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“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain.”

A United Nations report released Thursday detailing humanity’s degradation of natural resources warns swift and sweeping reforms are needed to keep feeding the growing global population.

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point.”

The new U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report argues that “a sense of urgency needs to prevail over a hitherto neglected area of public policy and human welfare, that of caring for the long-term future of land, soil, and water.”

“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils,” the publication explains, “is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain, guaranteeing nature-positive production, advancing equitable livelihoods, and building resilience to shocks and stresses arising from natural disasters and pandemics.”

Entitled The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture: Systems at breaking point (SOLAW 2021), the report declares that “time is of the essence.”

That tone is echoed by FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu in a foreword to the report, which he says provides “evidence of the changing and alarming trends in resource use.”

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point,” Qu writes. “It is clear our future food security will depend on safeguarding our land, soil, and water resources.”

Already, human-induced soil degradation affects 34% of land used for food while water scarcity threatens 3.2 billion people—nearly half the total human population—in agricultural areas, according to SOLAW 2021.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Climate Crisis & More Propaganda

December 4, 2021

The Climate Crisis & More Propaganda

QUESTION: How can you be against climate change when every world leader has been convinced and 97% of all scientists say you are wrong?

ANSWER: Climate always changes and it has done so for millions of years without soccer moms driving the kids in SUVs. It is just propaganda. Governments have adopted this as the excuse to impose political change. The United Nations uses it to further their own position that we need a one-world government to save the planet. They created a clock in New York to say we have only 7 years left before the planet dies.

Here is the data from the government itself and it shows no change in the trend whatsoever to support a perilous cliff for us 7 years from now. This is a chart of only January which is one of the coldest months of the year. The highest average remains that of 1932 and the Dust Bowl. There is absolutely no indication of a warming trend whatsoever. It is snowing in Hawaii right now. Temperatures in Siberia have broken all records dropping to minus 140°F where people may just freeze to death. Even the Northwest Passage was still frozen in August. Even looking at the entire Antarctic continent, this winter of 2021 is already the second-coldest on record as reported by the propaganda network – CNN.

This is not my personal opinion. I am closer to my expiration date than my birth date. I do not even sell advertising on this site because I do not need the money. What I do is for my grandchildren. I really do not care if you believe me or not…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Blah, blah, blah, yay: Another epic fail for the COP, but seeds of growth for our movements

December 2, 2021

Blah, blah, blah, yay: Another epic fail for the COP, but seeds of growth for our movements

Introduction

As COP 26 began, Greta Thunberg summed up the whole thing quite succinctly using just one word, three times: Blah blah blah.

And as it ended two weeks later, she tweeted:

The #COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah. But the real work continues outside these halls. And we will never give up, ever [emphasis added].

And indeed, COP 26 was an epic fail, even by the dismal standards of the 25 COPs that preceded it, but at the same time, the global climate justice movement made some much needed forward progress.

COP26

Source: Flickr

Why this COP was an epic fail

The process leading up to the COP was a blatant act of climate injustice

Starting with the process leading up till COP 26, we might well ask why was it held at all, under the conditions of COVID?

Large numbers of delegates and civil society, in its attempts to presence the world’s people, could not get to this summit, and this is beyond the usual exclusiveness of all COPs due to ordinary people and activists not having the means to travel, to be lodged, to miss work and income, and so on. This was built in by the ineptitude and lack of sincerity of the UK hosts, who had promised to make vaccines and entry requirements doable for those who wished to attend. So this can be called the COVID COP, to connect two of the many global crises that beset us.

