Under the banner Oil Kills, small groups of activists have occupied airport departure lounges, plane cabins, terminals, tarmacs and roads across three continents — and they aren’t done yet. Here are the numbers so far: 500 people, 31 airports, 22 groups, 166 arrests, 42 people on remand in prison — all in support of their one demand.
The coalition formed when members of Extinction Rebellion, the A22 Network and Stay Grounded began reaching out to other groups globally. What resulted was an unprecedented alliance of civil resistance groups focused on the sustained disruption of airports — a key pillar of the fossil fuel economy.
Unifying aims, collective strategy and diverse tactics
All Oil Kills participants are committed to nonviolent direct action and to the central demand, but from there, individual creativity and context has led to an array of actions. The resulting structure is a decentralized yet cohesive power bloc with unified aims that becomes more than the sum of its parts, rather than a lowest common denominator coalition.
Each participating group has adopted the central demand that governments must work together to establish a legally binding treaty to stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal by 2030, as well as supporting and financing poorer countries to make a fast, fair and just transition. But each local group also brings its own unique knowledge and demands which are in turn supported by the coalition. Futuro Vegetal in Spain, for example, focuses on the imperative to adopt a plant-based agri-food system while Students Against EACOP in Uganda demand a stop to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline — and all stand in solidarity with one another.
Each group also brings its own creative tactics, from airport glue-ins, to plane occupations, to spray-painting terminals, to street marches. “The airports don’t know what to expect because we don’t even know exactly what to expect from each other — it’s beautiful and effective,” said a coalition member who requested to remain anonymous for legal reasons.
On Aug. 9, Students Against EACOP in Uganda joined the Oil Kills campaign, planning a peaceful march to the parliament in Kampala and the delivery of a petition demanding an end to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, and for their government to sign the treaty to end fossil fuels.
Kamya Carlos, a student at Kyambogo University and spokesperson for Students Against EACOP, connects the inequitable and ecocidal nature of today’s airline industry to its origins in neocolonial extractivism. “New oil, gas and coal infrastructure continues to exacerbate the climate crisis. As the global temperatures hit their tipping points it is clear that projects such as the East African Crude Oil Pipeline should never be constructed in the first place,” he said. “These projects, which end up being used almost exclusively by rich people and polluting the atmosphere, should never be allowed by right thinking members of society. We demand the government to sign a fossil free treaty and call an end to EACOP.”
Even though police repression represents a major threat, on Aug. 27, 20 climate activists and persons affected by the oil pipeline came back out in another peaceful march to petition Uganda’s Ministry of Energy. They were again violently dragged from the street by police in fatigues and held on remand until Sept. 6, when the court finally granted their release on bail. All 20 have been ordered to appear for a hearing on Nov. 12.
“The resilience under extreme repression shown by Students Against EACOP is an inspiration and metaphor for the Oil Kills movement,” said Jamie McGonagill, an Oil Kills member from XR Boston. “We refuse to die.”
You can’t arrest a rising sea
As of this writing, 22 Oil Kills activists remain in custody in Uganda, six in Germany and 14 in the U.K. Speaking to the increasing criminalization of dissent, McGonagill explained that “draconian responses that imprison nonviolent climate activists, especially as we’ve seen lately in the U.K. and in Uganda, show that the authorities misunderstand us. They will not stop us. We will just get more and more creative.”
Oil Kills is not alone in facing repression. On Aug. 8 in New York City, a 63-year-old grandfather and professional cellist, John Mark Rozendaal, was arrested and hit with a criminal contempt charge, carrying a maximum sentence of seven years in jail, for performing Bach’s “Suites for Cello” at Citibank’s headquarters. Rozendaal was participating in the Summer of Heat campaign to pressure Citibank to divest from fossil fuels through sustained nonviolent civil disobedience. Connecting this case to the burgeoning international movement, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Mary Lawlor, in following Rozendaal’s case, has expressed her “strong concern” at the severity of the charges.
In a disturbing trend that has become the new normal in Italy, peaceful eco-activists are being branded a “danger to security and public order,” served with specious charges, banned from cities without trial, and criminalized under anti-terrorist laws intended to prosecute the Mafia.
