to:  https://www.emecs.or.jp/en/topics/item385

The 8th World Sustainability Forum will be held from 14-19 September 2020 in Geneva, Switzerland. For details visit: http://wsforum.org.

The 15th International MEDCOAST Congress on Coastal and Marine Sciences, Engineering, Management & Conservation may be in  October 2020. For details go to: http://www.medcoast.net/.

World Sustainable Development Summit 2020: Toward 2030 Goals may be in January 2021. For details visit: http://wsds.teriin.org. 

The Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability: Accelerating the Transition to Sustainability: Policy Solutions for the Climate Emergency is February 24-26, 2021 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. For details visit: http://onsustainability.com.

The 13th International Conference on Climate: Impacts and Responses: Adaptations: responding to Climate Change as an Emergency is 8-9 April 2021, At UBC Robinson Square, Vancouver, BC, Canada. The Climate Change Conference is for any person with an interest in, and concern for, scientific, policy and strategic perspectives in climate change. It will address a range of critically important themes relating to the vexing question of climate change. Plenary speakers will include some of the world’s leading thinkers in the fields of climatology and environmental science, as well as numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations by researchers and practitioners. For details go to: http://on-climate.com/the-conference.

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USEFUL WEB SITES

UN NGO Climate Change Caucus, with numerous task forces, is at: http://climatecaucus.net.

On the Frontlines of Climate Change: A global forum for indigenous peoples, small islands and vulnerable communities can be subscribed to at: http://www.climatefrontlines.org/lists/?p=subscribe. See postings on the website at: http://www.climatefrontlines.org/en-GB/node/148.

350.org focusses on stopping and mitigating global warming induced climate change: http://act.350.org/.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is concerned with the proper use of science in decision making, and of using science to prevent public harm in many areas, especially concerning the environment: www.ucsusa.org.

The Indigenous Environmental Network works on environmental issues  from an Indigenous point of view: http://www.ienearth.org.

The League of Conservation voters (LCV) is concerned with environmental issues: https://www.lcv.org.

Food & Water Action Fund (https://www.foodandwateractionfund.org) and Food and Water Watch (https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org) work to protect food and water.

Ocean River Institute is a non-profit that provides opportunities to make a difference and go the distance for savvy stewardship of a greener and bluer planet Earth: https://www.oceanriver.org.

Waterkeeper Alliance is a global movement for swimmable, drinkable, fishable water: https://waterkeeper.org.

WildEarth Guardians works to protect and restore wildlife, wild places and wild rivers in the American West: wildearthguardians.org.

Nuclear Information and Resource Service focuses on the dangers of nuclear arms and nuclear power: https://www.nirs.org.

Earth Policy Institute, dedicated to building a sustainable future as well as providing a plan of how to get from here to there: www.earthpolicy.org.

Wiser Earth lists more than 10,700 environmental and environmental justice organizations at: http://www.wiserearth.org/organization/

Earthwatch, the world’s largest environmental volunteer organization, founded in 1971, works globally to help the people of the planet volunteer realize a sustainable environment: http://www.earthwatch.org/.

Avaaz.org works internationally on environmental and peace and justice issues: http://www.avaaz.org.

The Environmental Defense Fund works on environmental issues and policy, primarily in the U.S.: http://edf.org.

Earthjustice focuses on environmental issues and action: http://action.earthjustice.org.

The Sierra Club works on environmental issues in the United States: http://action.sierraclub.org.

SaveOurEnvironemnt.org, a coalition of environmental organizations acting politically in the U.S.: http://ga3.org/campaign/0908_endangered_species/xuninw84p7m8mxxm.

The National Resources Defense Council works on a variety of environmental issues in the U.S.: NRhttp://www.nrdconline.org/, asd is affiliated with the NRDC Action Fund work http://www.nrdcactionfund.org.

Care 2 is concerned about a variety of issues, including the environment: http://www.care2.com/.

Rainmakers Oceania studies possibilities for restoring the natural environment and humanity's rightful place in it, at: http://rainmakers-ozeania.com/0annexanchorc/about-rainmakers.html.

Green Ships, in fall 2008, was is asking Congress to act to speed the development of new energy efficient ships that can take thousands of trucks off Atlantic and Pacific Coast highways, moving freight up and down the costs with far less carbon emissions and more cheaply:  http://www.greenships.org.

Carbon Fund Blog carries climate change news, links to green blogs, and a green resource list, at: http://carbonfund.blogspot.com/2008/03/sky-is-falling.html. Carbon Fund is certifying carbon free products at: http://www.carbonfund.org/site/pages/businesses/category/CarbonFree.

Grist carries environmental news and commentary: http://www.grist.org/news/,

Green Inc. is a new blog from The New York Times devoted to energy and the environment at: greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com.

Planting Peace is, "A Resource Center for news and activities that seek to build a powerful coalition to bring about cooperation and synergy between the peace movement, the climate crisis movement, and the organic community." Their web site includes extensive links to organizations, articles, videos and books that make the connections, at: http://organicconsumers.org/plantingpeace/index.cfm, Planting Peace is sponsored by the Organic Consumers Association: http://organicconsumers.org/.

The Global Climate Change Campaign: http://www.globalclimatecampaign.org/.

The center for defense information now carries regular reports on Global Warming & International Security at: http://www.cdi.org.

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