Major investment firm dumps Exxon, Chevron and Rio Tinto stock (excerpt): The Guardian

"Storebrand says corporate lobbying to undermine climate solutions is ‘unacceptable’"

companies that use their political clout to block green policies

 "A Nordic hedge fund worth more than $90bn (£68.6bn) has dumped its stocks in some of the world’s biggest oil companies and miners responsible for lobbying against climate action.

Storebrand, a Norwegian asset manager, divested from miner Rio Tinto as well as US oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron as part of a new climate policy targeting companies that use their political clout to block green policies.

The investor is one of many major financial institutions divesting from polluting industries, but is understood to be the first to dump shares in companies which use their influence to slow the pace of climate action.

Jan Erik Saugestad, the chief executive of Storebrand, said corporate lobbying activity designed to undermine solutions to “the greatest risks facing humanity” is “simply unacceptable”.

It's not OK to profit from the wreckage of the climate.

Storebrand will also divest from German chemicals company BASF and US electricity supplier Southern Company for lobbying against climate regulation, and a string of companies that derive more than 5% of their revenues from coal or oil sands.

“We need to accelerate away from oil and gas without deflecting attention on to carbon offsetting and carbon capture and storage. 

Renewable energy sources like solar and wind power are readily available alternatives,” he said.

“The Exxons and Chevrons of the world are holding us back,” he added. “This initial move does not mean that BP, Shell, Equinor and other oil and gas majors can rest easy and continue with business as usual, even though they are performing relatively better than US oil majors.”"

Go to The Guardian complete article

Related: How Hard Is It to Quit Coal? For Germany, 18 Years and $44 Billion (excerpt): NYT

Related: Prepare for even far more economic chaos than the depression caused by Covid-19


#jail the climate criminals, #jailclimatecriminals, #climatecriminals, Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell, 

 

Climate change: How the UK contributes to global deforestation (excerpt): BBC

Getty Images

"Cocoa, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber, soy, timber, beef and leather.

It's estimated that an area the size of the UK was used abroad every year between 2016 and 2018, to meet British demand for these natural materials.

People everywhere rely on things like these for everyday products and our need for them in the UK could be making climate change worse.

Palm Oil Plantation

It's all to do with the trees cut down around the world to help make those products. 

Globally it's thought deforestation is responsible for about 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
And according to the World Economic Forum, half of the world's tropical deforestation is illegal.

Now the UK wants big businesses to have to prove their brands aren't linked to illegal logging. Although some say the plan doesn't go far enough and it's not clear what the punishments would be if businesses don't do that.

Conservationists think many of the countries those things are

Palm Oil Nuts

coming from, and the products themselves, are strongly linked to illegal deforestation.

Chopping down trees to sell the timber, or to clear the land to produce something else there instead - without the right permission - is a multimillion-pound illegal industry."


See complete BBC article

It appears all developed countries using these products, dependent 
on deforestration, are responsible.

Related: Your Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered: NYT

Also: The End of the Environment: Bob Brown.: The Saturday Paper (excerpt)



 United Kingdom, Britain, palm oil, deforestation hotspot, illegal deforestration, illegal logging,

Australia fires: Similar or worse disasters 'will happen again' (excerpt): BBC

Wildfire: Australia should expect "worse" in the years to come

"An inquiry into the recent massive bushfire disaster in Australia has found the country should expect "worse" in the years to come.

 

The review - which looked at New South Wales (NSW), the worst-hit state - made sweeping proposals aimed at better preparing for future fire seasons.

 

The blazes began last August and burned for months, killing 33 people nationally and scorching vast areas.

 

The NSW state government said it would adopt the inquiry's 76 recommendations.

 

The "extreme and extremely unusual" bushfires destroyed 2,476

Fires caused by climate change

houses and 5.5 million hectares of land in that state alone, according to the NSW Bushfire Inquiry report.

 

"It showed us bushfires through forested regions on a scale that we have not seen in Australia in recorded history, and fire behaviour that took even experienced firefighters by surprise."

