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.

—-

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

Heat and drought would rank high on this list. The Middle East is heating twice as fast as the global average. Egypt and Iraq are especially vulnerable to sea level rise. Some of the consequent threats can only be dealt with by inter-governmental cooperation. But that kind of cooperation is hard to come by as things now stand.

An example of a cross-border problem is the substantial reliance of numerous MENA nations on imported food, especially grains, which renders them vulnerable to global food price fluctuations caused by climate-related events (or wars) in other regions.

We saw this problem in the Russia-Ukraine War, which threatened Middle East wheat supplies. But climate-drive mega-droughts could have similar implications.

MENA countries are not well positioned to deal with climate change impacts, they point out, given that governments tend to be highly centralized, with power concentrated in the hands of oligarchs or juntas dependent directly or indirectly on oil and gas. The oligarchs are out for themselves, seeking “rents” from oil-rich countries where they don’t have such mineral wealth themselves. They exclude from decision-making grass-roots organizations, workers, the poor and women, who are often on the front lines of global heating and know better than the air-conditioned, petroleum-swigging elites how dangerous it is. All this is true for individual countries. Imagine getting them to cooperate on climate resilience or the green energy transition across borders.

The oligarchs of the region promote water-intensive crops like citrus fruits for export even in arid countries, because they can make money on the exports, and even though their countries have to import a lot of food. That is, they could put in staples like grain instead of citrus fruits, but then they wouldn’t make money from exports. Their people would, however, be less hungry.

For another example, they say, the elites in Tunisia concentrate on olive cultivation for the world market (it is the third largest producer). But there are so many olive orchards and so few of any other sort of crop that the country is making difficulties for itself. Monocultures are especially vulnerable to disease outbreaks or global price fluctuations. The olive orchards drink up the country’s agricultural water, making it hard for farmers to put in other crops.

Embed from Getty Images
An irrigation system is used in an olive grove located in Siliana, Tunisia, on May 10, 2024. Farmers face a major problem in keeping their fields productive due to water stress and drought. (Photo by Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

In Libya, the army controls much of the economy. The country is heavily dependent on oil exports, and suffers when petroleum prices plummet. The country imports 75% of its food, so if anything disrupts the global food supply chain, Libyans are in big trouble. Petroleum is mostly used to fuel vehicles, but as the world electrifies and goes to EVs, Libyans will be up the creek if they don’t find another source of wealth.

There are five big categories of cross-country threats, they say:

1.The Biophysical: “risks for trans-boundary ecosystems, such as international river basins, oceans and the atmosphere.” They give the example of Turkey’s dam-building at the headwaters of the Euphrates, which is threatening water flows in Iraq, which depends on two large rivers for survival. Climate change is also reducing flow. Iraq could be in big trouble over this trans-boundary problem.

2. Financial. Foreign direct investment in the region could fall substantially because of climate impacts, hampering infrastructure projects. Lack of infrastructural adaptation could hurt efforts to come to terms with climate change.

3. Trade: “Potential risks to international trade, such as the import and export of climate-sensitive crops and implications for food security.” MENA imports 50% of its food from the outside, and if there are droughts elsewhere in the world things could turn very dangerous.

4. People-Centered: They point to the millions of displaced people in the region. Half of Syrians had to move house during the Civil War, in which a major drought was probably implicated. Some 11 million Sudanese have been displaced by the current civil war, in a population of 48 million. They don’t say so, but the Nile Delta in Egypt is very populous (60 million people) and very low-lying, at risk from the rising waters of the Mediterranean. God knows where they will go.

5. Geopolitical. This term refers to regional conflict. We see this (this is me, not the report) in Lebanon, where Israel’s attacks have displaced 1.2 million people. There are only about 4.5 million Lebanese.

While Europe has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to help MENA countries begin the transition to solar and wind energy, it has offered very little money to help Middle Eastern countries become more resilient in the face of climate change.

The authors note that the Middle East and North Africa is a diverse geographical area. It has its famous deserts but also mountain ranges, green valleys like Lebanon’s Biqa’ (now being bombed by Israel), long river valleys, mangrove stands along the seas, and swamps in southern Iraq.

The way contemporary analysts categorize the Middle East, it stretches from Iran in the east to Morocco in the far west, and from Syria in the north to Yemen in the south. Nearly 500 million people inhabit the area, and many states within it still have high birth rates, giving it millions of youths. The median age is something like 22 or 24, compared to 38.5 for the United States. Like India and Africa, it is young.

