Methane Emissions Crisis Worse Than Ever Before

Methane Emissions Crisis Worse Than Ever Before

by | Nov 8, 2024 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization

Editor’s notes: Methane(CH4) is the main component of natural gas. The word comes from the Greek methy “wine” + hylē “wood.” However, marketers came up with the term natural gas rather than methane gas to give it a clean, green image. Methane is produced by decaying organic material. Natural sources, such as wetlands, account for roughly 40% of today’s global methane emissions. But the majority comes from human activities, such as farms, landfills, dams and wastewater treatment plants – and fuel production. Oil, gas, and coal together make up about a third of global methane emissions. It can leak anywhere along the supply chain, from the wellhead and processing plant, through pipelines and distribution lines, all the way to the burner of your home’s stove or furnace. Once it reaches the atmosphere, methane’s super heat-trapping properties render it a major agent of warming. Over the last 20 years, methane has caused 85 times more warming than the same amount of carbon dioxide. But methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for long. Unlike carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for a century or more, methane only sticks around for about a dozen years.

Unlit or inefficient flares are another big source. Some companies routinely burn off excess gas that they can’t easily capture or don’t have the pipeline capacity to transport, but that still releases methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Global oil and gas operations emitted more methane in 2021 than Canada consumed that entire year, according to IEA estimates.

The only way to keep wetlands carbon in the ground is to quickly reduce and ultimately eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. Failing to do so will only give global warming a helping hand – as warming thaws wetlands and releases more methane, carbon and nitrogen from ancient stores, thus creating a continuous positive feedback loop. In total, methane is responsible for almost half of the global temperature rises since the industrial era.

The rapid growth in the atmospheric methane burden that began in late 2006 is very different from methane’s past observational record. Atmospheric methane’s unprecedented current growth is similar to ice core methane records during glacial-interglacial “termination” events marking global reorganizations of the planetary climate system.

Civilization, being what it is, cannot stop itself from using technology to mitigate the consequences of technological uses. Since civilization can not, on its own, take the necessary steps to relieve its addiction to modernity, it doubles down with solar panels and wind turbines. They are now looking at ways to geoengineer methane emissions. All in a doomed attempt to find a false solution to an overshoot predicament. This system can not continue, and it will be an outside force that brings it down. When that happens it would be best to have as much of the natural world left as possible.

By Olivia Rosane staff writer for Common Dreams

The number of methane “super-emitters” detected by a satellite company has surged by approximately one-third over the past year, despite pledges from fossil fuel companies to reduce their emissions of the highly potent greenhouse gas.

Stephane Germain, the CEO of methane-tracking company GHGSat, told The Associated Press last month that company satellites had detected around 20,000 oil and gas operations, coal mines, and landfills that spewed 220 pounds of methane per hour since the end of 2023—up from around 15,000 the year before.

“The past year, we’ve detected more emissions than ever before,” Germain said, adding that existing data on methane emissions is only “scratching the surface” of the reality.

GHGSat’s data covers the period since 50 fossil fuel companies pledged to end flaring and reduce methane emissions from their operations to “near zero” by 2030 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP28, in Dubai.

At the time, more than 320 civil society organizations criticized the pledge and other voluntary commitments as a “dangerous distraction.”

“The only safe and effective way to ‘clean up’ fossil fuel pollution is to phase out fossil fuels,” the groups wrote in an open letter. “Methane emissions and gas flaring are symptoms of a more than century-long legacy of wasteful, destructive practices that are routine in the oil and gas industry as it pursues massive profits without regard for the consequences.”

“That the industry, at this crucial moment in the climate emergency, is offering to clean up its mess around the edges in lieu of the rapid oil and gas phaseout that is needed is an insult to the billions impacted both by climate change and the industry’s appalling legacy of pollution and community health impacts,” they continued.

Yet now it seems as if the industry isn’t even attempting to clean up its mess around the edges.

Germain, who is sharing his company’s data ahead of the next round of climate talks at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, said that nearly half of the methane super-emitters GHGSat detected were oil and gas related. Another third were landfills or waste facilities, and 16% from mining. Geographically, most of the super-emitting sites are in North America and Eurasia.

A methane flare is seen at Pawnee National Grasslands. (Photo: WildEarth Guardians/flickr/cc)

The data comes amid growing concerns about the extent of methane emissions and how they threaten efforts to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas pollution this decade and limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C. Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide—with about 80 times its heat-trapping potential over its first 20 years in the atmosphere—but it also dissipates much more quickly. This means that curbing methane emissions could be an effective near-term part of halting temperature rise.

However, a series of studies published this year show these emissions moving in the wrong direction. A Nature analysis concluded in March that U.S. oil and gas operations were emitting around three times the methane that the U.S. government thought. A Frontiers of Science paper in July found that the growth rate of atmospheric methane concentrations had seen an “abrupt and rapid increase” in the early 2020s, due largely to the fossil fuel industry as well as releases from tropical wetlands.

