In 2022, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared that the “lifeline of renewable energy can steer [the] world out of climate crisis.” In saying so, he echoed a popular and tantalizing idea: that, if we hurry, we can erase the climate emergency with widespread adoption of renewables in the form of solar panels, wind farms, electric vehicles and more.
But things aren’t that simple, and analysts increasingly question the naïve assumption that renewables are a silver bullet.
That’s partly because the rapid transition to a global energy and transport system powered by “clean” energy brings with it a host of new (and old) environmental problems. To begin with, stepping up solar, wind and EV production requires many more minerals and materials in the short term than do their already well-established fossil fuel counterparts, while also creating a major carbon footprint.
Also, the quicker we transition away from fossil fuel tech to renewable tech, the greater the quantity of materials needed up front, and the higher the immediate carbon and numerous other environmental costs. But this shift is now happening extremely rapidly, as companies, governments and consumers try to turn away from oil, coal and natural gas.
“Renewables are moving faster than national governments can set targets,” declared International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol. In its “Renewables 2024” report, the IEA estimates the world will add more than 5,500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity between 2024 and 2030 — almost three times the increase between 2017 and 2023.
But this triumph hasn’t brought with it a simultaneous slashing in global emissions, as hoped. In fact, 2023 saw humanity’s biggest annual carbon releases ever, totaling 37.4 billion metric tons, which has led experts to ask: What’s going on?
The introduction of coal in 19th century England — an innovative, efficient, cheap new source of energy — made some wealthy, produced an onslaught of consumer products, and was a public health and environmental disaster. Contemplating the coal boom, economist William Stanley Jevons developed the Jevons paradox. Image via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
Jevons paradox meets limits to growth
Some analysts suggest the source of this baffling contradiction regarding record modern energy consumption can be found in the clamor by businesses and consumers for more, better, cheaper technological innovations, an idea summed up by a 160-year-old economic theory: the Jevons paradox.
Postulated by 19th-century English economist William Stanley Jevons, it states that, “in the long term, an increase in efficiency in resource use [via a new technology] will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decrease.” Put simply, the more efficient (and hence cheaper) energy is, the greater society’s overall production and economic growth will be — with that increased production then requiring still more energy consumption.
Writing in 1865, Jevons argued that the energy transition from horses to coal decreased the amount of work for any given task (along with the cost), which led to soaring resource consumption. For proof, he pointed to the coal-powered explosion in technological innovation and use occurring in the 19th century.
Applied to our current predicament, the Jevons paradox challenges and undermines tech prognosticators’ rosy forecasts for sustainable development.
Here’s a look at the paradox in action: The fastest-expanding renewable energy sector today is solar photovoltaics (PVs), expected to account for 80% of renewables growth in the coming years.
In many parts of the world, large solar power plants are being built, while companies and households rapidly add rooftop solar panels. At the head of the pack is China, with its astounding solar installation rate (216.9 GW in 2023).
But paradoxically, as China cranks out cheap solar panels for domestic use and export, it is also building six times more coal power plants every year than the rest of the world combined, though it still expects almost half its electricity generation to come from renewables, mainly solar, by 2028.
This astronomical growth at first seems like proof of the Jevons paradox at work, but there’s an unexpected twist: Why is China (and much of the rest of the world) still voraciously consuming outmoded, less-efficient fossil fuel tech, while also gobbling up renewables?
One reason is that coal and oil are seen as reliable, not subject to the same problems that renewables can face during periods of intense drought or violent weather — problems caused by the very climate change that renewables are intended to mitigate.
Another major reason is that fossil fuels continue being relatively cheap. That’s because they’re supported by vast government subsidies (totaling more than $1 trillion annually). So in a sense, we are experiencing a quadruple Jevons paradox, with oil, coal, natural gas and renewables acting like four cost-efficient horses, all racing to produce more cheap stuff for an exploding world consumer economy. But this growth comes with terrible environmental and social harm.
Exponential growth with a horrific cost
Back to the solar example: China is selling its cheap solar installations all over the globe, and by 2030 could be responsible for half the new capacity of renewables installed planetwide. But the environmental cost of satisfying that escalating demand is rippling out across the world.
It has spurred a huge mining boom. Desperate to satisfy fast-rising demand, companies and nations are mining in ever more inaccessible areas, which costs more in dollars, carbon emissions, biodiversity losses, land-use change, freshwater use, ocean acidification, plus land, water and air pollution. So, just as with fossil fuels, the rush to renewables contributes to the destabilizing of the nine planetary boundaries, of which six are already in the red zone, threatening civilization, humanity and life as we know it.
Mining, it must be remembered, is also still heavily dependent on fossil fuels, so it generates large quantities of greenhouse gases as it provides minerals for the renewables revolution. A January 2023 article in the MIT Technology Review predicts that the mining alone needed to support renewables will produce 29 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions between now and 2050.
Carbon is far from the only problem. Renewables also require a wide range of often difficult-to-get-at minerals, including nickel, graphite, copper, rare earths, lithium and cobalt. This means “paradoxically, extracting this large amount of raw materials [for renewables] will require the development of new mines with a larger overall environmental footprint,” says the MIT article.
There are other problems too. Every year 14,000 football fields of forests are cut down in Myanmar to create cheap charcoal for China’s smelting industries to process silicon, a key component of solar panels and of computers.
