Is the world being destroyed?

A shortage of nitrogen fertilizer is getting so bad that farmers won’t be able to get what they need for their fields in the near future.

That’s according to executives at CF Industries Holdings Inc., who spoke on an earnings call Thursday. If the owner of the world’s largest nitrogen facility is right and farmers have to scale back fertilizer applications, that could lower corn yields, pushing up the price of food even further. Food inflation is already a concern, with a United Nations gauge of global prices at a decade high.

Bad weather hit harvests around the world this year, freight costs soared and labor shortages have roiled the food supply chain from farms to supermarkets. An energy crisis has also proved a headache, forcing vegetable greenhouses to go dark and causing a knock-on risk of bigger fertilizer bills for farmers.

“The issue with the inputs and fertilizers and its implications for next year’s crop is a concern,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. “By now, the market has factored in most of the supply and demand issues. But the market has by no means factored in next year’s prospects in production.”

Some regions will likely continue to face food-security challenges. The UN on Thursday raised its outlook for global wheat trade to a record as purchases climb in Middle Eastern nations from Iran to Afghanistan. Droughts there slashed crops, boosting dependency on imported grain at a time when prices are soaring.

“This came at the worst time for those countries because world prices are just so high,” Abbassian said. “We cannot afford a bad year in 2022 for important crops.”

The price gains are stirring memories of spikes in 2008 and 2011 that contributed to global food crises. While it takes time for commodity costs to trickle to grocery shelves, officials in areas like North Africa and Turkey are already facing difficulties shielding shoppers from the blow.

Bigger expenses for farmers could also curb Northern Hemisphere plantings now underway, according to the FAO.

October’s food-price gains were mostly driven by higher costs for grains and vegetable oils, the FAO said in a report.

Still, there are signs of stabilizing prices for some foods, with with meat and sugar falling last month, Abbassian said. Global grain and oilseed supplies are proving sufficient to meet demand, and prices for rice -- one of the world’s vital staples -- remain subdued, he said.

“On the demand side, we’re beginning to get a better hold of what we actually need, so that uncertainty is perhaps diminishing,” he said.

Soils are home to diverse microbial communities that cycle nutrients, support agriculture, and trap carbon – an important service for climate mitigation. Globally, around 80% of Earth’s terrestrial carbon stores are found in soils. Due to climate warming and other human activities that affect soil microorganisms, this important carbon sink is at risk.

A new study led by Jane Lucas, a community ecologist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, investigated the interactive effects of rising temperatures and a common livestock antibiotic on soil microbes. The research team found that heat and antibiotics disrupt soil microbial communities – degrading soil microbe efficiency, resilience to future stress, and ability to trap carbon. The work, now available online, will appear in the December issue of Soil Biology and Biochemistry.

Lucas, says, “Most studies of soil health examine only one stressor at a time. Here, we wanted to explore the effects of warming temperatures and antibiotics simultaneously, to get a sense of how two increasing stressors impact soils.”

Monensin was selected because it is a common antibiotic whose use is expanding on cattle farms. Monensin is inexpensive, easy to administer, does not require a veterinary feed directive, and is not used in human medications. Like many antibiotics, Monensin is poorly metabolized; much of the antibiotic is still biologically active when it enters the environment through animal waste.

The team collected samples of prairie soil from preserved land in northern Idaho that was free of grazing livestock. Vegetation cover at the collection site, primarily tallgrass prairie, represents typical livestock pasture – without inputs from cattle waste.

Soil samples were treated with either a high dose, low dose, or no dose of the antibiotic; these were heated at three different temperatures and left to incubate for 21 days. Temperatures tested (15, 20, and 30°C) represented seasonal variation plus a future warming projection. For each treatment, the team monitored soil respiration, acidity, microbial community composition and function, carbon and nitrogen cycling, and interactions among microbes.

They found that with rising heat and antibiotic additions, bacteria collapsed, allowing fungi to dominate and homogenize – resulting in fewer total microbes and less microbial diversity overall. Antibiotics alone increased bioavailable carbon and reduced microbial efficiency. Rising temperatures alone increased soil respiration and dissolved organic carbon. Increases in these labile carbon pools can lead to a reduction in long-term carbon storage capacity.

Lucas says, “We saw real changes in soil microbe communities in both the low and high-dose additions. Rising temperature exacerbated these antibiotic effects, with distinct microbial communities emerging at each temperature tested. Within these assemblages, we saw reduced diversity and fewer microorganisms overall. These changes could diminish soils’ resilience to future stress.

We also found that heat and antibiotics increased microbial respiration, decreasing efficiency. Essentially, microbes have to work harder to survive when they are in a hot, antibiotic laden environment. This is similar to how it is easier to walk a mile when it is 70 degrees than it is to run a mile when it is 95 degrees. Decreased microbial efficiency can cause soils to store less carbon in the long term.”

As soil microbes are working harder (and inefficiently) to process carbon, less is converted into a stable organic form, which would become trapped in the soil. Instead, more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere as a gas. This effect could turn an important carbon sink into a carbon source, exacerbating climate change effects.

Senior author Michael Strickland, an Associate Professor at the University of Idaho’s Soil and Water Systems Department, says, “Forces of environmental change do not play out in isolation. Our results show that heat alone, antibiotics alone, and heat and antibiotics together all have different effects on soil microbial communities. These findings highlight the importance of testing multiple stressors simultaneously to more fully understand how our soils, and the essential functions they perform, are changing.”

Lucas concludes, “This work aligns with the ‘One Health’ approach. Agriculture, the environment, and public health are inextricably linked. Understanding how multiple stressors shape soil microbes is critical to supporting soil health in the face of global change. If we do not manage for interactive effects, things like soil carbon storage capacity and crop production could be jeopardized. In addition to broader climate mitigation efforts, limiting antibiotic inputs to the environment could help protect soils.”

08 Nov 2021 --- Agricultural expansion drives almost 90% of global deforestation – an impact much more significant than previously thought, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has revealed, as part of its Global Remote Sensing Survey.

Worldwide, more than half of forest loss is due to the conversion of forest into cropland. In contrast, according to the new study, livestock grazing is responsible for almost 40% of forest loss.

The new data also confirms an overall slowdown in global deforestation while warning that tropical rainforests, in particular, are under high pressure from agricultural expansion.

“According to FAO’s latest Global Forest Resources Assessment, we have lost 420 million hectares of forest since 1990,” FAO Director-General QU Dongyu underscores.

He also emphasizes that increasing agri-food productivity to meet the new demands of a growing population and halting deforestation are not mutually exclusive objectives.

Deforestation is the conversion of forest to other land uses, such as agriculture and infrastructure.“Turning the tide on deforestation and scaling up the hard-won progress on this front is of vital importance to build back better and greener from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Qu adds.

“We need to know where and why deforestation and forest degradation happens and where the action is needed,” he continues, noting that this can only be achieved by combining the latest technological innovations with local expertise on the ground. “The new survey serves as a good example of such an approach.”

Halting deforestation

More than 20 developing countries have already shown that it is possible to do so. The latest data confirms deforestation has been successfully reduced in South America and Asia.

According to the new data, between 2000 and 2018, the vast majority of the deforestation happened in tropical biomes. Despite a slowdown in deforestation in South America and Asia, the tropical rainforests in these regions continue to record the highest deforestation rates.

Agriculture remains the main driver of deforestation in all regions except for Europe, where urban and infrastructure development have a higher impact, the study says. Conversion to cropland dominates forest loss in Africa and Asia, with over 75% of the forest area lost converted to cropland. In South America, almost three-quarters of deforestation is due to livestock grazing.

The FAO-led study was conducted using satellite data and tools developed in partnership with NASA and Google and close collaboration with more than 800 national experts from almost 130 countries.

FAO’s work to date
Considering the connections between forests, agriculture and food security, FAO’s new strategic framework will lead efforts to transform agri-food systems to be more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable.

Together with the UN Development Programme and UN Environment Programme (UNEP), FAO supports more than 60 countries in implementing strategies to reduce deforestation and forest degradation emissions.

FAO is also co-leading the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration with UNEP, a significant opportunity to accelerate innovative ideas into ambitious actions.

Moreover, the recent UN Food Systems Summit formed a coalition between producer and consumer countries, companies and international organizations to halt deforestation and the harmful environmental impacts of converting land to produce agricultural commodities.

The Collaborative Partnership on Forests, led by FAO, uniting 15 international organizations, is developing a joint initiative to Turn the Tide on Deforestation to accelerate actions and scale up impact.

Calls for eco-labeling in light of COP26

Meanwhile, with world leaders gathered in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss climate change, it has been highlighted that food is responsible for 26% of greenhouse gas emissions globally.Eco-labeling could achieve the same for environmental credentials and drive rapid improvements in food sustainability, says the FSA.

Food Standards Agency (FSA) chief scientist, Robin May, explains why urgent progress is needed on a unified eco-labeling system for food in the UK as world leaders meet for COP26.

“The way we grow, process and transport food is a major contributor to climate change, with food production as a whole accounting for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing this will require dramatic changes in agriculture, manufacturing and transport.

The FSA’s Healthy and Sustainable Diets survey has shown that 48% of people feel responsibility for improving the environmental impact/sustainability of UK diets sits with the government. Equally, 48% of those surveyed also indicated that “those involved in food production or manufacturing” have a part to play.

Change is already underway, flags May. “In the UK, three-quarters of consumers rate sustainability as having a ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ significant influence on the food we buy and 40% of people claim that they have changed, or attempted to change, their diet for environmental reasons since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

However, transforming the food system into a fully sustainable one relies on understanding its environmental footprint.

Then “eco-labeling” of foods would enable consumers to compare the environmental footprint of different foods and vote with their wallets.

“More importantly, eco-labeling would be a powerful driver of change in the food industry,” May continues. “Experience has already shown that mandatory nutritional labeling has helped incentivize companies to reformulate foods, bringing health benefits that go far beyond individual changes in consumer purchasing.”