The danger of methane emissions is one reason that the climate movement has mobilized to stop the buildout of liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure, as methane routinely leaks in the process of drilling for and transporting the fuel. A September study found that, despite industry claims it could act as a bridge fuel, LNG actually has a 33%. greater greenhouse gas footprint than coal when its entire lifecycle is taken into account.

The fate of the LNG buildout, at least in the U.S., could be decided by the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. The Biden-Harris administration paused the approval of new LNG exports while the Department of Energy considers the latest climate science. While a Trump-appointed judge then halted the pause, this does not actually stop the DOE from continuing its analysis. A second Trump administration, however, would be almost guaranteed not to look further into the risk of methane emissions before it approves more LNG exports. Former President Donald Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill” and offered a policy wishlist to fossil fuel executives who back his campaign.

A document leaked in October showed that a major oil and gas trade association had drafted plans for a second Trump administration, including ending Biden administration regulations to curb methane emissions, such as an emissions fee.

As Mattea Mrkusic, a senior energy transition policy lead at Evergreen Action, warned, “Under Trump, we could double down on even more dirty fossil fuel infrastructure that’ll lock us into harmful pollution for decades to come.”

Banner Image by Carl Young via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Human Supremacy Where You Might Least Expect It

Human Supremacy Where You Might Least Expect It

by | Oct 31, 2024 | ANALYSIS, Human Supremacy, The Problem: Civilization

By Elizabeth Robson / RadFemBiophilia’s Newsletter

 

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.

I learned that the outcome of the previous biodiversity conference, COP 15, is the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). This is an agreement among COP 15 parties that “sets out an ambitious pathway to reach the global vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050.”

It’s important to note that the framework “supports the achievement of the [UN] Sustainable Development Goals.” I’ll come back to this point later on.