This rapid development in rural places also comes with harsh human costs: Mongabay has reported extensively on how Indigenous people, traditional communities and fragile but biodiverse ecosystems are paying the price for the world’s mineral demand in the transition to renewable energy.
There is strong evidence that the Uighur minority is being used as slave labor to build solar panels in China. There are also reports that workers are dying in Chinese factories in Indonesia that are producing nickel, a key metal for solar panels and batteries.
The manufacture of smaller and faster electronic devices is leading to ever more e-waste, the fastest growing waste stream in the world and by far the most toxic. Image by Montgomery County Planning Commission via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
The search for solutions
“We really need to come up with solutions that get us the material that we need sustainably, and time is very short,” said Demetrios Papathanasiou, global director for energy and extractives at the World Bank.
One popularly touted solution argues that the impacts imposed by the rapid move to renewable energy can be greatly reduced with enhanced recycling. That argument goes this way: The minerals needed to make solar panels and build windfarms and electric vehicles only need to be sourced once. Unlike fossil fuels, renewables produce energy year after year. And the original materials used to make them can be recycled again and again.
But there are problems with this position.
First, while EV batteries, for example, may be relatively long lasting, they only provide the energy for new electric vehicles that still require steel, plastics, tires and much more to put people in the Global North and increasingly the Global South on the road. Those cars will wear out, with tires, electronics, plastics and batteries costly to recycle.
The solar energy industry says that “solar panels have an expected lifespan between 25-30 years,” and often much longer. But just because a product can last longer, does that mean people won’t clamor for newer, better ones?
In developed nations, for example, the speed at which technology is evolving mitigates against the use of panels for their full lifespan. A 2021 article in the Harvard Business Review found that, after 10 years or even sooner, consumers will likely dispose of their first solar panels, to install newer, more efficient ones. Again, the Jevons paradox rears its anti-utopian head.
Also, as solar proliferates in poorer nations, so too will the devices that solar can drive. As solar expands in the developing world, sales for cheap solar lanterns and small solar home electric systems are also expanding. An article in the journal Nature Energy calculates that in 2019 alone, more than 35 million solar products were sold, a huge rise from the 200,000 such products sold in 2010.
This expansion brings huge social benefits, as it means rural families can use their smartphones to study online at night, watch television, and access the market prices of their crops — all things people in the Global North take for granted.
But, as the article points out, many developing-world solar installations are poor quality and only last a few years: “Many, perhaps even the majority, of solar products sold in the Global South … only have working lives of a couple of years.” The problem is particularly acute in Africa. “Think of those solar panels that charge phones; a lot of them do not work, so people throw them away,” said Natalie Gwatirisa, founder of All For Climate Action, a Zimbabwean youth-led organization that strives to raise awareness on climate change. Gwatirisa calculates that, of the estimated 150 million solar products that have reached Africa since 2010, almost 75% have stopped working.
And as Americans familiar with designed obsolescence know, people will want replacements: That means more solar panels, cellphones, computers, TVs, and much more e-waste.
Another disturbing side to the solar boom is the unbridled growth of e-waste, much of it toxic. Gwatirisa cautions: “Africa should not just open its hand and receive [anything] from China because this is definitely going to lead to another landfill in Africa.”
The developed world also faces an e-waste glut. Solar panels require specialized labor to recycle and there is little financial incentive to do so. While panels contain small amounts of valuable minerals such as silver, they’re mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material. While it costs $20-$30 to recycle a panel, it only costs $1-$2 to bury it in a landfill. And the PV industry itself admits that ‘the solar industry cannot claim to be a “clean” energy source if it leaves a trail of hazardous waste.’
Renewables are rapidly growing, producing a bigger share of global energy. But electricity demand is also soaring, as unforeseen new energy-guzzling innovations are introduced. For example, an artificial intelligence internet search is orders of magnitude more energy-intensive than a traditional Google search, and requires new power generation sources. Pictured is the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Station, infamous for a 1979 partial meltdown. The facility is soon to reopen to support AI operations. Image courtesy of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Solving the wrong problem
Ultimately, say some analysts, we may be trying to solve the wrong problem. Humanity is not experiencing an energy production problem, they say. Instead, we have an energy consumption problem. Thus, the key to reducing environmental harm is to radically reduce energy demand. But that can likely only be done through stationary — or, better still, decreased — consumption.
However, it’s hard to imagine modern consumers not rushing out to buy the next generation of consumer electronics including even smarter smartphones, which demand more and more energy and materials to operate (think global internet data centers). And it’s also hard to imagine industry not rushing to update its ever more innovative electronic product lines (think AI).
A decline in energy demand is far from happening. The U.S. government says it expects global energy consumption to increase by almost 50% by 2050, as compared with 2020. And much of that energy will be used to make new stuff, all of which increases resource demand and increases our likelihood of further overshooting already overshot planetary boundaries and crashing overstressed Earth systems.
One essential step toward sustainability is the circular economy, say renewable energy advocates. But, as with so much else, every year we somehow go in the opposite direction. Our current economic system is becoming more and more linear, built on a model of extracting more raw materials from nature, turning them into more innovative products, and then discarding it all as waste.
Currently, only 7.2% of used materials are cycled back into our economies after use. This puts an overwhelming burden on the environment and contributes to the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises.
If a circular economy could be developed by recycling all the materials used in renewables, it would significantly reduce the constant need to mine and source new ones. But, while efficient recycling will undoubtedly help, it also has limitations.
