At its most violent, Chido had winds of 150 miles per hour, and was still going nearly 140 miles an hour when it hit Mayotte. Huts, tin shanties, and bungalows offered no shelter at all from this juggernaut.

The Grantham Institute at Britain’s Imperial College estimated that human-caused climate change has made it 40% more likely that a tropical cyclone such as Chido would move from a Category 3 (11–129 miles per hour) to a Category 4 (130–156 miles per hour) on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. That is, the average global surface temperature is now 2.34º F. (1.3º C.) higher than in the late 1700s before the Industrial Revolution put all that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning coal (and later petroleum and fossil gas). That extra heat makes the Indian Ocean hotter, and hot ocean waters create and turbocharge cyclones (called “hurricanes” in the Atlantic). Hot waters also put more moisture into the atmosphere, causing massive downpours of the sort that struck Mayotte. The scientists at the Grantham institute warn that if we heat the world up by 4.68º F. (2.6º C.) above the average of the late 1700s, cyclones like Chido will be 66% more likely to move from a Cat 3 to a Cat 4.

Seriously, I don’t know how people expect to have civilization if we do that, i.e. if we don’t stop burning gasoline and coal right now. France is able to establish an emergency airlift of food and supplies to Mayotte from Réunion off the coast of Madagascar, without which there would be mass starvation within 4 days. But what if hurricanes even more powerful than Chido hit Réunion and Mayotte at the same time? Repeatedly?

I lived in the Horn of Africa when I was a teenager, and it gave me an interest in the region. If you come down the coast of West Africa, Kenya gives way to Tanzania below Mombasa. And then just south of Mtwara you come to the border with Malawi. And if you got on a ship there and went out a little southeast, you’d come to the Comoros islands (in Arabic, jaza’ir al-qamar or Islands of the Moon). Comoros is an independent country now, consisting of three islands. It is a former French colony that became independent in 1975 and is a member of the Arab League.

But a fourth island, Mayotte, might have become part of Comoros in the age of decolonization in the 1970s. The people there instead voted to remain part of France, and they are now recognized as an overseas département. When you’re part of France, you’re part of France, no matter if you are out on the edge of Africa facing the Indian Ocean. They have a deputy in the French National Assembly and two senators. Puerto Rico should be so lucky.

French President Emmanuel Macron even came for a visit on Thursday.

The 320,000 people there are mostly Sunni Muslims of Bantu heritage and their language descends from Swahili (Arabic for the “coastal language”). There are a few Roman Catholics. About 20% of the population has good French, essential for getting a government job. There may be 100,000 undocumented migrants — people come from the Comoros to Mayotte hoping it will be a launching pad for getting into France.

It is tempting to see what happened to Mayotte as a fluke, and to see the suffering there as that of a distant and exotic people. But islands and coastal areas being flattened by hurricanes is going to become more and more common, and future storms will be even more destructive. This cosmopolitan member of the Islands of the Moon is trying to tell us something. We should listen.

—–

Bonus Video:

French Mayotte cyclone’s toll still unclear as authorities ramp up response • FRANCE 24 English

Three-quarters of Earth’s land has become drier since 1990.

Droughts come and go – more often and more extreme with the incessant rise of greenhouse gas emissions over the last three decades – but burning fossil fuels is transforming our blue planet. A new report from scientists convened by the United Nations found that an area as large as India has become arid, and it’s probably permanent.

A transition from humid to dry land is underway that has shrunk the area available to grow food, costing Africa 12% of its GDP and depleting our natural buffer to rising temperatures. We have covered several consequences of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction in this newsletter. Today we turn to the loss of life-giving moisture – what is driving it, and what we are ultimately losing.

Why is the land drying out so fast? It’s partly because there is more heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases emitted from burning fossil fuels. This excess heat has exacerbated evaporation and is drawing more moisture out of soil.

‘Oil, not soil’

Climate change has also made the weather more volatile. When drought does cede to rain, more of it arrives in bruising downpours that slough the topsoil.

A stable climate would deliver a year’s rain more evenly and gently, nourishing the soil so that it can nurture microbes that hold onto water and release nutrients.

This is the kind of soil that industrial civilisation inherited. It’s disappearing.

“Soil is being lost up to 100 times faster than it is formed, and desertification is growing year on year,” says Anna Krzywoszynska, a sustainable food expert at the University of Sheffield.

“The truth is, the modern farming system is based around oil, not soil.”

Fossil fuels have unleashed agriculture from the constraints of local ecology. Once, the nutrients that were taken from the soil in the form of food had to be replaced using organic waste, Krzywoszynska says. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, made with fossil energy at great cost to the climate, changed all that.

Next came diesel-powered machinery that brought more wilderness into cultivation. Farm vehicles as heavy as the biggest dinosaurs now churn and compact the soil, making it difficult for earthworms and assorted soil organisms to maintain it.