 

The main causes were a drought which had made the land extremely dry and ready to burn, hot and windy weather, and climate change.

 

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said on Tuesday: "The next fire season is already upon us."

 

As deadly fires rage in the US summer in California, NSW has seen winter blazes this month - though none have posed a significant threat.

What did the report recommend?

Californian wildfires are also caused by climate change

It made far-reaching proposals, including:

• ordering residents in at-risk areas to conduct compulsory land-clearing
• better aerial firefighting strategies, including more water-bombing at night
• drawing on more Aboriginal land management techniques, such as cultural burning
• allowing firefighters to enter private properties to start controlled burns on materials which fuel fires
• improving alert systems for bushfire smoke, and research into its health impacts
• making government agencies more efficient and auditing their progress.

"Ms Berejiklian said: 'We have to accept also that our climate is changing and those who wrote the report acknowledge that.' "

 

Go to BBC article 

 

Related: The Observer view on the climate catastrophe facing Earth : The Guardian

 

 

#firestorms, #bushfires, #wildfire, firefighters, #Australia, #California, #cambio-climatico, #climatecriminals, #criminalesclimáticosdelacárcel, #jailclimatecriminals, #climateaction,  

How Hard Is It to Quit Coal? For Germany, 18 Years and $44 Billion (excerpt): NYT

An open-pit coal mine and power plant

 in Schophoven, Germany, this week. 

Credit...Federico Gambarini/DPA/

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Germany announced on Thursday that it would spend $44.5 billion to quit coal — but not for another 18 years, by 2038.

The move shows how expensive it is to stop burning the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, despite a broad consensus that keeping coal in the ground is vital to averting a climate crisis, and how politically complicated it is.

Coal, when burned, produces huge amounts of the greenhouse gas emissions that are responsible for global warming.

Germany doesn’t have shale gas, as the United States does, which

Resistance to the Adani Coal Mine in Australia

has led to the rapid decline of coal use in America, despite President Trump’s support for coal. Germany also faces intense opposition to nuclear power. After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, that opposition prompted the government to start shutting down the country’s nuclear plants, a transition that should be complete by 2022.

The money announced Thursday is to be spent on compensating workers, companies and the four coal producing states — three in the country’s east and one in the west. It followed months of negotiations between regional officials and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.

Germany’s timetable, though, could present challenges to the European Union’s efforts to swiftly cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as the bloc’s new leadership has announced. Countries around the world are watching how quickly the 28-country union, which, taken together is currently the third-largest emitter of planet-warming gases, can reduce its carbon footprint. Germany is the largest economy in the European Union.

Go to NYT article

By Somini Sengupta and Melissa Eddy, Jan. 16, 2020 

Related: The Observer view on the climate catastrophe facing Earth : The Guardian

 

Your Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered: NYT

The average greenhouse gas impact (in kilograms of CO₂) of getting 50 grams of protein from:

An excellent article on the climate change impact of various diets. below are sample graphics. The actual site is interactive and packed full of information. The article concludes with some suggested recipes for a climate friendly diet.

Here are a few shots of the excellent article.

Related: Recipes: Celebrate Sustainable Food for Planet A on our blog

Does what I eat have an effect on climate change? 

 

Go to New York Times site

Climate Friendly Recipes

Related: Recipes: Celebrate Sustainable Food for Planet A on our blog

The End of the Environment: Bob Brown.: The Saturday Paper (excerpt)

.... "The prime minister’s post-Covid-19 plan is to roar ahead with a slate of mega-projects that would be delayed by any

Liberals and nationals Fail Australian Forests

proper consideration of their environmental and Indigenous heritage impacts. 

 

While the EPBC Act rarely leads to any project being given the thumbs down, it does require environmental impacts to be assessed, and this takes time. The government’s solution? Get rid of the federal assessment.