The 2023 planetary boundaries update shows six boundary safe limits transgressed: climate change (CO2 concentration and radiative forcing), biosphere integrity (genetic and functional), land-system change, freshwater change (blue water use and green water), biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), and novel entities pollution (including thousands of synthetic chemicals, heavy metals, radioactive materials, and more). The ocean acidification boundary is very near transgression. Only the atmospheric aerosol pollution and stratospheric ozone depletion boundaries are still well outside the red danger zone. Image courtesy of Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al. 2023 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The future
Tom Murphy, a professor emeritus of the departments of physics and astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego, became so concerned about the world’s future, he shifted his career focus to energy.
While initially a big promoter of renewables, having built his own solar panels back in 2008, he has recently turned skeptical. Panels “need constant replacement every two or three decades ad infinitum,” he told Mongabay. “Recycling is not a magic wand. It doesn’t pull you out of the need for mining. This is because recycling is not 100% efficient and never will be. In the laboratory maybe, but not in the real world. You’re going to have this continual bleed of materials out of the system.”
Yet another renewables problem is that sustainable energy is often siloed: It is nearly always talked about only in the context of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Rarely are the total long-term supply chain costs to the environment and society calculated.
Reducing CO2 is clearly a vital goal, but not the only critical one, says Earth system scientist Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and who (with an international team of scientists), developed the planetary boundaries framework.
It is undeniably important to reduce greenhouse emissions by half over the next seven years in order to reach net zero by 2050, he says. But this will be difficult to achieve, for it means “cutting emissions by 7.5% a year, which is an exponential decline.”
And even if we achieve such radical reductions, it will not solve the environmental crisis, warns Rockström. That’s because radical emission reductions only tackle the climate change boundary. A recent scientific paper, to which he contributed, warns that “six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.”
Rockström in an exclusive interview told Mongabay that, at the same time as we vigorously combat global warming, “We also need to come back into the safe space for pollutants, nitrogen, phosphorus, land, biodiversity,” and more. This means that our efforts to repair the climate must also relieve stresses on these other boundaries, not destabilize them further.
Murphy says he believes this can’t be achieved. He says that modernity — the term he uses to delineate the period of human domination of the biosphere — cannot be made compatible with the protection of the biological world.
To make his point, he emphasizes an obvious flaw in renewables: they are not renewable. “I can’t see how we can [protect the biosphere] and retain a flow of nonrenewable finite resources, which is what our economic system requires.” He continues: “We are many orders of magnitude, 4 or 5 orders of magnitude, away from being at a sustainable scale. I like Rockström’s idea that we have boundaries, but I think his assessment of how far we have exceeded those boundaries is completely wrong.”
Murphy says he believes modernity has unleashed a sixth mass extinction, and it is too late to stop it. Modernity, he says, was unsustainable from the beginning: “Our brains can’t conceive of the degree of interconnectedness in the living world we’re part of. So the activities we started carrying out, even agriculture, don’t have a sustainable foundation. The minerals and materials we use are foreign to the living world and we dig them up and spew them out. They end up all over the place, even in our bodies at this point, [we now have] microplastics. This is hurting not just us, but the whole living world on which we depend.”
Like Murphy, Rockström says he is pessimistic about the level of action now seen globally, but he doesn’t think we should give up. “We have the responsibility to continue even if we have a headwind.” What is extremely frustrating, he says, is that today we have the answers: “We know what we need to do. That’s quite remarkable. Years back I could not have said that. We have solutions to scale down our use of coal, oil and gas. We know how to feed humanity from sustainable food systems, that largely bring us back into the [safe zone for] planetary boundaries, the safe space for nitrogen, phosphorous, freshwater, land and biodiversity.”
One key to making such radical change would be a dramatic, drastic, wholesale shift by governments away from offering trillions of dollars in “perverse subsidies” to environment-destroying fossil fuel and mining technologies, to pumping those subsidies into renewables and the circular economy.
Murphy says he doesn’t believe we should give up either. But he also says he doesn’t believe modernity can be made sustainable. “I suspect that the deteriorating web of life will create cascading failures that end up pulling the power cord to the destructive machine. Only then will some people accept that ecological ignorance — paired with technological capability — has dire consequences.”
But, he adds, this does not mean the human race is doomed.
“The modernity project does not define humanity. Humanity is much older. It’s too late for modernity to succeed but it’s not too late for humanity to succeed.” Here he turns to Indigenous cultures: “For hundreds of thousands of years, they survived and did quite well without causing the sixth mass extinction.”
“There isn’t a single Indigenous package,” he says. “Each is tuned to its [particular local] environment, and they vary a lot. But they have common elements: humility, only taking what you need from the environment, and the belief that we can learn a lot from our ‘our brothers and sisters,’ that is, the other animals and plants who have been around for much longer than us.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Murphy remains cheerful: “Most people are extremely depressed by what I say. I’m not. Not at all. I think it’s exciting to imagine what the future can be. You’re only depressed if you’re in love with modernity. If you’re not, it’s not devastating to imagine it disappearing.”
Banner image: Installation of solar panels. Image by Trinh Trần via Pexels (Public domain).
Editor’s note: This year’s biannual Biodiversity COP was in Cali, Colombia, a country with the dubious distinction of topping the list of the number of environmental activists killed by a country in both 2022 (60) and 2023 (79) and will probably have that dubious honor this year with a continuingly rising number of (115) as of November 7th.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — While music played in Bogotá’s streets and a sense of victory filled the air after a long protest, Ana Graciela received a new appointment on her calendar: the funeral of Carlos Andrés Ascué Tumbo.