Some parts of the region are desperately poor, others are fabulously wealthy. Outside the petroleum states, they point out, parts of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Libya, are low-income, conflict-impacted societies facing severe challenges like human displacement and acute poverty. Simultaneously, middle-income nations like Morocco and Egypt are proactively exploring business opportunities within the global green transition.

Morocco and Turkey are virtually the only countries in the area that have had some success transitioning their grids to sustainable sources of energy, though much poorer Morocco is more advanced in wind and solar, while Turkey depends more heavily on hydroelectricity.

( Otherwords.org ) – This year’s hurricane season has been devastating.

Hurricane Helene left a trail of wreckage across the Southeast and Appalachia, where over 230 people have died so far. Barely two weeks later, Milton slammed into Florida, killing dozens more, destroying homes, and leaving over a million people without power. Insurers are predicting that losses from Milton could reach $60 billion.

Everyone suffers in a disaster, but the most vulnerable suffer the most. And our government’s warped priorities can often make that worse.

When people are told to evacuate but not provided any assistance, people without vehicles — disproportionately low-income, unemployed, young, and Black — are stranded. Homeowners recoup some losses through insurance, but renters are left without housing if their home is destroyed.

Low-wage workers, who often have no paid leave, lose their paychecks when their workplaces close, even though they’re the very people who can least afford it. They’re sometimes even forced to keep working in dangerous conditions — which reportedly happened at a plastics factory in Tennessee, where some workers died as a result.

Appalachia, which bore the brunt of Helene’s impact, is among the poorest regions in the country, with a median household income almost 18 percent below the national figure and poverty rates above 30 percent in some counties. Many people who’ve lost their homes and livelihoods lack the resources to fall back on in an emergency.

Government recovery efforts often reinforce these inequalities instead of counteracting them.

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recovery assistance prioritizes assisting homeowners instead of renters. Consequently, people who receive meaningful assistance are disproportionately wealthier and whiter than people who don’t, exacerbating existing inequities.

Systemic discrimination is sometimes made worse by intentional discrimination. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, poor Black people were abandoned to die. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017 and thousands died, officials tried to downplay the death toll even as they took unacceptably long to restore basic services such as electricity.

FEMA is also consistently underfunded compared to the need. The U.S. experienced $603 billion in costs for major climate disasters between 2019 and 2023, an average of $120 billion a year. Meanwhile, the annual budget for FEMA has hovered around barely a quarter of that.

Instead, a large share of the recovery cost is borne by state, tribal, and local governments, and by insurance payouts (for those who can afford insurance). And tribal and local governments in poorer regions lack resources because of their meager tax revenues.

Right now, FEMA faces a funding shortfall. With the added costs of recovery from Milton, it’s certain to run out of funds before the end of hurricane season.

The proximate cause of the shortfall is a budget deal to appease a few far right, anti-tax extremists in Congress who threatened to shut down the government. But the deeper reason is that the government simply doesn’t prioritize helping vulnerable communities to recover from disasters.

On the same day that Helene made landfall, Israel received a U.S. military aid package of almost $9 billion, on top of billions more since the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible” genocide.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to provide subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, which totaled $14 billion in 2022. Far from ending these subsidies as the climate crisis worsens, the government has enacted new subsidies for greenwashing scams.

These choices devalue lives from Palestine to Florida to Appalachia. For disaster-hit communities to get the resources they need and deserve in order to recover, we need nothing short of a complete reversal of our government’s priorities.

(The Conversation) – Two years ago, when the curtain fell on the COP27 summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, developing nations on the frontline of climate change had something meaningful to celebrate.

The creation of a new fund for responding to loss and damage was agreed after a hard-fought diplomatic effort, spearheaded by a group of small island developing states (sometimes known as the Sids). The fund would provide much needed support for climate-vulnerable nations faced with a spiralling human and financial toll from sea-level rise, extreme temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and intensifying floods and storms.

Yet two years on, the world’s wealthiest nations – also the largest carbon emitters – are still dragging their feet. They’ve not followed up their pledges with anywhere near the finance required.

Some nations, particularly the 39 Sids, which include places like Barbados, Grenada, Fiji and Vanuatu, are uniquely vulnerable to climate change and are already paying the price.

Sky-high ocean temperatures created the conditions for Hurricane Beryl to develop in July this year, as the earliest-forming Category 5 hurricane on record in the Caribbean. As oceans warm up, climate science tells us that this rapid intensification is becoming more common.

