Analysis

This is how climate science went mainstream

Environmentalism has become mainstream. Recycling is now a $200 billion global industry. Sustainability has become a significant focus for global corporations. And governments have been introducing major programmes to cut carbon emissions. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1960s, worrying about our impact on the Earth was perceived as a niche pursuit. So how did we get to where we are today? Here’s a timeline of some key developments. 1962 – Silent Spring The book that is widely seen as having launched the modern environmental movement was written by an American ecologist, Rachel Carson. Silent Spring took aim at the use of pesticides and the damage they were causing to biodiversity. Carson called for environmental stewardship and a more considered approach to human intervention in the natural world. 1971 – Greenpeace Inspired by Rachel Carson, a group of activists from Vancouver, Canada set sail for Amchitka – an island off the coast of Alaska that was home to bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and 3,000 endangered sea otters – in an old fishing boat called The Greenpeace to try to stop an American nuclear weapons test. The activists feared the underground explosion would trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. The ship was forced to turn back, but the mission captured the public imagination. Greenpeace is now an international organization with offices in 40 countries and its own research laboratories. It is still involved in direct action, but also lobbies governments for policy changes and conducts investigations into “environmental crimes”. 1989 – Margaret Thatcher Known as “The Iron Lady” for the certainty she had about her political views, the former UK Prime Minister also raised awareness about climate change in a series of domestic and international speeches. In November 1989, she told the UN General Assembly: “The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country […]

The countries where it’s best to be a woman

Norway and Switzerland are the best countries to be a woman and Yemen and Afghanistan the worst, said research on Tuesday which found the state of women’s rights is not “all doom and gloom” around the world. While life for women has improved in some 60 countries, it has deteriorated in Yemen and other war-torn nations, research organizations Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security and Peace Research Institute Oslo concluded. The researchers looked at 167 countries since 2017 when the first Women, Peace and Security Index was compiled, weighing variables such as access to bank accounts, jobs and security. Rounding out the top of the list were Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Austria, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Sweden and Netherlands tied for ninth place, followed by Canada. At the bottom were Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Mali and Libya. “There are important areas of progress. It’s not all doom and gloom,” said Jeni Klugman, managing director of the Georgetown Institute and lead author of the index. Gains were strongest in women’s access to financial accounts, either mobile or at conventional banks, in fewer discriminatory laws and through increasing legislative representation. “A national election can bring about big changes, both positive and negative,” Klugman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We have a number of countries which boosted the share of women in their national legislatures. We also had several countries which went the other way,” she added. Iceland lost its top spot from 2017 after elections brought a drop in the number of women in parliament. The United States inched up to No. 19 from No. 22 two years ago, in part due to 2018 elections when a record number of women were elected to Congress. But Klugman said the United States […]

As Turkish troops move in to Syria, the risks are great – including for Turkey itself

Turkey did not waste much time in launching an attack on Syrian soil just days after US President Donald Trump announced he would withdraw US forces from northern Syria. As this development opens a new chapter in Syria, Turkey maybe unwittingly sinking deeper into that country’s civil war. This is not the first time president Trump has mentioned withdrawal from Syria – he voiced it in April 2018. Alleged gas attacks by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s incumbent government followed, which resulted in the US continuing its stay in Syria despite its reluctant president. The US government has always been tentative with its Syrian policy, which was openly exploited by Russia in its bid to support the Assad government’s grip on power in the embattled country. It is also not the first time Turkey has talked about a military presence in Syria. In January 2018, it sent troops to north-western Syria, establishing its control over lands to the west of the Euphrates river. Turkey has increased its military build up on the Syrian border ever since. The US contained any further Turkish advances by making it clear Turkey was not welcome to the east of the river, especially when the US needed the support of Kurdish forces in ending Islamic States’s presence in Syria. Why does Turkey want to increase its military presence in Syria? There are three main reasons Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is eager to send more troops in to northern Syria east of the Euphrates river. The first is the prospect of free Kurdish states near its borders inspiring the sizeable Kurdish populations in the south east of Turkey to seek similar aspirations. Northern Iraq is slowly moving towards independence. If Kurds in northern Syria were to establish an autonomous region, it would only be a matter of time before the same demands were raised in Turkey. […]