Nicknamed Lobo (meaning “wolf” in Spanish), the esteemed Indigenous guardian and educational coordinator was killed Aug. 29, while his fellow guardians, the Kiwe Thegnas (or Indigenous Guard of Cauca) were protesting for better security in Cauca, Colombia. The region has increasingly become dangerous with incursions by illegal armed groups.
“The situation is tough. Women and children are being killed [almost] every day,” said Ana Graciela Tombé, coordinator of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca.
The Bogotá protest gathered more than 4,000 people, in what is known as a minga in the Andean tradition, against escalating violence in the region. After eight days, on Aug. 28, the Indigenous communities succeeded in getting President Gustavo Petro to sign a new decree, the Economic and Environmental Territorial Authority, which grants Indigenous territories greater autonomy to take judicial action against violence within their lands.
But the sentiment is bittersweet for the Indigenous Nasa and Misak activists in Ana’s homeland of Cauca, particularly in Pueblo Nuevo, a nationally recognized Indigenous territory (resguardo). They’ve lost a dear leader and role model, impassioned with protecting their ancestral territory, forests and youth from illegal armed groups.
Labeled the deadliest country for environmental defenders in 2023, Carlos, 30, was the 115th social leader killed in Colombia this year, according to the Development and Peace Institute, Indepaz.
Although the police investigation into his death is still underway, members of his community say they believe Carlos was the latest victim of armed groups and drug traffickers the Nasa people have struggled with for more than 40 years. Mongabay spoke with these members of the community, including Carlos’ family and friends, to gather more information on his life and killing that received little attention in the media.
One of Carlos’ close friends leans on the coffin. Image by Tony Kirby.Musicians play Carlos’ favorite music. Image by Tony Kirby.
Pueblo Nuevo is located in the central mountain range of the Andes in the Cauca department, which today has become a hub for drug trafficking and illicit plant cultivation. This is due to its proximity to drug trafficking routes to ship drugs to international markets, the absence of state presence and the remoteness of the mountains.
The loss of Carlos is both physical and spiritual, a close friend of Carlos, Naer Guegia Sekcue, told Monagaby. He left behind a void in the lives of his family which they are trying to fill with love, Naer said, and the community and guardians feel like they lost a part of their rebellion against armed groups.
The ‘Wolf’
Carlos was a member of the Indigenous Guard since his childhood. The children’s section of the Guard is called semillas, meaning “seeds,” for how they’ll fruit into the next generation of leaders protecting their territory.
He met his wife, Lina Daknis, through mutual friends at university. Lina, though not of Indigenous heritage, said she fell in love with his rebellious spirit, devotion and commitment to Indigenous rights. When Lina became pregnant, the couple decided to raise their daughter in the Indigenous reserve, Pueblo Nuevo.
For many in this Indigenous community, their lands and forests are far more than mere sustenance; they hold deep traditional and spiritual significance. Among the Nasa people, one significant ritual involves burying the umbilical cord under stones of a sacred fire (tulpa), symbolically tying them to their ancestral territories. According to the sources Mongabay spoke to, they consider that the lands and forests do not belong to them but are a loan from their children they are entrusted to protect.
Carlos was fully dedicated to this Indigenous Guard, Lina said.
Many days, he would get up in the middle of the night to patrol the territory. While facing well-equipped armed groups, the Indigenous Guard remained unarmed. They carry a ceremonial wooden baton, adorned with green and white strings as symbols of Indigenous identity. Carlos was particularly outspoken against illegal armed groups and coca cultivation. Faced with their invasions and deforestation on their territory, the Guard also took on the role of environmental defenders.
Coca cultivation, as done by armed groups to produce cocaine, not only impacts lives, but also the environment. The traditionally sacred crop is now tied to violence and degradation in the region.
According to Colombia’s Ministry of Justice, 48% of cultivation is concentrated in special management areas, including national parks, collective territories and forest reserves. Between 2022 and 2023, coca cultivation caused the deforestation of 11,829 hectares (29,200 acres) of forested land, according to the latest report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This deforestation increased by 10% in 2023 and threatens biodiversity, placing more than 50 species at risk of extinction, the Ministry of Justice stated at the COP16 U.N. biodiversity conference.
In one instance, Carlos and the Guard destroyed coca plants, took photos and uploaded videos to social media. Shortly after, his family began receiving threats from anonymous people on social media, warning Carlos to be careful. Lina now said she believes these threats came from dissident groups profiting from coca cultivation.
Pueblo Nuevo is located in the central mountain range of the Andes in the Cauca department, which today has become a hub for drug trafficking and illicit plant cultivation. Image by Tony Kirby.
In Cauca, several dissident groups are active, including Estado Central Mayor and the Dagoberto Ramos Front. These factions emerged following the 2016 peace agreement and consist of former FARC guerrillas who either rejected or abandoned the reintegration process. Law enforcement say their presence poses a persistent threat. Most recently, in May, a police station in Caldono was attacked, with local authorities suspecting the involvement of the Dagoberto Ramos Front.
Despite the danger, Carlos never stopped his work.
“I told him to leave the Guard, to go to another country, that they would kill him,” said his mother, Diana Tumbo. “But he didn’t leave us nor the Guard.”
Carlos’ mother calls for the unity of the people in the fight against violence. Image by Tony Kirby.