The island nation of Fiji, best known as a tropical paradise, has experienced a frightening series of storms over recent years, linked to climate change. Cyclone Winston in 2016, one of the most intense on record, caused widespread flooding and lead to the loss of 44 lives.

This episode reduced Fiji’s GDP growth by 1.4 percentage points. According to the Asian Development Bank, ongoing losses from climate change could reach 4% of Fiji’s annual GDP by 2100, as higher temperatures and more extreme weather hold back growth.

This isn’t an isolated problem. Tropical cyclones and hurricanes have long battered small islands, but what is new is how often the most extreme storms and floods are happening, as well as our improved ability to measure their economic effects.

Direct and indirect impacts

Our latest research looked at extreme weather events affecting 35 small island developing nations. We first collected information about the direct consequences of these extreme weather events: the damaged homes, the injured people, and the bridges that must be rebuilt.

We then looked at how these events have affected GDP growth and public finances. These changes are not felt immediately, but rather as the economy stalls, tourism dries up, and expensive recovery plans inhibit spending in other areas.

In all, from 2000 to 2020, these direct and indirect impacts may have cost small island states a total of US$141 billion. That works out to around US$2,000 per person on average, although this figure underplays just how bad things can get in some places. Hurricane Maria in 2017 caused damage to the Caribbean island of Dominica worth more than double its entire GDP. That amounted to around US$20,000 per person, overnight. Almost a decade later, the country is still struggling with one of the largest debt burdens on earth at over 150% of GDP.

Of these huge aggregate losses across all the small island development states, around 38% are attributable to climate change. That’s according to calculations we made based on “extreme event attribution” studies, which estimate the degree to which greenhouse gas emissions influenced extreme weather events.

“Fiji Superstorm,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

What is clear is that small island economies are among the worst affected by severe weather. These island states have three to five times more climate-related loss and damage than other states, as a percentage of government revenues. That’s true even for wealthier small island states, like the Bahamas and Barbados, where loss and damage is four times greater than other high-income countries. For all small island nations, the economic impacts will increase, with “attributable” losses from extreme weather reaching US$75 billion by 2050 if global temperatures hit 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Our research helps us to see how far short the richer nations driving climate change are falling in their efforts to both curb emissions and to compensate the nations harmed by their failure to prevent climate change.

Developed countries need to pay up

One of the key discussions at the forthcoming COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, will be the “new collective quantified goal”. This is the technical name to describe how much money wealthy countries will need to contribute to help vulnerable nations to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

That overall goal must also include a target to finance small islands and other vulnerable countries, with billions more needed per year in the new loss and damage fund. Given the extent of actual and likely losses, nothing less than ambition on the scale of a “modern Marshall Plan” for these states will do.

In addition to this extra financing, the fund will need to work effectively to support the most climate vulnerable nations and populations when severe weather occurs. This can be done in a few ways.

The fund could create a budget support mechanism that can help small island states and other vulnerable countries deal with loss of income and the negative effects on growth. It could make sure loss and damage funds can be released quickly, and ensure support is channelled to those who need it the most. It could also make more concessional finance available for recovery, especially for the most adversely affected sectors like agriculture and tourism.

The world has a troubling history of missing self-imposed targets on climate finance and emissions reduction. But the stakes are ever higher now, and any target for loss and damage finance will need to be sufficient to deal with the challenges posed already by climate change, and in the years to come.

Emily Wilkinson, Principal Research Fellow, ODI Global; Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington; Matt Bishop, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Sheffield, and Vikrant Panwar, Senior Climate and Disaster Risk Finance Specialist, ODI Global

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

The Cuyahoga River, which runs through downtown Cleveland, Ohio, used to catch fire every decade or so. It started in the 1860s, when the river became choked with industrial waste, and the conflagrations continued all the way until the 1960s – the same decade that Americans got serious about environmental protection.

People in the US now take for granted their clean water, clean air, and healthy forests. And when those are jeopardised, such as when residents of Flint, Michigan, could no longer drink their tap water, they feel enraged – and justly so. But at this moment in history, the ability of Americans to expect a healthy and safe environment is in greater danger than at any time since the Cuyahoga River last caught fire in 1969.

The policy proposals outlined by Donald Trump and the thinktanks advising his campaign would turn back the tide on America’s bedrock environmental laws. Most of these laws were passed during the administrations of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon in the 1960s and 1970s.

Indeed, the blockbuster Project 2025 policy platform calls for “a whole-of-government unwinding” of the nation’s environmental laws, and states that the Environmental Protection Agency’s “structure and mission should be greatly circumscribed.”