According to Innova Market Insights, 62% of global consumers want to see the level of environmental impact of the packaging illustrated as a score or grade.

What you are watching is an international trade fayre for a burgeoning green industry. It is no accident that the fossil fuel corporations are over-represented or that the banking and financial sector are heavily involved. Because, while human-caused climate change is real enough, the “solution” you are being sold is nothing more than corporate imperialism, funded by new carbon taxes, green levies and taxpayer-backed loans, while draped in bright green clothing.

Until now, the prime movers in a green industry have escaped scrutiny because the crisis appeared far away while the “solutions” were relatively cost-free. A few pounds on everyone’s electricity bills only really hurt those at the very bottom, and we could all claim that we were doing our bit by funding wind turbines and solar panels while washing our clothes in cold water and sending our “recycling” to China to be incinerated or dumped in the sea. Indeed, insofar as climate activism has focused solely on raising awareness of the problem, there has been almost no serious discussion of the potential solutions. As Jasper Bernes in Between the Devil and the Green New Deal puts it:

“The Green New Deal proposes to decarbonize most of the economy in ten years— great, but no one is talking about how. This is because, for many, its value is primarily rhetorical; it’s about shifting the discussion, gathering political will, and underscoring the urgency of the climate crisis. It’s more big mood more than grand plan.”

Climate change though, was but one – the potentially lucrative one – aspect of a much bigger predicament. More immediate – although this has yet to filter up to our elders and betters (or so they tell us) as they jet around the planet lecturing the rest of us about carbon footprints – are two other aspects of the same human overshoot predicament. The first of these is the growing economic breakdown resulting from the failure to address the crisis of 2008. Rather than unwind the unrepayable debt run up by private banks, the debt has largely been transferred to governments and central banks. The likely result of this in the not too distant future, is a series of currency collapses as it becomes clear that future taxation cannot possibly repay outstanding state debt.

A potential trigger for this, and the second aspect of the predicament that we have been ignoring, is the crisis of resource depletion. In part, this is simply the product of our insane attempt to have infinite growth on a finite planet. Humanity’s collective economic activity is now so great that a series of key resources will be increasingly unavailable if we maintain today’s rate of global growth. And these shortages will become severe in the event that we begin to make the kind of zero-carbon transition envisaged by the green industry. As Natural History Museum Head of Earth Sciences Prof Richard Herrington et al., warned in 2019:

“To replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV and HGV fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of European industry…

“There are serious implications for the electrical power generation in the UK needed to recharge these vehicles. Using figures published for current EVs (Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe), driving 252.5 billion miles uses at least 63 TWh of power. This will demand a 20% increase in UK generated electricity.

“Challenges of using ‘green energy’ to power electric cars: If wind farms are chosen to generate the power for the projected two billion cars at UK average usage, this requires the equivalent of a further years’ worth of total global copper supply and 10 years’ worth of global neodymium and dysprosium production to build the windfarms.”

This amounts to imperialism masquerading as “saving the planet,” since it will be corporations based in the developed states using their exchangeable currencies – while they still have value – to consume what remains of the planet’s mineral reserves, thereby denying them to humanity as a whole. As Simon Michaux from the Finnish Geological Survey notes, in the event that the EU (which then included the UK) were successful in its effort to produce 200 million electric cars by 2030, the world would be left with just two months reserves of chromium, gold and zinc, three months of silver, and four months of nickel:

Even at the modest growth rates prior to the Covid pandemic, some of those metal reserves will likely be gone by the end of the decade. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that these estimates are overly optimistic because oil – the “master resource” – peaked in 2018. This is not the same as “running out of oil.” Rather, it marks the high point of oil production. This is because all of the old, big, and easy oil fields are in decline. And all we have to replace them are small and difficult – i.e., energy-expensive – deposits such as shale oil and bitumen sands.

The rising energy cost of oil translates into a rising energy cost of any industrial process which requires oil – and especially diesel. This includes the production of fossil fuels, including oil itself. As Richard Heinberg at Resilience explains:

“Coal and natural gas spot prices have recently soared to record levels internationally, while oil is trading at over $80 a barrel—the highest price in seven years. Newspaper columnists are asking whether people in Europe and Asia who can’t afford high fuel and electricity prices might freeze this winter…

“Political commentators are naturally searching for culprits (or scapegoats). For those on the business-friendly political right, the usual target is green energy policies that discourage fossil fuel investment. For those on the left, the culprit is insufficient investment in renewable energy.

“But there’s another explanation for the high prices: depletion. I’m not suggesting we’re about to completely run out of coal, oil, or gas; there’s no immediate danger of that. However, the energy industry has historically targeted the highest-quality and easiest-accessed of these resources, which means that what’s left, in most cases, are fuels that will be costlier to extract and process—and also more polluting.”

This is a serious problem for the emerging green industry and its Big Finance backers, because without cheap oil there is simply no way in which the proposed energy transition can happen. There is no part of the manufacture, transportation, deployment and maintenance of wind turbines, solar panels, tidal barrages, wave turbines, biofuels and biofuel refineries, geothermal plants, hydroelectric dams, or modular nuclear reactors which doesn’t depend upon fossil fuels in general, and diesel fuel in particular.

This feeds back into economics, of course. The big hike in gas prices did not just halt the production – ironically – of industrial carbon dioxide. Nitrogen fertiliser is made from gas, and the high prices have caused some fertiliser plants to cease production while others are charging prices too high for farmers to afford. Unlike the direct increase in gas and electricity prices which are hitting consumers this winter, fertiliser shortages and high prices will not be felt until next autumn, when global grain prices reach eye-watering levels as a result of decreased yields. Nor will this be the only shock, because a large part of the gas – nitrogen – fed grain harvest goes to animal feed and to supposedly green biofuels; so expect the prices of both to rise in subsequent years.

Indeed, as oil production falls, even mineral resources which were believed to be plentiful will turn out to be inaccessible as the cost of recovering them is too great. This leaves us increasingly vulnerable to an economic version of Liebig’s Law of the Minimum – that the system fails as a result of its least available input, irrespective of whether the other inputs are plentiful. The World Economic Forum’s wet dream of a new hydrogen economy, for example, will not fail for want of hydrogen, water or electricity, but from global shortages of the platinum required as an irreplaceable fuel cell catalyst.

For most of those discussing climate change both inside and outside the COP26 conference this week, there appears to be little awareness even that oil and gas are actually fossil fuels. The activist demand that humanity – or even that part of it which lives in the developed states – cease consuming fossil fuels immediately, would bring about mass fatalities on a scale which would make Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot blush, as each one of our life support systems – food, water, lighting and heating, healthcare, etc.. – failed within a matter of days. Indeed, even without a full-scale cessation of use, shortages and high prices would disrupt the economics of what are better referred to as “fossil carbons,” if we are to include the full range of products derived from them:

This is because there is little scope to vary the substances derived from a barrel of oil during the refining process. Petrol – largely a waste product – accounts for the majority of a barrel and is sold to the public as a means of subsidising the price of the more valuable products – especially diesel fuel. One consequence of the proposed switch to electric vehicles is that most of those other products will become unaffordable; not just because of the loss of petrol sales, but because of the new requirement to somehow dispose of all of that petrol.

The shear volume of products derived from oil which we take for granted but which we would struggle to do without is mind boggling. And yet ill-informed activists, corporate CEOs and supposedly responsible political leaders are warmly applauded when they propose an immediate end to fossil fuels before we have had a serious debate about the kind of economy we could realistically have with the available alternatives (as opposed to fantasy technologies which do not – and in many cases cannot – exist).

The need for this debate will become increasingly urgent with each new year in which oil production is lower than it was the year before – beginning in 2018 and continuing indefinitely. Although this will likely be obscured by the immediate collision between a financial system based on infinite growth and a finite planet Earth which can no longer support growth. In less unequal economies, the economic shock might have been easier to bear. But in the economies in which we live, the result can only be eco-austerity for the majority even as those represented inside the COP26 conference look forward to one last round of eco-socialism for the rich. As Jasper Bernes points out:

“The problem with the Green New Deal is that it promises to change everything while keeping everything the same. It promises to switch out the energetic basis of modern society as if one were changing the battery in a car. You still buy a new iPhone every two years, but zero emissions. The world of the Green New Deal is this world but better—this world but with zero emissions, universal health care, and free college. The appeal is obvious but the combination impossible. We can’t remain in this world.”

But for now at least, activists play into the hands of green greed by pretending that the primary need today is to “raise awareness” of climate change – it isn’t. Even in the backward USA, the majority of people now accept that climate change is real, and that human activity has contributed to it. As a result, the mass imposition of eco-austerity via various new carbon taxes and green levies on a population which cannot afford it, is being tacitly accepted as the only alternative. Meanwhile, the two other civilisation-collapsing threats – economic collapse and resource depletion – cannot even be mentioned in polite company.

A billion people will be affected by extreme heat stress if the climate crisis raises the global temperature by just 2C, according to research released by the UK Met Office at the Cop26 climate summit. The scientists said that would be a 15-fold increase on the numbers exposed today.

The key goal of Cop26 is to keep the chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C alive but delegates said there is much work to do to achieve this in the summit’s final week.

The Met Office assessed wet-bulb temperature, which combines both heat and humidity. Once this measure reaches 35C, the human body cannot cool itself by sweating and even healthy people sitting in the shade will die within six hours. The Met Office analysis used a wet-bulb temperature limit of 32C, at which workers must rest regularly to avoid heat exhaustion, for at least 10 days a year.

If efforts to end the climate emergency fail and temperatures rise by 4C, half of the world’s population will suffer from this extreme heat stress.

Heat is the most obvious impact of global heating and extreme heat in cities across the world has tripled in recent decades, according to a recent study. In the summer of 2020, more than a quarter of the US population suffered from the effects of extreme heat, with symptoms including nausea and cramps.

At least 166,000 people died due to heatwaves around the globe in the two decades to 2017, according to the World Health Organization. The UK government has been repeatedly warned by its official climate advisers that the country is “woefully unprepared” for increased heat, particularly in vulnerable locations such as hospitals and schools.