 

Forests are only proven carbon storage

When parliament resumes next week, Minister for the Environment Sussan Ley will introduce a bill, under the cover of Covid-19, to amend Howard’s EPBC Act and hand the power to the states – which are more vulnerable to the corporate sector – to approve mining, gas fracking, dam building, the rapid expansion of industrial fish farming and the invasion of national parks by private enterprise. She aims to wash her hands of the Commonwealth’s responsibility for environmental assessment and protection.

 

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Related: Does Australia's government take climate change seriously: Sky News UK Video

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The minister is not waiting for the final report, due in October, of her own inquiry into the EPBC Act, headed by businessman Graeme Samuel. Last month she peremptorily dismissed his interim report’s key recommendation that the Commonwealth set up a policing agency to watch over state management of environmental matters. This was despite Samuel’s finding that “Australia’s natural environment and iconic places are in an overall state of decline and are under increasing threat”.

 

Undoubtedly, the powers to protect Indigenous heritage will be the

Koala after wildfire

next thing shunted to the states. Ley knew the Juukan Gorge caves were to be blown up by Rio Tinto before the event and yet she did nothing. Next, she rejected national heritage protection for the ancient Djab Wurrung eucalypts in Victoria. Handing her powers to the states will spare her from such complicit embarrassment in the future.

 

Australia's climate action record

With the Greens opposed, it will be up to Labor and the crossbenchers in the senate to take on Scott Morrison’s game plan to relegate environmental powers to weaker state governments while concentrating economic might in Canberra: a boon for corporate environmental exploiters and their lobbyists in both cases.

 

This is a watershed moment for Australia’s environment. It has taken more than two decades to see any success in our fight to chip away at Howard’s RFAs. And now we face another era wherein policy is being devised to ignore the certainty of environmental devastation for the promise of a quick profit.

 

In Earth’s sixth great age of extinction, there is a rising tide of opposition to the foolishness, if not criminality, of destroying wildlife habitats – from the deep seas to coral reefs and coastlines to what little is left of woodlands, grasslands and forests.

 

Koala and destroyed forest

The phenomenon of Extinction Rebellion, temporarily quietened by Covid-19, is just a hint of the public unrest to come unless the needless exploitation of nature and our finest human heritage ends. Earth’s ecosystem is at breaking point. Our human herd is already using nearly twice the living produce this planet is capable of sustaining and yet, everywhere, the clamour is for “growth”.

If the forests continue to fall, everything else will follow. As with whaling in 1978, the time for logging Australia’s wildlife-filled and carbon-rich native forests is up.

 

For our forests and our wildlife, it’s time."

 

Go to the Saturday Paper's complete article by Bob Brown

August 22 – 28, 2020  |  No. 315   

Related: Does Australia's government take climate change seriously: Sky News UK Video

CLIMATE CHANGE, FOOD SECURITY, AND AGROBIODIVERSITY: C.G. Gonzalez

"CLIMATE CHANGE, FOOD SECURITY, AND AGROBIODIVERSITY: TOWARD A JUST, RESILIENT, AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEM Carmen G. Gonzalez* 

Climate change will cause more food shortages

 

The global food system is in a state of profound crisis. Decades of misguided aid, trade, and production policies have generated record levels of world hunger despite bountiful harvests and soaring profits for the transnational corporations that dominate the global food supply. The rapid expansion of industrial agriculture has produced an unprecedented loss of plant genetic diversity,  making the world's food supply dangerously vulnerable to wide-spread crop failure akin to that of the Irish potato famine.  In addition, climate change threatens to wreak havoc on food production by increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, depressing agricultural yields, reducing the productivity of the world's fisheries,  and placing additional pressure on scarce water resources. 

* Professor of Law, Seattle University School of Law

 .............

 

sustainable food systems

This Article examines the underlying causes of the global food crisis and recommends specific measures to address the distinct but related problems of food insecurity, loss of genetic resources, and climate change." 

Go to the scholarly article by Carmen g. Gonzalez


Related:

Chilling requirements for food crops

 Related:  9 Ways to assist Australia's farmers with climate change

Some Costa Rican forests returned after removing cattle farming subsidies