Environmental protection should be a non-partisan issue. Instead, it has become ideologically supercharged by its proximity to climate politics. Much of this polarisation comes from highly successful lobbying campaigns from entrenched interests – particularly fossil fuel companies – that are threatened by proposals for an energy transition.

Such issues are hardly new to American politics. In the 20th century, timber companies and mining firms swallowed up huge swathes of American forests, polluted waterways, and threatened beloved ecosystems. And in the 1960s, two enormous hydroelectric dams were nearly built that would have flooded the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River.

By the end of the 1960s, these assaults on public land, air, and water had slowed. But conservation and commonsense prevailed only because of regulation that evaluated the potential private benefits of development against the potential public costs. Industry frequently lost out, but public lands, public health, and America’s natural heritage won.

Today, few Americans would argue against the wisdom of these decisions to slow old-growth timber harvesting, to stop damming wild rivers, and to clean up the acid air in US cities. Yet they are now witnessing a once-in-a-generation push to turn back the clock on these hard-won victories, while also scuttling the path-breaking climate and green manufacturing achievements of Joe Biden’s administration.

Trump has promised to fire experts in government, install loyalists in their place, and adopt a “drill, baby, drill” mentality. And unlike in decades past, the threat of this deregulation is amplified by the enormous challenges posed by climate change, and the brazen willingness of certain cronies to peddle conspiracy theories about ecology and earth science.

“Negative Sunshine,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024.

Endangering the future

Gutting regulatory capacity, reducing public support for emergency preparedness (for example, by privatising the Federal Emergency Management Agency), and pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreement. These actions all reveal a shocking naivete, as though the era of environmental tragedy were purely a thing of the past.

But in 2023 alone, the US suffered a record 28 climate and weather-related disasters – shattering the previous record of 22 such disasters in a given year. Each caused more than US$1 billion (£770 million) in damage, with a total price tag north of US$90 billion.

These figures come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Project 2025 says “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatised, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

America’s environmental regulations are, admittedly, far from perfect, and the agencies tasked with enforcing them are often so underfunded that developers face long, burdensome delays. Bipartisan proposals to improve these issues are currently being hotly debated in Congress.

The future of America’s farms, infrastructure, homes, coastal communities, and forests is on the ballot. As election day approaches in this decisive decade for climate action, Americans should look to the past to ensure they don’t take a healthy environment for granted, while securing a safe climate for current and future generations.

Upon signing the landmark 1964 Wilderness Act, which protected vast swathes of US public land, President Lyndon B. Johnson called environmental regulations “the highest tradition of our heritage as conservators as well as users of America’s bountiful natural endowments.” This heritage and our shared planetary future depend on voters to steadfastly defend this tradition of stewardship.

utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=Imagine&utm_content=DontHaveTimeTop”>Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 35,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Stephen Lezak, Programme Manager at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford and Barbara Haya, Senior Fellow at the Center for Environmental Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

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

(The Conversation) – In the last few days, a seasonal weather system known in Spain as the “cold drop” or DANA (an acronym of depresión aislada en niveles altos: isolated depression at high levels) has caused heavy rain and flooding across Spain’s Mediterranean coast and in Andalusia, especially in the Valencian Community, Castilla-La Mancha and the Balearic Islands. The storm has left hundreds dead and many more missing, with immense damage in the affected areas.

50 years ago, a DANA occurred every three or four years, typically in November. Today, they can happen all year round.

How does a DANA form?

These storms are formed in the same way as Atlantic hurricanes or typhoons in China. The difference is that the Mediterranean is smaller than these areas, and so storms have a shorter path, and store less energy and water vapour.

Decades ago, warm sea surfaces at the end of summer would cause water to evaporate into the atmosphere. Today, the sea surface is warm all year, constantly sending massive amounts of water vapour up into the atmosphere.

The poles are also much warmer now than they were 50 years ago. As a result, the polar jet stream – the air current that surrounds the Earth at about 11,000 metres above sea level – is weakened and, like any slowly flowing current, has meanders. These bring cold air, usually from Greenland, into the high atmosphere over Spain.

The evaporated water rising off the sea meets this very cold air and condenses. The Earth’s rotation causes the rising air to rotate counterclockwise, and the resulting condensation releases huge quantities of water.

This combination of factors causes torrential, concentrated rains to fall on Spain, specifically on the Balearic Islands and the Mediterranean coast, sometimes reaching as far inland as the Sierra de Segura mountains in Andalucia and the Serrania de Cuenca mountains in Castilla la Mancha and Aragón. These storms can move in very fast, and are extremely violent.

