Why are we feeding crops to our cars when people are starving?  George Monbiot   What can you say about governments that, in the midst of a global food crisis, choose instead to feed machines? You might say they were crazy, uncaring or cruel. But these words scarcely suffice when you seek to describe the burning of food while millions starve. There’s nothing complicated about the effects of turning crops into biofuel. If food is used to power cars or generate electricity or heat homes, either it must be snatched from human mouths, or ecosystems must be snatched from the planet’s surface, as arable lands expand to accommodate the extra demand. But governments and the industries that they favour obscure this obvious truth. They distract and confuse us about an evidently false solution to climate breakdown. From inception, the incentives and rules promoting biofuels on both sides of the Atlantic had little to do with saving the planet and everything to do with political expediency. Angela Merkel pushed for an EU biofuels mandate as a means of avoiding stronger fuel economy standards for German motor manufacturers. In the US, they have long been used to prop up the price of grain and provide farmers with a guaranteed market. That’s why the Biden administration, as the midterm elections loom, remains committed to this cruelty. As the investigative group Transport & Environment shows, the land used to grow the biofuels consumed in Europe covers 14m hectares (35m acres): an area larger than Greece. Of the soy oil consumedin the European Union, 32% is eaten by cars and trucks. They devour 50% of all the palm oil used in the EU and 58% of the rapeseed oil. Altogether, 18% of the world’s vegetable oil is turned into biodiesel, and 10% of the world’s grains are transformed into ethanol, to mix with petrol.A new report by Green Alliance, an independent thinktank, shows that the food used by the UK alone for biofuels could feed 3.5 million people. If biofuel production ceased worldwide, according to one estimate, the saved crops could feed 1.9 billion human beings. The only consistent and reliable outcome of this technology is hunger. It’s not just a matter of the upward pressure on food prices, great as this is. Biofuel markets also provide a major incentive for land grabbing from small farmers and indigenous people. Since 2000, 10m hectares of Africa’s land, often the best land, has been bought or seized by sovereign wealth funds, corporations and private investors. They replace food production for local people with “flex crops”: commodities such as soya and maize that can be switched between markets for food, animal feed or biofuel, depending on which prices are strongest. Land grabbing isa major cause of destitution and hunger. As biofuels raise demand for land, rainforests, marshes and savannahs in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil and Africa are cleared. There’s a limit to how much we can eat. There’s no limit to how much we can burn. All the major crop sources of biodiesel have a higher climate impact than the fossil fuels they replace.                    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/30/crops-cars-starving-biofuels-climate-sustainable

The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse.  George Monbiot   Fri 9 Dec 2022 16.36 GMT  There are two extraordinary facts about the convention on biological diversity, whose members are meeting in Montreal now to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world’s 198 states, 196 are party to it. The second is the identity of those that aren’t. Take a guess. North Korea? Russia? Wrong. Both ratified the convention years ago. One is the Holy See (the Vatican). The other is the United States of America. This is one of several major international treaties the US has refused to ratify. Among the others are crucial instruments such as the Rome statuteon international crimes, the treaties banningcluster bombs and landmines, the convention on discrimination against women, the Basel convention on hazardous waste, the convention on the law of the sea, the nuclear test ban treaty, the employment policy convention and the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. In some cases, it is one of only a small number to refuse: the others are generally either impoverished states with little administrative capacity or vicious dictatorships. It is the only independent nation on Earth not to ratify the convention on the rights of the child. Perhaps this is because it is the only nation to sentence children to life imprisonment without parole, among many other brutal policies. While others play by the rules, the most powerful nation refuses. If this country were a person, we’d call it a psychopath. As it is not a person, we should call it what it is: a rogue state. Through its undemocratic dominance of global governance, the US makes the rules, to a greater extent than any other state. It also does more than any other to prevent both their implementation and their enforcement. Its refusal to ratify treaties such as the convention on biological diversity provides other nations with a permanent excuse to participate in name only. Like all imperial powers, its hegemony is expressed in the assertion of its right not to care. Take the nitrogen crisis in the Netherlands. Scientists there have been warning since the 1980s that the excessive release of nitrogen compounds – primarily by agriculture – exceed the land and water’s capacity to absorb them, killing rivers, polluting groundwater, damaging soil, wiping out wild plants and causing a severe but seldom-discussed air pollution crisis. But successive governments could not be persuaded to care.  This has triggered a furious reaction from the industries most affected, primarily livestock farming. The farmers’ protests have, like the Ottawa truckers’ strike, now become acause célèbre for the far rightall over the world. Rightwing politicians claim that the nitrogen crisis is being used as a pretext to seize land from farmers, in whom, they claim, true Dutch identity is vested, and hand it to asylum seekers and other immigrants, at the behest of “globalist” forces such as the World Economic Forum.   In other words, the issue has been co-opted by “great reset” and “great replacement” conspiracy theorists, who claim that there are deliberate policies to replace local, white people with “other cultures” .          https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/09/us-world-climate-collapse-nations    