Last week in the U.K., several high profile journalists and activists affiliated with the movement for Palestinian liberation were arrested in a sweep by counter-terrorism police for their opposition to genocide. They have been held under Section 12 of the U.K.’s Terrorism Act, which outlaws support for a “proscribed organization.” Such an application of the law would mean that you can go to jail for 14 years for expressing an opinion.
XR NYC organizer Meg Starr, a long-time Puerto Rican solidarity activist and coordinator of the XR Allies sub-circle, noted that the links between genocide and ecocide — in Palestine and elsewhere — are becoming clearer and more important to emphasize. “Our targeting of Citibank,” Starr commented, “included a focus on Citi’s major support of the Israeli military as part of their role as the world’s leading financier of oil and gas expansion.”
“Repression is not a gradual process, it leaps out at you and takes you off guard,” he warned from his prison cell. “Do you remember the Solidarity leaders in Poland? They were invited into talks with the Polish government but when they got to the meeting, they were arrested in one fell swoop and imprisoned for years. You don’t think it will happen to you and then it does.”
Hallam’s message is that we can expect more repression, but that authorities must also expect more resistance. “You can’t negotiate with physics, with a thousand peer-reviewed articles,” he wrote. “Just Stop Oil reminds us what resistance, that far-off folk memory relegated to Netflix, actually looks like in the present moment. Thousands of arrests, hundreds of imprisonments and a five-year sentence for making a speech.”
In a statement announcing a pause in international actions to allow politicians to consider their demands, Oil Kills echoed the realism of Hallam’s framing. “The facts are clear, we are flying towards the obliteration of everything we know and love. Continuing to extract and burn oil, gas and coal is an act of war against humanity. …To know these facts and yet to have no plan to end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal is reckless and immoral.”
They point out that while activists sounding the alarm and demanding change are increasingly criminalized, our politicians are actually the ones who are complicit in the greatest crime in human history. “Whether those in charge realize that they are engaging in genocide is not the question. For this is how it will be seen by the next generation and all future generations,” Oil Kills warned. “For now we are taking a pause, but governments must take heed: you cannot arrest your way out of this, just as you cannot imprison a flood or serve injunctions on a wildfire.”
Oppose oil injustice, propose mobility justice
Stay Grounded is a network of individuals, local airport opposition and climate justice groups, NGOs, trade unions, initiatives fostering alternatives to aviation like night trains and organizations supporting communities that struggle against offset or projects to develop so-called “sustainable aviation fuels.” Importantly, Stay Grounded goes beyond affirming the conclusion that business as usual is not an option, and stands for a 13-step program to transform transport, society and the economy to be just and environmentally sound.
“Flying is the fastest way to fry the planet so it’s key to start by cutting pointless and unfair flights like private jets or short haul flights,” said Inês Teles, a spokesperson for Stay Grounded and an Oil Kills member. “Our actions disrupting airports should be a shock to the system that is driving us towards climate catastrophe.”
In summary, Stay Grounded’s program begins with a positive vision for justice. It includes advice for achieving a just transition, shifting to other modes of transportation, developing economies of short distances and changed modes of living, as well as strong political commitments for land rights, human rights and climate justice.
Their program then details what must be avoided — obvious yet important items like growing the harmful air travel industry, including infrastructure expansion, loopholes and privileges for aviation, and common greenwashing pitfalls like carbon offsetting, biofuels, and illusory technocentric fixes.
Though Stay Grounded’s aims are more specific to the air travel industry than Oil Kills’ unifying demand for a treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030, coalition members are able to build on these positive aims, utilizing leadership from frontline communities affected by the air travel industry. Sharing and even cross-pollinating pro-social and ecologically healthy programs, in addition to opposing destructive practices, has been an effective way of galvanizing and sustaining support across diverse movements and communities.
Covering activism isn’t activist
The choice to focus on disrupting the air travel industry in order to pressure governments to adopt a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty is as bold as the demand itself. Much of the media’s reaction so far has been unsurprisingly harsh, condemning the disruptions as “not the right way to do it.” Very little critical analysis has been audible above the din, but that doesn’t mean critical analysis isn’t happening.
