Editor’s note: The team used an excavator to cut a trench through the center of the termite mounds, then carefully took soil samples every 10 cm down and 50 centimeters across. Another example of the hubris of human supremacy.
Inhabited termite mounds along the Buffels River in Namaqualand, South Africa, are an astounding 34,000 years old, according to a new study.
Termites are a diverse group of insects that play a vital ecological role by breaking down organic matter. They live in complex social groups, and some species create large underground nests. These can include extensive tunnels and chambers where the termites live and store plant material. Some termite mounds can be very old; in 2018, researchers discovered termite mounds in Brazil that were 4,000 years old.
But a recent Science of The Total Environment study has discovered that termite mounds inhabited by southern harvester termites (Microhodotermes viator) in Namaqualand are far, far older. Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers found that the mounds have been used by termites for 34,000 years, since before the last Ice Age. During this period, humans were busy making cave art while a few Neanderthals were still hanging on in southern Europe. The world was still full of megafauna like woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats and giant sloths.
The study also gives an unparalleled view of the past climate cycles in the region, and points to a previously unexplored role of termites in storing carbon, says Michele Francis, a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University and the study’s lead author.
“Our gut told us [the mounds] were special, and when we dug through and saw these old nests and termites, we thought ‘wow,’” Francis says. “It’s like watching a video of the past.”
Namaqualand is a semiarid region in western South Africa, known for abundant spring wildflowers. The land along the Buffels River is dotted with low mounds called heuweltjies, which are about 40 meters (130 feet) in diameter, where the southern harvester termites live in underground nests. A hard calcite layer on top of the mounds protects the termites from aardvarks (Orycteropus afer) and other insectivores.
To sample the mounds, the researchers first used an excavator to dig a trench 60 m (197 ft) wide by 3 m (10 ft) deep through the center. Then, in what Francis describes as hot, dusty work, they took samples across the entire cross section, using small metal spatulas to scrape soil into plastic bags. Sometimes the termites would come out and frantically try to repair their nests, using balls of soil to plug the holes the researchers had made.
Francis says she already suspected the mounds were quite old — but was still surprised when radiocarbon dating analysis revealed that the carbonate was up to 34,000 years old. Organic material, which degrades much faster, was also remarkably well preserved, and was up to 19,000 years old. The younger organic material was found lower down, demonstrating how the termites bury carbon deep in the mound.
The analysis provided an unparalleled view into the past, and indicates that these termites may play a previously unappreciated role in storing carbon, Francis says.
To sample the mounds, the researchers first used an excavator to dig a trench 60 m (197 ft) wide by 3 m (10 ft) deep through the center. Then, in what Francis describes as hot, dusty work, they took samples across the entire cross section, using small metal spatulas to scrape soil into plastic bags. Sometimes the termites would come out and frantically try to repair their nests, using balls of soil to plug the holes the researchers had made.
Francis says she already suspected the mounds were quite old — but was still surprised when radiocarbon dating analysis revealed that the carbonate was up to 34,000 years old. Organic material, which degrades much faster, was also remarkably well preserved, and was up to 19,000 years old. The younger organic material was found lower down, demonstrating how the termites bury carbon deep in the mound.
The analysis provided an unparalleled view into the past, and indicates that these termites may play a previously unappreciated role in storing carbon, Francis says.
This can happen in two ways. First, the termites gather small sticks or other carbon-rich plant material at the surface and carry them more than a meter (3 ft) underground, where they’re less likely to release carbon into the atmosphere as they decompose. Second, tunnels created by the termites allow rainwater to move through the mound. This rainwater can carry minerals and dissolved inorganic carbon deeper through the soil profile and into the groundwater.
It’s already established that termites contribute to the global carbon cycle, because many termite species use methane-producing microbes to digest their food. But so far their role in carbon storage and sequestration hasn’t really been explored, Francis says.
Francis, along with researchers from the U.S. and elsewhere, now plans to look at exactly how the carbon in the heuweltjies is being stored. She says she suspects that microbes are converting the organic carbon into a mineral form, which would explain why the mounds are so carbon dense. She says she hopes the new research will help put a value on the carbon storage potential of these, and other similar, mounds. As the heuweltjies cover a fifth of Namaqualand, the benefits of conserving the mounds, as opposed to using the land for agriculture, could be substantial.
“We can only do that if we know how much carbon is in there and how fast it’s being accumulated,” Francis says. “So what we’re trying to do is get people to study what was previously boring, so that we can really understand what’s happening under our feet.”
Ruth Kamnitzer is a BC-based freelance writer, focusing on biodiversity, climate, food security and creative non-fiction. She has an MSc in Biodiversity Conservation from the University of London and a certificate in Multimedia Journalism from the University of Toronto, and has worked in environmental education and ecological field research in Oman, Mongolia, Botswana and Canada. Her work has appeared in Sierra, Maisonneuve, the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine and other publications.
In France the unthinkable has happened: The working-class Yellow Vest movement, racial equity movements, and progressive climate activists have joined forces in a multiracial, cross-class coalition called Earth Uprisings. In uniting the climate movement with broader social justice causes, “Les Soulèvements de la Terre” is not just making history in France; it’s offering a blueprint for global environmental resistance. But the response has been shockingly violent and extreme.
1. The Start
On an icy day in January 2021, French climate activists gather in a wetland area in Notre-Dame-des-Landes around one depressing observation: None of their efforts have succeeded in making a real dent in the current environmental collapse.
That’s why they’re meeting. Like many other movements, they feel like they’re out of options. “The first wave of the ‘climate movement’ confronted us with this powerlessness,” some of the activists will later write in a collective book titled Premières Secousses (First Shockwaves). “From COP meetings to massive marches, from climate action camps to IPCC reports, we have not managed to significantly curb the ongoing devastation.”
So here they are, 200 of the foremost climate activists in the country. There are anti-nuclear activists; unions of smallholder farmers; and members of newer movements such as Youth for Climate or Extinction Rebellion. The room is full. Many have been holed up at home for weeks, waiting for the second Covid lockdown to lift. There are still curfews and restrictions in place, but they decide this meeting is too important.
“It’s been a year of one lockdown after the next,” an anonymous participant writes. “Residents of [Notre-Dame-des-Landes] decide to issue an invitation to an assembly called to ‘move heaven and earth’ with some concrete proposals. Little notes are sent to long-time comrades as well as to people just met… It is still forbidden to meet, but impossible not to get organized.”
They’re exhausted and desperate. They have no idea that they’re about to form the most feared climate movement of the 2020s in this country — a movement that both the government and polluting industries will dread. And a movement that could offer a blueprint for global climate resistance.
They get to work. After two days of discussions, and sometimes heated debates, they land on something new: a sort of loose coalition of local struggles across France, with a variety of actors and tactics, all acting under one banner, Les Soulèvements de la Terre. The Earth Uprisings.
Their slogan: We are the Earth defending itself.
The initial round of brainstorming produces ambitious ideas: “We must besiege Monsanto in Lyon,” “make the biggest intrusion ever carried out on a concrete plant,” “block the Yara synthetic fertilizer production terminal in the bay of Saint-Nazaire.”
Then the reality kicks in: They’ve just created a new movement, they have no idea whether it’s going to take, and actions in the past have yielded little result. They decide to test it out for six months, then come back and reassess.
But politically, their ambition is clear in the first call to action they publish a few weeks after the meeting. The focus is on three goals: taking back the land from polluting industries and intensive agriculture; ramping up tactics to include occupation and sabotage; and uniting all actors who have an interest in curbing the climate emergency. In the founding text, one of the things they emphasize is that they want to get rid of the class divide that has plagued the climate movement — not just in France but all over the world. They write: “We do not believe in a two-tiered climate activism in which a minority prides itself on eating organic and driving a hybrid SUV while the majority is stuck in jobs they don’t want to do, long daily commutes, and low-cost food. We will not accept to watch the end of the world, powerless, isolated, and locked in our homes.”
So they call to target, block, and dismantle three key industries: concrete, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers.
2. The Basins
After months of localized struggles to save natural land from urban development projects, one issue emerges and quickly gains traction: the fight for water.
In France, to counter more and more frequent droughts partly caused by climate change, the government is helping build “mega-basins” — large aboveground pools used to pump water in groundwater tables in the winter and irrigate large-scale farms in the summer.
