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Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 27 August 2019 15:49.
Euractiv File photo. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro attends the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Leaders’ meeting on the sidelines of G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, 28 June 2019. [Kremlin pool/EPA/EFE]
G7 agrees on €18 million plan for forest fires but Brazil refuses aid
On Monday (26 August), the second day of the G7 meeting in Biarritz, France, climate protection was on the agenda. Even though states agreed on a plan to tackle forest fires in the Amazon rainforest, Brazil rejected foreign aid. EURACTIV Germany reports
During the G7 summit, heads of state and government agreed on an emergency programme with almost €18 million to tackle the forest fires in the Amazon region. French President Emmanuel Macron had put the topic on the meeting’s agenda at short notice.
However, only a few hours later, Brazil’s cabinet chief Onyx Lorenzoni rejected the programme. He told a news portal that Brazil was not prepared to take the money and urged Europe to reforest ‘its own backyard’. The Brazilian press office of the presidency confirmed the rejection to AFP.
The Amazon rainforest, which is about twice the area of France (1.2 million km2), has been seeing many forest fires. For Macron, this is “a drama that concerns all of humanity”. That is why states want to provide Brazil with immediate financial and technical help.
The UK has been the largest donor, as it has proposed to deploy €11 million for the emergency fund. The UK also pledged to double its contribution to the international climate fund. Since 2014, the fund has provided $100 billion each year for regions afffected by climate change. The UK will therefore contribute almost €1.6 billion over the next four years.
Green Climate Fund
@GCF_News
The UK announces a doubling of their contribution to the #GreenClimateFund! Cheers for your leadership in turning #ClimateAmbition into #ClimateAction. #G7 #G7Biarritz @DFID_UK https://g.cf/2Nz89vB
10:29 - 26 Aug 2019
Macron also stated that a comprehensive reforestation programme for the Amazon region should be agreed at the climate summit in New York in September. Nine countries affected by the forest fires – Brazil, French Guyana, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname, Bolivia, Ecuador and Guyana – should benefit from the programme.
In these areas, forest fires have increased dramatically in recent weeks. Many of the fires are not natural as they result from fire clearances that create free space for animal breeding, for example.
According to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, 60% more rainforest was subject to slash-and-burn practices in June compared to the same month last year.
G7 weekend sum-up: Trump deepens divisions by pushing for Russia’s readmission
The readmission of Russia in the Group of Seven most industrialised countries became a bone of contention between Donald Trump and his partners during a summit held in Biarritz (France), as the Europeans and Canada insisted on maintaining the group as a “club of liberal democracies”.
Forest fires for financial interests
Brazil rejecting aid is not that surprising. The country’s right-wing populist president Jair Bolsonaro said such foreign aid had a “colonialist mentality” behind it.
It was not until France and Ireland threatened to block the long-planned trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur states that Brazil started to act. The president deployed 43,000 army troops and two military aircraft to deal with the forest fires over the weekend. Observers accuse Bolsonaro of at least tolerating the fires in his own country and of expecting economic benefits from the clearance.
France and Ireland threaten to vote against EU-Mercosur deal
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has threatened to vote against a trade deal between the EU and South American trade bloc Mercosur unless Brazil, where wildfires continue to devastate the Amazon rainforest, takes its environmental obligations more seriously.
The trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur states has thus become a driver of forest fires, criticised Martin Häusling, a spokesman for agricultural policy for the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament.
“Brazil is creating space for grazing land and soy plantations – because Europe is to be supplied with the meat of 600,000 cattle and countless chickens. And that needs space,” Häusling said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was satisfied with the talks on climate protection. Yesterday morning, Merkel held talks with UN Secretary-General António Guterres. It had been agreed that in the run-up to the COP25, the “commitment of as many countries as possible to climate neutrality by 2050 was of utmost importance”.
Trump’s chair remained empty
Further details on the G7 climate session are not yet known.
In addition to fires in the Amazon rainforest, the states at the G7 summit had also debated the protection of the oceans. In July, the EU and Canada launched a joint ocean programme.
