Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

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The UN’s International Maritime Organization [IMO] has just agreed to start charging ships for the greenhouse gases they emit. After decades of ineffective incremental tweaks to shipping emissions, the breakthrough came on April 11 at a summit in London. It makes shipping the first industry subject to a worldwide – and legally binding – emissions price.

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There was sustained opposition to ambitious action from Saudi Arabia and other petrostates, as well as from China and Brazil. Second, the US had already disengaged from negotiations. Even so, from outside the meeting, the US administration’s tariff war and explicit threat to retaliate against states supporting a shipping pricing regime could have affected talks far more than they did.

But researchers are not sure that this agreement can be considered a success. While there is little traditional climate change denial at the IMO, “mitigation denial” is alive and kicking. Mitigation denial means making lofty promises, often in line with scientific evidence, but not adopting concrete measures able to deliver on these targets. This is exactly what petrostates pushed the IMO to do last week.

Ultimately, the IMO has well and truly failed the most climate vulnerable, by favouring a more gradual and less certain transition to low-carbon shipping. It’s even effectively making these countries pay the price.

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In this powerhouse episode, Mark Lynas is joined by long-time friend and environmental journalist George Monbiot for a brutally honest conversation on where we are — and how we fight back. Together they challenge the idea that environmental progress is automatic or guaranteed, and instead delve into the deep political, economic, and social forces that shape our chances for a better future. Monbiot argues that unless we confront power, capitalism, and the failure of incrementalism, we’re simply sleepwalking into authoritarianism and ecological collapse. From colonialism to neoliberalism, from fascism to the failures of the left, this is a sweeping conversation on what went wrong — and how we can make things right, through a positive politics of belonging. This one pulls no punches.

🧠 Topics Discussed:

🏛️ Why environmentalism fails without confronting power

🛑 The myth of inevitable progress — and how it can be reversed

⚡ Technology is not enough: the limits of "techno-fix" thinking

💰 A crash course in the real origins of capitalism

📉 Why incremental change is a losing strategy

📢 What neoliberalism really is — and how it disempowers citizens

🧱 Private sufficiency, public luxury: a new vision for the future

🧠 Why the left keeps losing — and what must change

🎯 Popper’s paradox, politics of belonging, and how to counter fascism

📲 How social media is supercharging authoritarianism

😤 Can we still win? Yes — but only if we act boldly

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20970653

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For hundreds of millions of people living in India and Pakistan, the early arrival of summer heatwaves has become a terrifying reality that’s testing survivability limits and putting enormous strain on energy supplies, vital crops and livelihoods.

Both countries experience heatwaves during the summer months of May and June, but this year’s heatwave season has arrived sooner than usual and is predicted to last longer too.

Parts of Pakistan are likely to experience heat up to 8 degrees Celsius above normal between April 14-18, according to the country’s meteorological department. Maximum temperatures in Balochistan, in country’s southwest, could reach up to 49 degrees Celsius (120 Fahrenheit).

That’s like living in Death Valley – the hottest and driest place in North America – where summer daytime temperatures often climb to similar levels.

https://archive.ph/mmmT7

On February 18, a dam failed and a Chinese-owned copper mine spilled 50 million liters of acidic effluent into the Kafue River, damaging the lives of millions of people as pollution was detected at least 100 kilometers downstream.

Water supply was cut off in nearby towns. Fish populations have been devastated. Groundwater has likely been contaminated. Crops have been destroyed. And huge amounts of livestock have been killed, crashing the livelihoods of farmers.

“Prior to the 18th of February this was a vibrant and alive river,” Sean Cornelius, a local resident, told the Associated Press. “Now everything is dead, it’s like a totally dead river. Unbelievable. Overnight, this river died.”

“People unknowingly drank contaminated water and ate affected maize. Now many are suffering from headaches, coughs, diarrhea, muscle cramps and even sores on their legs,” Nsama Musonda Kearns, executive director of the Care for Nature Zambia NGO, told Climate Home News.

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The company responsible for the February 18 spill is Sino-Metals Leach Zambia, which is majority owned by the state-run China Nonferrous Metals Industry Group (中國有色礦業集團公司). But it is not alone.

This year, four copper mining companies — one British and three Chinese — have been accused of releasing toxic mining waste into the Kafue River.

Chinese imports of Zambian copper were worth up to $4.05 billion in 2023, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade, and Chinese companies own many of the copper mines in the country.

Those companies’ records of environmental and worker safety have long been treated with skepticism. There have been clashes with miners over unfair pay and conditions and in 2018 there were riots against Chinese businesses. Zambia’s Ministry of Green Economy and Environment raised concerns about the Sino Metal dam that broke as far back as 2023.

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“We’re moving into a political domain in which people understand you need to grab resources — food resources, mineral resources — and you need to create a hinterland and you need to control those hinterlands …” Martin Mills, director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research at the University of Aberdeen explained a recent Institute for Security and Development Policy online event.

China and its companies are by no means alone in doing this. But it is certainly a useful description of their operations in Zambia.