But pumping water makes droughts worse. And the reservoirs can only be used by a handful of large agribusinesses, which are mainly focused on cornfields and other irrigation crops for export. Activists argue that mega-basins effectively privatize water resources, sidelining small-scale, eco-friendly farmers.
“I guess it became a real realization for a lot of people, what the fight for water meant and access to water,” recounts Lea Hobson, a former Extinction Rebellion activist who now organizes with the Earth Uprisings. “I think that resonated for a lot of people. And it meant that a lot of people came from all over France.”
The campaign they launch to stop the construction of these mega-basins will radically reshape their future and the future of the French climate movement.
It will also unleash state violence against environmental activists on an unprecedented scale.
The first big protest takes place in October 2022, at the site of one of the basins in Sainte-Soline, a small village of about 600 people in western France. Thousands of activists turn up. So do hundreds of police officers, who use tear gas grenades to disperse protesters peacefully occupying the empty reservoir. Dozens are injured, and six people are arrested.
In the coming days, the public narrative of the events in Sainte-Soline becomes its own battle. Local officials say “very violent activists” wreaked havoc at the protest. Gerald Darmanin, the French minister of interior, calls the activists “eco-terrorists” — a rare term for a French government official discussing climate activists — and promises to fight them.
“This is an extremely strong word for a country which suffered deadly terror attacks in 2015, which left a lot of families in mourning,” points out Alexis Vrignon, a professor at the University of Orléans who specializes in the history of environmental conflict. “The tactics of the water protesters can be discussed in terms of ethics or effectiveness, but they are totally different” from those of terrorist groups, he adds.
According to Michel Forst, the United Nations special rapporteur on environmental defenders, the “campaigns of vilification by public officials also have a great impact, which is very unfortunate, on public opinion. When you have a minister … and members of parliament calling those people eco-terrorists or simply terrorists or comparing them to the Taliban, then it’s not only the people who are under pressure, but the cause they’re fighting for, which is also being debated.”
Despite these attacks in the media, activists reconvene in Sainte-Soline five months later. This protest is set to be bigger, more ambitious. The protesters — farmers’ unions, working-class Yellow Vests, and many other unlikely allies — arrive from all corners of France and even beyond. In a field a few miles away from the reservoirs, hundreds of brightly colored tents pop up around the protest camp.
There are also 3,000 officers on site, waiting for protesters.
“You had a lot of people who were not essentially in climate movements but heard of what was going on and so would come there … as their first big mass action,” Lea Hobson, the activist, remembers. “The diversity of people — I’ve never seen that in any actions that we’ve had in Extinction Rebellion, for example.”
On the morning of the protest, thousands start marching to one of the basins. Their goal is to stop construction, take apart some of the pipes that have already been installed, and get a moratorium on any new reservoirs being built with public funds. The march is joyous. There are families with kids, people playing accordions, dancing in their blue workers’ outfits, and huge mascots representing local species that are threatened with extinction: an eel, an otter and a type of bird called a bustard.
Then, in the space of a few minutes, the peaceful march descends into chaos. “You had police that kind of started to arrive from everywhere,” Hobson recalls. Tear gas grenades and rubber pellets start falling from the sky nonstop — almost one explosion per second for two hours. The only sound that cuts through the explosions is that of protesters screaming for street medics whenever a new person gets hit.
By late afternoon 200 protesters are injured, including dozens with severe injuries. Two people are in a coma, fighting for their lives. But on the news that evening, journalists describe violent protesters who caused altercations with the police. Even the president, Emmanuel Macron, says protesters were out to kill security forces.
In this violence against protesters, France is an outlier in the region. “France is the country where we have the most violent response by the police compared to other countries in Europe,” explains Forst, from the UN.
Hobson adds that “more people have been involved — organizations, collectives, charities, political movements — so the more diverse the movement has grown, the more repression there has been. The more massive the movement has become, the more repression there has been.”
Just days after the protest, activists are scrambling to care for the injured and the traumatized, and two men are still fighting for their lives. But as public opinion turns against the protesters, Darmanin, the minister of interior, takes advantage of the opportunity and announces the legal dissolution of the Earth Uprisings. To do this he uses a 1936 law initially passed to combat the violent far-right groups that were proliferating at the time, which has since been used against Muslim groups and activist movements.
3. The Trial
Ironically Earth Uprisings never had anything official to dissolve. It never had legal organizational status, it didn’t establish itself as a nonprofit, and under French law it was simply a “de facto gathering of people.” But dissolution would mean that anyone organizing events using the name and logo of Earth Uprisings risked being fined or imprisoned.
Darmanin’s announcement is a huge blow to activists and marks the start of a lengthy legal battle that will question the methods of the Earth Uprisings and the legitimacy of sabotage itself as a form of protest in the current climate emergency — a question that’s moving through climate movements around the world.
The accusations of violence don’t come as a surprise to the organizers. From the get-go, written in the invitations to the January meeting, was a call to discuss stronger modes of action — in particular, civil disobedience. The coalition openly leans on three tactics: occupation, blockages and sabotage (which the activists call disarmament).
“Disarming is the promise of appeasement. It is not a violent term,” the group’s lawyer, Antoine Lyon-Caen, argued at the trial. Echoing these sentiments, Stéphen Kerckhove, the president of Agir pour l’Environnement (Act for the Environment), explains the rise of Earth Uprisings as “an admission of failure of our legal [climate] nonprofits.” Despite efforts ranging from petitions to legal actions, change has been elusive, he says. “All the work we do never leads to anything. We shouldn’t be surprised that there are people advocating for disarmament.”
After each of the two protests at Sainte-Soline, the minister of interior, Gerald Darmanin — a highly controversial figure who has been accused by human-rights advocates of orchestrating an increase in violence against protesters, and whom several women have sued for sexual abuse — says that dozens of police officers have been injured. The Revelator and Drilled could not independently verify those claims. After the March protest, the public prosecutor announced that 47 officers had been injured. But 18 of those were included in the count as a result of suffering “acoustic trauma,” most likely as a result of the hundreds of explosions the police itself caused.
There is, however, abundant evidence of protesters being injured, sometimes nearly fatally, by security forces, documented in detail by human rights observers and journalists and corroborated by our sources.
The dissolution case rises through several courts before ending up at the Council of State, the highest court in France, which finally rejects the push for dissolution on Nov. 9, 2023. It also concludes that members of Earth Uprisings engaged in material degradation, but the movement was not responsible for any violence perpetrated against people.
“The targets of our actions are always material,” confirms Lena Lazare, a spokesperson for the movement. “We never target people. But often, when we are asked these questions, it is also a way to draw a line between ‘bad demonstrators’ and ‘good demonstrators.’ And we don’t think there are any bad demonstrators. We also think that the violence of the demonstrators is created by the police repression.”
The police brutality at Sainte-Soline was never addressed by the government. And the demonstrators are clear: Their actions are only legitimate in the context of the current environmental collapse, which sees tens of thousands of people die every year from heatwaves in Europe alone.
4. The Future
The months of court dates and appeals help drudge up public support for the group. Within days of Darmanin’s dissolution announcement, nearly 200 new Earth Uprisings committees sprout up across France. Thousands of people join. Actors, scientists, and politicians join the rallying cry: “You can’t disband a movement.”
“What that created was a massive outburst of support, and the creation of local groups all over France,” says organizer Lea Hobson.” And that’s something that’s quite new. You had people coming from loads of different backgrounds who started to be like, wait, we can’t let this happen.”
Its radical approach has also intensified conversations about environmental activism, nudging even the most traditional climate groups in France to reconsider their tactics. Earth Uprisings has made inroads into mainstream discourse, influencing political agendas and policy development. Most French people had not heard of a mega-basin before October 2022. Now the issue of water use is abundantly covered in mainstream media. Several of the mega-basin projects have been abandoned.
Most importantly, Earth Uprisings has created an unprecedented alliance among progressive groups across France, and built a blueprint for an agile, fluid, and ever-evolving movement structure that has, so far, eluded governmental and legal threats.
“There wasn’t much collaboration [among progressive groups],” says Hobson. “But when you start having a movement that collaborates and that accepts and uses different forms of tactics, how do you stop that? I think that’s going to be impossible to repress.”