The Met Office analysis is derived from research from the EU-funded Helix project, which also maps the rising risks of river flooding, wildfires, drought and food insecurity. Virtually the entire inhabited world is affected by at least one impact.

Andy Wiltshire, at the Met Office, said: “Any one of the climate impacts presents a scary vision of the future. But, of course, severe climate change will drive many impacts, and our maps show that some regions will be affected by multiple factors.”

Tropical countries including Brazil, Ethiopia and India are hardest hit by extreme heat stress, with some parts being pushed towards the limit of human liveability. But Prof Albert Klein Tank, director of the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: “These maps reveal areas of the world where the gravest impacts are projected to occur. However, all regions of the world – including the UK and Europe – are expected to suffer continued impacts from climate change.”

Scientists have been warning about deadly levels of heat and humidity for some years. A 2015 study showing the Gulf in the Middle East, the heartland of the global oil industry, set to suffer heatwaves beyond the limit of human survival if climate change is unchecked.

The deadliest place on the planet for extreme future heatwaves will be the north China plain, one of the most densely populated regions in the world and the most important food-producing area in the huge nation, according to 2018 research.

Here’s a tiny question. What is the lesson Covid is trying to teach us? As we settle in to a new normal, where Covid is going permanent, and there’s not much anyone can do about it except the billionaires who could vaccinate the world, but won’t — what should we be learning?

I think of Covid as a message backwards, from the future. And it says something like this. Life as you knew it is now over. The future is now going to become a bitter and bruising battle for the basics. The basics. Air, water, food, medicine, energy. Things that many of us once took for granted, and assumed would simply be around, as if by magic.

That age is now coming to an end. Did you ever think that breathable air would be in short supply? Where you have to wear a mask, because the air could infect you with a respiratory virus? That is what the future looks like, except for all the basics.

Another way to say that is that a certain way of life is now coming to an end.

To make that point, let me ask the question: why have Eastern countries done better on Covid than Western ones? What does that teach us about the future? Well, the first thing it teaches us that money and power and history are no guarantee of success in this battle for basics that the future is now about. Maybe the rich can buy clean air — but a whole society? Forget it.

People have to work together to provide one another the basics. And that is where the Western response to Covid has fallen down. Western nations are still fixated on illusory notions of freedom. But freedom itself is what is going to change radically in this age — if not by choice, then by the force of nature’s revenge.

Consider the example, as usual, of America. Americans wouldn’t cooperate with lockdowns. Governors revolted, and made it illegal to make people wear masks. Meanwhile, the Red States became the world’s worst Covid Belt, because people refused to stop…going to bars…having barbecues…eating at restaurants. Then the vaccine arrived, and too many Americans fought against having to take it. Meanwhile, the President simply gave away patents for the vaccines, allowing them to be privatized, even though they were made with public money. So the world is now unable to vaccinate people faster than they’re being infected, which means Covid will likely keep on spreading, and mutating, and becoming even more vaccine resistant. The result is that Covid has probably become a permanent fact of life — even air itself will be a luxury for the rich.

Americans, in other words, were obsessed with “freedom.” One certain idea of it. Freedom as an individualistic exercise in consumerism, in status and pleasure seeking. What Americans don’t tend to understand is that that old list of American “freedoms” is now badly obsolete. What good is it carrying a gun…when a tsunami or a megafire is approaching? What good is it being able to battle over whose God is stronger…when you can’t breathe the air anymore? What good is the “freedom” for corporations to maximize profits… if it means people die preventable deaths?

Life as the American set of freedoms is over now. Let me enumerate a few of those. The freedom to waste and squander. The freedom to believe in any old malarkey you like, no matter how ignorant. The freedom to abuse and exploit. The freedom to make the point of your life as shallow and foolish and stupid as you may want to, like just making more money.

None of these things were ever really “freedom.”

What such freedoms really were and are is the toxic hangover of centuries of brutality. Americans think they should be free to waste — while half the world still goes without decent food, water, or sanitation. They imagine they should be free to carry guns to Starbucks — while much of the world has been enslaved to pick those coffee beans. I’m not trying to moralize, just making a point. The world largely thinks of the American idea of freedom as a folly and a bewildering form of self-destruction.

Covid is trying to teach us, in no uncertain terms, that we are not really free in these old ways — and never were. They’re just paths to self-destruction. When we waste and squander, we pollute the skies, and the planet heats up. When we abuse the natural world, it bites back in the form of everything from pandemics to wildfires to floods.

Let me summarize what I am trying to say. The economist in me will put it this way. The global economy has been predicated on one simple transaction. The West and North — and particularly America — overconsumes, and the East and South is who and what is exploited to make that possible. That transaction is now over. The age of Western overconsumption is now at an end. Even the West is starting to suffer shortages of the basics — beginning with air. By the next decade, water, food, and energy will be in shortage, there, too.

The West can continue to pretend it can overconsume — by which I mean spend too much on consumerist toys which cost the reefs, rivers, forests, animals, skies, not to mention the human potential of people in the East, who are mostly stuck on assembly lines making stuff for it. Since that stuff is artificially cheap, those in the East are exploited — could you live on $3 an hour? — and by and large they stay poor. Because they stay poor, they don’t, in turn, have enough to invest in fighting climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse themselves — or even to give themselves decent food, water, sanitation, and medicine, which means pandemics that then affect the globe erupt at an increasing pace now.

That is why the whole world is coming to a standstill. This fatal bargain is now coming to an end. One great economic age is ending — the age of Western overconsumption. In hard terms, that means the West consuming more than the entire planet can provide sustainably, which is precisely why catastrophes from climate change to mass extinction to pandemics are now ripping our lives apart.

So where do we go from here? Well, we must ask the question: how did that age come to be, the age of Western overconsumption? If we want to fix it, that is. The answer, though, is ugly and difficult, and many people don’t want to hear it, much less understand it.

The age of Western overconsumption is really a consequence of a simple, brutal, dismal truth: 20% of the world is rich and white, and 80% is poor and not white. The 20% of the world that is rich and white is precisely that portion which enslaved, brutalized, and colonized the part that is 80% poor and not white.

Those centuries of abuse and exploitation led the rich and white societies to enjoy a generous surplus. You can think of that as everything from gold in bank vaults to all those hundreds of kinds of coffee and tea and sugar that you can find today in the aisles at a Walmart. The age of Western overconsumption is a product of the previous age of Western slavery, colonialism, and empire. That age allowed the West to get rich — and the West then spent its riches on consumption.

Economists once upon a time argued all this was a good thing. That buying stuff from poor countries would allow those countries to prosper, too. And that has been the case, to a minor degree — there have been some successes, like South Korea and Japan, and some half-successes, like China and Malaysia. But “externalities” dominated even this effect. What that means in plain English is that while rich Westerners buying stuff from poor Easterners might have balanced back the scales of empire and slavery — hey, at least they were being paid now, right? — nobody much noticed the effects on the planet.

This central transaction of the global economy, rich Westerners buying stuff from poor Easterners, was flawed in one central way. It was artificially cheap. Because it was still OK to exploit poor Easterners — to pay them the least that rich Westerners could get away with, instead of enough, say, to have decent water, food, sanitation, medicine, income — why wouldn’t it then be perfectly OK to abuse and exploit nature, too?

The East lost wars, and ended up enslaved. Nature has never really fought back at all — until now. And finally we are seeing how terrible its fury can be. Even the West can’t outrun an age of catastrophe like the one we face now — like I said, it’s already doing worse than the East when it comes to Covid.

So how do we fix all this? Well, the truth is that “we” probably can’t. I can tell you how, but Westerners by and large aren’t interested. What they seem to be interested in is never changing. In ways to be able to go on living in wasteful, harmful, toxic, abusive, exploitative ways, like Americans are — if you tell them how do that, they will admire and respect you. Gentle and wise Europe has made some progress, it’s true. But mostly, when you tell people like Americans that they must change now, and change fast, they give you the look: their eyes go dead and their jaws tighten. They’re holding in the anger of having to hear something that they don’t want to, aren’t equipped to, can’t handle.

“We” aren’t going to fix the age of Western overconsumption. What it would take is something like this: the rich West agreeing to pay nature. After all, nature works hard for us — it provides us everything from water to air to food to medicine. If the rich West were ready to agree to pay nature for the work it does — instead of exploit and abuse it — then treaties could be made to compensate Eastern countries and their people. To pay them living wages for doing things like caring for rivers, reefs, forests, oceans, animals, and so forth, instead of just toiling away on assembly lines to make cheap junk for rich Westerners.

But that is not going to happen, probably. I say that for a very simple reason. I have millions of readers, and the one topic nobody much in the West wants to hear about is fixing the future. They say they want to hear about it. They are constantly asking me what to do about the state of things. But when I write about it, only a handful truly listen. Not even a handful. So what I think the majority of Westerners mean when they ask me what to do is: “tell me a way to never have to change.”

Having a serious discussion with Westerners, with Americans in particular, about fixing the future has become impossible. That should be self-evident, though. Too many aren’t willing to change their lives even when a lethal pandemic is ripping through their societies.

And yet the rich West is the only part of the world with the money to really allow the future to be fixed. What does that tell you? It tells me it won’t be. And so what will happen, probably, is this. The world will go on spiraling headlong into the new Dark Age it’s entered. The fools and fanatics and extremists will go on rising to power, because the average person is incapable of change, but the old way of life is collapsing, and in that vacuum is where every fascism is really born.

Life as you know it really is coming to an end, my friend. If it hasn’t already. The problem? Not enough of us can face that simple fact with courage, grace, truth, kindness, love, and goodness. And so what do you expect to happen? If change can’t, then only collapse is left.

How such catastrophes occur remains mysterious. But research suggests that Earth may experience a cascade of disruptions when stressed

Five times in the last 500m years, more than three-fourths of marine animal species perished in mass extinctions. Each of these events is associated with a major disruption of Earth’s carbon cycle. How such catastrophes occur remains mysterious. But recent research increasingly points to the possibility that the Earth system – that is, life and the environment – may experience a cascade of disruptions when stressed beyond a tipping point.