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.

~~~

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
Eat, Pray, Pollute: On The Needed Death of Tourism

Eat, Pray, Pollute: On The Needed Death of Tourism

by | Oct 13, 2024 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization

By Christopher Ketcham / COUNTERPUNCH

A crowd of 3,000 anti-tourism protesters descended on posh downtown Barcelona last July, their demeanor one of delighted malice.  They cordoned off hotels and eateries with hazard tape, as if demarcating a crime scene. They sprayed with water guns the blithe holidaymakers seated in restaurants.  Video footage showed unhappy couples and glowering young men chased from their seats by the mob, stunned at the indignity.

The protesters shouted, “Tourists go home.” They held signs that said, “Barcelona is not for sale.” They spoke of “mass touristification” and inveighed against the greed of restaurateurs and hoteliers and Airbnb landlords profiting from the madding crowd while the average Catalan struggled to meet the skyrocketing costs of daily life. One of the protesters told an interviewer, “The city has turned completely for tourists. What we want is a city for citizens.”

The revolt in Spain — resident population 47 million; yearly visitation 85 million — is no outlier in the hypervisited destination countries of Europe. In Greece and Italy, for example, residents also rose up this year to say they will accept no more the invasion of their native ground, as mass visitation strains to the breaking point infrastructure, natural resources – especially water – and, at last, social sanity.

It’s the culmination of years of exploitation and maltreatment, said writer Chris Christou, who produces “The End of Tourism” podcast. “In the last decade, especially in southern Europe,” Christou told me in an email, “we’ve seen local movements sprout and mobilize —typically from the grassroots Left — against the relentless conversion of home into a veritable theme park for ignorant foreigners.”  Christou has documented the industry’s long train of offenses: environmental degradation; cultural appropriation and what he calls petrification (“the stasis or congealing of culture’s flow or growth”); spiraling economic inequality; the Airbnbization of dwelling; gentrification and displacement; corporate and government nepotism; the revolving door of corruption between tourism bureaus and industry; the rise of an extremely precarious labor force; and, not least, “the spectacled surveillance of place that effectively turns home, for local residents, into a turnstile Disneyland.”

Mainstream media during the summer figured out there was a story here. In the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Reuters, the scourge of “overtourism” made headlines for the first time.  The images of thronged locales published across the web and in newspapers had the quality of Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings of hell: people piling on one another, grasping, motioning, their forms indistinguishable, as the newly empowered consumers of the burgeoning global middle-class swarm across Earth in record numbers. 

There is no end in sight to this growth, as it appears to be the norm of fossil-fueled footloose modernity. In 1950 there were 25 million international tourist arrivals. Twenty years later the number had jumped to 166 million, by 1990 it was 435 million, and by 2018 it hit an all-time pre-Covid high of 1.442 billion.   By 2030, almost 2 billion tourist arrivals are projected.

In Barcelona, the big money is not in maintaining a city for citizens but in the flux of Boschian creatures.  Some 26 million visitors crammed into Barcelona in 2023 and spent nearly $14 billion.  The Barcelona city council and the Catalan government dedicate millions of tax-payer euros to ensure this continual flow through global marketing campaigns that sing the city’s praises.

The pressures from hyper-visitation and the greed of those who profit from it have become so great that residents have formed the Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, whose purpose is to reverse the toxic touristification process.  The group’s co-founder, 48-year-old Barcelonan Daniel Pardo, described touristification as “a transformation enacted on a territory and a population” by governments in collusion with commercial interests. He believes that degrowth of tourism means regulating it nearly out of existence.

“It means not only regulating tourism markets but promoting other activities in order to reduce the weight of tourism in the economy of the city,” Pardo told me.  Most important is the recognition of the almost pathological dependence on tourism in Barcelona and the many places like it.  The city has been shown to be painfully vulnerable to any unexpected crisis that upends travel patterns.

“It happened with Covid,” said Pardo, “happened before that with a terrorist attack, and before that with a volcanic explosion in Iceland.”  And it will happen, sooner or later, because of the climate crisis and unleashed geopolitical chaos. “Better than keeping on the tourism wheel, which smashes lives, territory and environment, let’s plan a transition process for Barcelona which reduces this risky dependance,” Pardo told me. “How? Not easy to say, since nobody is trying that almost anywhere.”

One place to start is with the ideological error in how we think of leisure travel as a right rather than a privilege.

“The right to fly does not exist. The right to tourism does not exist,” said Pardo recently on the End of Tourism podcast. “You cannot extend a model of tourism everybody thinks about to all the population.  It’s impossible.”  Pardo added in an email to me that the central issue is “about the limits of the planet, something so many people absolutely do not want to hear about.”

The tourism explosion can reasonably be explained by the IPAT math formula used in the ecological sciences.  Intended to measure how endless growth of modern industrial civilization strains a finite Earth, the formula states that impact equals population times affluence times technology.

With IPAT in mind, one could argue that too many would-be travelers with newly acquired affluence have access to new technologies.  Easy online bookings and guides, smartphones in general for facilitating and smoothing the travel experience, high-quality digital photography and video equipment made available for use by amateurs on social media, with its influencers driving place-based envy and desire — all this combines in a noxious stew on an overpopulated planet of societies abased by lust for money.

***

I have watched the touristification process wreck lives in an American city I once considered a place to settle and raise a family.  Moab, Utah, is called “the adventure capital of the world,” and the hordes converge on it for exploration of the surrounding desert wildernesses on vast public lands that include two legendary national parks, Arches and Canyonlands.  In the last 20 years, the city has become a nightmare of hypervisitation.  The Utah state government and a cabal of elites – landowners, businesspeople, speculators, moneylenders, rentiers – have joined to market Moab across the United States and globally so that huge profits can be reaped from a harvest of ever-increasing numbers of tourists.

