Gov’t Silent as Climate Change Unfolds

Tina Landis

As I write this article from San Francisco, Calif., the sky is dark orange and I need to have my desk lamp on to see, despite that it’s midday. There is so much smoke in the atmosphere above the summer fog layer that only the orange light gets through to the ground.

From megafires, extreme heat waves, summer snow storms and hurricanes, millions across the United States are witnessing the effects of climate change first hand. California broke record temperatures again over Labor Day weekend while fires burned from Alaska to Mexico and around the globe. Colorado went from record high temperatures over Labor Day weekend to a snowstorm on Tuesday with a 60 to 70 F drop in temperatures within 24 hours.

Northern California is currently experiencing three of the four largest fires in the state’s history, burning over 2 million acres–an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles–since Aug. 18 with hundreds of smaller fires dotting the state. Over 100,000 have been evacuated and thousands have lost their homes, all during an unprecedented economic crisis and a pandemic with no end in sight.

The majority of fires were triggered by a rare weather anomaly. A tropical cyclone off the California coast clashed with a prolonged heatwave, causing an atmospheric disturbance and over 11,000 dry lightning strikes within 72 hours beginning on the night of Aug. 18. This came while the state is in a drought with vegetation prime to ignite. The frequency and severity of tropical cyclones and heat waves in the region is growing with climate change making a repeat of this weather anomaly likely.

Currently, there are 89 large fires burning throughout the western United States. The 367 fires that were sparked by the lightning strikes overloaded already stretched CAL FIRE crews. Other states that generally send crews to support California were tied down with their own fires. The impossible task of containing so many massive fires at one time was even more dire due to a lack of inmate firefighters who annually supplement CAL FIRE crews.

As part of an early-release program to reduce COVID-19 risk in prisons, formerly incarcerated fire crew members were unable to serve due to felony records, despite years of experience fighting wildfires. The state has since passed AB-2147, which will allow those formerly incarcerated firefighters to serve on CAL FIRE crews after release.

Longest streak of poor air quality

The densely populated San Francisco Bay Area is currently experiencing the longest streak of poor air quality in history–at 23 consecutive days as of this writing. The fires have forced people to stay indoors to avoid smoke exposure in the time of COVID-19 when protecting our respiratory health is even more crucial. But due to the extreme heat wave making it unsafe to keep windows closed without air conditioning, many have no choice but to suffer through the smoke.

Immigrant farm workers throughout the state are being forced to work not only in extreme temperatures but also wildfire smoke. These super-exploited workers face eviction and starvation if they don’t go to work.

Wildfire evacuees face the choice of risking exposure to COVID-19 in shelters or paying for hotel rooms. Although evacuation centers are limiting the number of people per center to maintain social distancing, reports state that enforcement of masks is spotty, forcing working-class people to choose between sheltering in their cars during high temperatures and smoky air or risk COVID-19.

This is the class war on display, which will become heightened as climate change unfolds while the government does nothing significant to protect the most vulnerable. Every year, wildfires are becoming more frequent, larger, and more destructive, yet the state has done little to prepare and protect the population.

Until the 1800s when colonizers banned the practice, the indigenous people of California annually held controlled burns to clear vegetation and reduce the spread of wildfires. In recent years, the state has increased efforts to clear vegetation in advance of fire season. But with climate change exacerbating fire risk, aging electrical infrastructure, and extreme weather events like the one that caused the current fires, those efforts fall short.

At the same time as the fires raged, Hurricane Laura–one of the strongest hurricanes to reach landfall in Gulf Coast history–pounded southwestern Louisiana with 150 mph winds leaving 100,000 without power, cell service, or clean water for more than two weeks now. A dangerous heat wave that followed the storm caused more deaths than the hurricane itself.

After the initial impact, the media has been largely silent on the devastation that the community of the Lake Charles region is facing. Liberation News sent a team of journalists to provide aid and give voice to those impacted. The team discovered that residents have seen no government relief workers and have no access to shelters despite widespread devastation.

Scientists have a hard time predicting exactly how fast climate change will unfold and the extent of the effects. We are currently only at 1 C warming and already experiencing extreme weather and devastation around the globe. The much-touted Paris Agreement’s voluntary commitments have us on target for 3 C warming, when scientists warn that staying below 1.5 C warming is what is needed to avert catastrophe.

Despite being in charge of the wealthiest country in the world, the U.S. government–Democrat and Republican–is doing nothing to mitigate or prepare for the looming catastrophe. Even in to liberal bastion of California, state leadership is not taking the crisis seriously. California is the fifth largest economy in the world, yet there is no money for people’s needs while Big Tech gets tax breaks.