Tractors and chemicals served humanity for a long time, Krzywoszynska says. But soil is now so degraded that no amount of fossil help can compensate.

“Across the world, soils have been pushed beyond their capacity to recover, and humanity’s ability to feed itself is now in danger.”

Green pumps and white mirrors

The primary way that we have been making up for lost food yield is turning more forests into farms. This is accelerating our journey towards a drier, less liveable world because forests, if allowed to thrive, create their own rain.

“Water sucked up by tree roots is pumped back into the atmosphere where it forms clouds which eventually release the water as rain to be reabsorbed by trees,” say Callum Smith, Dominick Spracklen and Jess Baker, a team of biologists at the University of Leeds who study the Amazon rainforest.

“In the Amazon and Congo river basins, somewhere between a quarter and a half of all rainfall comes from moisture pumped from the forest itself.”

Image by MAMADOU TRAORE from Pixabay

Some experts have argued that the UN report understates Earth’s growing aridity by overlooking the water that is held in snow caps, ice sheets and glaciers. Climate change is melting this frozen reservoir, which also serves as a seasonal source of water.

“And as water in its bright-white solid form is much more effective at reflecting heat from the sun, its rapid loss is also accelerating global heating,” says Mark Brandon, a professor of polar oceanography at The Open University.

How do we adapt our relationship with the land to remoisturise the world? Krzywoszynska argues that there is no easy solution, but the future of food-growing “is localised and diverse”.

“To ensure that we eat well and live well in the future, we’ll need to reverse the trend towards greater homogenisation which drove food systems so far.”

The good news, according to Krzywoszynska, is that farmers are experimenting with methods that restore the soil even as they produce a diverse range of nutritious food. These innovators need rights and secure access to the land, the opportunity to share their experiences and financial and political support.

“Regenerating land is a win-win, for humans and their ecosystems, if we dare to look beyond the immediate short-term horizon,” she says.

Jack Marley, Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – What legal obligations do states have to fight climate change? Should high-emitting countries be held responsible for the harm they’ve caused? And should states safeguard the climate for future generations?

The international court of justice (ICJ) is considering similar questions to these in hearings ahead of issuing an advisory opinion on the obligations of states concerning climate change. Over the next two weeks, the court will hear statements from 98 countries.

The ICJ is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations and is concerned with states. It is not to be confused with the international criminal court (ICC), which prosecutes individuals. Both courts are based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Unlike court judgements, advisory opinions are not binding under international law. Yet, they can be instruments of preventive diplomacy and peace.

Often, people associate courts with a solely reactive approach to disputes and reparation of harms. For the ICJ this has meant, for instance, a 2018 order for Nicaragua to compensate Costa Rica after it damaged rainforests and wetlands in an unlawful incursion.

But courts can also play a critical role in preventing mass violations of human rights and injustices in the first place. For the ICJ, this might involve ruling that states have obligations to carry out due diligence before the approval of a new mine or dam. To fully realise our human rights, the ICJ must take this sort of preventive approach to climate change.

The ICJ faces a pivotal choice. It can either address climate change narrowly and reactively, or it could examine state obligations from a broader perspective.

That broader perspective might find that states are obliged to take full stewardship of the environment for both present and future generations. This would go beyond global climate change agreements.

The problem currently is that certain state actions (and inactions) may be considered sufficient under the UN’s Paris agreement, but that does not mean those states are complying with their duties to tackle climate change under international human rights law. Climate change and ecosystem degradation can, of course, violate a wide range of human rights. If the ICJ were to legally clarify that states do have climate obligations that go beyond the Paris agreement, that would represent a significant step forward in international law.

There are some precedents. For instance, the international tribunal for law of the sea (Itlos), through a recent advisory opinion of its own, has already recognised that greenhouse gas emissions are a form of marine pollution. States, it says, have specific legal obligations to address such pollution under the UN convention on the law of the sea.

The ICJ would also be building on the pioneering ideas of one of its former judges, Christopher Weeramantry of Sri Lanka. He argued that humanity is not in a position of dominance but is a trustee of the environment and that this carries weight as international customary norm.

Listen to scientists and traditional knowledge holders

Although some courts worldwide have used findings from the IPCC (a global scientific advisory body) in their climate-related rulings, these findings are yet to play a major role in the ICJ. However, the IPCC was explicitly mentioned in the UN general assembly resolution requesting the advisory opinion, and the court now has the opportunity to elevate these critical insights.

It should also factor in the IPCC’s less well-known sister organisation, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Ipbes)). Unlike the climate panel, the biodiversity platform weaves together science, practical and traditional knowledge-backed insights.

Peace with nature

Another way the ICJ can foster prevention is to focus not only on the symptoms of climate change and ecosystem degradation – the hurricanes, the enforced migrations and so on – but on their root causes.