The effect is no different from that in Barcelona, especially in the spawning of a precariat working class in Moab.  These are the service-industry peons at the bottom rungs of a system of economic inequality that has only worsened with hypervisitation.  Many are driven out of town by the high cost of living and end up car-camping on public lands, where they are vulnerable to predation.  Such was the case of Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner, a gay couple described as “deeply in love” and who lived out of their car, who were stalked and murdered in August 2021.  As my friend Laurel Hagen, attorney and long-time Moab resident and mother of two young children, put it to me, “Moab’s people are being fed slowly but surely to the tourism Moloch.”

The beneficiaries are also the same as in Barcelona.  “Those who benefit the most from hypertourism,” Jon Kovash, a writer and radio journalist in Moab, told me, “are the hedge funders engaged in raping the town. Anybody selling gasoline or liquor or restaurant food.  Realtors and land pimps. The internet lodging industry.”   Kovash also includes in this list of villains what he calls the “adventure scammers.”  These are the businesspeople who seek to convince the public of the need for paid guides or expensive mechanized rent-a-toys to get into the backcountry, when all one needs really is boots, backpack, a compass and map and a modicum of courage. (I lived in Moab for several years and spent glorious times in the backcountry without spending a nickel.)

Moab’s citizens are today under assault “like never before” – so longtime friends in town tell me – with the arrival of the UTV tour industry.  Utility task vehicles, or “side-by-sides,” are small, powerful four-wheel-drive autos designed for aggressive driving both off-road and on.  Piston, camshaft, clutch, gearbox, and various belts produce extraordinarily high levels of noise. Renting a UTV to tear about Moab and into the surrounding desert at full blast has become the thing to do.

“People in Moab should be defending their homes against UTV colonization and the violence of noise pollution,” Christian Wright, an author and former National Park Service historian, told me when I first met him in 2022.  Wright, who in 2019 published a book about radicalized “miners for democracy” in the coal towns of the American West, had himself been radicalized by the torture of years of living around UTVs in Moab.  The machines, he said, “are destroying the peace, harmony, and friendliness that once characterized Moab Valley.  Do we not have mountains of evidence that the constant noise leads to elevated heart rates, discontentment, and unprecedentedly colorful manifestations of language?”

The problem became so widespread that some Moabites, who happened to be parents dealing with infants terrified of the sound of the machines, described UTV tourism as a danger to the health of children.  Jon Kovash and his daughter Josie Kovash, who lived a few blocks from her dad and was herself a new mother, produced a radio documentary in 2021 cataloging the complaints of besieged residents.

None of these concerns were aired in a political vacuum.  Officials of Grand County, of which Moab is the seat, noted that their offices had in recent years received more complaints about noise than about any other issue.  According to former Grand County prosecutor Christina Sloan, the impacts on residents included “stress-related illnesses, high blood pressure, hearing loss, sleep disruption and lost productivity,” along with “feelings of isolation,” “lowered morale” and “emotional trauma.”

Acting on these concerns of the great majority of Moabites, the city in 2021 placed restrictions on UTV businesses and daily tours, setting up an enforcement system to reduce noise levels – only to see the Utah state legislature, friend to the industry, kill the local ordinances with passage in 2022 of an extraordinary bill that appeared to violate municipal sovereignty.  The infamous Blue Ribbon Coalition, a rightwing astroturf lobby group funded by fossil fuel companies and auto manufacturers, joined the fray with the filing of a lawsuit against the city of Moab for the attempt at regulation. Christina Sloan declared the 2022 pro-UTV bill “an illegal restraint on county and municipal constitutional police power. ”  It turns out Utah is now the only state in the union that has made UTVs street legal while also prohibiting municipalities from opting out of their use on streets.

Such is the hypocrisy that one finds everywhere across the rightwing American West: local sovereignty is sacrosanct only so long as it doesn’t conflict with industrial profits.  In this case, tourism trumped both liberty and democracy.

***

As a global force of havoc in the natural world, tourism is well-known to be “one of the leading sectors with deleterious effects on the environment.” The air travel related to tourism accounts for 8 percent or more of all greenhouse gas emissions. Tourism is anathema to biodiversity, implicated in producing wildlife deserts, as masses of people in animal habitat tend to adrenalize the animals and scatter them while impairing the habitat with dispersed pollutants. Backcountry tourism in Colorado, to take one example, has caused the die-off of elk populations.

Tourism is implicated in diminished freshwater supply for local residents.  It increases the chance of contamination from sewage and chemicals, soil erosion from trampling, and the accumulation of waste and air pollution.  Craig Downs, a toxicology expert who runs the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Virginia, has found that sunscreen effluent from mass tourism produces “a cascade of insults to the ecological structure” of both marine and freshwater ecosystems, reducing the life cycle viability of aquatic wildlife – in other words, poisoning the animals to the point they can no longer reproduce.

Tourism is also a source of enormous volumes of noise pollution.  The effect of noise pollution on human health is well-documented.  Over time, it is debilitating to body and mind, and the problem is only getting worse with the growing din of technoindustrial civilization. What about the effect, on a captive population, of the peculiarly grating racket of UTVs?  Moab is an experimental site, one resident told me, “to see how people react to the presence of high-pitched whining machines.  I think we are guinea pigs and the goal of the experiment is to see how long it takes to drive us nuts.”

Christian Wright, the historian who worked for the National Park Service, was driven almost to the edge.  His case, sensationalized and twisted in the media, made headlines across Utah. On February 17, 2023, he was surrounded at a gas station in Moab by heavily armed police. He was arrested, and his house was raided and searched.   Police found five AR-15-style assault rifles, along with a stash of psychedelic mushrooms, possession of which made it illegal under Utah law to own the guns.  His phones, computers, and hard drives were also seized. Local newspapers declared him a terrorist in waiting.