It turns out, if you actually listen to them, that Oil Kills activists take strategy extremely seriously — after all, they’re knowingly putting their own freedom on the line through their actions. That is not a decision to be taken lightly, especially in today’s legal context. While news coverage of their “stunts” has circulated widely, what about the reasons behind their actions and assessments of their impact?
Covering climate activism well is a critical part of getting the climate story right. Too often journalism focuses on protesters’ tactics and not the problems they’re drawing attention to or the arguments they’re making. In a recent roundtable discussion, author, journalist and activist Bill McKibben urged fellow journalists to consider that, “we can serve our audiences better, treating activists as the newsmakers they are, rigorously evaluating their arguments as we would a public official.”
Journalists often shy away from foregrounding activists as sources of information and analysis for fear of being perceived to be more “activist” than “objective.” This framing is entirely misleading however, and can more accurately be explained as the pressure to avoid platforming those seeking to change the system in deference to those whose position exists to maintain the system. Why is a politician or a business owner an appropriate subject, but not an activist? There is no objectivity in this, but there are salaries and awards.
The myth that journalism must keep activism at arms length also misses the point that many of these ordinary people taking action are some of the best informed on the biggest news story of our time: the climate and ecological emergency. Activists have been speaking on climate science and policy for decades, many have even been personally affected by ecological disaster, but they have been almost exclusively ignored by the mainstream press. After decades of fossil fuel industry gaslighting, it turns out the activists have been right all along. It’s past time to hear these people out as legitimate subjects and newsmakers, able and deserving to speak about their work and their areas of expertise.
Why target air travel?
First, the obvious answer: oil kills. And the air travel industry is very, very oily. Aviation is by far the mode of transport with the biggest climate impact. If aviation was a country, it would be one of the top 10 emitters.
Emissions from aviation are rising more rapidly than any other sector of the economy. The number of aircraft and the number of passenger-miles flown is expected to double over the next 20 years. If left unchecked, they could consume a full quarter of the available carbon budget for limiting temperature rise to 1.5 C.
Second, oil isn’t extracted equitably, burned equitably, and neither does it kill equitably. At the turn of the millennium, less than 5 percent of the world’s population had ever sat in an aircraft. But it is mostly non-flyers who bear the brunt of the climate crisis and the negative effects of airport expansion like land grabbing, noise, particle pollution and health issues. Communities in the Global South that have barely contributed to the crisis are affected most. Indeed, well before the repression of the Oil Kills coalition, climate activists — especially in Latin America — have faced what is being termed “ecopoliticide”: the targeted and strategic murder of those who dare take action.
Stephen Okwai, a project affected person who has joined the movement to stop the EACOP pipeline in Uganda, feels there is now greater risk in inaction than in protesting. A project affected person, or PAP, is a legal term for the people directly affected by land acquisition for a project through loss of part or all of their assets including land, houses, other structures, businesses, crops/trees and other components of livelihoods. They are legally owed compensation, but in the case of Okwai and others affected by EACOP, there has been no such justice.
“Currently most of us in western Uganda are being disturbed,” he explained. “You cannot know when the rain is going to start and when it will stop yet most of these people are farmers. The effect of this oil project is greatly impacted on the people.”
After he was arrested during the Aug. 27 march in Kampala, Robert Pitua, a member of Oil Kills, Students Against EACOP, and a PAP, said that, “Livelihood restoration programs [have been] insufficient, and now we cannot manage to restore the initial livelihoods we had. Most people are given unfair and inadequate compensation.” This structural and planned destruction of hundreds of communities has left PAPs no choice but to resist, and is the source of a common refrain in Students Against EACOP’s demonstrations: “We refuse to die.”
This leads to the third reason to target aviation. The Oil Kills uprising is highlighting that the problem of aviation is part of a bigger story of injustice — it is in fact a pillar helping to hold up a system of injustice. The air travel industry is contrary to the need to eliminate fossil fuel use; it is tied to the military-industrial complex; and it is connected with the undue influence of big business on public policy, including trade, economic development and climate.
