Environment

A History Of Success Drives The Ongoing Struggle To Clean Up Cancer Alley

December 17, 2024 Sue Inches, Waging Nonviolence. Organize! Cancer Alley, Environment, Fossil Fuels, health, Louisiana

Two days after the election, I left on a research trip to Mississippi and Louisiana. I joined four others from my church in Yarmouth, Maine. Our purpose was to witness and learn about the struggle for civil and environmental rights in a region known as “Cancer Alley.” This 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi — between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — is home to 150 petrochemical plants, all along the river. It is also home to many working-class people, a majority of them Black. The first thing you notice are the huge refineries. Tall smokestacks spew toxic chemicals and methane flares light up the sky. The scale of industrialization is hard to imagine — there are miles and miles of factories and chemical plants.

World Leaders Fail to Reach Agreement on Global Plastics Treaty

December 3, 2024 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. Educate! Environment, Plastics, Plastics Treaty, pollution, United Nations

Efforts by nations to come to an agreement on a global plastics treaty failed on Monday. While more than 100 countries sought to put a limit on the world’s plastics production — in addition to tackling recycling and cleanup — oil and gas companies were only prepared to address the problem of plastic waste. The meeting in Busan, South Korea was supposed to be the last, but negotiations will continue into 2025, reported The Associated Press. “It is clear that there is still persisting divergence,” said Inger Andersen, the United Nations Environment Programme’s executive director, as Reuters reported.

Despite Biden’s Promise To Protect Old Forests, His Administration Keeps Approving Plans To Cut Them Down

November 17, 2024 April Ehrlich, McKenzie Funk and Tony Schick, ProPublica. Educate! Biden administration, Earth Day, Environment, Forests, Joe Biden

On Earth Day in 2022, President Joe Biden stood among cherry blossoms and towering Douglas firs in a Seattle park to declare the importance of big, old trees. “There used to be a hell of a lot more forests like this,” he said, calling them “our planet’s lungs” and extolling their power to fight climate change. The amount of carbon trees suck out of the air increases dramatically with age, making older trees especially important. These trees are also rare: Less than 10% of forests in the lower 48 states remain unlogged or undisturbed by development. The president uncapped his pen, preparing to sign an executive order to protect mature and old-growth forests on federal lands. “I just think this is the beginning of a new day,” Biden said.

‘Fossil Fuels Are Still Winning’ As Carbon Emissions Reach Record Highs

November 14, 2024 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. Educate! Carbon Dioxide, climate crisis, emissions, Environment, Fossil Fuels

The most recent Global Carbon Budget report has found that the world’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels reached a record high in 2024, pushing the planet further off track from avoiding the most destructive impacts of global heating. The 2024 Global Carbon Budget — produced by the Global Carbon Project team of 120-plus scientists from around the world — projects that emissions from fossil carbon dioxide will reach 37.4 billion tonnes in 2024, an increase of 0.8 percent over the previous year, according to a press release from the Global Carbon Project.

Business Lobby Reached Record High At UN Biodiversity Talks

November 13, 2024 Rachel Sherrington, Claire Carlile and Hazel Healy, DeSmog. Educate! Biodiversity, climate crisis, COP16, Corporate lobbying, Environment, United Nations (UN)

Representatives of business and industry groups more than doubled at the UN’s latest biodiversity summit, DeSmog has found, sparking fears over the growing influence of powerful private sector bodies. Despite some important breakthroughs, talks at this year’s COP16 summit in Cali, Colombia – which aimed to reverse the drastic global decline in plant and animal life – ended in disarray on 2 November, with Greenpeace’s An Lambrechts complaining that progress to protect the world’s dangerously depleted ecosystems had stalled after “unprecedented corporate lobbying”.

Removing Hydropower Dams Can Restore Ecosystems

November 11, 2024 Katie Schmidt, Resilience. Educate! climate crisis, Dam Removal, Dams, Ecosystems, Energy, Environment, Hydropower, Indigenous Rights, Landback, Water

A free-flowing river supports abundant fish and wildlife, provides drinking water, and other intangible recreational benefits. But humans have sought to block rivers with dams for millennia. While dams have provided benefits like hydroelectricity and water storage, they have also been ecologically disastrous. Besides blocking fish migrations, these human-made structures can destroy seasonal pulses of water that keep ecosystems in balance. Some dams—especially those used for power—can deplete water in streams, leaving entire stretches of river bone dry.

COP29 Must Not Be Another Greenwashing Event

November 8, 2024 The Canary. Resist! Biomass, Climate Change, COP29, Energy, Environment, greenwashing

Countries must find real solutions for climate action and climate finance and reject false solutions such as biomass energy, says the Biomass Action Network as the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) to the UN Climate Convention is set to open in Baku, Azerbaijan, on 11 November. COP29 will focus on finance, as did the Biodiversity COP16 which was suspended last weekend due to the lack of agreement. Developed countries refuse to commit to sufficient financial support for developing countries. Instead, they promote false solutions like centralised (large scale) biomass energy.