Why the ocean should be on the G7 agenda
Surfrider Europe, a French organisation fighting for clean oceans, is organising an event ahead of the G7 summit in France. The aim is to call for incorporating ocean protection into international negotiations, particularly those concerning climate change. EURACTIV’s partner la Tribune reports.
US President Donald Trump did not take part in the working session on environment issues.
When journalists asked him whether he had been present after the working session, he replied that “the meeting will take place soon” and did not respond to the objection that it had already taken place.
According to media reports, US government representatives had snubbed Macron’s agenda for including “niche issues” such as biodiversity rather than economic issues.
According to Macron, there should be a final summit statement, albeit a minimalist one. At the previous summit, Trump withdrew his support from the joint statement At the last G7 summit, Trump decided not to sign the final summit statement.
As fires ravage massive areas of the Amazon, the vital rainforest is nearing a “tipping point” in which a third of its ecosystem could be irreversibly decimated, experts have warned.
The loss of such huge areas of the forest would result in the eradication of species, many of which are yet to be studied, but would also unleash vast amounts of stored carbon.
Such devastation could spell catastrophe for the planet due to the implications for climate change.
Thousands of fires are racing through the Amazon, with Brazil recording more than 75,000 individual forest fires in the first eight months of the year.
In July, the rate of deforestation equated to roughly an area the size of Manhattan every day, or the size of Greater London every three weeks.
Professor Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University, who has studied the Amazon since 1965, told The Independent there are signs it is on course for further extensive deforestation which will soon stretch beyond human control.
The previous research of his colleague Carlos Nobre indicates further razing could break the Amazon’s hydrological cycle, whereby it generates half its own rainfall. If a critical amount of trees are felled, the ecosystem will degrade to the point of being unable to support the rainforest.
But speaking to The Independent on Friday, Professor Lovejoy said things have since become much worse.
“When we were first worried about it, the amount of deforestation was small,” he said. “But then these other things started to interact – the impact of deforestation and the effects of climate change became apparent, and the extent of the use of fire [for clearing land] became apparent.
“The reason we believe the tipping point is so close is because we’re seeing historic droughts in 2005, 2010, and 2016. And satellite images in the north central Amazon also show forests remote from everything are beginning to convert into grassland. That’s yet another symptom.
“These are not little droughts – boats cannot get up some of the river’s tributaries, because they’re so dry.”
Professor Lovejoy said such a conversion from rainforest to savannah and scrubland would be the wider effect if a tipping point is reached.
“You’d have extensive parts of the southern and eastern Amazon and parts of the central converting to savannah, and maybe to even drier conditions.”
As well as the catastrophic loss of the rainforest as a massive carbon sink, Professor Lovejoy said losing swathes of the Amazon would result in a huge loss in the planet’s biodiversity.
“People don’t really grasp that the biodiversity in one part of the Amazon is very different to that in other parts,” he said.
A [right winger] is burning the Amazon – but Macron is complicit too
PM’s minister ‘cosying up’ to far-right Brazilian government.
Macron says France will block trade deal with Brazil over Amazon fires
Meat eaters are helping to fuel the Amazon forest fires
“So if you have regional loss, you’ve having actual total loss of that biodiversity. It’s the largest terrestrial repository of biodiversity on the planet, so all that will impact the future of Brazil, the economy, for the future of the world, vanishes.
“We tend to live in the delusion we don’t depend on the biology of the planet, but we do. Agriculture, forestry, medicine, all of that has a major biological base. Scientists are revealing new potential all the time. But you can’t do that if the species isn’t there to study. It’s like book burning on a very grand scale.”
He added: “The standing forest is absorbing carbon on an annual basis, but its even greater importance is in the total amount of carbon stored in the forest itself. Tropical rainforests store more carbon per unit area than basically any other kind of habitat. So it’s folly in the end.”
Asked if he thought Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was a threat to the future of life on our planet, Professor Lovejoy said: “He certainly is, and he’s also a threat to Brazilian agriculture.”
But he said judging by the amount of public concern in Brazil, he believes things can change, despite Mr Bolsonaro’s policies.
“When there’s so much smoke in Sao Paolo, the street lamps come on at three in the afternoon, it’s clear there’s a problem.