On occasions, this Mediterranean water vapour has moved as far as the Alps, crossing its western point and causing downpours in Central Europe.

Warming oceans, warming poles

Many years ago, humans discovered a gigantic source of energy: 30 million years worth of the sun’s energy, stored under the ground by plants and animals. Today, we are burning through this resource fast.

This fossilised energy source is made up of carbon compounds: coal, hydrocarbons and natural gas. By burning them, we release polyatomic molecules such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and other compounds. Once released into the atmosphere, these trap some of the heat radiating from the earth’s soil and seas, returning it to the planet’s surface.

This process is what causes climate change, and it can occur naturally. When these molecules, especially methane, are stored in continental ocean slopes, the water cools and the carbon dioxide captured by the waves is trapped inside. As the planet cools and sea levels fall, methane is eventually released into the atmosphere. The atmosphere warms up, warming the sea, and the sea releases CO₂ which amplifies the effect of the methane. The planet then gets warmer and warmer, causing glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise.

This alternation of cold and hot has occurred eight times over the last million years.

No end in sight for fossil fuels

Today we are forcing this process by emitting huge quantities of polyatomic gases ourselves. The question is whether we can limit these emissions. So far, this has been impossible.

To this we can add the fact that by 2050 there will be about two billion more human beings on the planet, who will also need food, housing and transport. This means more chemical fertilisers, cement, petrol, diesel and natural gas will be consumed, leading to further polyatomic gases being released.

Various measures to limit the burning of carbon compounds are falling short, or developing very slowly. Hopes for electric cars, for example, have been greatly diminished in recent years.

In Europe progress is being made in solar and wind energy, but electricity only makes up around a third of the energy consumed. Europe is also the only region making real progress on alternative electricity generation – much of China’s progress is being offset by its continued construction of coal-fired power plants.

Despite some large, high-profile projects, the reality is that we will continue to burn carbon compounds for many decades to come. This means the concentration of polyatomic gases in the atmosphere will increase over the next century, and with it the temperature of the planet, leading to more DANAs, hurricanes, typhoons and floods.

Climate adaptation is vital

What we are left with is adaptation, which is much more manageable as it does not require international agreements.

In Spain, for instance, we can control flooding through massive reforestation in inland mountainous areas, and through rainwater harvesting systems – building small wetlands or reservoirs on hillsides. This would slow the amount of water reaching the ramblas and barrancos, the gorges and channels that funnel rainwater through Spain’s towns and prevent them from flooding. At the same time, this would mean water can be captured by the soil, where it can then be gradually returned to the rivers and reservoirs.

Not only is this feasible, it is cost-effective, generates many jobs, and could save hundreds, if not thousands of lives.

Antonio Ruiz de Elvira Serra, Catedrático de Física Aplicada, Universidad de Alcalá

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

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

AP: “Climate change is making extreme downpours in Spain heavier and more likely, scientists say”

Project 2025, despite his dishonest denials, is Trump’s plan to gut the U.S. government, developed for the Heritage Foundation by Trump hangers-on.

I have said some of this before. It bears repeating.

Author Mary Annaïse Heglar said on social media, “If you know even a small amount about the fragile state of our ecosystem, you can recognize Donald Trump as an extinction level event.”

The Trump team will significantly raise US carbon dioxide emissions (4.8 billion metric tons in 2023, down from 4.9 billion in 2022), returning us to levels last seen in 2007, when we emitted 6 billion metric tons of CO2. The entire world releases 36.8 billion metric tons of CO2 each year. The US, with just 4.23% of the global population, generates 13% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

The United States is finally making some halting progress toward reducing greenhouse gases. The EPA looked at some 8,000 large industrial facilities, including power plants, and found that emissions were down 4% last year from 2022. This progress is fragile and Trump will overturn it, increasing fossil fuel use and torching the globe.

In Europe, the European Union’s deployment of wind, hydro, solar power, and batteries, along with the shift towards electric vehicles in some nations — coupled with enhanced energy efficiency — resulted in a nearly 9% reduction in total CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels within the European Union in 2023, despite some economic growth.

Only governments can act on climate change with the scale and speed that is necessary.

The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated $369 billion for clean energy initiatives and combating climate change. This amount surpasses the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of many nations, including Egypt, Pakistan, Chile, Greece, and others. This outlay represents an enormous lever. As Archimedes famously stated, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to rest it, and I will move the world.”

We have just 26 years to bring the world to carbon neutrality.

26 years.