Or we might call it the apartheid COP, to connect the climate crisis to the existing cultures of violence the world suffers, from local policing to national-level militarism (both led by the U.S., of course, the undisputed world number one in military spending and murderous police forces).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cop-26–Caught in a Net: Agriculture, Climate Change, and the Decarbonisation Agenda

November 24, 2021

COP26 – Caught in a Net: Agriculture, Climate Change, and the Decarbonisation Agenda

If all 2030 climate targets are met, the planet will heat by 2.7 C this century

November 8, 2021

If all 2030 climate targets are met, the planet will heat by 2.7 C this century

If all 2030 climate targets are met, the planet will heat by 2.7℃ this century — Corals will not likely survive more than 2℃ global warming. Credit: Shutterstock

If nations make good on their latest promises to reduce emissions by 2030, the planet will warm by at least 2.7℃ this century, a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has found. This overshoots the crucial internationally agreed temperature rise of 1.5℃.

Released today, just days before the international climate change summit in Glasgow begins, UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report works out the difference between where greenhouse emissions are projected to be in 2030 and where they should be to avoid the worst climate change impacts.

It comes as the Morrison government yesterday officially committed to a target of net-zero emissions by 2050. The government made no changes to its paltry 2030 target to reduce emissions by between 26% and 28% below 2005 levels, but announced that Australia is set to beat this, and reduce emissions by up to 35%.

The UNEP report was conducted before Australia’s new 2050 target was announced, but even with this new pledge, global pledges will undoubtedly still be short of what’s needed.

The report found global targets for net-zero emissions by mid-century could cut another 0.5℃ off global warming. While this is a big improvement, it will still see temperatures rise to 2.2℃ this century. If we don’t close the global emissions gap, what will Australia, and the rest of world, be forced to endure?

Pledges are falling short

As of August 30 (the date the UNEP report reviewed to), 120 countries had made new or updated pledges and announcements to cut emissions.

The US, for example, has set an ambitious new target of reducing emissions by 50–52% below 2005 levels in 2030. Similarly, the European Union will cut carbon emissions by at least 55% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Code Red on FacingFuture.TV

November 2, 2021

Code Red on FacingFuture.TV

Photograph Source: Emertz76 – CC BY 2.0

FacingFuture.TV recently hosted a preview of the upcoming IPCC 2021 UN climate report, which report guides the gathering of dignitaries from around the world meeting in Glasgow this November to discuss, analyze, and decide how to deal with global warming/climate change.

According to the Code Red interview, the IPCC is taking off its ultra conservative facemask of prior years to reveal a surly cantankerous grim sneer on a darkened background. In short, climate change is much worse than the IPCC has previously been willing to admit.

The FacingFuture.TV interview features Mark Andersen, CEO of Strategic News Service, Brian Wright a natural medicine expert, and Peter Carter an IPCC expert reviewer. The threesome expressed dismay over the failure of the general public to “get the climate change message” clearly enough to force policymakers to take some kind of massive urgent all-hands-on-deck immediate without hesitation corrective measures to head off an undeviating course of surefire destruction.

The following snippets from that interview underscore a level of frustration and a sense of urgency as a clarion call for anybody and everybody to demand an immediate halt to fossil fuels.

What’s new with the IPCC?

For starters, according to Dr. Carter, the new report is a “definitive report.” Its conclusions are definite. In other words, the IPCC is taking the issue much more seriously than ever before. This is the first report to state that global climate change is “unequivocally caused by human activities.”

Moreover, previous IPCC reports inadvertently gave the impression that society has plenty of time until 2050 to make the necessary changes, which has unintentionally served to bolster the interests of the fossil fuel industry and extend forecasts for future production by the International Energy Agency.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Billionaires Are Not Morally Qualified To Shape Human Civilization

November 1, 2021

Billionaires Are Not Morally Qualified To Shape Human Civilization

Press Conference - Margaret Chan & Bill Gates | Bill Gates, … | Flickr

Human civilization is being engineered in myriad ways by an unfathomably wealthy class who are so emotionally and psychologically stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability to easily do so.