As world leaders gather at Cop26 in Glasgow, it makes sense to rally behind concrete goals such as limiting warming to 1.5C. If we don’t meet such a goal, we’ll know it soon. Mass extinctions, on the other hand, may require tens of thousands of years or more to reach their peak. But if they are indeed the result of a disruptive cascade, we must act now to prevent such a runaway process from starting.

To see why, let’s first point out what we know.

Chemical analyses of ancient sedimentary rocks tell extraordinary stories of environmental change. A common element in these narratives is a crisis. Somehow the Earth system reaches a turning point where small fluctuations become large. In some cases, mass extinction ensues.

Many of these events are associated with increased releases of carbon dioxide (CO2) from volcanic eruptions. At least three of the five major extinction events occur at such times.

But volcanic releases of CO2 are too weak to explain, on their own, the severity of environmental crises. So scientists also consider other potential stressors. One idea focuses on releases of methane, a strong greenhouse gas. Another hypothesizes that volcanoes could effectively blow up sediments rich in coal or other organic material, thereby converting them to CO2.

My own recent research suggests that such case-by-case attributions are unnecessary. It turns out that the most severe environmental crises fall into either of two groups. In one group – the majority – carbon levels increase at a typical rate. In the other – four of the five great mass extinctions – carbon levels increase somewhat faster.

If the carbon cycle is pushed out of its equilibrium too rapidly, it may reach a tipping point beyond which the cycle itself greatly amplifies the original fluctuation. The resulting Earth-system disruption would then exhibit the intrinsic properties of the carbon cycle rather than special properties of the perturbation that initiated the disruption. This reasoning explains the common rate at which carbon levels often increased in the past. It also reflects well-established features of complex nonlinear systems.

n this view, mass extinction events are driven not just to the tipping point, but further beyond it. The extra kick may be responsible for their lethality.

Let’s now return to the risk of a modern catastrophe. Human activities are currently producing CO2 at a much faster rate than massive volcanism produced CO2 in the past. While that seems scary, we must recognize that the run-up to the crises of the past occurs over a much greater expanse of time than modern climate change. This means that the modern tipping point can be expressed in terms of total CO2 production rather than its rate. A simple calculation suggests that if we do not significantly cut back CO2 emissions, then we risk passing the threshold before the end of the present century.

This reasoning does not eliminate alternative explanations that call upon special sources of carbon. Moreover, the available data do not rule out mechanisms, such as ecological change, that could arrest a runaway process before it becomes severe. Nevertheless, the calculations are consistent with our present understanding of the carbon cycle.

These ideas are part of a continuing scientific effort to unravel some of the deepest mysteries of our past, not only to help inform our understanding of the risks of modern climate change, but also to discover how our world came to be. And therein lies a message for our political leaders convening at Cop26: let us not contribute to the risk of a sixth extinction. Efforts to limit CO2 emissions now may pay dividends further into the future than we can imagine.

In October, ahead of the useless and infuriating spectacle that is the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow, quietly, with little fanfare, and it seems almost reluctantly, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report titled:

“Climate Change and International Responses Increasing Challenges to US National Security Through 2040”

Taken together with articles and studies coming fast and furious regarding the state of the climate since the U.N. declaration of “Code Red for Humanity” last month, the report is both a sobering read and a final and unequivocal rebuke of climate denial as far as the U.S. government is concerned.

One notable omission from the report is the usual recap of the science behind climate change, designed to convince pea-brained, snowball-toting, mega-skeptics like Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma.

The first sentence states:

“Risks to US national security through 2040 will increase as countries respond to physical effects of climate change. Global temperatures most likely will surpass the Paris agreement goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius by around 2030, and the physical effects are projected to continue intensifying.” (emphasis mine)

Notice, they allowed no room for fudging. No “might be”, or “could be”, no “optimism” a-la CNN that “there is still hope!” or “ but we are not TOO late…”

The US military is planning on a greater than 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures and chaos, by 2030, even if Senator Inhofe thinks snowballs are proof of his scientific discovery that it is all a hoax.

Right below that declaration, is a deceptively bland-looking graphic, with full or half-full orbs denoting the likelihood and the severity of adverse events. The events below are considered “high risk to US national security” by the U.S. intelligence community by 2040, and by extension a risk to your security. That is less than 19 years from now. A newborn today will still be not old enough to buy a Bud in the U.S. but will be able enroll in the military and will have to deal with the risks of…

• Cross border water tension and conflict,
• Developing country financial and technology assistance,
• Petro-states resisting clean energy transition from fossil fuels,
• Competition with China over key minerals and clean energy technologies,
• Cross border migration due to climate impacts,
• The strain on energy and food systems,

to name a few.

In the key findings section we encounter:

“Key Judgment 1: Geopolitical tensions are likely to grow as countries increasingly argue about how to accelerate the reductions in net greenhouse gas emissions that will be needed to meet the Paris Agreement goals. The debate will center on who bears more responsibility to act and to pay — and how quickly — and countries will compete to control resources and dominate new technologies needed for the clean energy transition.”

This, after admitting that the world is not likely (at all) to meet the pledges made at Paris.

It remains a fact the industrial north is responsible for at least 62% of the CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere since 1751. It is also fact, that even after externalizing carbon emission to other countries and relying on shoddy carbon accounting, the North American per capita emissions is 3.5 times the world average, while the average European’s is 1.8. If you compare it to an average African citizen, a person living in North America is responsible for a staggering 13.7 times more carbon emitted annually.

“Countries most likely will wield contentious financial and economic tools to advance climate policies and defend their national economies”

Page 7

Many countries, devoid of the resources to meet the looming crisis, need help but the greedy, be it the feudal, colonial, or the capitalist kind, are loath to admit their undeniable responsibility to humanity, stop polluting, and pay up.

According to the External Affairs Minister of India, by the time of Indian Independence, the British had extracted $45 trillion of wealth from the subcontinent.

Even for allowing the moral escape clause of limiting the counting to start at a time when “international awareness of climate issues” grew, research estimates the environmental liability of the OECD 20 countries at $15 trillion!

However, the countries most responsible for this destruction are yet to make good on their pledge of the paltry $100 billion promised at the Copenhagen climate conference of 2009. Only $10.3 billion has been delivered so far.

The U.N. reports that in 2019, 118 million people in India “suffered the indignity of defecating in fields, forests, bodies of water, or other public spaces due to lack of access to toilets” — after making significant progress since 2015, when the number was over 560 million!

The Queen of England, on the other hand, having been handed sovereignty over the seabed around the British Isles in a breathtaking (pun intended) display of appropriating the commons by the consent of a handful of English gentlemen (The Continental Shelf Act of 1964), is now adding to her considerable ill-gotten gains by leasing the wind that blows over that seabed to the tune of millions of dollars. Apparently, looting of the sub-continent, and most of the planet for that matter, for 200 years wasn’t enough.

What would your demands be, if you were a leader of a country where 118 million people were desperately looking for a place to defecate twice a day while the country and the people that impoverished your country kept getting richer off air?

How would you plan for what would surely be “geopolitical tension” between nuclear-armed, economically challenged countries if you were a Pentagon analyst?

“Key Judgment 2: The increasing physical effects of climate change are likely to exacerbate cross-border geopolitical flashpoints as states take steps to secure their interests.”

Through its occupation of the Tibetan plateau, China controls the headwaters of not only the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers essential to feeding its ever-growing, coal-dependent population, but it also controls the headwaters of the Yarlung/Brahmaputra, Indus, Lakong, and Nu rivers, estimated to be home to 46 % of the world’s population in several countries. Two of those counties are nuclear powers and so is China.

Turkey sits on top of the Euphrates and Tigris, Ethiopia controls the Nile, Israel (also a nation that possesses nukes) has a death grip on the Jordan River, and Bolsinaro is burning the Amazon.

Flashpoints indeed!

The chart on page 2 of the report makes the point extremely clear even to the snowball-toting skeptics in the US Congress. Just look at the numbers. Happy Halloween!

DNI Report, Current & Projected Climate Change and it’s effects — page 2

Already over 800 million people worldwide suffer from hunger according to the UN. Given the enthusiasm for cutbacks on the part of industrialized countries, when the global average temperature reaches 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, that number will explode.

“All societies are three meals away from anarchy.” ...Vladimir Lenin

“Key Judgment 3: Scientific forecasts indicate that intensifying physical effects of climate change out to 2040 and beyond will be most acutely felt in developing countries, which we assess are also the least able to adapt to such changes. These physical effects will increase the potential for instability and possibly internal conflict in these countries, in some cases creating additional demands on US diplomatic, economic, humanitarian, and military resources.”

After decades of hegemonic oppression and capitalist exploitation, the weakened states of Central America are finding it impossible to deal with the effects of an increasingly destructive and hostile climate. Caught between hurricanes, droughts, and inept or outright corrupt governments while faced with starvation or becoming collateral damage to criminal elements, they flee, mostly northward.

The U.S., having found itself unable to deal with this mass of humanity to begin with, will soon find itself dealing with large internal population displacements due to the same dynamics, as well as more climate refugees massing its Southern border.

This northward movement of humanity in its hundreds of millions will leave no country unaffected. Along with the human misery of the so-called “caravans”, a flood of humanity, like Napoleon’s Grande Armee marching through Prussia, will devour everything in its path.

Donald Trump will not be the last leader to call for a wall, misguided as that approach is. India already has a wall along 76% of its border with Bangladesh, potentially in a futile attempt to cut off over 100 million future refugees. Backed against a rising sea, starvation, and no way out, they will also swarm that border. What would you do, if you had a child and that was the only way out?

What would you do, if you were a leader of a nuclear-armed country where 118 million people are lacking basic sanitation, let alone have access to air-conditioning needed to cool down in now-common 50 degrees C+ days, or have the electricity needed to run the pumps to drain your aquifers even further because China has reduced your water-flow and your crops are failing?