The evidence marshaled to justify the raid and arrest was that Wright may have participated in a vandalism campaign in which stickers were glued to various public objects in town, including utility poles.  The campaign, I later learned, involved numerous Moabites who were posting such stickers. Wright was not some lone nutter. One of the stickers said DEATH TO INDUSTRIAL TOURISM: it burns oil – destroys habitat – low wages – expensive housing.  Another said UTV NOISE IS CHILD ABUSE, and another said UTV NOISE IS RAPE CULTURE.

A sticker that Wright gave me as a gift was the old chestnut, DIE YUPPIE SCUM.   Another that police allegedly found in their raid of his house was decorated with an image of an assault rifle and stated, DEFEND YOUR HOME, RESIST UTV NOISE HARASSMENT, ABUSIVE TOURISTS & SLC POLITICIANS TAKE NOTE: MOAB IS NOT YOUR WHORE.

I had been corresponding with Wright for close to a year prior to his arrest, and we had become friendly.  Nothing in our exchanges suggested he was dangerous to people (though he might have been dangerous to property, which in the United States can be a worse crime). We had gone on long hikes together in the desert backcountry when I visited him in the snowy January of 2023, navigating the treacherous ice of red rock cliffs to collect in our backpacks the plastic detritus – mostly water bottles – that hikers had left in remote canyons of Arches National Park the previous summer. We had gone out boozing at a Moab saloon and had a fine time getting drunk. We played music in his basement, me on his drums, he on piano. He had a punk-rock style, with his mullet and leather jacket.  He was aggressive in a gentle way, and a weirdo, and maladjusted (I can relate).

Yet here was Wright, one month later, confined to a holding cell in the Moab city jail, charged with crimes – terroristic threats, illegal possession of assault rifles and drugs – that made him sound like a lunatic ready to burst.  It’s true that he had sent Grand County attorney Christina Sloan a letter, in 2022, stating that he wanted to chop up with an ax the owner of a UTV rental company that operated next door to the house he owned in Moab.  The unceasing UTV traffic was like a jackhammer in his brain.  He made no attempt to communicate with the person he wanted to kill, however, but only told prosecutor Sloan of his intentions – which is not how one usually conducts a death threat.

Sloan herself came to his defense in an article she published following his arrest.  “I’ve watched this smart, articulate, engaged, empathetic human fall apart over the last two years,” she said of Wright.  “It has made me feel more passionately than ever that noise pollution is a significant public health issue that needs our full attention.”  Sloan recalled Wright’s comments on UTV tourism to the Grand County Commission in April 2021, noting that “he and his mullet were vibrant and refreshing.”  Wright, she said, “articulately countered the pro-[UTV] conservative talking points hailing the supremacy of the American dollar above all else.”

Not long after his arrest, Wright was remanded for four months to a mental health facility in Utah, where he was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. He appreciated the care from the loving staff but didn’t enjoy being regarded as a “terrorist” based on slander spread by Moab authorities. As of this writing, he is back in his home, and most of the charges against him have been dropped.

***

The conflict over hyper-visitation plays out wherever there are lovely places that people want to consume as travelers.  In my backyard, on the highlands along the Hudson River valley north of New York City, a man named Dave Merandy, ex-mayor of the touristed village of Cold Spring, is fighting to stop the flood of people on his home ground.

The Hudson Highlands is a major draw with its green hills and handsome cliffs that afford scenic views of the wide Hudson.  The area already attracts hundreds of thousands of people a year.  Merandy, who stepped down as mayor of Cold Spring in 2021 after seven years of service, is a leader in the opposition to a planned expansion of tourism amenities that will likely increase the number of visitors in the Highlands to more than a million per annum.  Known as the Fjord Trail project, the expansion is supported by the New York State government, numerous environmental NGOs, and a friendly neighborhood billionaire named Chris Davis, heir to a Wall Street fortune who considers himself the lord over the commoners in this stretch of rural New York.

Why stop the growth of tourism in the Highlands?   “Because we already have enough,” Merandy told me during a visit at his house.  “We don’t need more people.”  He understood with clear eyes that the conflict was part of a global problem. “Nobody wants to address overpopulation. Everybody thinks it’s sustainable. We think we can just keep growing and growing. It’s crazy. This is a case where we want to have as many people as possible. You only have X amount of acres that can sustain a certain number of people. But then we tell ourselves, just bring them in, more and more and more. Put up a neon light, have a ribbon cutting, and everybody will say Chris Davis the billionaire is a hero.“

After I left Merandy, I stopped at a busy intersection on Route 9, in the town of Fishkill, where a masked man stood in the median in a black robe that whipped in the wind of the passing cars. He wore the infamous Scream mask and a big analog clock around his neck. This, obviously, was the Grim Reaper. I stopped to ask him what he was doing. “I’m Death,” he said. “And I’m reminding people they’re going to die.”

It struck me that, yes, lots of us are going to die a lot sooner than we expect if the growthist monster isn’t stopped. Climate change and ecological collapse, driven by overpopulation coupled with affluence-seeking, will kill out not only the beautiful wild things worth keeping on this planet but also a large part of humanity that hasn’t the money to buy its way out of collapse.

The place to build opposition to the monster is in your backyard, where the consequences are most painfully felt. En revanche, the prostitutes of business-as-usual – say, the billionaire lords up in the manor – will curse and slander you, declare you reactionary, the enemy of “progress,” and, perhaps worst of all, a nimby, somebody who wants selfishly to keep the backyard all to yourself.  Merandy, who grew up in the Highlands and learned there a love of nature, has been called all these things, as have the resisters in Barcelona and Moab.