This includes issues like inequality. After all, small island states such as the Seychelles face disproportionate impacts from climate change, despite doing very little to cause it. At the UN general assembly, the representative of Seychelles argued that the ICJ’s advisory opinion can help put a spotlight on the obligation of states to ensure that people in all countries have a right to a healthy environment.

“Climate Change,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024

This preventive approach can help foster peace with nature – the theme of the 2024 UN biodiversity conference – and thereby peace among people. This would set a powerful example for other courts, like the human rights courts of Europe, Africa and the Americas. It could inspire them to specify international and regional obligations in a way that promotes environmental justice and peace.

Collective action for future generations

The court should also take seriously the concerns of future generations. There is a vibrant social movement aiming to advance ambitious, rights-based societal action to address the root causes of planetary challenges. Spearheaded by the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change, this campaign has united youth and children civil society organisations, nature conservation and human rights groups, and other groups forming the Alliance for a Climate Justice Advisory Opinion. The Vanuatu government added its support to this call through its leadership and collaboration within the wider UN membership.

The passing of the UN general assembly resolution requesting the ICJ’s advisory opinion is in itself an achievement showing that the ICJ is not solely the domain of senior international lawyers. Instead, it can become an intergenerational space where vibrant social movements can also contribute to transformative international law.

If the ICJ does take a preventive and systemic approach, it would be a turning point for global intergenerational and interspecies justice and peace. The world now waits to see whether the court will seize this critical opportunity.

Claudia Ituarte-Lima, Leader of the Human Rights and Environment Thematic Area at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Lund University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – Earlier this week, the mining magnate Andrew Forrest made headlines calling for a global “polymer premium” – or plastic tax – to be placed on every tonne of newly manufactured plastics. A tax like this could form part of the Global Plastic Treaty being hammered out right now in Busan, South Korea. In fact, a treaty aimed at stopping plastic waste will have to have strong measures such as a plastic tax or a cap on plastic production to shift the status quo.

In economics, taxing things you don’t want should mean fewer get made. What Forrest is pitching is a way to curb the seemingly unstoppable rise in plastic production and tackle the plastic waste crisis at its source. While we may think recycling is all we need to solve the plastic waste problem, it’s nowhere near enough. Plastic is steadily choking seas and rivers, while toxic microplastics damage our health.

Forrest isn’t the first. Environmental groups and think tanks are also calling for a global tax on plastic producers and importers.

Many plastic products are designed to last for a long time. But manufacturers are increasingly churning out cheap plastics such as single-use items and food packaging which almost inevitably become waste.

Introducing a tax would add an additional cost to making virgin (new) plastic, to deter manufacturers from producing and selling as much non-recyclable and non-reuseable products as possible. If introduced, they would go some way to cut the overproduction of plastic.

What would a plastic treaty do?

Over this week and next, negotiators from more than 170 United Nations member states are working towards a Global Plastic Treaty at the fifth and final set of talks.

Work on this treaty has progressed rapidly. It was only in 2022 that 175 nations voted to adopt a historic resolution to negotiate a legally binding international treaty to end plastic pollution. In recognition of the danger posed by unchecked plastic production, nations set an accelerated timeline. If a treaty is agreed, it could come into effect as soon as 2025.

It would operate much like the legally-binding Paris Agreement on climate change, which requires nations to regularly report their greenhouse gas emissions and efforts to cut them. A Global Plastics Treaty would include binding measures requiring signatories to commit to action on plastic pollution. But exactly what will be covered and how is yet to be decided.

Nations have already agreed on measures to improve waste management and recycling as well as new design standards for plastic products.

While positive, the hardest part is yet to come.

These final negotiations wraps up on Sunday. Still to come is a decision on the most contentious issue: whether to introduce limits on how much plastic a company can produce. Plastic industry lobbyists are arguing strongly against any cap to plastic production.

Recycling isn’t enough

Plastic pollution has been a problem for decades. But to date, our efforts to respond have hardly made a dint. Today, there are about 7 billion tonnes of plastic waste in the world. So far, just 9% has been recycled.

The rest ends up burned in incinerators, in landfills, or in rivers, seas and forests. Plastics can also damage our health in many different ways.

Plastic production doubled between 2000 and 2019, reaching 460 million tonnes a year. By 2060, production is projected to almost triple that figure, to 1.2 billion tonnes a year.

AI-generated Image by Friedrich Teichmann from Pixabay

An increasing proportion of plastic production is single-use packaging, which is cheap to make and almost impossible to recycle.

Researchers have found recycling and waste management will only cut plastic pollution by 7% in the long term. These tools won’t be enough.

Plastic taxes are not new

In 2021, the European Union introduced a levy on non-recycled plastic packaging waste created by its member states. Set at €0.80 (A$1.30) per kilo, the cost is borne by national governments, who in turn can pass the cost on to producers. The levy is expected to generate A$11.3 billion per year when fully implemented.

Nations in Europe have already begun to pass on the cost. Last year, Spain imposed a tax on producers and importers of single use plastic packaging, while Hungary expanded an existing scheme to include plastic products. Earlier this year, Bulgaria, Portugal and the United Kingdom introduced their own fees for single-use plastics.