Blowout: Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All

by Rachel Maddow Rachel Maddow’s Blowout offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil-and-gas industry. With her trademark black humour, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe—from Oklahoma City to Siberia to Equatorial Guinea—exposing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas. She shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the United States, and the West’s most important alliances. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, but ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson emerge as two of the past century’s most consequential corporate villains. The oil-and-gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.” This book is a clarion call to contain the lion: to stop subsidising the wealthiest industry on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of predatory oil executives and their enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

Greta: the voice of climate activism who says ‘don’t listen to me’

She’s the voice of a global movement who mobilised millions of young people to demand action against climate change. Yet Greta Thunberg’s message to the US Congress – a hotbed of climate scepticism – was: “I don’t want you to listen to me. Little more than a year ago, we hadn’t heard of Thunberg. That changed after August 2018 when she held her first skolstrejk för klimatet, a ‘school strike for climate’, ducking out of class to protest outside Sweden’s parliament. “I want you to listen to the scientists.” Before long others joined her school strikes and, within a matter of months, a global movement was born. By March 2019, more than 2 million students across 135 countries were holding school strike demonstrations. Thunberg has come a long way in a year, both literally and figuratively. Just weeks after her 16th birthday she attended the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, where she famously urged world leaders to “panic” at the seriousness of the situation. “I don’t want your hope,” she told the audience. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I do. Every day. And want you to act. I want you to behave like our house is on fire. Because it is.” In March Thunberg was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Time magazine named her one of the world’s most influential people ans put her on its cover. She has addressed the European Parliament, the French National Assembly, the UK’s House of Commons, and met with Pope Francis. Now she is addressing the United Nations Climate Summit, a meeting she travelled to by carbon-neutral yacht. “It is insane that a 16-year-old would have to cross the Atlantic to take a stand,” she told reporters on arrival at the harbour. “The climate and ecological crisis is the […]

Lessons from China on how to drive sustainable growth

The Chinese dream will see us break the link between growing incomes, rising production and degradation of the environment. Our businesses should continue to grow even as our cities, farmland and entire ecosystems become greener and more sustainable. Long-term wealth creation should go hand-in-hand with sustainability. Earlier this year, Lyu Jun, Chairman of COFCO Corporation, described how the commercial case for sustainable production is lagging behind the moral one. Since his article was published as part of the World Economic Forum 2019 Annual Meeting, we have been actively demonstrating the commercial value of sustainability. In July, my company partnered with a consortium of 21 banks to engineer a $2.3 billion loan. Under the terms of this loan, we pay a lower interest rate if we can meet a series of annual targets on sustainability. Any interest saved will be re-invested into initiatives that increase our sustainability performance even further. Sustainability earns us money. This loan demonstrates some of the keys to sustainable growth. Here are five of them: Finance is emerging as a major driver of sustainability. Government policy and consumer preferences can certainly shift corporate behaviour, as tariffs on soy have shown. And most consumer-facing businesses are adapting to their customers’ preferences for more sustainability. But I see a more interesting role for the banks, whose influence is immense. The financial sector is shifting quickly towards sustainability as the links to reduced risk and better financial performance become clear. In the first half of this year, the issuance of sustainability-linked loans leapt 63% to $44 billion, as much as in all of 2018. Money talks. Innovation will be part of any solution While the public sector has limited funding resources, private investment and capability could play an instrumental role in achieving sustainable agricultural development goals. But current levels are not enough to […]

How China’s propaganda machine tried to control the message in the Hong Kong protests

China is known for the strict control it exercises on information, especially online. Discussion of events that might reflect unfavourably on the government is often censored, or framed in such a way that it becomes pro-government propaganda. That’s why so many Chinese citizens remain unaware of, for example, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Online discussion of the recent protests in Hong Kong against a now-suspended extradition bill was no different. But this was also a rare occasion when China’s news propaganda machine was mobilised to simultaneously target several audiences both inside and outside China. China’s propaganda network is made up of a constellation of domesticand international news outlets. They span social media, mobile apps, websites and traditional media. The news is tailored to particular audiences according to different agendas. Everything, however, comes under the direction of the Central Publicity (formerly translated as “Propaganda”) Department of the Chinese Communist Party. This is an amazing time lapse of the hundreds of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen the China extradition bill elevated from a local Hong Kong controversy to a story of international concern following the protesters’ lobbying campaign targeted at the G20 summit. As events escalated from peaceful rallies focused on a single issue to at times violent confrontations seeking a range of demands, including the resignation of Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, the agendas of several spheres of China’s propaganda converged. The first day protesters took to the streets was March 31. That was two days after the extradition bill was published in the Gazette, the official publication of the Hong Kong government. The same day, two Chinese-language newspapers that have long acted as de-facto official media of the Chinese government in Hong Kong (but not openly declared as such) swung into action. Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao both used either the entire or the majority of the second […]