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“Chinese companies have a reputation locally and globally of having weak safety and environmental compliance, and this reputation is known before we give such companies the opportunity to mine or operate in Zambia,” Timothy Kamuzu Phiri, director and co-founder of Mizu Eco-Care, a Zambian environmental organisation that was one of the signatories to the statement mentioned above, [said].

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Behind these declines lies a constellation of human-driven threats, with habitat destruction leading the charge. Each year, approximately 10 million hectares of forest — an area nearly the size of Kentucky — disappear to make way for agriculture, urban development, and resource extraction. Particularly devastating is the ongoing destruction of tropical rainforests, Earth’s most biologically diverse terrestrial ecosystems. The Amazon Basin alone has lost roughly 17% of its forest cover in the past 50 years, with deforestation rates accelerating dramatically in recent years despite increased awareness of the region’s critical importance to global climate regulation.

The connection between rainforest destruction and global agricultural systems reveals a particularly troubling cycle of environmental degradation. Vast tracts of pristine forest, especially in South America, are being systematically cleared to grow soybeans — not primarily for direct human consumption, but to feed livestock in industrial animal agriculture operations worldwide. This represents a staggeringly inefficient use of land: producing one pound of beef requires approximately seven pounds of grain, making meat production a principal driver of habitat loss. The irony is profound — forests that once supported immense biodiversity are destroyed to grow monoculture crops that feed animals raised in factory farms, all while greenhouse gas emissions from both deforestation and livestock production accelerate climate change.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20740784

Amid all the bad climate news flowing out of the Trump administration, you might have missed a quiet new consensus congealing in think tanks and big business. The targets set out by the Paris climate agreement, they argue—to limit global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—are a lost cause. It’s time to prepare for a world warmed by at least three degrees Celsius.

Owing to “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a research report last month, they “now expect a 3°C world.” The “baseline” scenario that JP Morgan Chase uses to assess its own transition risk—essentially, the economic impact that decarbonization could have on its high-carbon investments—similarly “assumes that no additional emissions reduction policies are implemented by governments” and that the world could reach “3°C or more of warming” by 2100. The Climate Realism Initiative launched on Monday by the Council on Foreign Relations similarly presumes that the world is likely on track to warm on average by three degrees or more this century. The essay announcing the initiative calls the prospect of reaching net-zero global emissions by 2050 “utterly implausible.”

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Related: Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?

(Previous climate models have underestimated the cooling effect of aerosol pollution and the climate's sensitivity to rising carbon dioxide levels.)

In the summer of 2023, a dozen people willingly walked into a steel chamber at the University of Ottawa designed to test the limits of human survival. Outfitted with heart rate monitors and temperature probes, they waited in temperatures of 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, while the humidity steadily climbed, coating their bodies in sweat and condensation. After several hours, their internal body temperatures began ratcheting upward, as the heat cooked them from the outside in.

“Few people on the planet have actually experienced temperatures like this,” said Robert Meade, a postdoctoral researcher in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who led the study. “Imagine moisture condensing on the skin like a glass of water on a hot day. That’s how hot it was, compared to skin temperature.”

Their experiment tested the body’s ability to cope with extreme heat by exposing participants to temperatures at which they could no longer cool themselves. Their study confirmed that this dangerous threshold is much lower than scientists had previously thought: a so-called wet-bulb temperature, which accounts for heat and humidity, of 26 to 31 degrees C.

https://archive.ph/Lj16Y

Some six million students lost up to two weeks' worth of classroom learning last year as temperatures hit a record 38.8 degrees Celsius (101.4 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the education department.

Schools reported cases of heat exhaustion, nose bleeds and hospitalisations as students struggled through lessons in classrooms without air conditioning.

Scientists say that extreme heat is a clear marker of climate change, caused largely by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Last year's heat was further exacerbated by the seasonal El Nino phenomenon.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20680602

The number of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. is increasing. A recent report says FEMA made a disaster declaration somewhere in the U.S. every four days, on average, in 2024

Unmanaged abandonment I guess ?

The memo, shared with The Grocer, warns food businesses are woefully unprepared for challenges including soil degradation, extreme weather events, global heating and water scarcity and that yield, quality and predictability of food supply are all at severe risk.

It goes on to claim that companies’ risk mitigation strategies are being assured by major audit and assurance firms and giving false confidence to investors, whereas the true threat to the supply chain is far greater than companies have acknowledged.

As President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders Tuesday aimed at keeping coal power alive in the United States, he repeatedly blamed his predecessor, Democrats, and environmental regulations for the industry’s dramatic contraction over the past two decades.

But across the country, state and local officials and electric grid operators have been confronting a factor in coal’s demise that is not easily addressed with the stroke of a pen: its cost.

For example, Maryland’s only remaining coal generating station, Talen Energy’s 1.3-gigawatt Brandon Shores plant, will be staying open beyond its previously planned June 1 shutdown, under a deal that regional grid operator PJM brokered earlier this year with the company, state officials, and the Sierra Club.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19706595

2024 climate trends should be a "wake-up call that we are increasing the risks to our lives, economies and to the planet,” said Celeste Saulo

In Egypt alone, the report found that cases have jumped by 609 percent since 2010.