Because these taxes are new, it’s difficult to fully assess their impact. But over time, these incentives should reduce plastic pollution and boost government revenue, which can be used to drive better recycling and resource recovery.

Australia’s government is consulting on new standards for packaging in a bid to phase out dangerous chemicals and boost use of recycled plastics, while some state and territory governments have introduced bans on single-use plastics. But plastic waste researchers and environmental advocates argue that stronger measures are needed to curb plastic waste.

Taxing single-use plastic packaging in Australia could raise $1.5 billion, according to one study. These funds could be used to accelerate progress on plastic pollution.

A global treaty needs teeth

Over the last 70 years, plastics have become ubiquitous. But the convenience of cheap plastics comes at a cost to our health and the health of the natural world.

Tackling plastic pollution will take concerted effort and financing to reduce plastic production.

As Andrew Forrest and others point out, taxing virgin plastic could discourage overproduction of plastics and encourage more investment in recyclable and reusable plastic products.

But for plastic taxes to work, they need to be widely adopted. That could be as part of the Global Plastic Treaty, or done on a national level. Plastic taxes could work as an alternative to capping plastic production, if negotiators can’t reach agreement in Busan.

Plastic taxes are not a silver bullet. We would still need a suite of measures addressing plastics throughout their lifecycle, from design and production to recycling and disposal. But putting a price on plastic would help.

Amelia Leavesley, Research Fellow in Urban Sustainability, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Spain is Europe’s champion at producing solar power, because some of its regions are especially sunny — think Seville. The Global Energy Monitor puts it this way: “The country has more utility-scale solar capacity in operation (29.5 GW) than any other European nation, and more capacity under construction (7.8 GW), and in early stages of development (106.1 GW) than the next three European countries combined.” They have 100 gigawatts of solar in development! That is all the solar capacity the US has now, and it is a much bigger and wealthier country.

Germany comes in second in Europe with 24.6 gigawatts of industrial-scale solar.

So far this year, renewables account for 57.5 percent of electricity in Spain, which is remarkable for an industrial democracy. Renewables only make 26% of American electricity, so Spain is doing twice as well as we are. Spain wants to get 74% of its electricity from renewables by 2030.

Wind power provides 22.4 percent of Spain’s electricity, while solar is at 18.3 percent. Solar, however, is rapidly building out.

Spain has already produced more renewable energy by November this year than it did in the full 12 months of 2023, and production is up 13%. And, this is the second year in a row that renewables produced more electricity for Spain than did fossil fuels.

All this is not an accident. The Socialist government of Pedro Sánchez has an industrial policy when it comes to green energy. He credits outgoing Minister for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITECO), Teresa Ribera Rodríguez, as having spearheaded the expansion of renewables since 2018, leading to some of Europe’s lowest electricity prices for consumers. Sunlight and wind are free, so once you have built the means to capture them, electricity generation is low-cost. This is especially true at a time when the Ukraine War has caused fossil gas prices to increase substantially, hurting countries dependent on it. Ribera is on her way to Brussels to serve on the European Commission, with portfolios in competitive practices and the environment.

In contrast, when they were in power Spain’s conservatives actually put a punitive tax on rooftop solar to benefit the fossil fuel corporations to which they are close.

All the research demonstrates that Socialist democracies make people happier than other systems, and now it turns out they are better for the health of the earth, as well.

Elections matter. But so do civil society initiatives. People are forming cooperatives to share the output of solar installations. Even football (soccer) teams have done this with solar panels at their stadiums.

Spanish utilities are increasingly creating hybrid solar parks that incorporate wind turbines and batteries, as well, to ensure steady power once the sun goes down. Spain has about 1 gigawatt worth of battery storage projects under review, and has a goal of 22.4 gigawatts of battery capacity by 2030 — a deadline that some experts believe the country will easily beat.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

TRT World: “60% of electricity in Spain comes from renewable energy”

(The Conversation) – A vast network of ocean currents nicknamed the “great global ocean conveyor belt” is slowing down. That’s a problem because this vital system redistributes heat around the world, influencing both temperatures and rainfall.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation funnels heat northwards through the Atlantic Ocean and is crucial for controlling climate and marine ecosystems. It’s weaker now than at any other time in the past 1,000 years, and global warming could be to blame. But climate models have struggled to replicate the changes observed to date – until now.

Our modelling suggests the recent weakening of the oceanic circulation can potentially be explained if meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet and Canadian glaciers is taken into account.

Our results show the Atlantic overturning circulation is likely to become a third weaker than it was 70 years ago at 2°C of global warming. This would bring big changes to the climate and ecosystems, including faster warming in the southern hemisphere, harsher winters in Europe, and weakening of the northern hemisphere’s tropical monsoons. Our simulations also show such changes are likely to occur much sooner than others had suspected.