In a way, attempting to predict the future is futile. Humans are fickle, leaders may change their minds. We have discovered that even quantum particles can’t be counted on to stay put. That’s one reason the reporters and courtesans tell us “but there is hope”, I suppose.

The U.S. Intelligence agencies do not deal in hope. They deal in analysis and risk assessment, although even they can’t help but indulge in magical thinking sometimes. Under “Events that would change their assessment”, they include:

“A successful geoengineering deployment at the scale that results in global cooling without negatively disrupting weather patterns.”

Insert miracle here ___

It is a sad day for humanity when even the most clear-eyed assessment of our “predicament” hopes for technological magic to save us, while ignoring one of the most obvious solutions.

Cut the military’s budget that uses the threat of ongoing conflict to bloat its spending, and funnel the money into realistic, fossil-fuel-cutting, emission-reducing solutions. Now. Repeat worldwide.

Sir David Attenborough said it best during his speech at COP 26:

“If working apart we are a force powerful enough to destabilize our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it!”

I share his passion, but sadly, not his optimism.

Over the last 70 years, plastic - an incredibly malleable, versatile, and durable material - infiltrated the market and permeated seemingly every nook and cranny on Earth. Plastics can provide important benefits, from life-saving medical devices to safe and long-life food storage. However, unnecessary and avoidable plastics, particularly single-use packaging and disposable items, are polluting our planet at alarming rates. Decades of economic growth and an increasing dependency on throw-away plastic products has led to a torrent of unmanaged waste that pours into lakes, rivers, coastal environments, and finally out to sea, triggering a ripple of problems.

From Pollution to Solution: a global assessment of marine litter and plastic pollution shows that there is a growing threat in all ecosystems from source to sea. It also shows that while we have the know-how, we need the political will and urgent action by governments to tackle the mounting crisis. The report will inform priority actions at the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA 5.2) in 2022, where countries will come together to decide a way forward for global cooperation. The new UN Assessment warns that unless we get a handle on our plastics problem:

Without urgent action, the estimated 11 million metric tons of plastic currently entering the ocean annually will triple in the next twenty years.

This would mean between 23 and 37 million metric tons of plastic flowing into the ocean every year by 2040.

That is equivalent to 50 kilograms of plastics per metre of coastline worldwide …

… or the weight of as many as 178 Symphony of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world.

The problem has burgeoned into a global crisis requiring both immediate and sustained attention and action. This assessment provides the definitive wake-up call to the ubiquity of marine litter and the adverse impacts of plastic pollution – from environmental degradation to economic losses for communities and industries, to human health risks – and shows us how we can do better. It’s time to join hands to turn the tide on marine litter and plastic pollution by implementing the many – great and small – solutions at hand, with urgency, innovation, commitment and accountability.

Harm to Marine Life

Marine litter and plastic pollution are problematic for many reasons. Plastics don’t biodegrade (decompose naturally in a way that’s not harmful to the environment). Instead, they break down over time into ever smaller pieces known as microplastics and nanoplastics, which can have significant adverse impacts.

Impacts to marine life range from physical or chemical harm to individual animals, to wider effects on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Pieces of plastic have been found in the digestive system of many aquatic organisms, including in every marine turtle species and nearly half of all surveyed seabird and marine mammal species.

Sea turtles mistake floating plastic bags for jellyfish, slowly starving as their stomachs fill with indigestible trash.

Seabirds peck at plastics because it smells and looks like food.

Marine mammals, sea turtles and other animals often drown after becoming trapped in lost or discarded plastics including packaging or fishing gear.

A leading cause of death for North Atlantic right whales, one of the world's most critically endangered whales, is being ensnared in ghost fishing gear.

There are less obvious impacts too. Not only do the toxins already found in plastics affect the ocean food web but plastic pieces are known to soak up pollutants that flow off land into the sea, including pharmaceutical and industrial waste. The toxicity can transfer through the food chain as marine species eat and are eaten. There is also a growing concern about non-native species hitching a ride across the ocean on floating trash into foreign seas and soil, such as algae, molluscs and barnacles, which can invade and degrade distant aquatic environments and species. The problem is compounded by the fact that most plastic garbage in the ocean eventually sinks to the seabed like a submerged trash pile, smothering coral reefs and seafloor marine life below.

Harm to Humans

Humans are also at risk from marine litter and plastic pollution. Environmental health is inextricably linked to human health. The pervasiveness of microplastics across our planet raises serious concerns for people's safety. New research shows that people are inhaling microplastics through the air, consuming them through food and water and even absorbing them through the skin. Microplastics have even been found within our lungs, livers, spleens, and kidneys, and one study recently found microplastics in the placentas of newborn babies.

The full extent of the impact on human health is still unknown since the research is nascent. There is, however, substantial evidence that plastics-associated chemicals, such as methyl mercury, plasticisers and flame retardants, can enter the body and are linked to health concerns, especially in women. Scientists also believe that some of the common chemicals found in plastics, such as bisphenol A, phthalates, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), could leach into the body. These chemicals have been linked to endocrine disruption, developmental disorders, reproductive abnormalities and cancer. That’s reason enough for a precautionary approach to be adopted.

The impacts of plastic pollution aren’t felt equally around the world. Wealthier countries produce more plastic waste, which all too frequently flows into less developed countries where waste management is the least sophisticated. Recycling can help to reduce plastic production and plastic waste; however, a major problem is the low recycling rate of plastics worldwide, which is currently less than 10 per cent.

Communities in developing countries are the least capable of managing the environmental, health, social and cultural burden of plastic pollution due to a lack of government support or funds. That means women, children, waste workers, coastal communities, Indigenous Peoples and people who depend on the ocean feel the impacts more intensely, particularly when moving or burning mismanaged waste. It also means these economies suffer as they're suffocated by plastics.

Marine plastics negatively impact the ability of myriad ecosystems to provide the basic benefits that humans both enjoy and take for granted, which range from clean water to productive aquaculture and fisheries, pest and disease control, climate regulation, heritage and recreation. According to the Pollution to Solution Assessment, marine plastics pollution reduces valuable marine ecosystem service by at least US$500 billion to US$2,500 billion each year, and that’s not including other social and economic losses like tourism and shipping.

The Assessment highlights that the direct economic losses to coastal and maritime industries, such as fisheries and shipping, are significant. In the Mediterranean region, these losses have been estimated at close to US$138 million per year. In the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation region, the losses total US$10.8 billion, a nearly ten-fold increase compared to 2009. However, these losses aren’t well reported, and the true costs of marine litter and plastic pollution on human, environmental, and social health are still being discovered.

Plastics and Climate Change

Plastics are also a climate problem. Not everyone knows that plastic is predominantly produced from oil and gas, both of which are fossil fuels. The more plastic we make, the more fossil fuel is required, the more we intensify the climate crisis in a continual negative feedback loop. Also, plastic products create greenhouse gas emissions across their whole lifecycle. If no action is taken, greenhouse gas emissions from the production, recycling and incineration of plastics could account for 19 per cent of the Paris Agreement's total allowable emissions in 2040 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In recent years, there has been an increased urgency to protect the ocean and seas to tackle climate change. The ocean is the planet's largest carbon sink, storing as much as 90 per cent of the additional heat that carbon emissions have trapped in our atmosphere and one-third of the additional carbon dioxide generated since the industrial revolution. Absorbing large quantities of carbon has slowed the visible impacts of a warming planet – but also accelerated catastrophic effects below the water's surface – a warming, acidifying and chemically imbalanced ocean.

Carbon is sequestered in every component of the ocean, especially mangroves, seagrass, corals and salt marshes. The more damage we do to our ocean and coastal areas, the harder it is for these ecosystems to both offset and remain resilient to climate change.

Alarmingly, a recent study on marine plastics pollution by GRID-Arendal, a UNEP partner, indicates that the four coastal ecosystems that store the most carbon and serve as natural barriers against rising seas and storms – mangroves, seagrasses, salt marshes and coral reefs – are being put under pressure from land-based plastic pollution as a consequence of their proximity to rivers. More than ever, marine litter surveys and research are essential to predict the consequences of pressures, design mitigation approaches, and guide adaptation.

From Plastic Pollution to Solution

Rampant pollution, biodiversity breakdown, and climate instability are the most pressing planetary crises of our time. The rapid growth of plastic production already poses threats to Earth's natural systems, on which life depends, and it's projected to get worse. By 2040, plastic waste is expected to present an annual financial risk of US$100 billion for businesses that would need to bear the costs of waste management at expected volumes. It is estimated that in Italy alone, between 160,000 and 440,000 metric tons of additional waste was produced in 2020 due to intensified reliance on medical protective equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic. If just 1 per cent of the single-use masks that contribute to this figure were improperly disposed of, up to 10 million masks might enter and pollute the ocean per month.

While the quantity of marine plastics that we need to tackle is so large it's hard to fathom, science tells us that most of the solutions we need already exist. Numerous regional, national, and local activities are helping reduce the flow of plastics into the ocean, such as the Regional Seas Conventions, national bans on single-use plastic products, business and government commitments to reduce, redesign and reuse plastic products, increase the recycled plastic content in new products, curbside initiatives, and municipal bag bans.

"Breaking the Plastic Wave", a global analysis of how to change the trajectory of plastic waste, reveals that we can reduce the amount of plastic entering the ocean by about 80 per cent in the next two decades if we utilize existing technologies and solutions.

Continuing with business-as-usual is simply not an option. The “Pollution to Solution” assessment explains that the scale of the problem requires urgent commitments and action at the global level, across the plastics lifecycle and from source to sea to achieve the necessary long-term reduction of waste.

Improve waste management systems so that the right infrastructure is available to receive plastic waste and ensure a high proportion can be reused or recycled.

Enhance circularity by promoting more sustainable consumption and production practices across the entire plastic value chain.

Engage consumers in addressing plastic pollution to influence the market and to inspire behavioral change.