The seeds of tomorrow
The road to the Carlos’ home is surrounded by peaceful landscapes: small villages, chicken restaurants and hand-built huts. But the graffiti on walls — “FARC EP” (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, People’s Army) and “ELN Presente” (National Liberation Army, Present) — are stark reminders of the violence. Despite the peace agreement signed between the FARC and the Colombian government in 2016, violence has resurged in Cauca.
Carlos saw the armed groups as a destructive force to youth by recruiting minors.
According to the annual report of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, armed groups forcibly recruited at least 71 Indigenous children in 2023. Oveimar Tenorio, leader of the Indigenous Guard, said the armed groups no longer have the political ideology that once defined the FARC. Instead, their attacks on the Indigenous Guard are driven by profit and control of drug routes.
“We are an obstacle for them,” he told Mongabay.
The graffiti reads “FARC – EP,” which stands for “Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army.” An man sits on a bench in a square in Jamundí, Colombia. For decades, violence has been a part of daily life for Colombians. Image by Tony Kirby.
Carlos became an educational coordinator, supporting teachers with Indigenous knowledge programs and organized workshops for the schools in the Sath Tama Kiwe Indigenous Territory. He believed in educating youth not just with academic knowledge, but with a sense of pride in their Indigenous heritage and the need to protect their land, Naer said.
Carlos encouraged the young people not to feel ashamed of being Indigenous, but instead to learn from their own culture. He always carried a book by Manuel Quintín Lame, a historical Indigenous Nasa leader from Cauca who defended Indigenous autonomy in the early 20th century.
But Carlos’ approach was one of tenderness; he was always listening to his students and fighting for a better future for the youth. “He was convinced that real change started from the bottom up, through children and the youth,” Naer said.
People show support for Carlos, demanding justice for him. Image by Tony Kirby.
Murder of the ‘Wolf’
His friends and family said Carlos’ actions made him a target.
On Aug. 29, 2024, Carlos went down to the village of Pescador, Caldono, to pick up his daughter from swimming lessons. It was a peaceful moment: mother, father and daughter having a family meal at a small restaurant. Afterward, Carlos went to refuel his motorbike at the gas station.
Suddenly, a stranger approached his wife in the restaurant, she said, asking, ‘Are you the woman who is with the man with the long hair? Something has happened, but I can’t say what.’
Carlos Andrés Ascué Tumbo of the Andes Mountains was shot in the head.
The Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca quickly blamed “criminal structures” linked to dissident FARC groups, particularly the Jaime Martínez and Dagoberto Ramos factions. However, the police investigation is ongoing, and the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Office of the Attorney General), which is overseeing the case, has not shared details with the public or Mongabay.
Mongabay approached Fiscalía General de la Nación and local authorities for comment but did not receive one by the time of publication.
Sept. 1, in a small village perched on a hillside, marked the date of Carlos’ funeral. Fellow members of the Indigenous Guard, wearing blue vests and carrying their batons, lined the dusty roads. They formed a solemn procession from Carlos’ house down to the cemetery with about 1,000 people walking around them through Pueblo Nuevo.
“We want to show our strength,” said Karen Julian, a university student in Cauca who didn’t know Carlos personally but felt compelled to attend his funeral. Along with others, she boarded a brightly painted chiva bus to Carlos’ home village, where he was laid to rest.
Members of the Indigenous Guard, carrying batons, line the streets of Pueblo Nuevo, accompanying Carlos on his final journey to his grave. Image by Tony Kirby.
Children holding flowers led the way of the procession, followed by a cross and then the coffin. A woman rang the church bell and people chanted the slogan to resist armed groups: “Until when? Until forever!”
At the covered sports field at the center of the village, the funeral transformed into a political rally. “I will not allow another young person to die!” Carlos’ mother shouted to the audience. “I demand justice.” She spoke of her worries for her granddaughter, Carlos’ daughter, who stills had many plans with her father. She called on the community to stand united against the violence that has taken so many lives.
As Carlos’ coffin was lowered into the ground, the crowd began to swell, pressing in tightly with his 6-year-old daughter at the front row of the mass. All were watching as the coffin reached its final destination.
“Carlos’ death was not in vain,” Naer said. “The youth understand that they must follow his path. The younger generations will continue preserving the Indigenous traditions while defending our territories and rights.”
The last look: Carlos’ daughter watches her father before he is buried, while his parents cry beside the coffin. Image by Tony Kirby.
Banner image: Carlos’ fellow guardians carry his coffin; they fought shoulder to shoulder to protect the Indigenous territories against illegal armed groups. Image by Tony Kirby.
In general, the United Nations (UN) Biodiversity Conference gets far less press than the UN climate change conferences, but I’ve seen more news items for this year’s Biodiversity Conference of the Parties (COP 16) than I have for previous biodiversity COPs. Still, I didn’t initially pay it much attention, because I’ve become so leery of these annual (for climate change COPs) and biannual (for biodiversity COPs) UN affairs. Why? Because, so far at least, these meetings have amounted to mostly good vibes, with little to no action that has any meaningful consequence in protecting the natural world.
This year’s biannual Biodiversity COP is in Cali, Colombia, a country with the dubious distinction of topping the list of the number of environmental activists killed by country in both 2022 (60) and 2023 (79). It runs until November 1, 2024.
I decided to take a deeper look at the biodiversity goals of these UN meetings at the prompting of two friends who both shared news items related to this year’s COP; one with a dismal “Expect less than nothing from COP 16. Much less.” and the other with a much brighter “Protection of nature efforts are being attempted globally.” outlook.