“Not only is the air travel industry a cornerstone of globalized fossil capitalism, but it is also a symbol of inequity,” Jamie McGonagill said. “By disrupting a major column of the system, we aim to disrupt the system itself.”
Rather than plentiful data and common sense reasoning, it is more often a powerful underlying consciousness that has spurred many to action. When asked why it was necessary to disrupt air travel across Europe and North America, Just Stop Oil spokespeople replied, “because governments and fossil fuel producers are waging war on humanity. Even so-called climate leaders have continued to approve new oil, gas and coal projects pushing the world closer to global catastrophe and condemning hundreds of millions to death.”
The Oil Kills coalition has rallied around reality with the seriousness it deserves, refusing dystopia by disrupting it, and demanding a clear and urgent path towards repair. “Our leaders from wealthier countries must seek a negotiating mandate for an emergency Fossil Fuel Treaty,” said coalition members in an Aug. 14 statement. “They also need to immediately finance and support poorer countries to make a fast, fair and just transition.”
If increased media attention on the climate and ecological emergency is any indicator of success, and it is, the Oil Kills uprising is punching well above its weight. “Oil Kills” was mentioned over 2,900 times in the press during the first week of the campaign. The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative has also never attracted so much media attention worldwide, with an increase of over 1,000 percent in mentions from the week prior to the campaign’s launch. Oil Kills actions drew comments from politicians, government officials and from the vice president of Norwegian oil giant, Equinor. For only 500 people spread out over three continents, they have indeed been hard to ignore.
It is true, not all publicity is created equal — but pleasing the general public is not always the priority. In a recent article, Mark Engler and Paul Engler, coauthors of “This is an Uprising,” discussed why protest works even when not everyone likes them. They explain that a very common result is that, when asked about a demonstration that makes news headlines, respondents will report sympathy for the protesters’ demands, but they will express distaste for the tactics deployed. They will see the activists themselves as too noisy, impatient and discourteous.
The coauthors, both experienced activists and resistance scholars, point out that this is actually an age-old dynamic, and one addressed eloquently by Martin Luther King Jr. in his renowned 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” They explain that, “this letter was written not as a response to racist opponents of the movement, but rather to people who professed support for the cause while criticizing demonstrations as ‘untimely’ and deriding direct action methods. ‘Frankly I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation,’ King quipped. But confronting these criticisms, he made the case for why the movement’s campaigns were both necessary and effective.”
In a similar vein, Oil Kills participants, like medical student Regina Stephan who recently took action at the Berlin airport with Letzte Generation, feel they have no choice but to act: “Just yesterday, the state of Lower Saxony gave the green light for new gas drilling off Borkum,” Stephan said. “That can’t be true! As long as our decision-makers work hand in hand with the fossil fuel companies and put profit before human life, I’m standing here — on the tarmac — and I can’t help it!”
Joining in this sentiment, Anja Windl, who took action at Stuttgart airport said very succinctly: “As long as our livelihoods are being systematically destroyed, our protests will not stop.”
Importantly, Oil Kills participants are not demanding that everyone utilize the same tactics. Rather, these activists are urging others to join the climate justice movement in diverse ways. Anja continued, “if you also want to campaign for an end to fossil fuels, you don’t have to sit on an airfield like I did: Just come to a Disobedient Assembly near you!”
In recent years, there has been considerable research published that attempts to measure radical flank effects and track the polarizing effects of movements. Mark Engler and Paul Englers’ analysis cautions that, “while there are limits to how much protest impacts can be precisely quantified, the cumulative result of such research, in the words of one literature review, is to point to ‘strong evidence that protests or protest movements can be effective in achieving their desired outcomes,’ and that they can produce ‘positive effects on public opinion, public discourse and voting behavior.’” They conclude that both the historical experience of organizers and recent studies provide backing for the idea that “support for a movement’s issue can grow, even when a majority of people do not particularly like the tactics being used.”