And for the people who have come out of Sainte-Soline intact, she says, “the rage and the willingness to do things” has only grown. “It’s weird because you have a feeling of exhaustion and you feel that what is coming next” — both the climate threats and the crackdowns — “is probably going to be 10 times worse. Yet the fact that more and more people and groups are coming together, when they wouldn’t even speak together a few years ago, is a sign that things are changing really quickly.”
This article first appeared on The Revelator and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Growing up in a Pakistani village in the 2000s, sustainability was embedded throughout my daily life. My family has always been cautious of wasting energy, gas or water because these resources are expensive. We grew most of our own vegetables and reared poultry for eggs. By just buying a few essential groceries from the nearby market, we produced very little household waste. Food scraps were fed to our cattle, and we’d save any plastic bags to reuse.
The United Nations defines sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”. But so much complicated jargon makes it difficult to distinguish between environmentally ethical practices and mere feelgood marketing.
Some major brands and big corporations promote and package their products as more eco-friendly than they actually are. In 1986, American environmentalist Jay Westerveld coined the term “greenwash” to describe hotels that were promoting towel reuse as an environmentally conscious initiative, when it was really a cost-cutting measure.
Today, greenwashing encompasses a wide range of deceptive marketing tactics, but as consumers, we have the right to know the true environmental impact of our choices. Here are four ways to avoid being duped by greenwashing:
1. Look for marketing buzzwords
Look out for feelgood marketing and buzzwords such as “natural”, “eco-friendly”, “sustainable” and “green”. These labels can be open-ended, without a technical definition or any legal requirements. For example, the term “compostable” differs from “home compostable” – it requires industrial processing with high temperatures, even though it may sound eco-friendly.
There’s no legal time limit for calling something degradable – everything breaks up eventually, even plastic bags.
There is no such thing as a totally carbon-free product. Every process, every product, every supply chain has carbon emissions associated with it. So any marketing language should mirror the impact of that particular product or brand.
Some brands use cute-looking emojis and caricatures with buzzwords that look similar to some certifications, but in reality, they are meaningless. To address this, the European Commission recently proposed a directive, requiring companies to back up green claims with evidence, focusing on life-cycle and environmental footprint methods, setting minimum requirements for sustainability labels and logos.
2. Verify any claims
Pause before you purchase anything and demand evidence to back up any claims that a brand makes.
Either look for statistics that prove the claims on a company’s website, third-party certification or ask the brand and supplier for the evidence of their claims. If they are truly eco-conscious, they’ll proudly share the real numbers.
3. Look for certification
Legit third-party certifications like the EU-mandated energy labels provide valuable and true information about the energy efficiency of household electric appliances. Don’t fall for random stickers that give the impression of formal validation but don’t require any specific criteria to be met.
Plastic recycling labels can be confusing too. The triangle with three chasing arrows, called the Mobius Loop is a universal symbol that means “recyclable”. But, the Mobius Loop with a number in it indicates the type of plastic (there are seven different types) – not that the packaging is recyclable.
Even if technically recyclable, plastic needs to be dry, clean and separated before being recycled. One plastic water bottle may contain three or four different types of plastics, from the bottle itself to the cap and label. Together as a composite, some can be difficult to recycle.
Tthe new tethered bottle caps are mandated by the EU to prevent litter, but they still don’t make recycling any easier.
4. Take a big picture view
Some companies genuinely care. For 35 years, outdoor clothing company Patagonia has pledged 1% of sales to conservation. More than US$89 million (£69 million) has been donated to environmental groups globally through its 1% for the Planet initiative. Cosmetics retailer Lush is working hard to close the loop by limiting water consumption and preventing as much packaging waste as possible.
Investigate the brand’s overall effort to be transparent and environmentally friendly, rather than just looking at one product. If companies aren’t setting clear targets, sharing their progress and being open with their customers, switch to brands that do provide the evidence, listen to their customers and respond.
As paying customers, we have a right to know the environmental footprint of the products and services we’re buying.
Editor’s note: When a hurricane like Helene or Milton ravages coastal communities, already-strained first responders face a novel, and growing, threat: the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles, store PV solar, e-bikes, and countless gadgets. When exposed to the salty water of a storm surge or extreme heat, they are at risk of bursting into flames — and taking an entire house with them.
“Anything that’s lithium-ion and exposed to salt water can have an issue,” said Bill Morelli, the fire chief in Seminole, Florida, and the bigger the battery, the greater the threat. That’s what makes EVs especially hazardous. “[The problem] has expanded as they continue to be more and more popular.”
Also petrochemical-based building materials and furnishings have replaced traditional wood, fabric and metal materials in homes worldwide. But plastics are more flammable and release persistent toxic chemicals when burned or exposed to high heat. Over the last 25 years, wildfires have multiplied and intensified due to global warming, and often now jump the wildland-urban interface, burning whole neighborhoods and leaving behind a dangerous toxic home legacy. After the Camp Fire razed Paradise, California, in 2018, water utilities found high levels of volatile organic compounds in drinking water. Similar issues have arisen in places like Boulder County, Colorado, where the Marshall Fire destroyed nearly 1,000 structures in 2021,
“The extreme heatwaves of 2023, which fueled huge wildfires, and severe droughts, also undermined the land’s capacity to soak up atmospheric carbon. This diminished carbon uptake drove atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to new highs, intensifying concerns about accelerating climate change. Widespread wildfires across Canada and droughts in the Amazon in 2023 released about the same amount of carbon to the atmosphere as North America’s total fossil fuel emissions, underscoring the severe impact of climate change on natural ecosystems.”
The following story talks about the Moss Landing fire but there was also a fire that erupted in southeast Missouri at one of world’s largest lithium-ion battery recycling facilities and also in Madison County, Illinois.
Batteries’ toxic gases can cause respiratory, skin and eye problems. Toxic gases from burning lithium-ion batteries can contaminate wildlife such as Monterey Bay’s unique tidal wetland.
This is the fourth fire at the Moss Landing battery storage facility.
Referring to last week’s explosive fire, County Supervisor Glenn Church said, “This is a wake-up call for the industry. If we’re going to move ahead with sustainable energy, we need a safe battery system in place. State of the art safety protocols did not work.”
County officials lifted evacuation orders Friday evening after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found “no threat to human health.” Still, Highway 1 remains closed, and health officials in Monterey, San Venito and Santa Cruz counties advise residents to stay indoors, turn off ventilation systems and limit outdoor exposure. Www.ksbw.com provides live updates.
WILDFIRES AND URBAN FIRES
When the Los Angeles fires started January 7, I learned about the differences between wild and urban fires. Wildfires occur in forests or grasslands, fueled by trees or other vegetation. More than 80% of wildfires start by human activities like abandoned cigarettes, campfires and barbeques. Wildfire smoke can penetrate deep into peoples’ lungs and aggravate heart and lung diseases.
Urban fires—conflagrations—are fueled by combustible construction materials including wood framing, plastics, metals, furniture fabric and solar panels (hazardous waste). Because of houses’ flammable contents, urban fires burn extremely hot and generate toxic emissions. High winds and insufficient water supply intensify urban fires. Burning houses emit chemical toxins and generate more heat than burning trees (which, if alive, hold fire-resistant moisture).
INCLUDING LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES IN FIRE RISK ASSESSMENTS
Here’s a question: How do lithium-ion batteries contribute to urban fires?
Like much of the world, Southern California is now dotted with lithium batteries at every telecom cell site (for backup in the event of a power outage); in every electric vehicle, e-bike and hoverboard; in every EV charger; in laptops, tablets and smartphones—and their chargers; in smart utility meters on grid-connected houses and buildings; in off-grid rooftop solar PV systems’ batteries; in battery energy storage systems (BESS) for large-scale solar facilities and wind facilities.
RECOGNIZING THE FIRE RISKS CAUSED BY DRY AND COVERED SOIL
LA has endured eight months without rain. Drought increases fire risk.
Do fire risks also increase when soil can’t absorb and hold water? Soil’s ability to absorb and hold water is one of the Earth’s main cooling mechanisms. How do we reconcile this when we’ve covered land with paved roads, houses, malls, parking lots, data centers and battery storage facilities?
When rebuilding, what policies will ensure that fire’s toxic emissions (to air, soil and groundwater) will not affect future residents and farmers? Given that Governor Newsom has suspended environmental reviews to speed rebuilding in wildfire zones, what will protect residents in rebuilt areas from toxic exposures?
