ECONOMIC & CORPORATE  The absurdity of oil drilling in the Okavango is now very much a reality. Against the backdrop of the Okavango Delta, one of Earth’s last truly wild areas, Canadian company ReconAfrica has to date drilled three major exploratory wells in Namibia, with two more wells planned before the end of the year. Despite the many threats this poses to regional biodiversity and the local communities who depend upon the fragile ecosystem for their livelihoods, ReconAfrica is now also preparing to start exploration activities in Botswana close to the Okavango Delta and the Tsodilo Hills, both UNESCO World Heritage sites. I am from Botswana, and I am very interested in the regional ecology, hydrology, and biodiversity of the Okavango; and how local communities can benefit from long-term sustainable practices that protect the ecosystem and their own livelihoods. Oil drilling significantly threatens biodiversity and the livelihoods of local communities in northwestern Botswana, although it is just one of the numerous threats we face. he other challenges are deep rooted in socio-economic dynamics and include......regional development and urban expansion across the river basin and especially within the Angolan catchment area (where the vast majority of the rainfall that feeds the river system falls);......debilitating levels of poverty (over 75% of the population living in the Okavango River Basin in Angola live below the poverty line)........anthropogenic climate change......illegal hunting.....access to water and many other challenges. While these threats are intertwined and highly complex in nature, the challenge posed by oil drilling in the Okavango is comparatively simple. It is a challenge driven purely by the neo-colonialist greed of a foreign company hellbent on generating profits at the expense of the environment and local communities. And the costs we now face as a result are profound. Beyond the irrationality of extracting hydrocarbons when we should actively be seeking to keep them in the ground, oil drilling has the potential to contaminate localized and regional hydrological systems and destabilize the fragile ecosystem within the Okavango Delta.  Campaigners and conservationists fear the proposed oilfield stretching across Namibia and Botswana would devastate regional ecosystems and wildlife as well as local communities. The plans are the latest threat to elephants in the region, hundreds of which have died mysteriously in the past year. Scientists are trying to find the cause of the deaths but believe they may be linked to a rising amount of toxic algae – caused by global heating – in their waterholes.  https://www.rewild.org/news/cop-15-oil-drilling-continues-to-threaten-biodiversity-in-the-okavango   

A recent study in the scientific journal Nature suggests that to stand a 50% chance of avoiding more than 1.5C of global heating, we need to retire 89% of proven coal reserves, 58% of oil reserves and 59% of fossil methane (“natural gas”) reserves. If we want better odds than 50-50, we’ll need to leave almost all of them untouched. Yet most governments with major reserves are determined to make the wrong choice. As the latestproduction gap report by the UN and academic researchers shows, over the next two decades, unless there’s a rapid and drastic change in policy, coal is likely to decline a little, but oil and gas production will keep growing. By 2030, governments are planning to extract 110% more fossil fuels than their Paris agreement pledge (“limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels”) would permit. Even nations that claim to be leading the transition mean to keep drilling.  The oil corporations have spent many millions of dollars on ads, memes and films to convince us they’ve gone green. But the latest report on this issue by the International Energy Agency reveals that in 2020 “clean energy investments by the oil and gas industry accounted for only around 1% of total capital expenditure”. There’s scarcely a fossil fuel project on Earth that has not been facilitated by public money. In 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund, governments spent $450bn in direct subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. The IMF accounts for the other costs the industry imposes on us – pollution, destruction and climate chaos – at $5.5tn. But I find such figures meaningless: dollars can’t capture the loss of human life and the trashing of ecosystems, let alone the prospect ofsystemic environmental collapse. One in five of all deaths, according to a recent estimate, are now caused by fossil fuel pollution. Since the Paris agreement in 2015, the world’s 60 largest banks have poured $3.8tn into fossil fuel companies. People in rich nations seek to blame climate breakdown on India and China, which continue to develop new coal plants. But an estimated 40% of the “committed emissions” for the Asian coal plants sampled by researchers can be attributed to banks and investors in Europe and the US. Everything about the relationship between nation states and the fossil fuel industry is perverse, stupid and self-destructive. For the sake of this dirty industry’s profits and dividends – overwhelmingly concentrated among a tiny number of the world’s people – governments commit us to catastrophe.                    https://www.monbiot.com/2021/11/05/groundtruthed/

CORPORATE GREED NOT CLIMATE ACTION TANKS A BANK.....Republicans are blaming the collapse of two major banks over the weekend on “woke” investment practices, once again dragging the effort to address the climate crisis into America’s increasingly polarizing culture wars. But their reasoning doesn’t align with assessments from leading economists who have mostly tied the bank failures to risky bets on cryptocurrency—not clean energy—and the plummeting value of government-backed securities amid rising interest rates. High-profile Republican pundits and far-right lawmakers, including Donald Trump Jr., Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, chimed in with similar accusations on social media. And Suzanne Downing, a former communications director of the Alaska Republican Party, explicitly blamed financial institutions “buying into climate change theology” in a Sunday op-ed.   According to analyses by Baker and other well known economists, the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, which held some $220 billion in assets and was America’s 16th largest commercial bank before its collapse Friday, was tied largely to the bank’s decision to buy up government bonds amid the tech boom between 2019 and 2022, when many Silicon Valley companies were flush with cash. Between the end of 2019 and the first quarter of 2022, deposits to Silicon Valley Bank more than tripled to $198 billion, far outpacing the national average, Marc Rubinstein, a former hedge fund manager and popular financial analyst, noted in his assessment. With deposits skyrocketing and demand for loans relatively low, the bank chose to invest the bulk of that money in government bonds, he said, which tanked in value as the tech boom faded and the Fed raised interest rates to curb inflation. As clients began asking for their money back, Silicon Valley Bank was forced to prematurely sell $21 billion in bonds at a $1.8 billion loss, triggering an old-fashioned bank run, Rubinstein concluded.Signature Bank’s collapse can be explained even more simplistically. As the finance trade publication Barron’s noted in its apt analysis, “the bank’s connections with cryptocurrency seem to have spooked depositors after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, prompting a run on the bank’s deposits which, in turn, prompted action from regulators."....no URL- read the article and checkout all the links.   

Oil companies and governments have pledged to slash methane emissions in recent years, but so far have little to show for it. Emissions of this potent greenhouse gas by the fossil fuel industry continued to climb in 2022, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.  The group condemned the oil and gas industry for failing to address this problem even as it saw record profits last year, driven up by a tighter energy market following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The technology needed to eliminate most methane emissions already exists and would require spending only a tiny percentage of those profits to deploy, the agency said. “Methane cuts are among the cheapest options to limit near-term global warming,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, or IEA, said in a statement outlining the findings. “There is just no excuse.”  About one-third of the global warming to date can be attributed to methane emissions. Many human activities are to blame, including agriculture and all the rotting waste people throw out. But in the U.S., energy production is the biggest culprit, according to the IEA. Methane, the main component in natural gas, leaks into the atmosphere accidentally and is also intentionally released during the production and transport of fossil fuels. The IEA estimates that the global energy industry released nearly 135 million metric tons of methane in 2022, which is higher than the previous year and only slightly below the record seen in 2019. Methane traps nearly 90 times as much heat as carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere. The good news is it breaks down within decades. That means curbing its release could slow global warming in the short term while the world moves beyond fossil fuels.  Fortunately, 75 percent of energy-related methane emissions can be eliminated with readily available technologies, the IEA said Tuesday, at a cost of about $100 billion. That’s less than 3 percent of the profits that oil and gas companies earned last year, the group pointed out.           https://grist.org/energy/big-oil-record-2022-profits-methane-emissions-iea/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=beacon