Finally, success cannot be fully measured by public opinion, especially when the strategy is to trouble public consensus. Oil Kills has been very clear that they are not acting in order to sooth or please anyone — they are intentionally sounding the alarm as a way of empowering people to act. By treating the climate crisis as a crisis, and reacting accordingly, activists are, in a sense, giving other people permission to do the same and showing them how. It’s like when someone is real with you and that makes you feel like you can be real too — and we all need to get real, real fast. The spell of complacency is like the tranquilizer that helps walk a cow to slaughter. Oil Kills is shouting, “wake up and live!”
In a debrief by the Oil Kills campaign on Aug. 16, they addressed the public: “it is time to face reality: no one is coming to save us. There is no free pass, no shelter from the coming storm. Our best chance of survival is to resist. To join the growing numbers of ordinary, everyday people, from across the globe who are refusing to stand by while hundreds of millions of innocent people are murdered.”
Offering a pathway forward out of doom, Oil Kill’s messaging has remained crystal clear: “The climate crisis will not end until every single country has phased out fossil fuels, [and] those who bear the greatest responsibility and have the greatest capacity must do the most … In this time of crisis, we expect our governments to work collaboratively, as we have done, and negotiate a Fossil Fuel Treaty to end the war on humanity before we lose everything.”
The next rebellion is coming
Coming back down from the hugeness of our crisis and into ourselves as individuals often causes a feeling of paralysis, especially for the majority of people not yet interconnected within communities of resistance and solidarity. But there have been actions where small groups or even lone activists have held up an Oil Kills banner and received media coverage and support because they are part of a global campaign which can’t be ignored. Every single contribution adds to that.
In a Sept. 6 letter to climate activist prisoners of conscience, Naomi Klein wrote, “In a world that was right-side up, you would be celebrated as the ones who helped break the spell that is setting our world on fire. In truth, your actions could still do that, if enough people know about them.”
It continues to be an urgent and essential task to ensure that more and more people do know about Oil Kills and other manifestations of resistance, but it is also evident that the world’s elites already understand the threat that these actions represent — the threat of mass uprising. That threat is precisely why nonviolent direct action in defense of planetary life is being criminalized so viciously.
Klein continued, “Movements against climate arson are already converging with movements against genocide and unfettered greed. The next wave of rebellion is coming. Along with the tankers, I see it clearly on the horizon.” The Oil Kills uprising and fellow movements around the world have placed their bodies between those tankers and our shared future to say, “here, and no further.”
If enough of us line up behind them, their actions could very well lead the way to an adoption of a treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030 — that remains to be won. What is for certain is that their actions are troubling the autopilot system, disrupting the mechanics of fossil-capital’s death march and creating desperately needed space to pursue alternate routes. Whatever else lies on the horizon, their contributions are already impacting the world in ways we cannot yet know, but will be unlikely to forget.
Self-deception is rife within the environmental profession and movement. Some denial or disavowal is not surprising, due to how upsetting it is to focus on an unfolding tragedy. But our vulnerability to self-deception has been hijacked by the self interests of the rich and powerful, to spin a ‘fake green fairytale’. Their story distracts us from the truth of the damage done, that to come, and what our options might be. Indeed, their fairytale prevents us from rebelling to try to make this a fairer disaster, or a more gentle and just collapse of the societies we live in. Averting wider rebellion might be why the fairytale receives loads of funding for books, awards, feature articles and documentaries, as well as videos for popular YouTube channels. That’s why, like me, you might not have realised for years that it is a fairytale. In this essay I will explain the nine lies that comprise this ‘fake green fairytale’ before explaining how much damage is being done to both people and planet from the dominance of this story within contemporary environmentalism.
The ‘fake green fairytale’ claims humanity can maintain current levels of consumption (a lie) by being powered by renewables (a lie) which are already displacing fossil fuels (a lie) and therefore reach net zero (a lie) to bring temperatures down to safe levels within just a few years (a lie) to secure a sustainable future for all (a lie) and that the enemies of this outcome are the critics of the energy transition (a lie) who are all funded or influenced by the fossil fuel industry (a lie) so the proponents of green globalist aims are ethical in doing whatever it takes to achieve their aims (a lie).
Due to widely available evidence to the contrary, these are not just misunderstandings. To demonstrate that, I’ll explain them briefly in more detail.