The United Nations has estimated that world hunger could be ended for an additional expenditure of $30 billion a year, with other estimates considerably lower. The other day Elon Musk became the first person ever to attain a net worth of over $300 billion. A year ago his net worth was $115 billion. According to Inequality.org, America’s billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.1 trillion, which is a 70 percent increase from their combined net worth of under $3 trillion at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

So we’re talking about a class which could easily put a complete halt to human beings dying of starvation on this planet by simply putting some of their vast fortunes toward making sure everyone gets enough to eat. But they don’t. This same class influences the policies, laws, and large-scale behavior of our species more than any other.

To get a sense of how insane this is, imagine if you had seen a video clip of me calmly watching a child drown to death in a swimming pool and doing nothing to help. After watching such footage, would it ever in a million years occur to you that I am someone who should be in charge of the entire world?

I’m going to guess no. I’m going to guess that, in the unlikely event that you ever decided anyone should rule the world, after watching me let a child drown I’d rank somewhere near the very bottom of possible candidates.

Now imagine if instead of letting one child drown, it was millions.

That’s how absolutely insane it is that we allow this class to shape our civilization.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Leaked documents reveal the fossil fuel and meat producing countries lobbying against climate action

October 23, 2021

Leaked documents reveal the fossil fuel and meat producing countries lobbying against climate action

Files show how Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and OPEC have pressed to water down a key UN scientific report.

The revelations – which show how this small clutch of nations is attempting to water-down the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) major upcoming assessment of the world’s options for limiting global warming – come just days before the start of crucial international climate negotiations in Glasgow.

They come from a leak of tens of thousands of comments by governments, corporations, academics and others on the draft report of the IPCC’s ‘Working Group III’ – an international team of experts that is assessing humanity’s remaining options for curbing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or removing them from the atmosphere.

The documents passed to Unearthed show how fossil fuel producers including Australia, Saudi Arabia and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), are lobbying the IPCC – the world’s leading authority on climate change – to remove or weaken a key conclusion that the world needs to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.

In one comment seen by Unearthed, a senior Australian government official rejected the largely uncontroversial conclusion that one of the most important steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was to phase out coal-fired power stations.

Phrases like ‘the need for urgent and accelerated mitigation actions at all scales’ should be eliminated

Meanwhile, Brazil and Argentina, two of the world’s biggest producers of beef and animal feed, have been pressing to delete messages about the climate benefits of promoting ‘plant-based’ diets and of curbing meat and dairy consumption.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ecological Economists Support Message of Religious Leaders to Cop 26

October 21, 2021

Ecological Economists Support Message of Religious Leaders to Cop 26

His Holiness Pope Francis, His Grace Justin Welby Archbishop of Canterbury, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew issued an urgent joint message in advance of COP 26. They have been joined by many leaders of other religions in their call for creation care with justice.

They remind everyone of our individual and collective responsibility to take action to avert global environmental catastrophe, resulting from our having “greedily consumed more of the earth’s resources than the planet can endure.” They warn that the future will be worse for our children unless we act collaboratively and urgently as the situation clearly requires. They state that “we must decide what kind of world we want to leave to future generations”.

The profound exhortations of the religious leaders resonate deeply with us, the undersigned Circle of Ecological Economics Elders. Working across the natural and social sciences we have come to the same conclusion. Since the early 1970s, humanity has overshot the resource regenerative and waste absorptive capacities of the earth and has been moving in an unsustainable direction ever since – to the benefit of very few at the expense of very many. The problems we face can usually be traced to the excessive scale of our economies which require increasing quantities of materials and energy, produce ever greater quantities of wastes, and degrade the earth’s land, air, and waters. To respond to the call of our religious leaders, to respond to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor, now requires a significant reduction in the physical size of our human niche rather than a continuing expansion and faster degradation of the biosphere in the name of growth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Africa’s Disappearing Glaciers Signal ‘Irreversible’ Threat to Earth System: Report

October 20, 2021

Africa’s Disappearing Glaciers Signal ‘Irreversible’ Threat to Earth System: Report

The authors of a U.N. report urge greater investment in climate adaptation and weather services on the continent.