Close the tap by phasing out unnecessary, avoidable, and most problematic plastic items and replacing these with alternative materials, products and services.

Deal with the legacy through effective monitoring to identify sources, quantities and the fate of plastics.

Improve and strengthen governance at all levels.

Enhance knowledge and monitor effectiveness using sound science.

Improve finance with technical assistance and capacity building.

Several existing international agreements and conventions already provide support for reducing marine pollution, combatting climate change (SDG 13), and sustainably using the oceans (SDG 14). The Global Partnership on Marine Litter, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the Convention on Biological Diversity directly relate to the health of the ocean, its ecosystems and marine life. The Basel, Stockholm and Rotterdam conventions relate to the movement and disposal of hazardous waste and chemicals. There is also growing momentum for a potential global agreement on marine litter and plastic pollution to tackle this scourge.

There is no single solution. As with many intergenerational environmental assaults, this requires systems thinking, innovation and transformation. However, the goal is singular: reduce the use of unnecessary, avoidable and problematic plastics, and stop their flow into our lakes, rivers, wetlands, coasts and seas. We are all in this together, and together, we can, we must solve the marine litter and plastic pollution problem.

Global food systems have increased in complexity significantly since the mid-twentieth century, through such innovations as mechanization, irrigation, genetic modification, and the globalization of supply chains. While complexification can be an effective problem-solving strategy, over-complexification can cause environmental degradation and lead systems to become increasingly dependent on external subsidies and vulnerable to collapse. Here, we explore a wide array of evidence of complexification and over-complexification in contemporary global food systems, drawing on data from the Food and Agriculture Organization and elsewhere. We find that food systems in developed, emerging, and least developed countries have all followed a trajectory of complexification, but that return on investments for energy and other food system inputs have significantly declined—a key indicator of over-complexification. Food systems in developed countries are further along in the process of over-complexification than least developed and emerging countries. Recent agricultural developments, specifically the introduction of genetically modified crops, have not altered this trend or improved return on investments for inputs into food systems. Similarly, emerging innovations belonging to the “digital agricultural revolution” are likewise accompanied by energy demands that may further exacerbate over-complexification. To reverse over-complexification, we discuss strategies including innovation by subtraction, agroecology, and disruptive technology.

Introduction

Since the advent and rapid proliferation of industrialized agricultural practices in the mid-twentieth century, global food systems have consistently succeeded in producing more food, overall and per-capita, every year (Figure 1). While this is a tremendous technological achievement, these gains have required immense investments of social and ecological capital, and as such, have been accompanied by great environmental and societal costs (Campbell et al., 2017). The agri-food industry is among the largest contributing sectors to numerous global challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and freshwater contamination (Hajer et al., 2016; Evans et al., 2019). Global malnutrition and hunger are likewise high and on the rise, and the ability of our existing food systems to continue to feed current and future populations is questionable, given the expected environmental impacts of climate change on crop yields and the various systemic supply chain vulnerabilities highlighted by COVID-19 (Dawson et al., 2016; Laborde et al., 2020). As such, many scholars argue that nothing less than a rapid and radical transformation of global food systems is necessary (Rotz and Fraser, 2015; Searchinger et al., 2019; Rockström et al., 2020).


Figure 1. Trends in global food systems illustrate global successes in producing more food every year, both in total and per-capita, while keeping food prices relatively stable (left axis). Undernourishment has dropped modestly during this period but remains a significant problem (right axis). Food production data are standardized to a 1961 index value of 100. See the Supplementary Material for source data.

In this paper, we offer an innovative analysis of the successes and challenges of global food systems framed by historian Harold Tainter's theory of societal complexification (Tainter, 1995, 2006). Tainter defined complexification somewhat differently than is currently used in such areas as ecology and complex systems theory; he defines it as a strategy for solving problems, specifically solutions and technologies that require increased specialization of social roles and institutional hierarchies, greater technical competencies, larger scales of integration, increased use of energy, and increased production and flow of information (Flannery, 1972; Tainter, 1995, 2006; Strumsky et al., 2010). In this sense, complexification is an historically ubiquitous human strategy for adaptation and problem solving, but it is also costly, because increases in complexity generally require attendant increases in energy investments (Boserup, 1975; Tainter, 1995; Pelletier et al., 2011).

Some studies of past societies suggest that sustained complexification can become maladaptive and lead to diminishing returns (Tainter, 2006; Strumsky et al., 2010) (Figure 2). Tainter calls this over-complexification: a stage of development in which investments in complexity produce few benefits, increase dependence on externalities, and make societies more vulnerable to collapse (Tainter, 2006; Fraser, 2011; Angeler et al., 2020). As the costs and pitfalls of over-complexification become evident, Tainter argues, people begin to reject complex solutions and turn instead toward simple or traditional ones.


Figure 2. Tainter's theoretical relationship between complexification and efficiency. Some complexification in society is adaptive, e.g., technological innovations (A1,E1) which favorably impact the relationship between inputs and outputs (ROI). However, there is a threshold (A2,E2) at which the introduction of new technologies, while still beneficial to overall productive output, begin to have less benefit. Eventually, a threshold of over-complexification is reached (A3,E3), beyond which (shaded area) new investments in complexity are more costly than they are worth, and as such, can only be sustained by external subsidies. Historically, this is the point at which past societies have started on the pathway to collapse. If corrective action is taken (A2,E4), the relationship between complexity and energy can be stabilized to balance costs and advantages (A1,E5). Adapted from Tainter (1995).

Below, we draw on a wide array of quantitative data to explore the extent of complexification in global food systems and evaluate whether there is evidence of over-complexification. First, we present evidence that the recent history of global food systems has been one of ever-increasing complexification, beginning with mechanization in the developed world in the early twentieth century, and most recently taking such forms as genetic modification and globalization of supply chains. Then, we explore evidence of over-complexification; following Tainter, we focus on return on investments (ROI) for energy (E-ROI) as well as for mechanization, irrigation technology, chemical-based fertilizer and pesticides, and most recently, adoption of genetically modified (GM) crops (Woods et al., 2010; Pelletier et al., 2011). We also discuss evidence of societal rejection of complexity, specifically in the forms of local and alternative food movements and GM skepticism.

Note that we recognize that “global food systems” comprise a heterogeneous assemblage of systems for food production, distribution, processing, and marketing, some of which exhibit tighter local and regional couplings than others. As such, we explore evidence of complexification globally, broken down by developed countries, least developed countries, and emerging countries, and also for the four top GM-adopting countries (which we take as an indicator of advanced complexification): Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. Given the presumptively transformative nature of GM technology, our assumption is that any evidence of benefits of GM crops to E-ROI will be particularly evocative regarding the state of complexification in these nations.

We couch our findings in a discussion of emerging trends in agribusiness, such as digital agriculture, vertical farming, and the use of big data. Given these unfolding innovations, and given too the urgency to rapidly transform global food systems, our discussion is both timely and critical (Weersink et al., 2018; Rotz et al., 2019). As such, we conclude by exploring existing and emerging strategies for reversing over-complexification in food systems, including innovation by subtraction, disruptive innovation, and agroecology.

(...)

Huge amounts of uncounted emissions of highly warming greenhouse gas methane are being released by "super-emitters" all over the world, satellite observations reveal.

Scientists have only recently worked out how to detect methane emissions from space, but what they have seen since has taken them by surprise. The greenhouse gas, which is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, is leaking from gas pipelines, oil wells, fossil fuel processing plants and landfills all over the world. It is frequently released through negligence and improper operations; the emissions, in many cases, are not accounted for in mandatory greenhouse gas inventories.

"We see quite a lot of those super-emitters," Ilse Aben, senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) told Space.com. "These are large emissions, and we see a lot of them on the global scale — much more than we had expected."

Aben heads a team of experts working with data from an instrument called Tropomi (for TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument) that flies on the European Sentinel 5P satellite, which is part of the Earth-observing constellation Copernicus.

Sentinel 5P launched in October 2017, and Tropomi started providing data a few months later. In the years since, scientists have slowly learned how to reliably interpret its measurements.

"We measure methane concentrations in the total column from the top of the atmosphere down to the surface," Aben said. "What we are looking for is the little bit of extra signal that suggests something is being released on the ground."

Tropomi pinpoints emission sources with a rather crude resolution of 3.4 by 4.3 miles (5.5 by 7 kilometers), an area about the size of a smaller city. But the Tropomi team collaborates with Canadian company GHGSat, which currently flies three methane-detecting satellites, the first of which launched in 2016. GHGSat provides a much more detailed resolution of 66 feet (20 meters), which enables the company to do finer detective work.

"With Tropomi, we look for these hotspots on a global scale," said Aben. "We measure methane across the globe every day, and then we provide these locations to GHGSat and they can zoom in and pinpoint the exact facility that is leaking those emissions."

The oil industry's dirty secrets

The collaboration has proved fruitful. In data gathered over the first two years of Tropomi's operations, scientists discovered major leaks of methane in the oil and gas fields of Turkmenistan, most of which were completely preventable.

Oil and gas fields must build flare installations that prevent methane from leaking into the atmosphere, and Aben said that these leaks suggest those installations are not being used properly.

"These emissions actually relate to flare installations that are not being flared in the oil and gas industry," said Aben. "Flaring is meant to get rid of the methane gases by burning them. It would obviously be better to capture the gas, but they are not even burning it. It's just methane pouring out, and that is not normal operations."

The Tropomi measurements revealed thousands of tonnes (in some cases even tens of thousands of tonnes) of methane leaking from 29 plants every hour.

And the problem is not limited to Turkmenistan. A separate analysis of Sentinel 5P data released by French analytics company Kayrros in March this year found frequent methane leaks on three major pipelines supplying natural gas from Russia to Europe. Most of these events happened during maintenance work. Surprisingly, Kayrros detected 40% more leaks in the pandemic year 2020 compared to 2019, in spite of the overall reduction in gas imports from Russia to Europe, which was reported by the International Energy Agency.