“The world doesn’t expect Brazil to manage this all completely on its own, the world would like to help. And we hope we will be welcomed into some kind of partnership.”
Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the cheapest and most efficient way to tackle the climate crisis. So states a Guardian article, citing a new analysis published in the journal Science. The author explains:
As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.
For skeptics who reject the global warming thesis, reforestation also addresses the critical problems of mass species extinction and environmental pollution, which are well-documented. A 2012 study from the University of Michigan found that loss of biodiversity impacts ecosystems as much as does climate change and pollution. Forests shelter plant and animal life in their diverse forms, and trees remove air pollution by the interception of particulate matter on plant surfaces and the absorption of gaseous pollutants through the leaves.
The July analytical review in Science calculated how many additional trees could be planted globally without encroaching on crop land or urban areas. It found that there are 1.7 billion hectares (4.2 billion acres) of treeless land on which 1.2 trillion native tree saplings would naturally grow. Using the most efficient methods, 1 trillion trees could be restored for as little as $300 billion—less than 2% of the lower estimates for the Green New Deal introduced by progressive Democrats in February.
The Guardian quoted Professor Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who said, “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.” He said it was also by far the cheapest solution that has ever been proposed. The chief drawback of reforestation as a solution to the climate crisis, as The Guardian piece points out, is that trees grow slowly. The projected restoration could take 50 to 100 years to reach its full carbon sequestering potential.
A Faster, More Efficient Solution
Fortunately, as of December 2018, there is now a cheaper, faster and more efficient alternative—one that was suppressed for nearly a century but was legalized on a national scale when President Trump signed the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018. This is the widespread cultivation of industrial hemp, the nonintoxicating form of cannabis grown for fiber, cloth, oil, food and other purposes. Hemp grows to 13 feet in 100 days, making it one of the fastest carbon dioxide-to-biomass conversion tools available. Industrial hemp has been proved to absorb more CO2 per hectare than any forest or commercial crop, making it the ideal carbon sink. It can be grown on a wide scale on nutrient-poor soils with very small amounts of water and no fertilizers.
“If we are to survive earth systems breakdown, then we must begin by transforming the Treasury and by removing the politicians that threaten the futures of today’s younger generations.” Ann Pettifor writes on the British Chancellor’s recent attack on ‘net zero’.
It took a child, Greta Thunberg, to alert much of the adult world to the catastrophic threat posed not just by climate breakdown, but earth systems breakdown. Sadly her voice did not reach one of the politicians responsible for defending the nation’s security: Philip Hammond. Watching the Chancellor attack the Prime Minister for wanting to invest a smidgeon of Britain’s annual income in the future survival of the nation, it’s hard to believe that it is now eighty three years since John Maynard Keynes invented the field of macroeconomics. We have had eighty three years in which to train Treasury economists to think in terms of the aggregate economy, and we still have a Chancellor that views the economy through the wrong end of a telescope – as if it were a household.
From Keynes’s macroeconomic perspective, the public sector finances are not analogous to household finances. Keynes turned Say’s Law on its head (CW XXIX, p. 81):
“For the proposition that supply creates its own demand, I shall substitute the proposition that expenditure creates its own income”
Given spare capacity, public expenditures not only are productive in their own right but also foster additional activity in the private sector, according to the multiplier. Increased employment means increased incomes, which, from the point of view of government, means higher tax revenues and lower welfare (and, later, debt interest) expenditures.
Now one can just imagine how intellectually challenging it would be for #spreadsheetPhil to accept that “expenditure creates its own income”. It does not do that for individuals, or even households, he will argue. Quite so. But the collective sum that is government expenditure, if invested in the creation of a skilled, well-paid ‘green carbon army’ would generate considerable income for government – and would help ensure the survival of life on earth.
The mainstream media has been bombarding Western countries with news about the need for a more circular economy and slow phasing out of plastic from our daily lives in order to protect the environment, focusing on the World’s oceans. But how much of that plastic pollution is actually the West’s fault?
It’s easy to see awareness campaigns about animals trapped in all sorts of trash and to then want to do something in order to prevent such a terrible thing from happening again. In the past few weeks, the mainstream media has been on a crusade against the horrors of plastic in developed nations, targeting everyday, easily dischargeable items such as plastic bags and plastic straws.