A new United Nations-backed report reveals the extent of Africa’s “disproportionate vulnerability” to the climate emergency, with the continent’s three glaciers expected to disappear entirely in the next two decades as the population faces the increasingly dire effects of the heating of the planet.

“Total deglaciation” of the glaciers of the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is expected by the 2040s, while the Mount Kenya massif could lose its ice caps a decade sooner, “which will make it one of the first entire mountain ranges to lose glacier cover due to human-induced climate change,” according to the State of the Climate in Africa 2020 report.

“In sub-Saharan Africa, climate change could further lower gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 3% by 2050.”

The loss of the three glaciers in East Africa, which are retreating at faster rates than the global average, “signals the threat of imminent and irreversible change to the Earth system,” said World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

“Administrative barriers” currently put long term observation efforts at the mountains’ summits at risk of being abandoned, according to the report by the WMO, the African Union Commission (AUC), the Economic Commission for Africa, and other agencies—but the authors noted that “investing in climate adaptation, early warning systems, and weather and climate services can pay off.”

“In sub-Saharan Africa, climate change could further lower gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 3% by 2050,” wrote Josefa Leonel Correia Sacko, commissioner for rural economy and agriculture at the AUC. “This presents a serious challenge for climate adaptation and resilience actions because not only are physical conditions getting worse, but also the number of people being affected is increasing.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Upcoming UN Climate Talks in Glasgow Are a Make-or-Break Moment

October 5, 2021

This image provided by NASA shows Hurricane Florence from the International Space Station on September 12, 2018. | Photo by NASA via AP

The Upcoming UN Climate Talks in Glasgow Are a Make-or-Break Moment

Failure to halt greenhouse gas emissions is not an option—though it’s frighteningly likely

In early November, government leaders from around the world will meet in Glasgow, Scotland, for the latest round of United Nations–sponsored climate change negotiations. This year’s climate summit—COP26, in UN-speak—will be the most important since the 2015 talks in Paris, and this will be true however the meeting unfolds. If Glasgow is a “success,” this will be taken as a sign that our faltering international institutions might actually, if just barely, be able to spur the planetary mobilization we now desperately need. If it’s a “failure,” well, no such luck—it will become even more difficult to imagine cooperative planetary action, at scale and in time to avoid a truly catastrophic shift in the climate system.

How will we tell if Glasgow is a success? This is a tough question, one that involves judgments about both the geophysical realities of a destabilized Earth and the “realities” of our political systems, which are clearly not up to the challenge. The storms and the firestorms are looming large, and so too is the catastrophe of “vaccine apartheid,” which under Boris Johnson’s government has queued up a summit that does not promise to be either safe or inclusive. Even in the best case, the Glasgow COP is not going to yield anything like a world historic breakthrough. Given that a breakthrough is exactly what we need, how can we ever hope to judge the UN talks as even a measured success? By attending to key details. Keep in mind that, six years after Paris, plenty of people in the climate movement still can’t say “Paris” without saying “failure,” and this despite the obvious fact that, had the Paris Agreement not been completed before Donald Trump’s election, we would now be in even more terrifying straits.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable

September 29, 2021

The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable

There are big problems with the most important metric used to assess progress toward the U.N.’s environmental goals.

Art for the Global Goals campaign at Liu Bolin Studio in Beijing on Aug. 28, 2015.

In 2015, the world’s governments signed on to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a commitment to bring the global economy back into balance with the living world. Now, five years later, as the U.N. General Assembly convenes online to discuss the global ecological crisis, everyone wants to know how countries are performing.

To answer this question, delegates and policymakers have referred to a metric called the SDG Index, which was developed by Jeffrey Sachs “to assess where each country stands with regard to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.” The metric tells a very clear story. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, and Germany—along with most other rich Western nations—rise to the top of the rankings, giving casual observers the impression that these countries are real leaders in achieving sustainable development.