The celebrated climate scientist Michael E. Mann shows that if we cease burning fossil fuels (petrol, natural gas, coal) by 2050, the planet will immediately stop warming. Additionally, all the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide we have released into the atmosphere since 1750 will be absorbed by the oceans. Between 65% and 80% of CO2 is taken up by the oceans over a period of 20 to 200 years.

It means that the threat of the planet’s climate going chaotic and threatening human civilization can be averted. The trick is that we must swing into action several times faster than we are presently doing.

Instead, Trump would take us back to the bad old days of ever-increasing emissions.

“Trump Tsunami,” Digital, Dream / Dark Fantasy v3

If we continue releasing billions of metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere beyond 2050, we will exceed the oceans’ capacity to absorb it, and everything, 100% of the emissions we produce after that point, will remain in the atmosphere for centuries. The average rise in the earth’s surface temperature since 1750 could surpass 5.4º F (3º C.), a level that scientists fear could destabilize our climate system.

The shifts in the Earth’s climate that we are already witnessing — including enormous wildfires, extreme heat waves, ocean temperatures surpassing 100º F (37.7º C.), powerful hurricanes, and catastrophic floods — are far more intense than the models predicted at this stage of climate change. These unexpected developments suggest that, in the near future, the climate could become extremely hostile if we fail to change our behavior. What if we are forced to retreat underground due to unbearable surface temperatures? What if all the power lines are destroyed by storms? Society cannot function without electricity. What if all buildings need to be redesigned to withstand winds of 160 miles per hour?

We saw the flash floods inundate Spain’s Valencia over the weekend, when the city suddenly was hit with torrential rains. They killed over 200 people. This sort of very heavy 1-day rainfall event is 12% more intense and 2 times as likely because of the increase we have provoked through burning coal, gas and petroleum, of 1.3º C. / 2.3º F. of the average temperature of the earth’s surface since 1750. Hot air has more moisture in it, so the rainfall is heavier than it used to be.

George Lee at Ireland’s RTE writes that World Weather Attribution, a group of climate scientists, “published an analysis of the ten most deadly extreme weather events of the past 20 years as a result of which more than 570,000 people died. They concluded unequivocally that, yes, human-caused climate change intensified every single one of those most deadly events. Four of those top ten global weather disasters occurred in Europe.”

What can stop the worst of this mounting catastrophe from striking us, our children and grandchildren? Governments. In the industrialized democracies, government policy is set by the parties that win elections.

This year, one political party genuinely seeks to devastate the planet for the short-term selfish gains of a few individuals. The other party is at least partially dedicated to combating climate change and can be further pressured to take stronger action in that direction.

Nothing else matters as much. The war in Ukraine does not matter as much. The US-China confrontation in the South China Sea is not as pressing. The Israeli total war on Gaza civilians, horrific as it is, and Hamas terrorism against civilians, as horrific as that is, does not matter as much as the fate of the globe.

In fact Israel, Gaza and Lebanon are destined to see significant loss of coastline to rising sea levels over the next century (and potentially as early as 2050), with the risk of widespread displacement of populations. There could be 1.2 billion climate refugees in the world by 2050, and these fragile Levantine societies are especially vulnerable.

Powerful Mediterranean cyclones, or Medicanes, similar to the one that swept Libya’s Derna into the sea last year, will strike their towns. Some parts of the Levant will see a decrease in available water of 30% by the end of the century. Intolerable heatwaves will claim the lives of the elderly and children. The region is warming at twice the global average rate. Carnegie concludes of the Middle East, “Heat waves are set to be experienced ten times more frequently by the same year. Future temperatures in the region are projected to exceed a threshold for human adaptability, leading to higher mortality rates for children and the elderly.”

Israelis and Palestinians will not endure unless they lay down their arms and collaborate to adapt to these changes.

In my opinion, the primary responsibility for this shift lies with Israel, which is currently dominated by a far-right ethno-nationalist expansionist agenda, as it is by far the more powerful party. Israeli technological advancements and Palestinian knowledge of traditional agricultural practices will be vital. But we are talking about just a few million people.

What good would it do anyway to win a war in Beirut, Haifa and/ or Gaza City but then have the oceans, cyclones, heat waves and drought come for you and chase you out of them anyway?

Once the Democrats are in power, if you disagree with their policies, challenge them, apply pressure, and push for change. Trump and MAGA, however, are not responsive to grassroots movements. They are controlled by a small group of self-serving billionaires who are determined to put you in the ground and then make you pay to be buried in it.