Mapped: How Big Industries Hope To Sway The UN Biodiversity Talks

October 30, 2024 Hazel Healy and Rachel Sherrington, DeSmog. Educate! Activism, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Biodiversity, Colombia, COP16, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Food and Agriculture, Pesticides, Social Justice, United Nations (UN)

Under thundery tropical skies, and amid ever more dire warnings on the precarious state of the world’s ecosystems, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference is unfolding in Colombia. This year’s summit, known as COP16, follows on from the last biodiversity conference held in Montréal in 2022, when negotiators struck an historic deal – the equivalent of the Paris Agreement on climate change – to “halt and reverse” nature loss. Now, government representatives from nearly 200 countries, along with scientists, Indigenous groups, and environmental activists, are gathered in the southern city of Cali to negotiate how to put this plan into action: protect earth’s habitats and the people who depend on them.

When Golf Courses Go Wild

October 26, 2024 Josh Kozelj, The Tyee. Create! Canada, Environment, Housing, Public Spaces, Rewilding

In the fields beside a suburban lake on Vancouver Island, relics from a past life are hidden in plain sight. The land, formerly the home of a nine-hole golf course for more than 50 years, is no longer doused with water every day or mowed at 4 a.m. — yet remnants of its former state still exist. A sand trap now serves as a children’s play pit, littered with Tonka trucks and toys. The fairway, once cut to under an inch, has grass up to shin height and rows of flowers. Old golf greens have been turned into campgrounds. The transformation is par for the course, says Jason Cole, co-CEO of Power to Be, a registered charity that took over the property in Saanich, B.C., seven years ago from a couple who wanted to lease their roughly 80 acres of land.

Industrial Fishing Undermines World’s Greatest Carbon Sink

October 24, 2024 Sophie Kevany, DeSmog. Educate! Aquaculture, Big Ag, Carbon sequestration, Environment, Fishing, Food

Fish is often sold as the perfect climate-friendly dinner: highly nutritious and lower carbon than other forms of protein. But new research is increasingly bringing some of these eco marketing claims into question. In part, because industrial fishing – scientists and campaigners say – is weakening the ocean’s ability to act as a carbon sink. Over the last 60 years, the ocean, forests and other natural carbon sinks have absorbed over half of all man-made emissions, slowing down global warming. Yet, as temperatures rise, scientists warn such processes could be on the brink of collapse.

Coming Soon To A Country Near You: The Not-So-Subtle Shift To Adaptation?

October 24, 2024 Erik Assadourian, Resilience. Strategize! Adaptation, Capitalism, Environment, Resilience, Sustainability

he shift to adaptation is coming. And when it comes it will be Earth-shaking—where collectively, those with resources start to give up the struggle to stop climate change, and instead focus primarily on protecting their own proverbial asses. Fortunately, we’re not quite there yet. In fact, returning to the report The Wall Street Journal mischaracterized, mitigation finance is growing far faster than adaptation finance, reaching $1.3 trillion annually in 2021-2022, double the $653 billion averaged in 2019-2020. Adaptation finance, on the other hand, grew to $63 billion, a 28% increase year-on-year, but because mitigation finance grew much more, adaptation finance dropped from 7% to 5% of the total.

Major Chemical Accidents Are Alarmingly Common In The US

October 17, 2024 Mike Ludwig, Truthout. Educate! BioLab, Chemical Industry, Environment, Georgia, History, Public Health

Investigators have been busy at the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, the independent federal agency tasked with determining the root causes of major chemical accidents at industrial facilities. In Georgia, fallout is continuing more than two weeks after a massive chemical fire erupted at the BioLab pool and spa supply facility in Conyers, just outside of Atlanta. The fire created a toxic plume of chlorine gas that forced 17,000 people from their homes just days after Hurricane Helene hit the state. In the suburban petrochemical corridor east of Houston, Texas, the Chemical Safety Board is investigating the toxic release of hydrogen sulfide at an oil refinery that left two contract workers dead and 35 others injured on October 10.

Ecuador Voted To Stop Drilling In The Amazon

October 15, 2024 Adem Ay, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Amazon Rainforest, Chevron, Ecuador, Environment, Oil and Gas Industry

Environmental activists rarely get to celebrate a major win for the planet, but that’s what happened in Ecuador last year. After a decade-long struggle between activists and the government, a referendum was held in August 2023 on whether to continue drilling for oil in a protected part of the Amazon. The people voted to kick the oil industry out. The government and the state oil company, Petroecuador, had tried every trick in the book to get a different result. There was a disinformation campaign, threats of austerity, even an attempt to void hundreds of thousands of signatures that were collected for the referendum to happen.

Degrowth: Beyond Education For Sustainable Development

October 15, 2024 Amerissa Giannouli, Resilience. Create! climate crisis, Education, Environment, Sustainability

Large-scale development projects, innovative green technologies, artificial intelligence, and trips to Mars are often seen as central solutions to the climate crisis leading to diverse socio-ecological and economic implications. Despide their inconsistencies and conflicted outcomes, their influence is so strong that our present approaches and vision for the future seem constrained by them. This short essay aims to explore opportunities and entry points that could mobilise personal and collective transformations in how we think and act, with the goal of fostering a more ecological and socially just response to the climate crisis.

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