First, the claim that humanity can maintain current levels of consumption is not true. Already, humanity is overshooting the carrying capacity of Planet Earth. This year the day that marked the beginning of the overshoot was August 1. We are degrading the capacity of seas, forests and soil to produce what we need, as well as using up key minerals. That’s even with around 800 million people malnourished last year (about 1 in 10 of us worldwide). Meanwhile, our monetary system requires our economy to expand consumption of resources, and the theory of decoupling that consumption from resource use has been debunked by hundreds of peer reviewed studies (see Chapter 1 of Breaking Together).
Second, the claim that modern societies can be powered by renewables while maintaining our current levels of energy use is not true. Over 80% of current primary energy generation is from fossil fuels. Even if we tried to switch everything to electric and generate the power from nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and wave, then we wouldn’t have enough metals for either the wire or the batteries. For instance we would need 250 years of annual production of copper for the wire and 4000 times the annual production of lithium. Mining is an ecologically damaging activity. And we would need to trash huge tracts of forest to produce the needed quantities of metal. There will be resistance, and rightly so (see Chapter 3 of Breaking Together).
Third, the claim that renewables are already displacing fossil fuels is not true. Instead, globally, renewables are providing additional energy, with fossil fuel usage also increasing. There is no sign of global energy demand declining or any policies aimed at that. We all know that having a side salad with our pie and chips doesn’t make the belly disappear. Therefore, renewables are not yet an answer to the problem of carbon emissions from fossil fuels forcing further climate change. Only policies targeting a reduction of use of fossil fuels, globally, would begin to tackle that – and we see it hardly anywhere.
Fourth, the claim that the world can reach net zero carbon emissions is a lie. Not only is that due to the previous two lies about energy production and demand. Not only is that due to the limitations of any carbon removal technologies and approaches, for getting CO2 out of the atmosphere. It is also because of the fundamental role of fossilised or natural gas in current industrial agriculture. We are a grain-based civilization with estimates of between 50 to 80% of our calories coming from 5 key grains, either directly or via the animals that some of us eat. About 60% of these are produced with chemical fertiliser, which is currently dependent on fossil fuels. A tonne of such fertiliser releases twice its weight as CO2. That is before considering the machines and transportation involved (see Chapter 6 of Breaking Together). With Bekandze Farm, my own work and philanthropy is promoting farming without chemicals, but I recognize we are utterly dependent on them for our current food supply.
Fifth, the claim that achieving net zero emissions would bring temperatures down to safe levels within just a few years is not true. The claim derives from over-claiming, or misrepresenting, what the simulations run on some climate models have found. Those models ignored methane. In addition, recent data on removing aerosols suggests it is a larger driver of heating than was previously understood. Even with those limitations, the research was inconclusive, with some models showing ongoing warming, some showing none, in the impossible scenario of the world having stopped all CO2 emissions. That scenario, by the way, would be even more severe curtailment than net zero (which still allows for some emissions).
Sixth, the claim that such changes will secure a sustainable future for all is not true. That is because both ecological overshoot and climate change have already progressed too far, while ongoing destruction and pollution are too much of a feature of industrial consumer societies (see Chapters 1 and 4 of Breaking Together). The idea that billions more people can improve their lives by being incorporated into such industrial consumer ways of life is nonsense. Rather, the way we privileged people live is a time-bound and geographically-bound niche: if we care about people in poverty then we need to look at different ways of helping, as well as consuming and polluting less ourselves.
Seventh, the claim that any critics of the renewable energy transition are enemies of a sustainable future is not true. The enemies of humanity living happily-ever-after in industrial consumer societies are basic physics, chemistry and biology. Evangelising about it and condemning non-believers does not make that future any more feasible. Instead, we could be working for a more gentle and just collapse, and a lesser dystopia, with less suffering and more joy than otherwise would be the case. The enemies of that are people who distract us from how to fairly reduce and redistribute resource use.
Eighth, the claim that critics are all funded or influenced by the fossil fuel industry is not true. Rather, many of us are the more radical and anti-corporate voices in environmentalism. We are aligned with the history of environmental critique, which recognizes climate change as one symptom of a destructive economic system and its associated politics and culture. We want to reduce emissions but refuse to align with a new faction of capital that wants to profit from this disaster by selling inadequate solutions and false hope.