Scientists amazed as Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years early

Matthew Green – Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.General view of a landscape of partially thawed Arctic permafrost near Mould Bay, Canada, in this handout photo released June 18, 2019. The image was captured in 2016 by researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks who were amazed to find the permafrost thawing 70 years faster than models predicted. A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilized the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia. “What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters by telephone. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.” The team’s findings, published on June 10 in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency. The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analyzing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned Cold War-era radar base more than 300 km from the nearest human settlement. Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognizable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier. The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks – waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter […]

Three Lessons from the Hong Kong Protests

Protests this month in Hong Kong over a proposed extradition law have revealed the depth of citizens’ concern for their way of life, and of their anger at Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s gross mismanagement. Lam now seems unlikely to serve out her full term in office – but China also has lessons to learn from recent events. LONDON – The massive protests in Hong Kong in recent weeks have demonstrated the depth of its citizens’ determination to uphold their democratic way of life – something they were supposedly guaranteed when the United Kingdom returned sovereignty over the city to China in 1997. Moreover, the protests hold three powerful lessons: for Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, for the demonstrators themselves, and for China’s rulers. The Roots of Our DiscontentTITO BOERI interviews RAGHURAM G. RAJAN about the plight of left-behind communities, migration, and the war on expertise.9Add to Bookmarks Over the past few years, the Chinese authorities have steadily increased their interference in Hong Kong’s affairs, gradually eroding the “one country, two systems” principle that was meant to ensure a “high degree of autonomy” for the city after 1997. The current crisis stems from China’s desire for a legal framework to return fugitives from the mainland who have allegedly used the city as a safe haven for ill-gotten wealth. In many respects, the extradition law introduced by Lam represented an extension of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign to Hong Kong, and was intended to avoid further incidents like Chinese security officers’ 2017 abduction of tycoon Xiao Jianhua from the city. There is no evidence that China gave Lam detailed instructions on enacting the law. Instead, she seems to have taken it upon herself to introduce it. However, Lam exceeded her remit by making the proposed extradition law applicable not only to fugitive mainland Chinese, but […]

We need to protect 30% of the planet by 2030.

Nicole SchwabDirector, International Relations, Last Wild Places, National Geographic Society Kristin RechbergerChief Executive Officer, Dynamic Planet At a time when the world is grappling with meeting the Paris Climate Agreement and trying to prevent the sixth mass extinction on Earth, an international team of scientists has published a way forward – a Global Deal for Nature. The science-backed plan, published in Science Advances, proposes ambitious targets for the conservation of nature as the most effective pathway to address the extinction crisis and help us avert catastrophic climate change, before it’s too late. The deal calls for 30% of the planet to be protected by 2030, with an additional 20% to be maintained or restored to a natural state and designated as climate stabilization areas. The link between biodiversity and climate change Biodiversity – the variety of life on Earth, from species to ecosystems – has a close relationship to climate change. Tropical forests, for example, are home to more than half of all species on land, and capture more of our carbon pollution than any other terrestrial ecosystem. They also sequester much more carbon than planted monocultures. The same is true for other ecosystems, such as intact mangroves and seagrass beds, which are sites of great biodiversity that store more carbon than coastal areas that have been degraded. But we have already transformed over half of Earth’s land to produce our food, and severely damaged our oceans. As a result, not only are we losing species at a rate 1000 times greater than the natural extinction rate, but we are also losing the ability of the natural world to rid us from our own pollution. At the moment, 45% of the planet is still in a natural or semi-natural state. But this is changing rapidly, putting severe pressure on the survival […]

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