What measures would prevent lithium-ion batteries (at cell sites, in electric vehicles, smart meters, laptops, tablets, smartphones, rooftop solar system batteries, etc.) from catching fire and exploding? Could we prohibit lithium-ion batteries until they’re proven safe and ecologically sound from cradle-to-grave? New Hampshire legislators have introduced an ACT that would allow towns to decline 5G cell sites.
How could rebuilding Los Angeles respect the Earth? To reduce fire risk, support healthy water cycling and increase locally-produced food, could rebuilding policies encourage healthy soil structure?
To provide much-needed affordable housing in LA and elsewhere, would any mansion-owners turn their homes into multiple-family units?
RECONSIDER “SUSTAINABILITY”
Many communities and corporations aim to sustain themselves by installing battery energy storage systems and solar facilities. According to the California Energy Commission, since 2020, battery storage in the state has increased sevenfold—from 1,474 megawatts in 2020 to 10,383 megawatts by mid-2024. One megawatt can power 750 homes.
In New Mexico, AES Corporation has proposed building a 96 MW, 700-acre solar facility with 45 MWs/39 battery containers in Santa Fe County. (Each battery is about 39’ x 10’ x 8’.) Santa Fe’s Green Chamber of Commerce, the Sierra Club’s Rio Grande Chapter, the Global Warming Express and 350 Santa Fe support AES’s project.
Opponents of AES’s facility include the San Marcos Association, the Clean Energy Coalition and Ashley Schannauer (formerly a hearing officer for the state’s Public Regulatory Commission).
I frequently hear people call battery storage, solar PVs, industrial wind and EVs “sustainable.” Looked at from their cradles to their graves, this is simply not true. Mining lithium ravages ecosystems. So does burning coal and trees to make solar panels’ silicon. Refining lithium and making silicon electrically-conductive takes millions of gallons of water, daily. At end-of-life, these technologies are hazardous waste.
Meanwhile, I have many friends with rooftop solar systems and EVs. I would welcome forums about reducing our overall use of energy, water, extractions and international supply chains. I would welcome learning how to live with less.
As survivors of the LA fires, battery fires, Hurricane Helene, Israel’s decimation of Gaza and other catastrophes rebuild, what would communities look like if we considered our technologies’ impacts to ecosystems and public health from their cradles to graves? What would our communities look like if we think, “Ecosystems and public health first?”
Banner Moss Landing battery plant fire, January 16-17, 2025.
MY MISTAKE While writing article I got help from a physicist of fire ignition, an electrical engineer, a forensic fire investigator and an electrician. I also went to the Internet, which informed me that in the event of an outage, cell sites’ power is backed up by lithium-ion batteries. This isn’t totally correct. While 5G small cells primarily use lithium ion batteries, larger cell towers usually backup with lead-acid batteries. I apologize for this error.
On December 14th 1982, a blockade was launched to stop the construction of a hydroelectric dam that would have flooded Tasmania’s Franklin and Gordon rivers and surrounding old-growth forests. Over the next 3 months, over 1,340 people were arrested for trespassing, occupying roads and work sites, and chaining themselves to equipment. The protest gained widespread national and global support and played a major role in the cancellation of the project.
Tasmanian Wilderness Society blocks dam construction (Franklin River Campaign) 1981-83
In 1976, the Hydro Electric Commission of Tasmania solidified their plans with the Australian government to build a dam across the Franklin and Gordon Rivers, in the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park. The Tasmanian Wilderness Society formed not long after this announcement to take action against the Hydro Electric Commission and their plans to bulldoze the surrounding wilderness for the construction of the dam. The director of the Wilderness Society and leader of the anti-dam campaign for the following seven years was Bob Brown, a local environmentalist and general practitioner.
From 1976 through 1981, the Tasmanian Wilderness Society focused on creating awareness and education through public meetings, pamphlets, and tours of the Franklin River. They focused heavily on the danger to endangered species and ancient rain forests that flooding would have as a result of the Hydro Electric dam being built.
In 1981, the discovery of ancient aboriginal paintings in caves of the lower Franklin River region ignited the controversy. The caves were filled with not only Aboriginal paintings, but campfires, tools and animal bones that dated back thousands of years. This discovery created an even larger debate over the construction of the dam, bringing it into the political sphere, as Australia was nearing both state and federal elections. Candidates chose a side of the issue to include in their platform. Throughout their actions, the Tasmanian Wilderness Society maintained pressure to urge politicians to take a definite stance on the Franklin Dam issue.
The Tasmanian state government announced plans to hold a referendum to engage citizens in the Hydro Electric Commission’s decision. The Wilderness Society asked that a “NO DAMS” option be included in the referendum. In the lead-up to the referendum, the campaigners distributed yellow, triangular “NO DAMS” stickers. The Tasmanian government announced that the referendum would have two options, both of which took the construction of the dam as given. The two options only differed by location: Gordon Below Franklin and Gordon above Olga. The Wilderness Society encouraged voters to take part in a “Write-in”, by writing “NO DAMS” on their ballot in protest. When the government held the referendum on 12 December 1981, 33% of the voters wrote “NO DAMS” on their ballots.
Although federally the Australian Labour Party was quite popular in their anti-dam platform, pro-dam political parties were more popular in the Tasmanian state. In May 1982, the Liberal party under Robin Gray (a pro-dam politician) won the majority of seats in Tasmania and Gray became the Premier. Upon his election, he announced plans to begin construction. The dam itself was to cover 33 kilometers of the Franklin River and 37 kilometers of the Gordon River.
In response to this decision, in August and September, Bob Brown went on tour screening films of the Franklin River to raise support and awareness. Brown and the Wilderness Society also organized rallies to gain the attention of influential political figures. During a Melbourne rally, David Bellamy, a British botanist and T.V. presenter toured expressed their anti-dam positions to the 5,000 participants. The goal of this portion of the campaign was to increase pressure on the Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to intervene through Tasmanian State government and stop the dam. Fraser did not intervene and override the state legislation, as he believed it was a state government issue
and not a federal one.
In November 1982, 14,000 people converged on the streets of Melbourne for another rally. Bob Brown announced that they would blockade the construction of the dam site beginning on 14 December 1982.
On 14 December 1982, 2,500 people converged at the dam site to participate in the blockade. Protesters made a human chain through the forest to prevent construction workers from entering the site. Protesters also blockaded by water on canoes, to prevent police from bringing machinery into the site by a barge. These blockaders maintained morale and enthusiasm through the use of song. Protesters developed songs over the course of the campaign that were regularly sung during rallies, marches, in jail, and at the blockade site. Folk singer Shane Howard wrote the official anthem of the campaign, titled “Let the Franklin Flow”. During the course of the blockade, police arrested 1,440 people. David Bellamy and Claudio Alcorso (a Hobart Millionaire) participated in the blockade and were arrested.
On 1 March 1983, the Wilderness Society held a day of action during which 231 people were arrested in their boats on the Gordon River and the Wilderness Society’s flag was flown above the Hydro Electric Commission building in Hobart, Australia.
The Tasmanian Wilderness Society drew further attention on 2 March 1983 by printing full-page colour photographs in Australian newspapers of the Franklin River area. The captions on these publications read, “Could you vote for a party that would destroy this?” This was an attention-grabbing act as few publications used colour at the time.
On 5 March 1983, the Australian Labour Party under new Prime Minister, Bob Hawke (who maintained an anti-dam platform) won the federal election and announced that he
would halt the dam construction. The Australian Labour Party introduced regulations under the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act 1975. Additionally, Hawke declared the Franklin River area a World Heritage site, outlawing the dam under the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983.
The Tasmanian state ignored the new regulations, as they believed that the federal government could not legally intervene in this state-level issue. The company contracted by the Tasmanian government continued clearing the site until the federal government brought the Tasmanian government to High Court on 31 May 1983. On 1 July 1983, the High Court ruled in favour of the federal government and proclaimed that they could legally enforce the international standards for a World Heritage Site on a state government.
The Franklin River campaign was so successful that it largely ended the generation of electricity through hydro dams in Australia. The federal government demanded that the Tasmanian government give a compensation package of $270 million to the Wilderness Society.