National Oceanography Center: “The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC): What Is It and Why Is It So Important?”

Changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

The Atlantic ocean circulation has been monitored continuously since 2004. But a longer-term view is necessary to assess potential changes and their causes.

There are various ways to work out what was going before these measurements began. One technique is based on sediment analyses. These estimates suggest the Atlantic meridional circulation is the weakest it has been for the past millennium, and about 20% weaker since the middle of the 20th century.

Evidence suggests the Earth has already warmed 1.5ºC since the industrial revolution.

The rate of warming has been nearly four times faster over the Arctic in recent decades.

Meltwater weakens oceanic circulation patterns

High temperatures are melting Arctic sea ice, glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet.

Since 2002, Greenland lost 5,900 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of ice. To put that into perspective, imagine if the whole state of New South Wales was covered in ice 8 metres thick.

This fresh meltwater flowing into the subarctic ocean is lighter than salty seawater. So less water descends to the ocean depths. This reduces the southward flow of deep and cold waters from the Atlantic. It also weakens the Gulf Stream, which is the main pathway of the northward return flow of warm waters at the surface.

The Gulf Stream is what gives Britain mild winters compared to other places at the same distance from the north pole such as Saint-Pierre and Miquelon in Canada.

Our new research shows meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic glaciers in Canada is the missing piece in the climate puzzle.

When we factor this into simulations, using an Earth system model and a high-resolution ocean model, slowing of the oceanic circulation reflects reality.

Our research confirms the Atlantic overturning circulation has been slowing down since the middle of the 20th century. It also offers a glimpse of the future.

Connectivity in the Atlantic Ocean

Our new research also shows the North and South Atlantic oceans are more connected than previously thought.

The weakening of the overturning circulation over the past few decades has obscured the warming effect in the North Atlantic, leading to what’s been termed a “warming hole”.

When oceanic circulation is strong, there is a large transfer of heat to the North Atlantic. But weakening of the oceanic circulation means the surface of the ocean south of Greenland has warmed much less than the rest.

Reduced heat and salt transfer to the North Atlantic has meant more heat and salt accumulated in the South Atlantic. As a result, the temperature and salinity in the South Atlantic increased faster.

Our simulations show changes in the far North Atlantic are felt in the South Atlantic Ocean in less than two decades. This provides new observational evidence of the past century slow-down of the Atlantic overturning circulation.

What does the future hold?

The latest climate projections suggest the Atlantic overturning circulation will weaken by about 30% by 2060. But these estimates do not take into account the meltwater that runs into the subarctic ocean.

The Greenland ice sheet will continue melting over the coming century, possibly raising global sea level by about 10 cm. If this additional meltwater is included in climate projections, the overturning circulation will weaken faster. It could be 30% weaker by 2040. That’s 20 years earlier than initially projected.

Such a rapid decrease in the overturning circulation over coming decades will disrupt climate and ecosystems. Expect harsher winters in Europe, and drier conditions in the northern tropics. The southern hemisphere, including Australia and southern South America, may face warmer and wetter summers.

Our climate has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. More rapid melting of the ice sheets will accelerate further disruption of the climate system.

This means we have even less time to stabilise the climate. So it is imperative that humanity acts to reduce emissions as fast as possible.

Laurie Menviel, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney and Gabriel Pontes, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Since I study the Middle East, I’ve had to learn about energy markets and security. One time about a decade ago I was doing some energy consulting with the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). Japan had had to deal with the closure of many of its nuclear plants after the Fukishima disaster by importing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from the Middle East. They were nervous about the security of the region, though. I told my Japanese colleagues that they would be better off going in for wind and solar. One replied that Japan had very little land available for solar farms. I don’t know how sincere this reply was. I think those bureaucrats were just wedded to nuclear power. In fact, Japan now has over 87 gigawatts of solar power. It has been adding about 6 gigs of solar a year recently.

One solution to this problem that is increasingly being tried out is agrovoltaics, putting solar panels on farms but in such a way that they help crops grow. So far in the US, most agrovoltaic set-ups are for sheep raising, since grass can grow under the panels. In fact, the panels help the grass thrive in hot, sunny environments by providing shade and allowing retention of moisture, which is also good for “tomatoes, turnips, carrots, squash, beets, lettuce, kale, chard, and peppers.”

Solar panels are rapidly becoming more efficient, which will allow this form of energy to produce electricity while taking up less space.

In the meantime, another possible solution is to put the solar panels on floating platforms. Japan has put them on lakes, for instance.

The panel arrays can also be placed offshore. Fish and other marine life like structures such as the steel truss platform piling used for China’s offshore solar farms. It gives them places to hide from predators, e.g.

China is the most advanced solar society in the world with over 600 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, which saves the country billions of dollars a year over paying for imported fossil gas. The US is in comparison backward, only having about 130 GW of solar.