If humanity is to survive this crisis, we must immediately put all resources into preparing for what’s currently unfolding and what’s to come. We must immediately transition off fossil fuels and restore ecosystems that capture carbon from the atmosphere. We must protect the population from climate disasters and provide real relief for people in the aftermath.

Capitalism has proven time and again that it is incapable and unwilling to meet the needs of the people. If we don’t uproot the system that has created the climate crisis, that continues to ignore it and go about business as usual, the majority of us face a truly dire not-too-distant future. The people have the power to change the path we are on–to share the challenges together and build a better world for all.

(Tina Landis is a socialist activist and an organizer in the environmental and social justice movements in the USA.)

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New WWF Report Reveals: Nature Is Unraveling

Soumya Sarkar

Global biodiversity is in steep decline, the World Wildlife Fund has warned in its flagship Living Planet Report 2020. The numbers of mammals, birds, fish, plants and insects have fallen an average of 68% from 1970 to 2016, which is more two thirds in less than 50 years.

Humans are destroying nature at a rate never seen before, and the slide shows no signs of slowing, the report said.

“Biodiversity is fundamental to human life on earth, and the evidence is unequivocal – it is being destroyed by us at a rate unprecedented in history,” said the World Wildlife Fund report published once every two years. “Since the industrial revolution, human activities have increasingly destroyed and degraded forests, grasslands, wetlands and other important ecosystems, threatening human well-being.”

About 75% of the earth’s ice-free land surface has already been significantly altered, most of the oceans are polluted and more than 85% of the area of wetlands has been lost, the report showed.

“The way we produce and consume food and energy, and the blatant disregard for the environment entrenched in our current economic model, has pushed the natural world to its limits,” said Marco Lambertini, director general, World Wildlife Fund International. “Covid-19 is a clear manifestation of our broken relationship with nature.”

The Living Planet Report is based on data from the Living Planet Index produced by the Zoological Society of London. The index is statistically created from journal studies, online databases and government reports for 20,000 populations of 4,200 species of mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish, or approximately 6% of the world’s vertebrate species.

Alarming decline

“The Living Planet Index is one of the most comprehensive measures of global biodiversity,” said Andrew Terry, director of conservation at Zoological Society of London. “An average decline of 68% in the past 50 years is catastrophic and clear evidence of the damage human activity is doing to the natural world.”

“If nothing changes, species populations will undoubtedly continue to fall, driving wildlife to extinction and threatening the integrity of the ecosystems on which we all depend,” Andrew Terry.

The rate of decline is not uniform. The Freshwater Living Planet Index shows that freshwater biodiversity is declining far faster than that in oceans or forests, with an alarming 84% decline in freshwater species, which is equivalent to 4% per year since 1970.

In the tropical sub-regions of the Americas, there is a catastrophic 94% decline, the largest fall observed in any part of the world in the past 50 years.

Land conversion for agriculture has caused 70% of global biodiversity loss and half of all tree cover loss, and of the total amount of water withdrawn from available freshwater resources, 75% is used for crops or livestock.

Since 2000, 1.9 million sq km of previously wild and undeveloped land – an area the size of Mexico – has been lost through conversion, mostly in tropical and subtropical grasslands, savanna and shrubland ecosystems, and Southeast Asian rainforests.

In the marine environment, overfishing in wild capture fisheries is the primary driver of change, with one in three fish stocks overfished. Pollution, coastal development and climate change are also affecting ocean productivity.

India’s situation

India’s ecological footprint, according to the index, is lower than 1.6 global hectares per person, which is the lowest bracket and is smaller than that of many large countries. However, its high population levels make it likely for the country to face a widening ecological deficit even if current per-capita levels of resource consumption remain the same.

India is a highly biodiverse country, holding over 45,000 species of plants in only 2.4% of the world’s land area. Over 12% of wild mammal species are threatened with extinction in the country.

Larger animals, particularly in freshwater habitats, are in greater danger of extinction, the report said. These include river dolphins found in India, giant catfish in the Mekong, otters and beavers, among others.

In India, 3% of bird species face extinction, with the number increasing every year. As many as 19% of amphibians are threatened or critically endangered. Bee colonies are also collapsing drastically across the country.

“We are heading to a point of no return,” said Sejal Worah, director of programmes at World Wildlife Fund India.

Based on new research by a global group of scientists, published in Nature journal on September 10, the Living Planet Report calls for action to halt and reverse the downward spiral of wildlife loss. The research shows that things can be turned around if ambitious conservation efforts to protect wildlife are combined with stopping habitat loss and deforestation.