Wright and Merandy and the Barcelonans armed with water guns are all engaged in the same fight in defense of the place they call home. They have the right and the duty to take their stand. And history will prove them to be honorable. Those who oppose mass tourism today are in fact doing a service for humanity tomorrow.  The reality is that travel as we know it will have to end if society is to meet the reductions in carbon emissions to keep warming below catastrophic levels. The tourism industry – along with the billions who see an exotic vacation in their near future – will not accept that judgment.

An abridged version of this piece first appeared at Truthdig.

Christopher Ketcham writes at Christopherketcham.com and is seeking donations to his new journalism nonprofit, Denatured.  He can be reached at christopher.ketcham99@gmail.com.  

Photo by Shlomo Shalev on Unsplash

The Nine Lies of the Fake Green Fairytale

The Nine Lies of the Fake Green Fairytale

by | Oct 5, 2024 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization

By Prof Jem Bendell / thoughts on collapse readiness and recovery

Self-deception is rife within the environmental profession and movement. Some denial or disavowal is not surprising, due to how upsetting it is to focus on an unfolding tragedy. But our vulnerability to self-deception has been hijacked by the self interests of the rich and powerful, to spin a ‘fake green fairytale’. Their story distracts us from the truth of the damage done, that to come, and what our options might be. Indeed, their fairytale prevents us from rebelling to try to make this a fairer disaster, or a more gentle and just collapse of the societies we live in. Averting wider rebellion might be why the fairytale receives loads of funding for books, awards, feature articles and documentaries, as well as videos for popular YouTube channels. That’s why, like me, you might not have realised for years that it is a fairytale. In this essay I will explain the nine lies that comprise this ‘fake green fairytale’ before explaining how much damage is being done to both people and planet from the dominance of this story within contemporary environmentalism.

The ‘fake green fairytale’ claims humanity can maintain current levels of consumption (a lie) by being powered by renewables (a lie) which are already displacing fossil fuels (a lie) and therefore reach net zero (a lie) to bring temperatures down to safe levels within just a few years (a lie) to secure a sustainable future for all (a lie) and that the enemies of this outcome are the critics of the energy transition (a lie) who are all funded or influenced by the fossil fuel industry (a lie) so the proponents of green globalist aims are ethical in doing whatever it takes to achieve their aims (a lie).

Due to widely available evidence to the contrary, these are not just misunderstandings. To demonstrate that, I’ll explain them briefly in more detail.

First, the claim that humanity can maintain current levels of consumption is not true. Already, humanity is overshooting the carrying capacity of Planet Earth. This year the day that marked the beginning of the overshoot was August 1. We are degrading the capacity of seas, forests and soil to produce what we need, as well as using up key minerals. That’s even with around 800 million people malnourished last year (about 1 in 10 of us worldwide). Meanwhile, our monetary system requires our economy to expand consumption of resources, and the theory of decoupling that consumption from resource use has been debunked by hundreds of peer reviewed studies (see Chapter 1 of Breaking Together).

Second, the claim that modern societies can be powered by renewables while maintaining our current levels of energy use is not true. Over 80% of current primary energy generation is from fossil fuels. Even if we tried to switch everything to electric and generate the power from nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and wave, then we wouldn’t have enough metals for either the wire or the batteries. For instance we would need 250 years of annual production of copper for the wire and 4000 times the annual production of lithium. Mining is an ecologically damaging activity. And we would need to trash huge tracts of forest to produce the needed quantities of metal. There will be resistance, and rightly so (see Chapter 3 of Breaking Together).

Third, the claim that renewables are already displacing fossil fuels is not true. Instead, globally, renewables are providing additional energy, with fossil fuel usage also increasing. There is no sign of global energy demand declining or any policies aimed at that. We all know that having a side salad with our pie and chips doesn’t make the belly disappear. Therefore, renewables are not yet an answer to the problem of carbon emissions from fossil fuels forcing further climate change. Only policies targeting a reduction of use of fossil fuels, globally, would begin to tackle that – and we see it hardly anywhere.

Fourth, the claim that the world can reach net zero carbon emissions is a lie. Not only is that due to the previous two lies about energy production and demand. Not only is that due to the limitations of any carbon removal technologies and approaches, for getting CO2 out of the atmosphere. It is also because of the fundamental role of fossilised or natural gas in current industrial agriculture. We are a grain-based civilization with estimates of between 50 to 80% of our calories coming from 5 key grains, either directly or via the animals that some of us eat. About 60% of these are produced with chemical fertiliser, which is currently dependent on fossil fuels. A tonne of such fertiliser releases twice its weight as CO2. That is before considering the machines and transportation involved (see Chapter 6 of Breaking Together). With Bekandze Farm, my own work and philanthropy is promoting farming without chemicals, but I recognize we are utterly dependent on them for our current food supply.

Fifth, the claim that achieving net zero emissions would bring temperatures down to safe levels within just a few years is not true. The claim derives from over-claiming, or misrepresenting, what the simulations run on some climate models have found. Those models ignored methane. In addition, recent data on removing aerosols suggests it is a larger driver of heating than was previously understood. Even with those limitations, the research was inconclusive, with some models showing ongoing warming, some showing none, in the impossible scenario of the world having stopped all CO2 emissions. That scenario, by the way, would be even more severe curtailment than net zero (which still allows for some emissions).

Sixth, the claim that such changes will secure a sustainable future for all is not true. That is because both ecological overshoot and climate change have already progressed too far, while ongoing destruction and pollution are too much of a feature of industrial consumer societies (see Chapters 1 and 4 of Breaking Together). The idea that billions more people can improve their lives by being incorporated into such industrial consumer ways of life is nonsense. Rather, the way we privileged people live is a time-bound and geographically-bound niche: if we care about people in poverty then we need to look at different ways of helping, as well as consuming and polluting less ourselves.