There’s only one problem. Despite its name, the SDG Index has very little to do with sustainable development all. In fact, oddly enough, the countries with the highest scores on this index are some of the most environmentally unsustainable countries in the world.

Take Sweden, for example. Sweden scores an impressive 84.7 on the index, topping the pack. But ecologists have long pointed out that Sweden’s “material footprint”—the quantity of natural resources that the country consumes each year—is one of the biggest in the world, right up there with the United States, at 32 metric tons per person. To put this in perspective, the global average is about 12 tons per person, and the sustainable level is about 7 tons per person. In other words, Sweden is consuming nearly five times over the boundary.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The fight over food at the UN’s Food Summit

September 28, 2021

The fight over food at the UN’s Food Summit

*Food Summit image via the International Science Council*

The UN’s Food Systems Summit was held last week in New York. This sounds like it ought to be a good thing, given the sense of impending crisis around the food sector. But a lot of people aren’t happy about it. There have been protests by people who say they have been excluded from the process, critical op-ed articles, and pre-summit withdrawals by some invited stakeholders.

At The Counter Lela Nargi wrote a good explainer of what’s going on:

At the pre-summit, global leaders declared intentions to forge an international road map for the future of agriculture on a rapidly changing planet. They were “expected to step up and launch bold new actions, solutions, partnerships, and strategies” to vastly improve food and ag systems. “That’s where the decisions (were) made,” explained professor Molly Anderson about the decision to protest the pre-summit. “The cake (was) baked at the pre-summit and the summit will be the celebration where they eat the cake.”

‘Tech-heavy, corporate centric’

Anderson has some skin in this game. She is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), which has withdrawn its participation in the Summit, criticising ‘opaque methods of decision-making and a favoring of tech-heavy, corporate-centric private sector voices.’

At heart, this dispute is about competing values and visions of a food future. Anderson’s perspective is that the UN Summit is over-interested in tech food futures such as digitisation, gene editing, and precision agriculture, which “won’t help the poorest and hungriest people in the world very much, and will make the gap between the very poor and hungry and the wealthy even wider than it is now.” In contrast:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beware the United Nations, IMF, WHO, World Bank, and BIS

September 27, 2021

Beware the United Nations, IMF, WHO, World Bank, and BIS

People must understand that just as a small business wants to expand and grow bigger, that same human tendency exists in government. No matter what form, they will always try to expand their power. The United Nations has been the greatest threat to humanity since Adolf Hitler. They have justified expanding their dreams of world power to bring peace to the world with one government. For years, the IMF has been part of this same agenda. They have sought to replace the sovereignty of the nation-states with a one-world government, and this is what is really behind this COVID and climate change agenda. This “world government,” they argue, should dictate financial policies to nation-states. They want the world to pay taxes to them, not governments.

The old wars are over. Welcome to Biden’s new wars

September 24, 2021

The old wars are over. Welcome to Biden’s new wars

Biden begins his first address to the UN General Assemble with a lie: “…the U.S. is not at war.” —

Joe Lauria

“Joe Biden, in his first address to the United Nations General Assembly, told world leaders Tuesday: ‘I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.’ According to the latest available White House war report, the U.S. was involved in seven wars in 2018: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger. The U.S. withdrew last month from Afghanistan, so the number of current U.S. wars is likely six. Likely because in an age of so-called counter-terrorism operations it’s not entirely clear where U.S. forces are deployed. … In any case, the United States is not at peace, as Biden implied. With 800 military bases and installations around the world the U.S. remains perpetually on a war footing. … After leaving Afghanistan last month Biden indicated the Pentagon’s attention would focus even more intently on Russia and China. The controversial, new U.S.-U.K.-Australia defense pact is clearly aimed at Beijing. Unlike Obama, Biden did not utter the words Russia or China in his speech. Instead he condemned them under the coded language of ‘authoritarianism.’ War is over. Welcome to the new war.” —Joe Lauria, Consortium News

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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