Those who demand better pay and conditions for workers and justice for poor people have been pitched by demagogues and corporate lobbyists against those who demand a habitable planet. For years, we have struggled with the question of how to overcome this division and create a social and environmental justice platform that could unite vast numbers of the world’s people. Only one thing was clear: any such campaign had to be led by activists from poorer nations. Now, I believe, the breakthrough has arrived.t has proved too easy to stop people uniting around the crucial issues of our time. Those who demand better pay and conditions for workers and justice for poor people have been pitched by demagogues and corporate lobbyists against those who demand a habitable planet. For years, we have struggled with the question of how to overcome this division and create a social and environmental justice platform that could unite vast numbers of the world’s people. Only one thing was clear: any such campaign had to be led by activists from poorer nations. Now, I believe, the breakthrough has arrived.Developed by campaigners in some of the world’s most exploited countries, it’s a brilliant idea: simple but systemic.                                                                                                                                                                Rich nations owe a massive climate debtto poorer nations, they are deemed to owe massive financial debts to the rich nations, yet they cannot pay them without destroying their economies and their ecosystems. The proposal is simultaneously to cancel both the climate and the financial debts, liberating the money poorer nations need to take climate action. Debt for Climate, mobilising labour, social and climate movements in 28 countries, will be launched by campaigners during the G7 summit in Germany, which starts on Sunday.Campaigners often talk of “odious debts”, which means loans agreed by dictatorships, that provide no benefit to the nation. But all the debts deemed to be owed by poor nations to the rich world and its corporations could be seen this way. The idea that the global south, looted and enslaved for centuries, should owe money to its exploiters is grotesque.An analysis in the journal Global Environmental Change suggests that $10tn of value is extracted from poorer countries by richer ones every year, in the form of raw materials, energy, land and labour. That’s 70 times as much money as would be needed to end extreme poverty worldwide. This extraction provides rich nations with a quarter of their GDP: much of our apparent wealth depends on exploitation.                        https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/24/rich-nations-climate-debt-cancelling-debts-emissions-global-debt-swap-campaign?utm_campaign=Daily%20Briefing&utm_content=20220624&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter    

George Monbiot, from The Guardian

January 26, 2022

Carbon offsetting is not warding off environmental collapse – it’s accelerating it....George Monbiot.....Wealthy companies are using the facade of ‘nature-based solutions’ to enact a great carbon land grab. There is nothing that cannot be corrupted, nothing good that cannot be transformed into something bad. And there is no clearer example than the great climate land grab.We now know that it’s not enough to leave fossil fuels in the ground and decarbonise our economies. We’ve left it too late. To prevent no more than 1.5C of heating, we also need to draw down some of the carbonalready in the atmosphere.By far the most effective means are “nature-based solutions”: using the restoration of living systems such as forests, salt marshes, peat bogs and the seafloor to extract carbon dioxide from the air and lock it up, mostly in trees or waterlogged soil and mud.

Something that should be a great force for good has turned into a corporate gold rush, trading in carbon credits. A carbon credit represents one tonne of greenhouse gases, deemed to have been avoided or removed from the atmosphere. Over the past few months, the market for these credits has boomed. There are two legitimate uses of nature-based solutions: removing historic carbon from the air, and counteracting a small residue of unavoidable emissions once we have decarbonized the rest of the economy. Instead, they are being widely used as an alternative for effective action. Rather than committing to leave fossil fuels in the ground, oil and gas firms continue to prospect for new reserves while claiming that the credits they buy have turned them “carbon neutral”.The French company Total is hoping to develop new oilfields in the Republic of the Congo and off the coast of Suriname. It has sought to justify these projects with nature-based solutions: in Suriname by providing money to the government for protecting existing forests, and in Congo by planting an area of savannah with fast-growing trees.

The landi is likely to belong to local people through their customary rights, which are unrecognised in Congolese law, were not mentioned in Total’spress release about the deal. In other words, the offset project, far from compensating for the damage caused by oil drilling, could compound it. These are not the only issues. In all such cases, an extremely stable bank of carbon – the fossil fuels buried below geological strata – is being swapped for less secure stores: habitats on the Earth’s surface.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/26/carbon-offsetting-environmental-collapse-carbon-land-grab?utm_term=61f28a705d05f49f63868a6f1dde06ac&utm_campaign=GreenLight&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=greenlight_email