Are they preaching to the right audience though?
IFLScience@IFLScience
Shocking Images Of Marine Life Being Suffocated Highlight The Problem Of Plastics In The Oceanhttps://www.iflscience.com/environment/shocking-images-marine-life-suffocated-highlight-plastics-ocean/ …
13:40 - 22 Mar 2019
161 people are talking about this
These distressing images are of great shock value, they create awareness for a major problem that affects all sorts of ecosystems and in this case, marine and sea life, but surprise, surprise, if they want this campaign to be effective, these slogans should be written in Mandarin, Hindi or any African language.
First of all, the disposal of waste in Western nations (and also other developed countries such as Japan or South Korea) is treated very differently than those in developing nations in continents such as Africa and Asia. Not even emerging nations such as India, China or Brazil recycle or treat their waste as much as their Western counterparts, with Brazil being the country who is doing a better jon of treating and recycling these sorts of dischargeable items.
This graph, although from 20 years ago, depicts a good image of how solid waste was and still is treated worldwide.
In 1998, few were the countries that cared or could afford to recycle their solid waste. As we can see, most of the waste being recycled was done in Western nations such as the US, Canada, European countries, Australia, New Zealand and a few East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea.
Recycling has evolved a lot in the last 15-20 years, but still, Western nations are at the forefront on the treatment and re-use of plastic, glass, card or paper, more so than any other Latin American, Asian or African country (Take into account that the graph only shows OECD countries).
In the graph below we can see the ten most polluting rivers on the planet. Two of them are in Africa: the Niger and Nile rivers. The other two in South Asia: the Indus and Ganges rivers. The remaining six are in East and Southeast Asia.
95% of the plastic polluting the World’s oceans comes from just these 10 rivers.
And finally, we finish up where we started, we already know that the ten most polluted rivers are in Africa and in Asia, but which countries are the ones who are actually polluting our oceans with plastic the most, thereby threatening ecosystems and sea life?
Well, the answer is, above all, Asian countries, with China being by far the most polluting country on the planet, followed by Southeast Asia and Pacific countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and more far below, Thailand and Malaysia.
To finalise, seeing turtles with straws up their noses or sea lions asphyxiating in plastic bags is sad, it is far from reality. Researchers came to the conclusion that what traps the most animals actually is fishing gear, lots and lots of fishing gear. The data presented is clear, Third World nations are by far the ones who most pollute our World Oceans due to bad infrastructure, not having facilities in order to treat their waste, and if you want to help animals not getting trapped, pushing for policies that punish commercial fishermen who leave or dispose of nets and other gear in the water might be the way to go.
As alarm bells sound over the advancing destruction of the environment, a variety of Green New Deal proposals have appeared in the U.S. and Europe, along with some interesting academic debates about how to fund them. Monetary policy, normally relegated to obscure academic tomes and bureaucratic meetings behind closed doors, has suddenly taken center stage.
The 14-page proposal for a Green New Deal submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., does not actually mention Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), but that is the approach currently capturing the attention of the media—and taking most of the heat. The concept is good: Abundance can be ours without worrying about taxes or debt, at least until we hit full productive capacity. But, as with most theories, the devil is in the details.
MMT advocates say the government does not need to collect taxes before it spends. It actually creates new money in the process of spending it; and there is plenty of room in the economy for public spending before demand outstrips supply, driving up prices.
Critics, however, insist this is not true. The government is not allowed to spend before it has the money in its account, and the money must come from tax revenues or bond sales.
In a 2013 treatise called “Modern Monetary Theory 101: A Reply to Critics,” MMT academics concede this point. But they write, “These constraints do not change the end result.” And here the argument gets a bit technical. Their reasoning is that “the Fed is the monopoly supplier of CB currency [central bank reserves], Treasury spends by using CB currency, and since the Treasury obtained CB currency by taxing and issuing treasuries, CB currency must be injected before taxes and bond offerings can occur.”