COP 16 will build on previous work by asking the participating parties to agree on a plan for meeting the goals and targets agreed to in the GBF from COP 15.
So, to understand the goals of these biannual biodiversity conferences, we must take a look at the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) from COP 15.
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The GBF (PDF) opens with “Biodiversity is fundamental to human well-being, a healthy planet, and economic prosperity for all people…”. This might sound good to most peoples’ ears, but to me, it sets the tone of “for all people” that suffuses the rest of the document—one that is human supremacist to its core.
The agreed upon outcomes specified in the framework are described in the vision, the mission, four goals and 23 targets. Let’s take a look.
The vision: “A world of living in harmony with nature where ‘by 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people.’”
This clearly states that the primary goal of biodiversity is benefits for all people. There is no indication here that nature and living beings exist for their own sake. There is no recognition of the rights of non-human beings, including wildlife and ecosystems. Biodiversity is seen as something to be “wisely used” (by humans) so that we can continue to get the benefits of “ecosystem services.”
“Sustaining a healthy planet” sounds nice, but is incredibly vague and seems secondary to the “benefits essential for all people.”
The mission: “To take urgent action to halt and reverse biodiversity loss to put nature on a path to recovery for the benefit of people and planet by conserving and sustainably using biodiversity and by ensuring the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the use of genetic resources, while providing the necessary means of implementation.”
Halting biodiversity loss and putting nature on a path to recovery would be fantastic. Especially for nature. But no, this isn’t a mission for nature’s sake at all. It is “for the benefit of people.”
“Ensuring … benefits from the use of genetic resources” is interesting. It seems a bit out of left field until you understand that this means the genetic material from plants, animals, and microorganisms, which holds potential value for research, development, and commercial applications.
In other words, the authors of this framework see the natural world as a source of genetic materials to use for making a profit. That is, they objectify the natural world in the extreme, reducing living beings to genes, with the goal of conserving biodiversity to make more opportunities to profit from those genes.
Well, at least we know what their priorities are! And again, we see no understanding or recognition that nature and living beings exist for their own sake, and have the right to do so.
The Goals and Targets described in the framework flow from this vision and mission, so we can assume they will have similar issues, and they do.
The four Goals are identified as Goals A through D.
Goal A sounds good—to maintain, enhance, and restore the integrity of ecosystems—until you get to the last paragraph, which clarifies the point to all the lovely sounding language that precedes it: “The genetic diversity within populations of wild and domesticated species, is maintained, safeguarding their adaptive potential.”
We already know that the primary purpose of that “genetic diversity” is “genetic resources” for the “benefit of all people.”
Essentially, the point of Goal A is to maintain and restore ecosystems so we can get as many “genetic resources” as possible to make a nice hefty profit. Got it.
Goal B is worse:
“Biodiversity is sustainably used and managed and nature’s contributions to people, including ecosystem functions and services, are valued, maintained and enhanced, with those currently in decline being restored, supporting the achievement of sustainable development for the benefit of present and future generations by 2050.”
So, we are to value “nature’s contributions to people.” What about nature’s contributions to itself? Apparently those don’t matter. This goal reduces nature to “ecosystem functions and services” that are useful to people and to “sustainable development.” (See the last section below for more on “sustainable development.”)
Basically this is saying that biodiversity is for people; that ecosystems are “services” for people. “Present and future generations” are generations of people, not of wildlife and ecosystems.
Goal C elaborates on the reduction of nature to “genetic resources” for people and profit, saying that “the monetary and non-monetary benefits from the utilization of genetic resources and digital sequence information on genetic resources… are shared fairly and equitably” among people.
Are you starting to get the picture now?
Their Targets are similarly problematic.
Target 1 is to “Ensure that all areas are under participatory, integrated and biodiversity inclusive spatial planning and/or effective management processes.” In other words, humans should “manage” all areas on the planet for—per their goals—people.
Don’t wild beings get a single square inch of the planet to manage (or just live in) for themselves that isn’t managed by people? Apparently not.
Target 2 is to “Ensure that by 2030 at least 30 per cent of areas of degraded terrestrial, inland water, and marine and coastal ecosystems are under effective restoration, in order to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, ecological integrity and connectivity.”
So we are to restore ecosystems, not because nature needs intact ecosystems to survive and thrive, but rather to enhance “ecosystem functions and services” (that benefit humans, as earlier established) and “ecological integrity and connectivity” (for genetic resources to benefit humans, as earlier established). It’s all for people.
I won’t bore you with all 23 Targets, but allow me just one more.
Target 9 is to “Ensure that the management and use of wild species are sustainable, thereby providing social, economic and environmental benefits for people…” (emphasis added).
I’m sure you have the picture now.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals
We should not be surprised by the human supremacy at the heart of these biodiversity goals. This is a UN program, and as stated by the UN and in the GBF itself, the framework is “a contribution to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” which is itself a human supremacist agenda.
Before we go further, we should talk about what “sustainable development” means. The definition of “sustainable” is “able to be maintained at a certain rate or level,” according to the Oxford Dictionary. The UN defines “development” as “a multidimensional process that aims to improve the quality of life for all people.”
The UN’s Quality of Life Initiative defines “quality of life” by a broad range of factors including health, work status, living conditions, and command of material resources.