Sources
Walker, J. (2013, July 01). The day the franklin river was saved. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20130817151559/http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/outdoor/anniversary-of-the-franklin-river-campaigns-success.htm (Link not working 2 March 2022 – Australian Geographic)
The Wilderness Society. (n.d.). History of the franklin river campaign 1976-83. Retrieved from http://www.wilderness.org.au/history-franklin-river-campaign-1976-83. Link not working 2 March 2022
Gibbs, C. J. Legal Database, (1983). Commonwealth v. Tasmania (the Tasmanian dam case). Retrieved from website: http://law.ato.gov.au/atolaw/view.htm?DocID=JUD/158CLR1/00002 (Link not working 2 March 2022)
Documentary – The Franklin River Blockade, The Wilderness Society, 2006
Watch a 20-minute documentary, including footage of various blockade actions. It can be viewed in two parts.
The Wilderness Society. (Producer). (2006, October 17). The Franklin River Blockade 1983, Tasmania (Part 1 of 2) [Web Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGpy8_v3tmI
The Wilderness Society. (Producer). (2006, October 17). The Franklin River Blockade 1983, Tasmania (Part 2 of 2) [Web Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhCGFHkzifQ
The story of the Tasmanian Dam case in 1983 from a lecture on Commonwealth environmental laws at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, given by Dr Chris McGrath in 2015.
To conclude then, while the Franklin blockade demonstrates the limitations of protest in Australia it shows that symbolic protest can influence important decisions. Symbolic protest will be of use to protesters in a limited set of circumstances.
The Franklin River blockade became one of the most iconic in Australian history, stopping the damming of the river and bringing footage of rugged forests and civil disobedience into loungerooms of the country on the news. Members of Goanna (playing as the Franklin Gordon River Ensemble) soundtracked the blockade with the singalong anthem Let The Franklin Flow.
Here is an Easy Read Guide called The Franklin River Story. Easy Read uses clear, everyday language matched with images to make sure everyone understands.
You may not have noticed, but earlier this month we passed Earth overshoot day, when humanity’s demands for ecological resources and services exceeded what our planet can regenerate annually.
Many economists criticising the developing degrowth movement fail to appreciate this critical point of Earth’s biophysical limits.
Ecologists on the other hand see the human economy as a subset of the biosphere. Their perspective highlights the urgency with which we need to reduce our demands on the biosphere to avoid a disastrous ecological collapse, with consequences for us and all other species.
July 24, 2025 is Earth Overshoot Day, the baseline for the Earth’s resources we can sustainably use. First described in 1971 the overshoot day was Dec 25th. After that date we will be in ecological debt, humanity’s demand for nature’s resources will be exceeding the Earth’s capacity to regenerate
Many degrowth scholars (as well as critics) focus on features of capitalism as the cause of this ecological overshoot. But while capitalism may be problematic, many civilisations destroyed ecosystems to the point of collapse long before it became our dominant economic model.
Capitalism, powered by the availability of cheap and abundant fossil energy, has indeed resulted in unprecedented and global biosphere disruption. But the direct cause remains the excessive volume and speed with which resources are extracted and wastes returned to the environment.
From an ecologist’s perspective, degrowth is inevitable on our current trajectory.
Carrying capacity
Ecology tells us that many species overshoot their environment’s carrying capacity if they have temporary access to an unusually high level of resources. Overshoot declines when those resources return to more stable levels. This often involves large-scale starvation and die-offs as populations adjust.
Access to fossil fuels has allowed us to temporarily overshoot biophysical limits. This lifted our population and demands on the biosphere past the level it can safely absorb. Barring a planned reduction of those biosphere demands, we will experience the same “adjustments” as other species.
One advantage humans have over other species is that we understand overshoot dynamics and can plan how we adjust. This is what the degrowth movement is attempting to do.
To grasp the necessity of reducing ecological overshoot we must understand its current status. We can do this by examining a variety of empirical studies.
Material flows and planetary boundaries
Analysis of material flows in the economy shows we are currently extracting more than 100 billion tons of natural materials annually, and rising. This greatly exceeds natural processes – erosion, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes – that move materials around the globe.
Only about 10% of these resource flows are potentially renewable. In many cases, we are harvesting more than can be regenerated annually (for example, many fish stocks).
Humans have now transgressed at least six of nine planetary boundaries. Each boundary has distinct limits, but in some instances the overshoot is at least double the safe operating level.
We have now exceeded six planetary boundaries, and for some by at least double the safe operating level. Stockholm Resilience Centre, CC BY-SA
Both material flow analysis and planetary boundaries provide critically important information about our impacts on the biosphere. But they fail to capture the full picture. The former doesn’t directly measure biosphere functioning. The latter doesn’t capture inter-dependencies between various boundaries.
The biosphere is a holistic entity, with many self-organising and interconnected subsystems. Our generally reductionist scientific methodologies are not able to capture this level of complexity. The methodology that comes closest to achieving this is the ecological footprint.
Biocapacity
The ecological footprint measures the amount of productive surface on Earth and its capacity to generate resources and assimilate waste. These are two of the most fundamental features of the biosphere.
It then compares this available biocapacity with humanity’s annual demands. Humanity’s ecological footprint has exceeded the biosphere’s annual biocapacity since at least 1970 and is currently almost twice the sustainable level.
The reason we can use more of what is generated annually is because we use stored biomass – ancient solar energy captured over millennia – to power this draw-down.
“The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century.” New paper by Bill Rees (one of the people who conceptualized the idea of “the ecological footprint” just dropped…)
The political and public concern about climate change is considerable internationally and in New Zealand. But this is one of many environmental crises, together with soil erosion, groundwater pollution, deforestation, the rise of invasive species, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification and the depletion of resources. They are all symptoms of overshoot.
The climate crisis is seen as a problem requiring a solution rather than a symptom of overshoot. The problem is generally formulated as looking for a way to maintain current lifestyles in the wealthy world, rather than reducing overshoot.
The ecological perspective accepts that we exceed biophysical boundaries and emphasises the importance of reducing energy and material consumption – regardless of how the energy is provided.
The scope of human disruption of the biosphere is now global. This ecological perspective highlights the current magnitude and closeness of significant and unwelcome changes to Earth systems. The reduction of humanity’s demands on the biosphere is an overriding priority.
Save LBI Sues U.S. Agencies and Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind, Challenging Federal Approvals Greenlighting Marine Ecosystem Devastation, Including Risks to Critically Endangered Whales
LONG BEACH ISLAND (LBI), NEW JERSEY, January 13, 2025 – Save LBI, an organization that has been actively litigating issues surrounding marine mammal, human health, economic and other impacts connected to offshore wind industrialization off New Jersey since 2022, has filed suit against the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Marine Fisheries Service, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, U.S. Department of Interior, and the Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind project for violations of a number of federal environmental statutes.
“This lawsuit serves as the first of its kind, launching a wide-ranging challenge against Atlantic Shores’ federal approvals, based on violations of environmental statutes such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and the Clean Air Act,” said Thomas Stavola, Jr., Esq., the attorney representing Save LBI. “We believe we have organized a compelling case that will demonstrate that these federal agencies were derelict in their respective duties to take critical information into account, and moreover, made arbitrary assumptions that entirely failed to disclose and consider the injurious impacts of the Atlantic Shores South project.”
Bob Stern, Ph.D., the primary plaintiff and president of Save LBI, further explained, “For example, “the agencies assume, incorrectly, that no North Atlantic right whales will suffer injury or death as a result of the Atlantic Shores South project. The evidence contradicts that assumption. In fact, our review and independent mathematical analyses shows a systemic underestimation of impact, and clearly indicate that the noise caused by pile driving, and, soon after, perpetual operational noise, will injure and kill high numbers of marine mammals — and, yes, injure and kill a number of North Atlantic right whales, a critically endangered animal that cannot afford to suffer any deaths given their numbers are now less than 340 total.”
The lawsuit ultimately seeks to have all federal approvals rescinded and the Atlantic Shores South project halted — stopping construction and preventing devastation to marine mammal life in the NJ/NY Bight regional waters. Eight other co-plaintiffs have joined Save LBI in this action, many of whom will be severely economically impacted due to the egregious harm to the marine ecosystem and the aesthetic, recreational blight imposed on the Jersey Shore via the circa 200 1,000-foot-plus high monstrosities slated to be constructed starting less than 9 miles east of Long Beach Island.