The counterargument, made by American Monetary Institute (AMI) researchers, among others, is that the central bank is not the monopoly supplier of dollars. The vast majority of the dollars circulating in the United States are created, not by the government, but by private banks when they make loans. The Fed accommodates this process by supplying central bank currency (bank reserves) as needed, and this bank-created money can be taxed or borrowed by the Treasury before a single dollar is spent by Congress. The AMI researchers contend, “All bank reserves are originally created by the Fed for banks. Government expenditure merely transfers (previous) bank reserves back to banks.” As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis puts it, “federal deficits do not require that the Federal Reserve purchase more government securities; therefore, federal deficits, per se, need not lead to increases in bank reserves or the money supply.”
What federal deficits do increase is the federal debt; and while the debt itself can be rolled over from year to year (as it virtually always is), the exponentially growing interest tab is one of those mandatory budget items that taxpayers must pay. Predictions are that in the next decade, interest alone could add $1 trillion to the annual bill, an unsustainable tax burden.
To fund a project as massive as the Green New Deal, we need a mechanism that involves neither raising taxes nor adding to the federal debt; and such a mechanism is proposed in the U.S. Green New Deal itself—a network of public banks. While little discussed in the U.S. media, that alternative is being debated in Europe, where Green New Deal proposals have been on the table since 2008. European economists have had more time to think these initiatives through, and they are less hampered by labels like “socialist” and “capitalist,” which have long been integrated into their multi-party systems.
A Decade of Gestation in Europe
The first Green New Deal proposal was published in 2008 by the New Economics Foundation on behalf of the Green New Deal Group in the U.K. The latest debate is between proponents of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), led by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, and French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling “Capital in the 21st Century.” Piketty recommends funding a European Green New Deal by raising taxes, while Varoufakis favors a system of public green banks.
Belgian students gather to call for urgent measures to combat climate change during a demonstration in Brussels, Belgium, 24 January 2019. According the police more than 35,000 students are taking part in the demonstration.
Thousands of Belgian school children skipped classes on Thursday (24 January) to flood Brussels in an unprecedented protest against global warming and pollution, vowing to miss school once a week until the government takes action.
Students banging drums and carrying signs decrying man-made climate change gathered around the European Parliament.
Police said the 35,000-strong gathering was the biggest turnout of recent times for a student protest in the Belgian capital, which is also home to European Union institutions.
“If we skip every Thursday, if we don’t go to school, the big people in our country and in the world will see that this is a problem,” said high school student Joppe Mathys.
Another student held a sign saying: “Be part of the solution, not the pollution.”
A nine-year-old girl, who gave her name only as Lalla and was with her teacher, said it was time people stopped driving cars and walked and cycled instead.
“Dinosaurs thought they had time too,” read one banner.
Belgian school students feel abandoned by their politicians so they have started a weekly strike for the climate. Their protests pose a major question about how young people are represented in politics ahead of the EU elections in May.
Brussels police spokeswoman Ilse Van de Keere said the student demonstration was the biggest in recent memory.
Broad protests started across Belgium on 2 December with a “Claim the Climate” march, when over 65,000 demonstrators called for Belgian and European leaders to adopt ambitious climate policies in line with goals set by the Paris agreement in 2015. That demonstration came before the COP24 UN climate summit in Poland, where a report was released ranking Belgium 31 out of 60 on the 2019 Climate Change Performance Index, or a “medium” performance in implementing the Paris agreements. Brussels has been regularly ranked as one of the most congested cities in western Europe in recent years due to Belgium’s high population density and large number of commuters.
That is also a mark of shame for a capital where the EU sets European climate policies.
Across the EU, road congestion costs the bloc one percent of its annual economic output, or €100 billion per year, according to the European Commission.
In the run-up to the UN climate conference, which began in Katowice in Poland on 2 December, many thousands of people demonstrated to support accelerating the phasing out of the coal industry. EURACTIV Germany reports.
Euractiv File photo. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro attends the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Leaders’ meeting on the sidelines of G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, 28 June 2019. [Kremlin pool/EPA/EFE]
Related: indigenous tribes of Amazon suited to preserve the forest as they are evolved in harmony.
Philip Steffon CC2.0