We can thus understand the UN’s “sustainable development” as development that improves the health, work status, living conditions, and command of material resources for all people in a way that can be maintained at a certain rate or level.
Looking at the UN’s list of Sustainable Development Goals, we see included in that “affordable and clean energy,” “industry, innovation, and infrastructure,” “sustainable cities and communities,” “decent work and economic growth”, and so on.
Development usually means converting nature into commodities for human use, whether that’s converting a wetland into a parking lot, a river into electricity via a dam, or a forest into timber. These are the activities that drive economic growth, that are required for “affordable energy,” “industry,” and “infrastructure,” and the typical outcome of “innovation” is doing these things faster.
So “sustainable development” really means sustaining the conversion of nature into commodities at a certain rate or level.
If that certain rate or level looks anything like our lives here in the developed world, this is clearly impossible. Humans already use 1.75 Earth’s worth of “resources” (with the developed world using the vast majority of those “resources”), and so we are drawing down Earth’s carrying capacity at a rapid pace. There will be no sustaining anything at the current rate and level in the near future, given how quickly we are drawing down Earth’s carrying capacity now.
I hope it’s clear to you that the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is all about people, and that it comes at the expense of the natural world. If you doubt that the agenda is entirely human supremacist, I would urge you to spend some time reading this substack and others about the impacts of “industry, innovation, and infrastructure” on the natural world and about how economic growth is incompatible with a living planet (e.g. my article about Ecological Overshoot and some of the resources I point to from there).
Returning to the GBF, we find that Section C affirms the role that the biodiversity framework plays in these Sustainable Development Goals by specifying that the framework is to be “understood, acted upon, implemented, reported and evaluated, consistent with” the “Right to development” (among other considerations):
“Framework enables responsible and sustainable socioeconomic development that, at the same time, contributes to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.” (emphasis added).
The framework was doomed from its start by virtue of this “right to development.”
~~~
It might be tempting to believe that a global conference on biodiversity would put the needs and interests of the natural world first, but we would be mistaken in that belief. Reading the details of the vision, mission, goals, and targets of the GBF, we can clearly see that human needs are prioritized and that the entire framework is structured around protecting biodiversity for the benefit of people.
This is a human supremacist framework. That it is should not be surprising, as human supremacy is the primary and most pervasive ideology held by humans.
Banner by Shutterstock/Molishka from COP16 UN-HABITAT
Editor’s note: Climate change can not be addressed without stopping the extinction and plastics crisis. Every day, an estimated 137 species of plants, animals and insects go extinct due to deforestation alone. Microplastics have been detected in more than 1,300 animal species, including fish, mammals, birds, and insects. A global plastic treaty will only work if it caps production. Bangladesh is about to implement its existing law regarding plastic usage by strictly banning single-use plastic and, gradually, all possible plastic uses.
Scientific models can never account for all of the interconnected relationships within planetary systems’ boundaries. That is one reason why catastrophe predictions are always being pushed ahead.
There is simply no way the current economic system can persist indefinitely on a finite planet. Unfortunately, COP16’s primary goal is critical to striking a sustainable balance between human civilization and the natural world. That is an impossibility. We must tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, including fossil fuel extraction, mining, industrial agriculture, intensive livestock farming, large-scale infrastructure projects, and monoculture tree plantations, basically civilization.
It is time to end civilization. Everything that claims existence must lose it; this is the eternal law. Power never gives up power willingly; it can only be broken with struggle. Nature is struggling to survive; we should help it.
Wildlife, climate and plastic: how three summits aim to repair a growing rift with nature
By the end of 2024, nearly 200 nations will have met at three conferences to address three problems: biodiversity loss, climate change and plastic pollution.
Colombia will host talks next week to assess global progress in protecting 30% of all land and water by 2030. Hot on its heels is COP29 in Azerbaijan. Here, countries will revisit the pledge they made last year in Dubai to “transition away” from the fossil fuels driving climate breakdown. And in December, South Korea could see the first global agreement to tackle plastic waste.
Don’t let these separate events fool you, though.
“Climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion are not isolated problems,” says biologist Liette Vasseur (Brock University), political scientist Anders Hayden (Dalhousie University) and ecologist Mike Jones (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences).
Earth’s fraying parasol “How hot is it going to get? This is one of the most important and difficult remaining questions about our changing climate,” say two scientists who study climate change, Seth Wynes and H. Damon Matthews at the University of Waterloo and Concordia University respectively.
The answer depends on how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gases like CO₂ and how much humanity ultimately emits, the pair say. When Wynes and Matthews asked 211 authors of past reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, their average best guess was 2.7°C by 2100.
“We’ve already seen devastating consequences like more flooding, hotter heatwaves and larger wildfires, and we’re only at 1.3°C above pre-industrial levels — less than halfway to 2.7°C,” they say.
There is a third variable that is harder to predict but no less important: the capacity of forests, wetlands and the ocean to continue to offset warming by absorbing the carbon and heat our furnaces and factories have released.
This blue and green carbon pump stalled in 2023, the hottest year on record, amid heatwaves, droughts and fires. The possibility of nature’s carbon storage suddenly collapsing is not priced into the computer models that simulate and project the future climate.
However, the ecosystems that buffer human-made warming are clearly struggling. A new report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) showed that the average size of monitored populations of vertebrate wildlife (animals with spinal columns – mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians) has shrunk by 73% since 1970.
Wildlife could become so scarce that ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest degenerate, according to the report.