It is therefore no surprise that Beijing has, as Aman Tripathi reports, just connected to high capacity transmission wires the world’s large offshore solar plant off the coast of Shandong Province, a 1-gigawatt facility. The facility also does fish farming.

The nearly 3,000 photovoltaic platforms are attached to fixed pilings in the sea floor and are spread over an area of some 4 square miles. It will generate enough power to provide electricity to 2.6 million people.

And this installation is only the beginning. China is aiming to have 60 gigawatts of offshore solar in only 3 years from now — an incredible build-out if it happens.

China also already has 61 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity.

Wind, water, solar and battery are clearly the way forward on meeting the world’s power needs while avoiding massive carbon pollution. Solar plus battery in my view has the greatest potential over the medium to long term. The issue of where to put the PV panels is not in my view a very serious problem. If there is a will to use them to cut carbon dioxide production, as there is in China, then places will be found to put them — as China is demonstrating.

And by the way, if the US government under the incoming Trump administration puts roadblocks in the way of solar power, it will just accelerate American decline and help propel China further toward great power status. The future is solar panels and electric vehicles, and China is already eating our lunch on those two. If that goes on for a while, we’ll be poor, breathing dirty air, and paying trillions for climate catastrophes, while China replaces us as the world’s leading superpower.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

News.Com.Au : “China’s Massive 1-gigawatt Offshore Solar Cell Platform Now Connected To The Grid”

(The Conversation) – Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has won the 2024 Booker prize. What it so skilfully and ambitiously exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis.

While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six astronauts and cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space Station. Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless.

Orbital was written during lockdown when the meaning of home (for those lucky enough to have one) changed forever. There’s a sense in which Harvey’s six astronauts return us to that moment when our homes became prisons and we were forced to contemplate the global effects of a virus that had no respect for national boundaries.

On the International Space Station, borders are only visible on the side of the Earth that is under night and only really as clusters of artificial light which shows cities. Rivers are “nonsensical scorings … like strands of long fallen hair” and “the other side of the world will arrive in 40 minutes” blurring it all.

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Russian cosmonaut Anton contemplates US astronaut Michael Collins’ iconic photograph of Apollo 11 leaving the surface of the Moon in 1969 with the Earth beyond. He thinks “no Russian mind should be steeped in these thoughts”, but he is captivated by where the people are in the photograph. Is Collins the only human not to appear in it? Or is he the only human presence we can be sure of?

Shaun has a postcard of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, sent to him by his wife. The painting’s complex composition has been said to create a unique illusion of reality where it is unclear who the subject is. Is it the viewer? The royal child? King Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain who are depicted on the wall?

“Welcome,” Shaun’s wife writes on the postcard, “to the labyrinth of mirrors that is human life.” The Italian astronaut Pietro solves the labyrinth with the simple observation that the dog at the child’s side must surely be the subject of the painting. “[It is] the only thing… that isn’t slightly laughable or trapped within a matrix of vanities.” Humans, Shaun concludes, are no big deal.

While we gaze at ourselves and try to “ascertain what makes us different” from a dog, which as French theorist Michel Foucault also observed is the only object in the painting that has no function other than to be seen, it reminds us that our differences are negligible. As Shaun concludes, we are also animals fighting for survival.

In 16 orbits, the Earth on its tilted axis delivers a succession of landmasses that the astronauts can name but are de-familiarised by distance and momentum. The Pyramids, the New Zealand fjords, and a desert of dunes are “entirely abstract [and] … could just as easily be a closeup of one of the heart cells they have in their Petri dishes”. Japanese astronaut Chie’s laboratory mice – the canaries in the coal mine of their endeavour – finally learn to negotiate micro gravity “rounding their shoebox module like little flying carpets”. And, on a spacewalk, British astronaut Nell looks back at the “vast spread of the space station and, in this moment it, not earth, feels like home”.

This disassociation from the planet is common among returned astronauts who often report a feeling of closer affinity with their spacecraft. Harvey’s evocative prose describes the tension between a longing for the planet they think of as “mother” and the ambition to leave home forever. At one point Shaun wonders why they are trying to go where the universe doesn’t want them when “there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does.” But later he expresses frustration with the necessity to orbit two hundred and fifty miles above the earth. The moon, he reckons, is just the start.

What Harvey’s novel so skilfully exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis. The future of humanity is written, Shaun tells Pietro, “with the gilded pens of billionaires”. So while an unprecedented weather event threatens life below, the six astronauts and cosmonauts are rigorously documenting “their own selves”, taking “blood, urine, faecal and saliva samples” and monitoring “heart rates and blood pressure and sleep patterns” to satisfy some “grand abstract dream of interplanetary life” away from Earth.

Orbital is a slim volume of 135 pages but the economy of Harvey’s writing manages to convey a whole universe of meaning. She taps the contemporary zeitgeist of planetary insecurity alongside the span of history from Las Meninas to the spectacle of astronauts “imagineered, branded and ready”, prepared for consumption by “Hollywood and sci-fi, Space Odyssey and Disney.” “They’re humans,” writes Harvey, “with a godly view that’s the blessing and also the curse.”