The U.S. is not blameless either. American scientists, using the Tropomi data, detected huge amounts of methane leaking from abandoned uncapped gas wells in Pennsylvania, and quantified massive leaks from several gas well blowouts that spouted methane for weeks.

Yasjka Meijer, the mission scientist of Europe's planned greenhouse gas monitoring mission CO2M, told Space.com that combined, all these leaks might account for much more than the emissions that natural gas companies report. These hidden emissions could, in fact, undermine the effectiveness of the shift away from the burning of coal toward the burning of gas for electricity generation, Meijer said. Many countries rely on gas as a temporary measure to decrease greenhouse gas emissions while developing fully renewable energy resources.

"A lot of oil and gas producers say that their average leakage is about 3 to 4%," said Meijer. "It turns out to be much more. But burning gas in a power plant outperforms coal in terms of the carbon footprint only if the leakage is not more than about 8%. With the numbers now, we actually have doubts, because it might be perhaps 10 or 15% and then the global climate impact would be much larger."

But it's not just the fossil fuel industry that has its dirty emission secrets. Aben said the team was almost shocked at the extent of methane plumes leaking from landfills.

"Before we saw the first one, I had never thought we would be able to see landfill emissions from space," said Aben. "That certainly gave us a 'wow' moment when we saw it for the first time. And now there's a whole bunch of them that we have detected."

Early stages

Thorsten Fehr, head of the atmospheric section at the European Space Agency (ESA), which is developing the CO2M mission and operating Sentinel 5P for Copernicus, cautions that monitoring greenhouse gas emissions from space is still in its early stages. But the space industry is ready to take the technology another step further and effectively start policing emitters from space. Such a capability will be crucial to keep the world on track to meeting its emission reductions targets in order to keep global warming close to the 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degree Celsius) limit set out in the Paris Agreement negotiated at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris.

Currently, nations self-report their emissions based on the amount of fossil fuels the various sectors of their economy burn. However, countries often release these numbers on a five-year delay, and experts question their accuracy.

"The Paris Agreement asks for a transparency framework," Fehr told Space.com. "To basically show what people are doing, and that's exactly what we are trying to do now."

There are currently a plethora of space missions being readied to tackle methane emissions. In addition to GHGSat, Sentinel 5P and CO2M, a U.S. company called MethaneSAT, a spin-off from the nonprofit organization Environmental Defense Fund, plans to launch a new methane-monitoring spacecraft in October 2022. Earth-observation company Planet, together with a range of research institutions including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, are developing an entirely new constellation of methane-monitoring satellites as part of a public-private partnership.

This sneaky greenhouse gas is a focus of an international pledge that was introduced at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow on Nov. 3. Over 100 nations have signed the document, promising to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030. According to a European Commission's statement, this reduction alone could reduce the atmospheric warming projected by 2050 by 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.28 degrees Celsius).

Scientists call methane emissions a "low-hanging fruit" and hope that the reductions should be relatively easy to achieve.

"It's in nobody's interest to release this methane," said Meijer. "It should be easier to regulate than carbon dioxide, because for carbon dioxide, you would have to tell people to stop burning the fossil fuels."

The carbon dioxide challenge

To similarly monitor carbon dioxide emissions is much more complicated. But Fehr says ESA is ready for the challenge, and with the CO2M mission plans to provide the first of its kind tool capable of distinguishing individual anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide from space.

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2, launched in 2014, currently provides data on the regional distribution of carbon dioxide sources and natural sinks, reflecting global trends and seasonal changes. Its sister instrument, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, is attached to the International Space Station, taking measurements since 2019. But the resolution of these two instruments is nowhere near detailed enough to spot individual emitters.

"There's a big difference between monitoring carbon dioxide and methane," said Meijer. "The [natural] amount of methane in the air is much lower than the amount of carbon dioxide. Plus what is being emitted from sources is much higher than the background so it's much easier to distinguish it from space. For carbon dioxide it's the opposite. There's already a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere naturally and the addition of individual sources is relatively small, you're talking about a quarter of a percent."

There are currently nearly 420 parts of carbon dioxide in a million parts of air, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the 1700s, before humankind started burning fossil fuels, the value was about 280, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The CO2M mission, expected to launch by 2026, hopes to measure the concentrations with an accuracy of 0.25%, which, according to Meijer, is still a technical challenge.

Making the world to cooperate

Aben hopes satellite observations will help keep the world on track to tackle climate change. The scale of the methane leaks surprised scientists, she said, but now that the previously hidden gas pipeline leaks and polluting landfills can finally be seen, fixing the problem is, at least, possible.

"I think that these satellite observations will certainly stir up and change the way we will be reporting emissions," she said. "We are seeing things that I think are not visible at the moment in some of the reporting. Not all of the reporting is wrong, but this certainly adds a category of emissions that we might have missed."

Meijer, however, cautions that it might still take a considerable effort to get the whole world on board. "This is the first time that you can actually put a finger on it," he said. "But the problem is, how are you going to communicate with a country somewhere in Africa that there is too much methane leaking out of their facilities."

At the recently concluded COP26 conference, nations strengthened their commitments to the goals of the Paris Agreement, agreeing to speed up the elimination of coal from the energy mix and increase their emission reduction efforts across the board.

With the new pledges, the world might be on track to keeping the global temperature rise within 3.2 degrees F (1.8 degrees C). That value is still above the preferred limit of 27 degrees F (1.5 degrees C), but considerably better than the 4.8 degrees F (2.7 degrees C) trajectory predicted under previous plans. The battle is by far not yet won.

Flooding and mudslides had closed most routes between the coast and BC Interior over the past 24 hours, but the back route through Whistler on Hwy 99 remained open this morning.

That changed shortly after 11 am, when DriveBC reported that a mudslide 42 kilometres south of Lillooet had shut down Hwy 99 as well.

The only way to drive between the coast and the rest of Canada at this time is through the United States.

However, Washington is also seeing highway closures due to the inclement weather and residents would need a COVID-19 test to re-enter Canada.

In Glasgow over the past couple of weeks, we were treated to one vision of the climate future: halting, inadequate policy progress coupled with ever-rising hyperbole and rhetorical alarm. In British Columbia, Canada, right now, a different vision is unfolding: one climate emergency following in the wake of another, indeed made possible by the previous disaster, and in a prosperous, modern, well-governed corner of the global north, absolutely overwhelming local infrastructure and the capacity of public officials and local bureaucracy to manage the crisis.

In June, the Pacific “heat dome” shattered temperature records throughout B.C., forcing climate scientists to reconsider their models and killing hundreds of humans and more than a billion marine animals, along with harvests of whole regions of farmland — “the cherries roasting on trees.” The wildfire season overall burned more than 3,000 square miles this year, an area of land about the size of Puerto Rico, releasing probably a hundred million tons of carbon into the atmosphere and destroying the city of Lytton. And now, as happened in California with much more modest rainfall after the historic wildfire season of 2018, a “storm of the century” powered by an “atmospheric river” has hit Canadian mountains totally stripped of tree protection, producing mudslides and rockslides and landslides, trapping hundreds of cars on roads suddenly piled with debris including “families in cars without food or medications.” The storm closed major highways, downed power lines, forced the evacuation of thousands, shut down two of the country’s biggest railroad lines and its largest container port, and literally washed away parts of the region’s chief east-west roadway, the Trans-Canada Highway. A thousand train cars carrying grain are currently idling, and it’s estimated that the railroads won’t reopen for weeks. Some of the highways may take longer. Farmers have been “trying to save their livestock by towing them in boats in water that was five feet deep.” Others have been herding cattle by Jet Ski.

The storm itself was historic, but the impacts would have been impossible had the prior destruction not paved the way for these climate cascades. Just look at these images.

“It came down faster than the speed of sound,” one local resident said of a mudslide in a vivid interview with the CBC. “I just turned around, and I’m just watching the whole side of the mountain coming down and taking out these cars … everything just being swept away. Just complete panic.” She watched with her husband and 9-year-old son as three cars were carried off by the mud. “No sooner do we get back into our vehicles, the people that were in front of us are just screaming and running,” she said. “The look on their faces, it was like a tsunami was coming. It was the scariest thing that I’ve ever seen.”

A water-treatment facility in Merritt was flooded, mixing the local drinking water with sewage. A floodwall in Mount Vernon completed in 2016 and designed to withstand a crest of 38 feet barely held — the Skagit River reached 36.79 feet on Monday night.

“There were neither road nor flood warnings,” one resident of Vancouver told The Guardian. “It seems nobody expected the storm to be so devastating. The rain was just incessant for 24 hours.”

“The impacts have been significantly greater than expected,” acknowledged Mike Farnworth, the deputy premier of British Columbia, echoing the language of bewilderment and disorientation that accompanied the heat dome this summer as well.

This is Canada. We aren’t just failing to address the growing climate crisis to come; we’re unprepared even for the impacts already here — in part because they keep surprising us with their intensity and in part because, in places across the global north, we can’t seem to fathom our genuine vulnerability.

We’ve all watched over many decades the various verbal spins on the changes in our atmosphere brought about by industrial human activity. We’ve bounced from Air, Water and Land Pollution to Acid Rain to Greenhouse Effect to Ozone Hole to Global Warming to the Plastic Scourge to Mass Extinction to Climate Change. Whichever is the term du jour gets the most press and attention. Each of these things has brought arguments over the scope and the reasons for why and inevitably someone says something unbelievably banal and dimwitted such as “The climate always changes” as though that somehow means anything without the how and how much and how fast parts included. Sometimes it’s the “It was way hotter on Earth before such as during the Jurassic Period” as though that was supposed to bode well for us late warm-blooded mammals that evolved in a much cooler environment. Regardless of all that rhetoric and spin, the time is past to confront the Reality of what we have wrought and to name ALL of these many things together, each of which is only increasing to add up to Biosphere Trauma.