“More than 90% of tropical trees and shrubs depend on animals to disperse their seeds, for example,” says biodiversity scientist Alexander Lees (Manchester Metropolitan University).
“These ‘biodiversity services’ are crucial.”
The result could be less biodiverse and, importantly for the climate, less carbon-rich habitats.
Plastic in a polar bear’s gut
Threats to wildlife are numerous. One that is growing fast and still poorly understood is plastic.
Bottles, bags, toothbrushes: a rising tide of plastic detritus is choking and snaring wild animals. These larger items eventually degrade into microplastics, tiny fragments that now suffuse the air, soil and water.
“In short, microplastics are widespread, accumulating in the remotest parts of our planet. There is evidence of their toxic effects at every level of biological organisation, from tiny insects at the bottom of the food chain to apex predators,” says Karen Raubenheimer, a senior lecturer in plastic pollution at the University of Wollongong.
Plastic is generally made from fossil fuels, the main agent of climate change. Activists and experts have seized on a similar demand to address both problems: turn off the taps.
In fact, the diagnosis of Costas Velis, an expert in ocean litter at the University of Leeds, sounds similar to what climate scientists say about unrestricted fossil fuel burning:
“Every year without production caps makes the necessary cut to plastic production in future steeper – and our need to use other measures to address the problem greater.”
A production cap hasn’t made it into the negotiating text for a plastic treaty (yet). And while governments pledged to transition away from coal, oil and gas last year, a new report on the world’s energy use shows fossil fuel use declining more slowly than in earlier forecasts – and much more slowly than would be necessary to halt warming at internationally agreed limits. The effort to protect a third of earth’s surface has barely begun.
Each of these summits is concerned with ameliorating the effects of modern societies on nature. Some experts argue for a more radical interpretation.
“Even if 30% of Earth was protected, how effectively would it halt biodiversity loss?” ask political ecologists Bram Büscher (Wageningen University) and Rosaleen Duffy (University of Sheffield).
“The proliferation of protected areas has happened at the same time as the extinction crisis has intensified. Perhaps, without these efforts, things could have been even worse for nature,” they say.
“But an equally valid argument would be that area-based conservation has blinded many to the causes of Earth’s diminishing biodiversity: an expanding economic system that squeezes ecosystems by turning ever more habitat into urban sprawl or farmland, polluting the air and water with ever more toxins and heating the atmosphere with ever more greenhouse gas.”
Editor’s note: This article does not mention the subsidies going to “renewable” energy, which is in the trillions, and its environmentally harmful implementation. Also not mentioned are the costs associated with the loss of livelihood for those humans affected by these unsustainable “developments”, not to mention the harm done to more than human species.
Governments across the world now spend a total of $2.6 trillion per year on subsidies that harm the environment, jeopardizing global climate and biodiversity targets, according to an analysis released Tuesday.
The analysis came in an updated report from the research group Earth Track, which found that harmful fossil fuel subsidies top $1 trillion annually and harmful agricultural subsidies top $600 billion. Governments also fund pollution and destruction in sectors such as water, construction, transport, forestry, and fisheries.
The $2.6 trillion total, which the report authors said was likely an underestimate, marked an $800 billion increase—or about $500 billion in real dollars—from $1.8 trillion cited in the initial report, released in February 2022.
In December 2022, the world’s nations agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a deal that included, as target 18, a commitment to identify environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS) by 2025 and reduce them by $500 billion by 2030.
“Two years on from the signing of the landmark biodiversity plan, we continue to finance our own extinction, putting people and our resilience at huge risk,” Christiana Figueres, the United Nations’ chief climate diplomat when the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, told The Guardian. “Estimates are higher than previously thought—with at least $2.6 trillion now funding the destruction of nature, endangering the chances of meeting our nature and climate goals.”
Private interests usually benefit from the harmful subsidies. Bill McGuire, an emeritus professor of earth sciences at University College London, responded to Earth Track’s findings by spelling out this out.
“Want to know how criminally insane our political-economic system is?” he wrote on social media. “We are actually paying corporations to destroy the planet.”
The report shows the massive scale of government investment in EHS across the world, with the $2.6 trillion total for 2023 amounting to about 2.5% of global gross domestic product.
Other estimates of EHS have been even higher. An International Monetary Fund working paper last year estimated that fossil fuel subsidies alone amount to $7 trillion annually. Subsidies are difficult to quantify as some are implicit, such as not applying an excise tax on fossil fuels that damage the environment.
Report co-author Doug Koplow of Earth Track told Common Dream that the IMF paper included more externalities “rather than just fiscal subsidies,” based on his recollection.
The Earth Track report found that increased global fossil fuel subsidies following the Russian invasion of Ukraine were the main reason for the $800 billion increase since the last report was written. “This example highlights the sensitivity of EHS to macroeconomic conditions,” the report says.
In a statement, Koplow emphasized the importance of the cross-sectoral analysis, arguing that sectors, such as agriculture, are too often looked at in isolation. “It is the combined effect of subsidies to these sectors that compound to drive loss of nature and biodiversity resources,” he wrote.
The analysis comes amid an onslaught of extreme weather this year that’s been made more likely by fossil fuel-driven climate breakdown. Large-scale flooding devastated Central Europe this week, killing more than 20 people. The planet has seen record temperatures for 15 straight months.
Biodiversity loss also continues apace, with experts calling for strong action as the COP16 meeting of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity is set to begin in Colombia on October 21.