Hollywood aside, I was reminded more of John Carpenter’s budget film Dark Star where bored astronauts on an interminable mission to destroy unstable planets are fixated on their dwindling supply of toilet paper. There is a sense, in Orbital, that the mundanity of decay is already overwhelming the spectacle of orbit. The module is “old and creaky” and “a crack has appeared”. The International Space Station is, after all, due to be decommissioned in 2031. Harvey has written a novel for the end of the world as we know it. The hope it offers is that we might learn to know the earth differently, while we can.

Debra Benita Shaw, Debra Benita Shaw is Reader in Cultural Theory in the School of Architecture and Visual Arts, University of East London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

And yes, in case you think that, as in his novel 1984, published in 1949, a year before his death and just as the Cold War (a term he was the first to use in an essay in October 1945) was getting underway, our world, too, seems to be heading for a nightmarish future, I suspect that — were he capable of returning to this planet of ours — he wouldn’t disagree with you for a moment. Phew! Sorry for such a long, complicated sentence, but little wonder given the way our world is now tying itself in knots. Yes, just last week, with the election of climate-change denier and (to steal from Orwell) our very own Big Brother Donald Trump as president of the United States (again!), we just paved the way for an instant all-American nightmare. Still, even without him, the world was anything but peachy keen.

As a matter of fact, we live in a country on the brink of who knows what, on a planet on the brink of… well, yes, who has any idea anymore? One thing, however, is obvious (even if not to The Donald, who plans to “drill, baby, drill” on day one back in the White House): it’s getting hotter by the year (after year after year) in every sense imaginable, as heat records are broken, week by week, month by month around the world. After all, 2024 is expected to be the hottest year in human history, beating out 2023 for that record, and yet, all too sadly, it’s not likely to hold that record for more than a year. As Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out recently: “The latest scientific data shows a devastating scientific duality: not only is 2024 slated to be the hottest year on record to date, but it could also be one of the coolest years we’ll see in the decades ahead.”

Yikes!

War, War, and More War

Just consider that, so many thousands of years after we humans first began making war on each other, we’re on a planet that seems to be going down big-time in ways Orwell couldn’t have imagined. And no matter its state, we just can’t seem to stop ourselves from, or even evidently stop wanting to make war again… and again… and again.

At this point, in fact, at least three thoroughly nightmarish, seemingly never-ending conflicts are being fought (and fought and fought) on this planet of ours. There is, of course, the war in Ukraine that began with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s painful decision in February 2022 to invade that country. More than two and a half years later, with perhaps 200,000 or more deaths and the destruction of significant parts of Ukraine, it seems as if that particular war is in a nightmarish slog of endless devastation leading who knows where or to who knows what end (including, possibly, the first use of nuclear weapons since August 1945, something Orwell was already thinking about in that Cold War essay of his only months after the U.S. nuked the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II).

And oh yes, only recently, a third country, also nuclear-armed like the Russians, and its leader, like Vladimir Putin, also willing to threaten the use of such weaponry, decided to directly enter the fray. I’m thinking, of course, about the neighboring state of North Korea. And don’t be confused by that “neighboring.” After all, that country’s only about 4,500 miles away from Ukraine, but it’s certainly a neighbor of Russia’s, right?

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Whoops, sorry about that! After a glance at a map, I realize that I must have meant a neighbor of China, which is indeed a neighbor of Russia, which is more or less the same thing. Under the circumstances, why shouldn’t North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have sent 8,000 to10,000 of his crack troops to more or less the other side of the planet (or do I mean the universe?) to help an atomic near-neighbor? And I certainly have no right to be critical of such a decision, since in this century my own country has dispatched its military endless thousands of miles away to fight (losing) wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of course, whatever my country did, what’s now going on in Ukraine should still be the definition of a nightmare first class, a war without end that only seems to be growing more severe. But perhaps when compared to what’s now taking place in the Middle East, it might have to be seen as a nightmare second class. After all, another nuclear-armed country, Israel, in response to a horrifying terror attack on its citizens by the Palestinian group Hamas on October 7, 2023, has spent more than a year (14 months!) devastating and decimating just about anything left standing, including human beings, in the tiny Gaza Strip. It has by now killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including staggering numbers of children, destroyed most of the infrastructure there, promoted famine, and well… honestly, that’s just a start, since Vladimir Putin…oh, sorry, my mistake, I meant Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been spreading the war on Gaza in a thoroughly — yes! — devastating way to Lebanon (where, forget the growing numbers of dead, more than 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced from their homes and turned into refugees in next to no time at all). Meanwhile, he’s been going face to face, or perhaps I mean bomb to bomb and missile to missile — and keep in mind that most of those bombs and missiles come from my own remarkably generous country, since Israel is “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. military aid since World War II” — with Iran. And who knows where that set of wars may, in fact, go from here (though undoubtedly, nowhere good), or where else in the Middle East the Israelis might still want to expand their military campaigns.