Seventh, the claim that any critics of the renewable energy transition are enemies of a sustainable future is not true. The enemies of humanity living happily-ever-after in industrial consumer societies are basic physics, chemistry and biology. Evangelising about it and condemning non-believers does not make that future any more feasible. Instead, we could be working for a more gentle and just collapse, and a lesser dystopia, with less suffering and more joy than otherwise would be the case. The enemies of that are people who distract us from how to fairly reduce and redistribute resource use.

Eighth, the claim that critics are all funded or influenced by the fossil fuel industry is not true. Rather, many of us are the more radical and anti-corporate voices in environmentalism. We are aligned with the history of environmental critique, which recognizes climate change as one symptom of a destructive economic system and its associated politics and culture. We want to reduce emissions but refuse to align with a new faction of capital that wants to profit from this disaster by selling inadequate solutions and false hope.

Ninth, the claim that proponents of pseudo-green capitalist policies are ethical in doing ‘whatever it takes’ to achieve their aims is not true. For it is not ethical to override support for the rights of indigenous peoples living in the lands where large corporations want to mine, so that more people can drive a Tesla. It is not ethical to infiltrate climate activist groups to steer them away from radical politics. It is not right to get big tech platforms like Facebook to restrict the reach of analysis which challenges their ‘fake green fairytale’.

I know these self-deceptions are powerful and have consequences, as they shaped my work for decades. In general, they pull us back from revolutionary despair – the kind of transformation that has occurred for so many people when they don’t believe in the false God of technosalvation.

Going forward, I wonder how much ecological destruction, in the form of new mining and old nuclear, will be unresisted, permitted and financed due to belief in the fake green fairytale? We have already seen that in a variety of cases. UK Government support for new nuclear power stations was enabled by climate concern that rose due the campaigns of Extinction Rebellion. Unfortunately, those new stations will not use the new technologies without meltdown risk or hazardous waste. Permits for mining in primary forests have been issued because of the climate crisis. For instance, the Brazilian government has explained that critical minerals for the net zero economy are a reason to issue permits for mining in the Amazon, including in areas inhabited by indigenous peoples. Such mining is a major cause of deforestation. However, the narrowness of the fake green fairytale overlooks this. It ignores the science on the role of forests in cooling our climate through cloud seeding. It’s not just regional, with pollen and bacteria rising from the Amazon forest then seeding clouds and snow over Tibet (Chapter 5 of Breaking Together). Because he is so fixated on the fairytale, billionaire non-scientist Bill Gates tells us trees don’t matter that much for climate. Laughing off tree protection or planting for climate concerns, he asked his audience last year: “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?”

And so we return to the matter of self-deception. There will be money to be earned in maintaining it. I wonder how much censorship, surveillance, and authoritarianism will arise from those who need to maintain the fake green fairytale while resisting a growing backlash? Definitely some. Maybe a lot. Myself and others critiquing the mainstream climate narratives of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have already had our content suppressed or removed from social media platforms. In a world where over 80% of social media sharing globally is enabled by just three American multinational corporations, there is a huge risk to public awareness.

I describe the nine lies of self-deception that comprise the fake green fairytale as being pathological because they prevent humanity from creatively exploring what our options are in this age of consequences. That is why I disagree with those people who say “we” environmentalists should not argue amongst ourselves. They are mistaken about who “we” are. I’m not in the same environmental profession or movement as people who will campaign for policies that will help to trash the Amazon Rainforest for the false promise of a more electric lifestyle. I’m not in the same profession or movement with people who want us to defer to the systems that have caused or administered this destruction. I’m in a very different movement, which believes in freeing people and communities from the pressure to destroy our environment in order to service global capital. That is the ecolibertarian ethos, which I explain in my book Breaking Together.

Photo by Lukas Eggers on Unsplash

Subsidies That Harm the Environment Reach $2.6 Trillion Per Year

Subsidies That Harm the Environment Reach $2.6 Trillion Per Year

by | Sep 21, 2024 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization

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.

By Edward Carver staff writer for Common Dreams.

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.

Photo by Chris Leipelt on Unsplash

We’re Protecting the Ocean Wrong

We’re Protecting the Ocean Wrong

by | Sep 6, 2024 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization

Editor’s note: Protecting the ocean means life protection, our ecosystems depend on intact and clean oceans. Even though the aim is to protect 30% of the planet, it’s not clear what conservation actually means worldwide. That leads to ineffective conservation measures and demands more knowledge about oceanic ecosystems and also implementing it. For the most part protected areas don’t need to be managed, they just need to have humans leave them alone.

By David Shiffman/Revelator

There’s never been more momentum for protecting the ocean, but new research finds that many efforts fail to protect endangered species — or have barely gotten off the drawing board.

Ocean ecosystems and the marine wildlife that depend on them are under threat as never before. Between overfishing, climate change, plastic pollution, and habitat destruction, it’s a bad time to be a prawn, cod, seabird, or whale.

There’s no single silver bullet solution to the biodiversity crisis, but in recent years, many people in the environmental community have focused on the goal of “30 x 30”: protecting 30% of the planet by the year 2030. Many nations have made promises toward that goal, including the United States, which has adapted it into the “America the Beautiful” initiative.

Measurable goals like this provide nations with clear, quantifiable conservation goals that others in the international community can follow, verify, or use to identify shortfalls and push for more action.