These inexcusable damages by the Atlantic Shores South project are not limited to marine mammal devastation, but also include significant impacts to tourism, shore economies, statewide energy bills, national defense, vessel navigation, and home values — all of which have been swept under the rug by much of the mainstream media, many elected officials, the Atlantic Shores company, and the federal agencies in their inexplicable haste to approve a project still in search of a clear purpose and need.
“We hope this lawsuit will serve as the vehicle to finally illuminate the damage being wrought here and to impose significant pressure on Atlantic Shores to withdraw, as their obfuscation of the project’s true effects are indefensible. The agencies simply cannot objectively argue that their approvals were made in accordance with the best science,” concluded Bob Stern.
This lawsuit was filed in federal court in the United States for the District of New Jersey on January 10, 2025.
About Save LBI
Save Long Beach Island (Save LBI) is an organization of citizens and businesses on and off the Island working together to protect the ocean and Long Beach Island and neighboring communities from the destructive impact of the Atlantic Shores project and potentially other offshore wind projects. As a not-for-profit, non-partisan entity, we do not endorse any political candidates but vigorously pursue policies and actions that protect the Island and New Jersey communities. The organization is led by Beach Haven resident Bob Stern, a Ph.D. engineer with
experience in environmental law who previously managed the U.S. Department of Energy’s office overseeing environment protection related to energy programs and projects.
Save LBI is fighting to stop the ill-conceived Atlantic Shores projects. Please visit SaveLBI.org to join the fight and consider making a donation.
ACK for Whales To File New Suits to Stop Environment-Destroying New England Wind Offshore Turbine Project Grassroots Group Has sent Notices to Federal Government Warning of Litigation Because Government Broke Multiple Federal Laws “We’re not going to stop fighting for the environment.”
NANTUCKET, MA, January 13, 2025 – ACK for Whales, the Nantucket grassroots group (formally known as Nantucket Residents Against Turbines) fighting to protect the environment from the devastation posed by New England Wind’s giant offshore wind project, said today that it has filed two Notices of Intent to sue the Department of Interior and other federal agencies for violating federal laws intended to protect the environment and endangered species.
The announcement comes as the group revealed the United States Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear the group’s petition for certiorari from lower court decisions on a different legal issue and involving a different project.
The new litigation is broader in scope than the suit previously filed against Vineyard Wind and seeks to halt and preclude construction by New England Wind of offshore wind turbines.
“New England Wind is an existential threat to our environment and while we are disappointed by the Court’s decision to not hear our appeal, we’re not going to stop fighting for the environment,” ACK for Whales President Vallorie Oliver said.
The Notices of Intent were sent Monday to the Departments of the Interior and Commerce, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and informed the federal agencies that decisions made to allow New England Wind’s project to build turbines off Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard violate the Endangered Species, Marine Mammal Protection, National Historic Preservation, and Outer Continental Shelf Land Acts.
The letters warn that if the agencies do not reverse their approvals, ACK for Whales will proceed with its suits when the 60 day Notice period expires to prevent “substantial” harm to biological resources, including the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale, interference with economic activities in the high seas and territorial seas, including tourism, commercial fishing, and whale watching.
“The government continues to mislead the people of Massachusetts,” Oliver said, “making their usual false claims about offshore wind. The state’s press release claimed building these whale- killing monstrosities will ‘reduce the state’s carbon emissions by the equivalent of taking one million gas-powered cars off the road. Collectively, these projects will create thousands of jobs and generate billions of economic activity.’
“The State made the same false claims about Vineyard Wind and since that project was begun, BOEM has admitted building offshore wind will have no meaningful impact on reducing climate change, Vineyard Wind admits it’s not keeping track of the jobs it allegedly creates in Massachusetts, and its CEO admits that our power bills are going up.
“We can’t figure out why the government keeps giving away the store to foreign energy companies like Avangrid,” Oliver said. “We’re a non-partisan organization, we don’t do politics, but we hope Mr. Trump keeps his word and ends this madness on Day One of his Administration,” Oliver said.
About ACK for Whales
ACK for Whales is a group of Nantucket community members who are concerned about the negative impacts of offshore wind development off the south shores of our beloved Island. The Massachusetts/Rhode Island wind area is bigger than the state of Rhode Island and will ultimately be occupied by 2,400 turbines, each taller than the John Hancock building in Boston, connected by thousands of miles of high voltage cables. There are many unanswered questions, and the permitting of these massive utility projects has happened largely out of the public eye. We provide a community group of neighbors and friends, who all love the same place.
Editor’s note: “75 of the world’s largest 114 fossil fuel companies have now made net zero by 2050 commitments, yet not a single fossil fuel company has committed to phasing out oil and gas production by 2050 nor have any committed to ending exploration for new oil and gas fields or halting the extraction of existing reserves.”
“Real Zero, not greenwashed ‘net zero,’ is essential. As the Corporate Accountability report concludes, it’s time to reject the big polluters’ agenda and implement programs that rapidly phase out fossil fuels and truly eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.”
We “obsess” over getting to “Net Zero” yearly CO2 increases in the atmosphere. The Moderates in Climate Science THEORIZE that when this happens, the GMST will IMMEDIATELY stop going up and will level off.
DOES IT LOOK LIKE “NET ZERO” is going to happen?
If your child is born this year, they are likely going to live through +1.5°C of warming by the time they are 25. A fact that is likely going to cause a 40% to 50% drop in the global food supply and a reduction of 2.5 billion — 4 billion in the global population by 2050, at a minimum.
The overshoot myth of bargaining: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C
Record breaking fossil fuel production, all time high greenhouse gas emissions and extreme temperatures. Like the proverbial frog in the heating pan of water, we refuse to respond to the climate and ecological crisis with any sense of urgency. Under such circumstances, claims from some that global warming can still be limited to no more than 1.5°C take on a surreal quality.
For example, at the start of 2023’s international climate negotiations in Dubai, conference president, Sultan Al Jaber, boldly stated that 1.5°C was his goal and that his presidency would be guided by a “deep sense of urgency” to limit global temperatures to 1.5°C. He made such lofty promises while planning a massive increase in oil and gas production as CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
We should not be surprised to see such behaviour from the head of a fossil fuel company. But Al Jaber is not an outlier. Scratch at the surface of almost any net zero pledge or policy that claims to be aligned with the 1.5°C goal of the landmark 2015 Paris agreement and you will reveal the same sort of reasoning: we can avoid dangerous climate change without actually doing what this demands – which is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industry, transport, energy (70% of total) and food systems (30% of total), while ramping up energy efficiency.
This is also not surprising given that net zero and even the Paris agreement have been built around the perceived need to keep burning fossil fuels, at least in the short term. Not do so would threaten economic growth, given that fossil fuels still supply over 80% of total global energy. The trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets at risk with rapid decarbonisation have also served as powerful brakes on climate action.
Overshoot
The way to understand this doublethink: that we can avoid dangerous climate change while continuing to burn fossil fuels – is that it relies on the concept of overshoot. The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.
This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.
To argue that we can safely overshoot 1.5°C, or any amount of warming, is saying the quiet bit out loud: we simply don’t care about the increasing amount of suffering and deaths that will be caused while the recovery is worked on.
Our co-editors commission long-form journalism, working with academics from many different backgrounds who are engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
A key element of overshoot is carbon dioxide removal. This is essentially a time machine – we are told we can turn back the clock of decades of delay by sucking carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere. We don’t need rapid decarbonisation now, because in the future we will be able to take back those carbon emissions. If or when that doesn’t work, we are led to believe that even more outlandish geoengineering approaches such as spraying sulphurous compounds into the high atmosphere in an attempt to block out sunlight – which amounts to planetary refrigeration – will save us.
The 2015 Paris agreement was an astonishing accomplishment. The establishment of 1.5°C as being the internationally agreed ceiling for warming was a success for those people and nations most exposed to climate change hazards. We know that every fraction of a degree matters. But at the time, believing warming could really be limited to well below 2°C required a leap of faith when it came to nations and companies putting their shoulder to the wheel of decarbonisation. What has happened instead is that the net zero approach of Paris is becoming detached from reality as it is increasingly relying on science fiction levels of speculative technology.
There is arguably an even bigger problem with the Paris agreement. By framing climate change in terms of temperature, it focuses on the symptoms, not the cause. 1.5°C or any amount of warming is the result of humans changing the energy balance of the climate by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This traps more heat. Changes in the global average temperature is the established way of measuring this increase in heat, but no one experiences this average.