Climate Change is not a cause but a symptom of many underlying causes. However, these causes such as carbonization of the atmosphere are not alone as insults to Nature and it is important to keep a sharp eye on all of these threats because any one of them could be our undoing, let alone all of them taken together. This includes:

• Atmospheric carbon
• Toxins and carcinogens everywhere
• Plastification
• Overfishing
• Unsustainable farming
• Deforestation
• Over-paving
• Loss of wilderness, wetlands and encroachment
• Overpopulation
• Resource mismanagement
• Loss of biodiversity
• Energy waste
• Food waste
• Acidification
• Mass extinction

The biosphere is a global ecosystem composed of living organisms (biota) and the abiotic (nonliving) factors from which they derive energy and nutrients.

This is the standard definition of the Biosphere which is another way of saying “Where all life lives on Earth.” This includes our oceans and atmosphere, every forest, plain, mountain, valley, lake, river, stream, aquifer, layers of soil, tundra, marsh, swamp, wetland, desert and more. Planets without biospheres are said to be abiotic or dead. I’m not entirely sure I agree with this definition since I find it perfectly feasible that the Earth or even the whole Solar System or Galaxy is a living organism we just don’t understand yet. I’m not even so sure every atom is not in possession of some animating Life Force (animism), but that’s a topic for philosophical debate.

Regardless, we as humans have very specific biological needs and conditions which must be met for us to survive starting with a narrow temperature range. The Earth is sometimes called a Goldilocks Planet because it occupies a sweet spot in relation to the Sun where if we were much closer it would be too hot to sustain life (Venus) and much farther too cold (Mars). Other factors such as availability of certain elements in the right mix and the right gravity all conspire for optimal living conditions. Recent hunting for other such planets has not been particularly fruitful and certainly nothing for many light-years around has been found or proven to sustain similar life to Earth’s. We are an Oasis, a blue jewel in the vast void of Space.

To ruin the habitability of such a perfect home would necessarily rise to the level of a Cosmic Crime, one that is simply punished with extinction. The Earth has certainly lost count of the number of species that have come and gone like so many canceled shows on the Cosmic TV. Sure, some shows have a nice run of many millions of years and others not so long and one might even see it as one big show where various species have their own episodes, like the dinosaurs. However you look at it, the Human Show is perilously close to being canceled. But we are not alone. Our fellow mammals such as lions, tigers, bears, dogs, whales, dolphins and many others are also in danger. So are many non-mammalian species such as birds, bees, corals, fish, octopuses and many, many more. And none of it is their fault. It’s entirely OUR FAULT.

We are the only industrial strength species that runs machines, makes synthetic chemicals and burns things 24 hours per day, 365 days per year! Industrial Scale means that we have amplified our effects well beyond our small numbers (compared to say 4 quadrillion ants). We have cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships moving at all hours of every day. We create massive amounts of materials (products) that Nature can’t break down through biological processes and we spread them relentlessly to all corners of the Earth. For all intents and purposes, we behave like an infection or a parasite that is slowly killing its host.

We know that poison when taken often requires only the tiniest amount to bring our biological process to a complete halt (i.e. death). We have even made such powerful poisons that mere micrograms can kill us. But death is not the only symptom of poisons. We didn’t invent poisons. Thousands of animals use poisons and venoms to defeat their prey or defend against predators. All of those are Natural agents, however, and Nature has no trouble breaking them down. Some poisons act slowly, making us ill, sluggish or giving us cancer or other maladies. It is highly likely that our manufactured poisons permeate our biosphere in the form of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, particulates, plastics, long-chain polymers, radioactive materials, gases and more that are constantly being manufactured and moved around.

We are a short-sighted species, often living for today with few thoughts about what the future holds. The time for such shallow behavior is over! Farmers will often concentrate on this year’s harvest using pesticides, fertilizers and various unsustainable practices that often create downstream issues such as dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico or degrade the very soil they depend on making it less arable next year. This sort of thinking goes far beyond farming and applies to millions of businesses, entire governments and importantly, individuals who live for today’s comfort, delusional as to how this same comfort may very well be at the expense of future comfort.

We all keep warm in the winter, cool in the summer, travel around freely, eat food from land and sea, buy packaged goods, drugs, cosmetics, devices, doodads, upkeep lawns, you name it. Each of these things in their current forms are unsustainable. Each of these contribute to Biosphere Trauma. But they don’t need too.

Sustainability is the capacity to endure in a relatively ongoing way across various domains of life. … According to Our Common Future (Brundtland Report), sustainable development is defined as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Sustainability is not just a convenient word, it is an imperative. Any practice that has a net effect of degrading the biosphere is said to be unsustainable. Degradation of the biosphere is an extremely careless and egregious crime against what once WAS a perfectly operating Interdependent System that supports the Web of Life. Before humans blew up, the Earth was a specialist at sustainability. Each part of the puzzle fit with the next and each species was afforded their share of the whole and each year was equal to the next. Humans for some reason have decided to not only take more than our share but to also spoil the remaining shares for everyone else. In reality, we are taking from our future selves, our children and their children and that is a major crime.

Yes, it’s good that we have recently become more aware of our impact and we have found a term, Climate Change, to hang onto and communicate a problem but this term is far too weak to convey the dire situation. After all, people are right to point out that the climate has always changed. Climate Change IS normal. So why would we use a term that was so mild to describe an existential threat? Well we know—TOO MUCH Climate change TOO FAST. That’s the real situation. But Climate Change is a little too safe a term and can be glossed over as “normal” or “it happened before” as it often is, becoming an excuse to minimize the threat, kicking the can down the road or denial or even dismissal. It’s time to sound a louder alarm before it’s too late, if it’s not already. Rapid Climate Change is only ONE of our many Biosphere problems.

All of these things are connected as they always have been. Deforestation leads to less oxygen and more CO2 at the same time we pour billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. Overfishing disturbs the chain of life in the oceans, taking food away form other creatures and allowing more parasitic forms to flourish. Indeed, the real threat of Ecosystem Collapse looms before us. This is where so many threads are pulled out of what was a perfect tapestry and the whole thing falls apart and can’t be put back together, just like Humpty Dumpty, no matter of many of the King’s Horses or Men try. Not everything is recoverable and the point of no return is a VERY REAL point we are rapidly approaching.

Oh, the Earth will be quite fine. She’s well prepared to do her Planet thing with her Age Old partner the Sun. She has all the time in the world and can evolve a whole new set of creatures from the bottom of the sea over a billion years. But do we really want to make her do that when she is offering us such a wonderful, sustainable alternative? Why would we chose that path unless we were completely insane and suicidal?

We need to start looking at the WHOLE picture we are creating and not just one of its symptoms. We must be clear-minded, sober and Truthful. We must be caring, not just for ourselves but for ALL creatures and ALL generations. Therefore I strongly believe it is time to rebrand Climate Change as something far more dangerous and ominous that should be on the tongues of every activist and young person who is concerned about where we are going. It’s time to quit messing around and call it what it is—Biosphere Trauma.

Lightning-sparked wildfires killed thousands of giant sequoias this year, adding to a staggering two-year death toll that accounts for up to nearly a fifth of Earth’s largest trees, officials said on Friday.

Fires in Sequoia national park and the surrounding national forest that also bears the trees’ name tore through more than a third of groves in California and torched an estimated 2,261 to 3,637 sequoias. Fires in the same area last year killed an unprecedented 7,500 to 10,400 of the 75,000 trees.

Sequoias are the largest trees by volume and are native in only about 70 groves scattered along the western side of the Sierra Nevada range. They were once considered nearly fire-proof. That intense fires burned hot and high enough to kill so many of the giants puts an exclamation point on the impact of the climate crisis.

“The sobering reality is that we have seen another huge loss within a finite population of these iconic trees that are irreplaceable in many lifetimes,” said Clay Jordan, superintendent of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. “As spectacular as these trees are, we really can’t take them for granted. To ensure that they’re around for our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, some action is necessary.”

The combination of a heating planet that has created hotter droughts and a century of fire suppression that choked forests with thick undergrowth has fueled blazes that have sounded the death knell for trees that date back to ancient civilizations.

California has seen its largest fires in the past five years, with last year setting a record for most acreage burned. So far, the second-largest amount of land has burned this year.

After last year’s Castle and SQF Complex fires took officials by surprise by wiping out so many sequoias, extraordinary measures were taken to save the largest and oldest trees this year.

The General Sherman tree, the largest living thing on Earth, and other ancient trees were wrapped in a foil blanket. A type of fire-retardant gel, similar to that used as absorbent in babies’ diapers, was dropped on tree canopies that can exceed 200ft (60 meters) in height. Sprinklers watered down trunks and flammable matter was raked away from trees.

The measures spared the Giant Forest, the premiere grove of ancient trees in the park, but the measures couldn’t be deployed everywhere.

The bulk of the Suwanee grove in the park burned in an extreme fire in the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River drainage. The Starvation Complex grove in Sequoia national forest was largely destroyed, based on estimates of how much of it burned at high-severity.

In 2013, the park had done climate modeling that predicted extreme fires wouldn’t jeopardize sequoias for another 50 years, said Christy Brigham, chief of resource management and science at the two parks. But that was at the start of what became a punishing five-year drought that essentially broke the model.

Amid the drought in 2015, the park saw giant sequoias torched for the first time. Two fires in 2017 killed more giant sequoias, serving as a warning for what was to come. “Then the Castle fire happened and it was like, ‘Oh, my God,’” Brigham said. “We went from the warning sign to hair on fire. To lose 7,000 trees in one fire is crazy.”

A full mortality count from last year’s fire is still not available because crews in the forest were in the process of confirming how many trees died when lightning struck on 9 September, igniting the Windy fire in Sequoia national forest and the SQF Complex in the park, Brigham said.

Not all the news from the estimates was bleak.

While fire burned into 27 groves and large numbers of trees were incinerated, a lot of low-intensity fire that sequoias need to thrive cleared out vegetation and the heat will open cones so they can spread their seeds.

Areas, however, where fire burned so hot that seeds were killed may not be able to regenerate. For the first time, the park is considering planting seedlings to preserve the species.

“I’m not ready to give up on giant sequoias,” Brigham said.