At the same time, many experts warn that number-based targets like “protect 30%” lend themselves to incentives to arguably-kinda-sorta protect as much as possible, rather than protecting the most ecologically important areas. Governments, for instance, can use what’s euphemistically referred to as “creative accounting” — counting things as protected that probably should not be considered protected.

Two new research papers examine some of this creative accounting in the ocean. Together, they stress important things to keep in mind when creating protected areas and when assessing their usefulness.

To Protect a Species, Protect Areas Where They Actually Live

A surprisingly common issue in area-based conservation happens when a government declares a new protected area to help save a threatened species of concern…without first checking to see if the species actually lives within those boundaries.

It happens more often than you might think. A new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology looked at 89 marine protected areas in Europe that are supposed to protect diadromous fish species (those that migrate between ocean and fresh water, like salmon or some eels) of conservation concern.

Their findings are shocking: Many of these areas protect habitats where those fish species do not live, and very few of them protect the most important core habitat for any diadromous fish species.

“A marine protected area should be an area that protects part of the marine environment,” says Sophie Elliott of the Wildlife Conservation Trust, the study’s lead author. “I say ‘should’ because there are a lot of parks that don’t have enough thought put into them. Quite often things are done quickly without thinking or understanding the situation.”

Sometimes this happens because of limited resources for scientific study. In other words, according to Elliot, we simply don’t know enough about species’ habitat use to protect their key habitat, at least not yet. This is known as the rare-species paradox: Endangered species are often hard to find and study, especially in the vast ocean, so it can be hard to understand what habitat qualities they need to thrive, even if we can hypothesize that protecting certain regions will mitigate some of the threats the species face.

Other times government officials, in search of positive publicity, announce a new protected area that was studied but wasn’t intended to protect a species.

“We had a series of MPAs that were supposed to have measures in place to protect certain species,” Elliott says. “But then an extra species got tacked on to the stated goals of the MPA, and it wasn’t effective for that species.” She declined to identify examples, given the political sensitivities of some of these protected areas.

In addition to gathering more data and always basing protected-area design on the best available data, Elliott recommends a more holistic approach to designating future protected areas.

“When people think about putting MPAs in place, look at the whole range of biodiversity that exists within it, because there might be many endangered and protected species,” she says. “You need to know what’s in that MPA and do ecosystem-based management” — management focusing on the whole ecosystem and not just individual species. It’s the difference between protecting cod by establishing fishing quotas versus protecting cod by also managing their habitat and predators and food and other things that eat that food. “We’ve long been calling for that, but we aren’t really working toward it at all,” she says.

What Counts As ‘Protected’ Varies More Than You Think

Another key issue in marine protected area management is what should count as “protected.”

Some areas restrict oil and gas extraction but allow any and all fishing. Some allow swimmers and other recreation, while others say people can’t even go scuba diving.

In one glaring recent example, the advocacy group Oceana U.K. found evidence that the United Kingdom allows bottom trawling in many of its MPAs. Bottom trawling is a fishing method that’s extremely destructive to sensitive habitat types; it’s been compared to clear-cutting forests to catch rabbits.

“At the end of the day … there’s no one clear definition of what conservation means around the world,” says Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has studied the issue. “One of the negative externalities of the global push to protect 30% of the ocean is that some governments are more concerned with being able to say that they protected 30% of the ocean than they are concerned with delivering meaningful biodiversity protections.”

Villagomez and his colleagues have identified another big issue: According to their new analysis in the journal Conservation Letters, fully one-quarter of the 100 largest marine protected areas — as cataloged in the United Nations and IUCN’s world database of protected areas — are announced but not yet implemented. Many have no clear timeline of when the formal protections might be put into place, or what those regulations might look like.

For now, those areas exist on paper but remain unprotected in the real world. For example, the paper cites the OSPAR MPA network covering 7% of the Northeast Atlantic, which currently appears to have no concrete protections.

This wide range of rules and inconsistent protections makes it harder to protect the ocean — or to count it toward 30×30 goals.

Governments are not supposed to submit anything to the world database of protected areas until something is designated, “but they do, and that’s just the reality,” says Villagomez.

But here’s the biggest problem: The study found that many of the world’s largest MPAs lack the scientific knowledge, funding, and political support to be effective.

“We know that MPAs work when they are well designed and provided the funding to operate,” Villagomez told me. “But for about one-third of the MPAs we studied, based on everything we know about protected area science, they will never result in positive outcomes for biodiversity.”

The conclusions of these two papers are clear: Too many marine protected areas are poorly designed and sited in places where the species they’re ostensibly trying to protect do not actually live. Also, too many allow destructive extractive industries to operate, limiting the benefits of any protection.

Despite these setbacks, Villagomez remains optimistic about the future of MPA-based protections.

“The good news is that this works really well about one-third of the time — if you play baseball and you hit the ball 300 out of 1,000 times, you’re going to the Hall of Fame,” he says. “There’s a ton of science that shows that well-designed well-implemented MPAs work, and for one-quarter of the MPAS we looked at, they’re well designed and are just lacking funding for implementation.”

Photo by BeccaCheney/Wikimedia Commons CC By-SA-4.0

David Sherman is a marine biologist specializing in the ecology and conservation of sharks. He received his Ph.D. in environmental science and policy from the University of Miami. Follow him on Twitter, where he’s always happy to answer any questions anyone has about sharks.