Climate change is dangerous because of weather that affects particular places at particular times. Simply put, this extra heat is making weather more unstable. Unfortunately, having temperature targets makes solar geoengineering seem like a sensible approach because it may lower temperatures. But it does this by not reducing, but increasing our interference in the climate system. Trying to block out the sun in response to increasing carbon emissions is like turning on the air conditioning in response to a house fire.
In 2021 we argued that net zero was a dangerous trap. Three years on and we can see the jaws of this trap beginning to close, with climate policy being increasingly framed in terms of overshoot. The resulting impacts on food and water security, poverty, human health, the destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems will produce intolerable suffering.
The situation demands honesty, and a change of course. If this does not materialise then things are likely to deteriorate, potentially rapidly and in ways that may be impossible to control.
Au revoir Paris
The time has come to accept that climate policy has failed, and that the 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead. We let it die by pretending that we could both continue to burn fossil fuels and avoid dangerous climate change at the same time. Rather than demand the immediate phase out of fossil fuels, the Paris agreement proposed 22nd-century temperature targets which could be met by balancing the sources and sinks of carbon. Within that ambiguity net zero flourished. And yet apart from the COVID economic shock in 2020, emissions have increased every year since 2015, reaching an all time high in 2023.
Despite there being abundant evidence that climate action makes good economic sense (the cost of inaction vastly exceeds the cost of action), no country strengthened their pledges at the last three COPs (the annual UN international meetings) even though it was clear that the world was on course to sail past 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. The Paris agreement should be producing a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but current policies mean that they are on track to be higher than they are today.
Editor’s note: DGR knows that “renewable” technologies are not sustainable and that the only transition will be to a future that does not include civilization.
We do not deny that significant progress has been made with renewable technologies. Rates of deployment of wind and solar have increased each year for the past 22 years and carbon emissions are going down in some of the richest nations, including the UK and the US. But this is not happening fast enough. A central element of the Paris agreement is that richer nations need to lead decarbonisation efforts to give lower income nations more time to transition away from fossil fuels. Despite some claims to the contrary, the global energy transition is not in full swing. In fact, it hasn’t actually begun because the transition demands a reduction in fossil fuel use. Instead it continues to increase year-on-year.
And so policymakers are turning to overshoot in an attempt to claim that they have a plan to avoid dangerous climate change. A central plank of this approach is that the climate system in the future will continue to function as it does today. This is a reckless assumption.
2023’s warning signs
At the start of 2023, Berkeley Earth, NASA, the UK Met Office, and Carbon Briefpredicted that 2023 would be slightly warmer than the previous year but unlikely to set any records. Twelve months later and all four organisations concluded that 2023 was by some distance the warmest year ever recorded. In fact, between February 2023 and February 2024 the global average temperature warming exceeded the Paris target of 1.5°C.
Currently we cannot fully explain why global temperatures have been so high for the past 18 months. Changes in dust, soot and other aerosols are important, and there are natural processes such as El Niño that will be having an effect.
But it appears that there is still something missing in our current understanding of how the climate is responding to human impacts. This includes changes in the Earth’s vital natural carbon cycle.
Around half of all the carbon dioxide humans have put into the atmosphere over the whole of human history has gone into “carbon sinks” on land and the oceans. We get this carbon removal “for free”, and without it, warming would be much higher. Carbon dioxide from the air dissolves in the oceans (making them more acidic which threatens marine ecosystems). At the same time, increasing carbon dioxide promotes the growth of plants and trees which locks up carbon in their leaves, roots, trunks.
All climate policies and scenarios assume that these natural carbon sinks will continue to remove tens of billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. There is evidence that land-based carbon sinks, such as forests, removed significantly less carbon in 2023. If natural sinks begin to fail – something they may well do in a warmer world – then the task of lowering global temperatures becomes even harder. The only credible way of limiting warming to any amount, is to stop putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in the first place.
Science fiction solutions
It’s clear that the commitments countries have made to date as part of the Paris agreement will not keep humanity safe while carbon emissions and temperatures continue to break records. Indeed, proposing to spend trillions of dollars over this century to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, or the myriad other ways to hack the climate is an acknowledgement that the world’s largest polluters are not going to curb the burning of fossil fuels.
Over the following years we are going to see climate impacts increase. Lethal heatwaves are going to become more common. Storms and floods are going to become increasingly destructive. More people are going to be displaced from their homes. National and regional harvests will fail. Vast sums of money will need to be spent on efforts to adapt to climate change, and perhaps even more compensating those who are most affected. We are expected to believe that while all this and more unfolds, new technologies that will directly modify the Earth’s atmosphere and energy balance will be successfully deployed.
What’s more, some of these technologies may need to operate for three hundred years in order for the consequences of overshoot to be avoided. Rather than quickly slow down carbon polluting activities and increasing the chances that the Earth system will recover, we are instead going all in on net zero and overshoot in an increasingly desperate hope that untested science fiction solutions will save us from climate breakdown.
We can see the cliff edge rapidly approaching. Rather than slam on the brakes, some people are instead pushing their foot down harder on the accelerator. Their justification for this insanity is that we need to go faster in order to be able to make the jump and land safely on the other side.
We believe that many who advocate for carbon dioxide removal and geoengineering do so in good faith. But they include proposals to refreeze the Arctic by pumping up sea water onto ice sheets to form new layers of ice and snow. These are interesting ideas to research, but there is very little evidence this will have any effect on the Arctic let alone global climate. These are the sorts of knots that people tie themselves up in when they acknowledge the failure of climate policy, but refuse to challenge the fundamental forces behind such failure. They are unwittingly slowing down the only effective action of rapidly phasing out fossil fuels.
That’s because proposals to remove carbon dioxide from the air or geoengineer the climate promise a recovery from overshoot, a recovery that will be delivered by innovation, driven by growth. That this growth is powered by the same fossil fuels that are causing the problem in the first place doesn’t feature in their analysis.
The bottom line here is that the climate system is utterly indifferent to our pledges and promises. It doesn’t care about economic growth. And if we carry on burning fossil fuels then it will not stop changing until the energy balance is restored. By which time millions of people could be dead, with many more facing intolerable suffering.
Major climate tipping points
Even if we assume that carbon removal and even geoengineering technologies can be deployed in time, there is a very large problem with the plan to overshoot 1.5°C and then lower temperatures later: tipping points.
The science of tipping points is rapidly advancing. Late last year one of us (James Dyke) along with over 200 academics from around the world was involved in the production of the Global Tipping Points Report. This was a review of the latest science about where tipping points in the climate system may be, as well as exploring how social systems can undertake rapid change (in the direction that we want) thereby producing positive tipping points. Within the report’s 350 pages is abundant evidence that the overshoot approach is an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with the future of humanity. Some tipping points have the potential to cause global havoc.
The melt of permafrost could release billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and supercharge human-caused climate change. Fortunately, this seems unlikely under the current warming. Unfortunately, the chance that ocean currents in the North Atlantic could collapse may be much higher than previously thought. If that were to materialise, weather systems across the world, but in particular in Europe and North America, would be thrown into chaos. Beyond 1.5°C, warm water coral reefs are heading towards annihilation. The latest science concludes that by 2°C global reefs would be reduced by 99%. The devastating bleaching event unfolding across the Great Barrier Reef follows multiple mass mortality events. To say we are witnessing one of the world’s greatest biological wonders die is insufficient. We are knowingly killing it.
We may have even already passed some major climate tipping points. The Earth has two great ice sheets, Antarctica, and Greenland. Both are disappearing as a consequence of climate change. Between 2016 and 2020, the Greenland ice sheet lost on average 372 billion tons of ice a year. The current best assessment of when a tipping point could be reached for the Greenland ice sheet is around 1.5°C.
This does not mean that the Greenland ice sheet will suddenly collapse if warming exceeds that level. There is so much ice (some 2,800 trillion tons) that it would take centuries for all of it to melt over which time sea levels would rise seven metres. If global temperatures could be brought back down after a tipping point, then maybe the ice sheet could be stabilised. We just cannot say with any certainty that such a recovery would be possible. While we struggle with the science, 30 million tons of ice is melting across Greenland every hour on average.
Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are being affected by global warming. Pexels from Pixabay, CC BY
The take home message from research on these and other tipping points is that further warming accelerates us towards catastrophe. Important science, but is anyone listening?