And if all of that isn’t enough for you, or this deeply battered planet of ours, then don’t forget Sudan, where a devastating civil war has been raging for a year and a half, killing untold tens of thousands of Sudanese, displacing eight and a half million more of them from their homes, and causing a brutal famine affecting millions that could destroy an inconceivable number of lives. And like the horrifying conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, that war between two local military factions shows not the slightest sign of ending any time soon.

So, three devastating regional wars on one small planet. If that isn’t distinctly an achievement of sorts for a humanity that continues to arm itself to the teeth, then I’m not sure what is.

Planetary War

And sadly, all three of those wars, which have essentially nothing to do with each other — you seldom see even two of them, no less all three, in the same news coverage — are distracting us remarkably well from what might be considered the real, or at least the most devastating war on Planet Earth. I’m thinking, of course, of the war that, thanks to us, this planet is now waging on — yes! — us.

After all, even where there hasn’t been horrific war-making, all too often there have been other kinds of devastation. Take Spain recently, where in the neighborhood of the city of Valencia, a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours in a stunning weather event leading to floods that killed hundreds and destroyed much property. Consider that a reminder, amid humanity’s seemingly unending wars (and our unending ability to keep on waging them), that thanks to the greenhouse gases we humans, especially the two great global powers, the United States and China, are still pouring into the atmosphere at — all too sadly — a record pace, this planet is essentially responding by making war on us. (And don’t forget that our wars and the militaries that fight them are another devastating way we humans have discovered to pour yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, heating this planet further, and the U.S. military, even when not at war, remains a gigantic emitter of such gases.)

While my country is historically the greatest producer of greenhouse gases ever, in our own moment it’s fallen into second place to China, which (despite its impressive investment in the production of green energy) continues to increase its use of coal, in particular, pouring yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a fashion never before seen on Planet Earth.

It’s not that we haven’t been warned, not just by scientists, but by the weather itself. And you don’t have to be in Spain to notice it. After all, if you live in the southeastern United States, you’re not likely to soon forget the devastation caused by hurricanes Helene and Milton, after they revved up while passing over the record-hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico, before clobbering Florida and the Southeast. And that’s just one example among so many, including for instance the stunning fires that swept across Canada in the summer of 2023 (and again in 2024), sending devastating clouds of smoke south into the United States.

Let’s face it, whether we’re talking about fire, drought, floods, unprecedented storms, or so much else, we increasingly live on a different planet. After all, in 2023, the average global rise in temperature hit 1.48 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Worse yet, by July of this year, it had hit the ultimate 1.5 degree mark that the 2015 Paris climate accord set as the level not to be reached by the end of this century 12 (yes, 12!) months in a row. Worse yet, scientists are now talking about a possible devastating rise of 3 degrees or more by century’s end. With that in mind, just imagine what future hurricanes are going to feel like when they sweep across parts of this country.

In short, while we humans have anything but given up our old ways of making war on ourselves, it seems that we’ve found a new way of doing so as well, and if that isn’t dystopian, what is? I suspect that George Orwell would be stunned by the planet we now seem to be on and the climate-denying president Americans just sent back into the White House to create an all-too-literal hell on Earth.

And given all of that, I wonder what this planet could prove to be like in 2084, if we don’t change our habits, whether it comes to making war or burning fossil fuels? Will we still be slaughtering each other on a planet that could be truly experiencing truly devastating weather in ways we may not yet be able to imagine? It’s hard even to dream (as in having a nightmare, of course) of a future in which neither those recent hurricanes, nor the flooding in Spain will seem all that disastrously out of the ordinary, anything but — and that’s assuming none of the nine countries on this planet that have already gone nuclear (or others which may be heading in that direction) decide to atomize the planet instead.

Now, mind you, it’s also possible that (thanks to some miracle) by 2084, we humans will have figured out how to truly green ourselves and this planet, leaving all those greenhouse gases to the history books, along with our endless centuries of increasingly devastating war-making.

But given our past and the recent American election, I wouldn’t count on it.

Honestly, who would have guessed that we humans might prove capable of making Orwell’s 1984 seem like an upbeat fantasy a century later when, whatever wars might then be underway, the planet itself could prove to be a genuine hell on earth?

And here’s the truth of it all: it shouldn’t have to be this way.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Yep, it’s me again with the same old, same old. Sigh. And instantly in a far worse world with Donald Trump on his way back to the White House. And there’s no question that I need your help to keep TomDispatch going under increasingly grim global circumstances. Anything you can offer will mean so much to me (and to the writers who continue to produce pieces for this site that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere). Anyway, if the mood strikes you, do visit our donation page and think about what you could do. Tom]

Via Tomdispatch.com