It means transformative changes in farming and how we produce food, tackling the more than 30% food that is currently wasted, and working to restore damaged habitats and landscapes.

Bending the curve

Known as the Bending the Curve Initiative, this research has developed pioneering modelling, providing a proof of concept that terrestrial biodiversity loss from land-use change can be halted and reversed.

“This study shows the world may still be able to stabilise and reverse the loss of nature. But to have any chance of doing that as early as 2030, we will need to make transformational changes in the way we produce and consume food, as well as bolder, more ambitious conservation efforts,” said Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at World Wide Fund United Kingdom and a co-author of the study.

“The Anthropocene could be the moment we achieve a balance with the rest of the natural world and become stewards of our planet,” David Attenborough said in Voices for a Living Planet. “Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials.”

“But above all, it will require a change in perspective,” Attenborough said.

(Article courtesy: Mongabay. Mongabay-India is a conservation and environment news and features service.)

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We’ve Passed the Point of No Return on Rising Sea Levels

Dave Blinderman

In the coming decades, tens of millions of people will be displaced by coastal flooding as sea levels rise. This rise can no longer be prevented, even if all carbon emissions stop tomorrow. An unprecedented, and under capitalism likely impossible, level of international cooperation will be required to mitigate the effects of this looming disaster.

According to a report from researchers at Ohio State University, the Greenland ice sheet is doomed. Changes in the ocean and atmosphere in the Arctic mean Greenland will no longer receive enough snowfall to make up for the summer melt. If the ice sheet, the largest outside of Antarctica, melts completely, global sea levels will rise by more than seven metres.

The revelation came in the same week as a devastating report on global ice loss. UK scientists estimate that the world lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017. Roughly half of the resulting melt water has come from glaciers and ice sheets on solid ground (rather than from sea ice), causing a 3.5cm rise in global sea levels. “To put that in context”, professor Andy Shepherd, director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at Leeds University, told the Guardian, “every centimetre of sea level rise means about a million people will be displaced from their low-lying homelands”.

Another study, published in the journal Scientific Reports on 30 July, outlines the scale of destruction that could be unleashed by rapid sea level rises in the remaining decades of the 21st century. The report, by researchers at the University of Melbourne, attempts to quantify the social and economic cost of more frequent coastal flooding. Unsurprisingly, the numbers are terrifying. Under a business as usual scenario, the frequency of what we now call one-in-100-year floods will increase to one every decade in most parts of the world. The researchers predict millions more people will be at risk of disastrous floods, especially in low-lying coastal areas where some of the largest cities in the world now sit. The economic cost of this flood damage is estimated to be as high as US$11.3 trillion.

According to the lead author, Ebru Karezci, “Curbing rising greenhouse gases is critical, but much of the predicted sea level rise is already baked in—it will happen irrespective of what happens with greenhouse gases. So we need to adapt”. She notes that some countries are better prepared with existing coastal defences and enough wealth to construct more in the coming years. Others won’t be so lucky. The capital of Indonesia, Jakarta—home to more than 10 million people—is so vulnerable to rising sea levels that the government last year announced plans to move to a new, purpose-built city in Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo.

Existing inequalities in preparedness reflect the legacy of exploitation and uneven development across the planet. In a cruel twist, the people who have gained the least and suffered the most from capitalism are likely to feel the worst impacts of the climate crisis generated by it.

In Australia, there is already significant coastal erosion. Several major winter storms hit the east coast in recent months, washing away beaches and threatening homes in some areas. If current trends continue, existing coastlines will be transformed beyond recognition by the end of the century. Without massive investment in new coastal defences, some coastal communities could be lost entirely.

Given the mounting scientific evidence of the devastating economic impact of rising sea levels and other consequences of global warming, you might expect governments and business leaders to be paying more attention to the problem. Unfortunately, as the past three decades of inaction on climate change show, they are more concerned about short-term economic gains than about the prospect of damage from climate change in the long term.

If anything, the situation in the COVID-19 era is worse than ever. Under the cover of the pandemic, governments around the world have loosened environmental regulations to allow new fossil fuel projects. In Australia, the government is preparing a “gas-led economic recovery” that will cement the country’s status as one of the world’s worst climate criminals.

At a time when an unprecedented level of cooperation is required to overcome the existential threat of climate change, we remain trapped within a capitalist system that runs on competition and the pursuit of profit. The need for an alternative has never been more urgent.

(Article courtesy: Red Flag, an Australian socialist publication.)