It’s five minutes to midnight…again
We know we must urgently act on climate change because we are repeatedly told that time is running out. In 2015, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the UN special adviser and director of The Earth Institute, declared:
The time has finally arrived – we’ve been talking about these six months for many years but we’re now here. This is certainly our generation’s best chance to get on track.
In 2019 (then) Prince Charles gave a speech in which he said: “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.”
“We have six months to save the planet,” exhorted International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol – one year later in 2020. In April 2024, Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said the next two years are “essential in saving our planet”.
Either the climate crisis has a very fortunate feature that allows the countdown to catastrophe to be continually reset, or we are deluding ourselves with endless declarations that time has not quite run out. If you can repeatedly hit snooze on your alarm clock and roll over back to sleep, then your alarm clock is not working.
Or there is another possibility. Stressing that we have very little time to act is intended to focus attention on climate negotiations. It’s part of a wider attempt to not just wake people up to the impending crisis, but generate effective action. This is sometimes used to explain how the 1.5°C threshold of warming came to be agreed. Rather than a specific target, it should be understood as a stretch goal. We may very well fail, but in reaching for it we move much faster than we would have done with a higher target, such as 2°C. For example, consider this statement made in 2018:
Stretching the goal to 1.5 degrees celsius isn’t simply about speeding up. Rather, something else must happen and society needs to find another lever to pull on a global scale.
What could this lever be? New thinking about economics that goes beyond GDP? Serious consideration of how rich industrialised nations could financially and materially help poorer nations to leapfrog fossil fuel infrastructure? Participatory democracy approaches that could help birth the radical new politics needed for the restructuring of our fossil fuel powered societies? None of these.
The lever in question is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) because the above quote comes from an article written by Shell in 2018. In this advertorial Shell argues that we will need fossil fuels for many decades to come. CCS allows the promise that we can continue to burn fossil fuels and avoid carbon dioxide pollution by trapping the gas before it leaves the chimney. Back in 2018, Shell was promoting its carbon removal and offsets heavy Sky Scenario, an approach described as “a dangerous fantasy” by leading climate change academics as it assumed massive carbon emissions could be offset by tree planting.
Shell is far from alone in waving carbon capture magic wands. Exxon is making great claims for CCS as a way to produce net zero hydrogen from fossil gas – claims that have been subject to pointed criticism from academics with recent reporting exposing industry wide greenwashing around CCS.
But the rot goes much deeper. All climate policy scenarios that propose to limit warming to near 1.5°C rely on the largely unproven technologies of CCS and BECCS. BECCS sounds like a good idea in theory. Rather than burn coal in a power station, burn biomass such as wood chips. This would initially be a carbon neutral way of generating electricity if you grew as many trees as you cut down and burnt. If you then add scrubbers to the power station chimneys to capture the carbon dioxide, and then bury that carbon deep underground, then you would be able to generate power at the same time as reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, there is now clear evidence that in practice, large-scale BECCS would have very adverse effects on biodiversity, and food and water security given the large amounts of land that would be given over to fast growing monoculture tree plantations. The burning of biomass may even be increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Drax, the UK’s largest biomass power station now produces four times as much carbon dioxide as the UK’s largest coal-fired power station.
Five minutes to midnight messages may be motivated to try to galvanise action, to stress the urgency of the situation and that we still (just) have time. But time for what? Climate policy only ever offers gradual change, certainly nothing that would threaten economic growth, or the redistribution of wealth and resources.
Despite the mounting evidence that globalised, industrialised capitalism is propelling humanity towards disaster, five minutes to midnight does not allow time and space to seriously consider alternatives. Instead, the solutions on offer are techno fixes that prop up the status quo and insists that fossil fuel companies such as Shell must be part of the solution.
That is not to say there are no good faith arguments for 1.5°C. But being well motivated does not alter reality. And the reality is that warming will soon pass 1.5°C, and that the Paris agreement has failed. In the light of that, repeatedly asking people to not give up hope, that we can avoid a now unavoidable outcome risks becoming counterproductive. Because if you insist on the impossible (burning fossil fuels and avoiding dangerous climate change), then you must invoke miracles. And there is an entire fossil fuel industry quite desperate to sell such miracles in the form of CCS.
Four suggestions
Humanity has enough problems right now, what we need are solutions. This is the response we sometimes get when we argue that there are fundamental problems with the net zero concept and the Paris agreement. It can be summed up with the simple question: so what’s your suggestion? Below we offer four.
1. Leave fossil fuels in the ground
The unavoidable reality is that we need to rapidly stop burning fossil fuels. The only way we can be sure of that is by leaving them in the ground. We have to stop exploring for new fossil fuel reserves and the exploitation of existing ones. That could be done by stopping fossil fuel financing.
At the same time we must transform the food system, especially the livestock sector, given that it is responsible for nearly two thirds of agricultural emissions. Start there and then work out how best the goods and services of economies can be distributed. Let’s have arguments about that based on reality not wishful thinking.
2. Ditch net zero crystal ball gazing targets
The entire framing of mid and end-century net zero targets should be binned. We are already in the danger zone. The situation demands immediate action, not promises of balancing carbon budgets decades into the future. The SBTi should focus on near-term emissions reductions. By 2030, global emissions need to be half of what they are today for any chance of limiting warming to no more than 2°C.
It is the responsibility of those who hold most power – politicians and business leaders – to act now. To that end we must demand twin targets – all net zero plans should include a separate target for actual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. We must stop hiding inaction behind promises of future removals. It’s our children and future generations that will need to pay back the overshoot debt.
3. Base policy on credible science and engineering
All climate policies must be based on what can be done in the real world now, or in the very near future. If it is established that a credible amount of carbon can be removed by a proposed approach – which includes capture and its safe permanent storage – then and only then can this be included in net zero plans. The same applies to solar geoengineering.
Speculative technologies must be removed from all policies, pledges and scenarios until we are sure of how they will work, how they will be monitored, reported and validated, and what they will do to not just the climate but the Earth system as a whole. This would probably require a very large increase in research. As academics we like doing research. But academics need to be wary that concluding “needs more research” is not interpreted as “with a bit more funding this could work”.
4. Get real
Finally, around the world there are thousands of groups, projects, initiatives, and collectives that are working towards climate justice. But while there is a Climate Majority Project, and a Climate Reality Project, there is no Climate Honesty Project (although People Get Real does come close). In 2018 Extinction Rebellion was formed and demanded that governments tell the truth about the climate crisis and act accordingly. We can now see that when politicians were making their net zero promises they were also crossing their fingers behind their backs.
We need to acknowledge that net zero and now overshoot are becoming used to argue that nothing fundamental needs to change in our energy intensive societies. We must be honest about our current situation, and where we are heading. Difficult truths need to be told. This includes highlighting the vast inequalities of wealth, carbon emissions, and vulnerability to climate change.
The time for action is now
We rightly blame politicians for failing to act. But in some respects we get the politicians we deserve. Most people, even those that care about climate change, continue to demand cheap energy and food, and a constant supply of consumer products. Reducing demand by just making things more expensive risks plunging people into food and energy poverty and so policies to reduce emissions from consumption need to go beyond market-based approaches. The cost of living crisis is not separate from the climate and ecological crisis. They demand that we radically rethink how our economies and societies function, and whose interests they serve.
To return to the boiling frog predicament at the start, it’s high time for us to jump out of the pot. You have to wonder why we did not start decades ago. It’s here that the analogy offers valuable insights into net zero and the Paris agreement. Because the boiling frog story as typically told misses out a crucial fact. Regular frogs are not stupid. While they will happily sit in slowly warming water, they will attempt to escape once it becomes uncomfortable. The parable as told today is based on experiments at the end of the 19th century that involved frogs that had been “pithed” – a metal rod had been inserted into their skulls that destroyed their higher brain functioning. These radically lobotomised frogs would indeed float inert in water that was cooking them alive.
Promises of net zero and recovery from overshoot are keeping us from struggling to safety. They assure us nothing too drastic needs to happen just yet. Be patient, relax. Meanwhile the planet burns and we see any sort of sustainable future go up in smoke.
Owning up to the failures of climate change policy doesn’t mean giving up. It means accepting the consequences of getting things wrong, and not making the same mistakes. We must plan routes to safe and just futures from where we are, rather where we would wish to be. The time has come to leap.
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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).
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