Ninth, the claim that proponents of pseudo-green capitalist policies are ethical in doing ‘whatever it takes’ to achieve their aims is not true. For it is not ethical to override support for the rights of indigenous peoples living in the lands where large corporations want to mine, so that more people can drive a Tesla. It is not ethical to infiltrate climate activist groups to steer them away from radical politics. It is not right to get big tech platforms like Facebook to restrict the reach of analysis which challenges their ‘fake green fairytale’.
I know these self-deceptions are powerful and have consequences, as they shaped my work for decades. In general, they pull us back from revolutionary despair – the kind of transformation that has occurred for so many people when they don’t believe in the false God of technosalvation.
Going forward, I wonder how much ecological destruction, in the form of new mining and old nuclear, will be unresisted, permitted and financed due to belief in the fake green fairytale? We have already seen that in a variety of cases. UK Government support for new nuclear power stations was enabled by climate concern that rose due the campaigns of Extinction Rebellion. Unfortunately, those new stations will not use the new technologies without meltdown risk or hazardous waste. Permits for mining in primary forests have been issued because of the climate crisis. For instance, the Brazilian government has explained that critical minerals for the net zero economy are a reason to issue permits for mining in the Amazon, including in areas inhabited by indigenous peoples. Such mining is a major cause of deforestation. However, the narrowness of the fake green fairytale overlooks this. It ignores the science on the role of forests in cooling our climate through cloud seeding. It’s not just regional, with pollen and bacteria rising from the Amazon forest then seeding clouds and snow over Tibet (Chapter 5 of Breaking Together). Because he is so fixated on the fairytale, billionaire non-scientist Bill Gates tells us trees don’t matter that much for climate. Laughing off tree protection or planting for climate concerns, he asked his audience last year: “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?”
And so we return to the matter of self-deception. There will be money to be earned in maintaining it. I wonder how much censorship, surveillance, and authoritarianism will arise from those who need to maintain the fake green fairytale while resisting a growing backlash? Definitely some. Maybe a lot. Myself and others critiquing the mainstream climate narratives of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have already had our content suppressed or removed from social media platforms. In a world where over 80% of social media sharing globally is enabled by just three American multinational corporations, there is a huge risk to public awareness.
I describe the nine lies of self-deception that comprise the fake green fairytale as being pathological because they prevent humanity from creatively exploring what our options are in this age of consequences. That is why I disagree with those people who say “we” environmentalists should not argue amongst ourselves. They are mistaken about who “we” are. I’m not in the same environmental profession or movement as people who will campaign for policies that will help to trash the Amazon Rainforest for the false promise of a more electric lifestyle. I’m not in the same profession or movement with people who want us to defer to the systems that have caused or administered this destruction. I’m in a very different movement, which believes in freeing people and communities from the pressure to destroy our environment in order to service global capital. That is the ecolibertarian ethos, which I explain in my book Breaking Together.
Editor’s note: This article is an update from a year ago. Trying to fix the climate change planetary boundary at the expense of biodiversity or any of the other planetary boundaries is a fool’s errand. This article does not state the fact that it only takes one planetary boundary to collapse to cause a massive die-off of life on the planet. Plus no mention of the poly-crisis of nuclear war, increasing inequality, AI and global economic crash.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. – The Second Coming William Butler Yeats in 1919
By Edward Carver writer for Common Dreams
Six of nine planetary boundaries have already been transgressed, and a seventh, for ocean acidification, is on the verge of being breached, according to a major report released Monday.
The 96-page report, produced by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), is the first in a planned series of annual “planetary health checks.”
The authors found that safe planetary boundaries had already been crossed for the climate, freshwater, land use, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, and biosphere integrity—in keeping with a study in Science Advances last year. They found a “clear trend towards further transgression”—moving deeper into the danger zone, where irreversible tipping points are more likely to be triggered—in each of the six categories.
“Our updated diagnosis shows that vital organs of the Earth system are weakening, leading to a loss of resilience and rising risks of crossing tipping points,” Levke Caesar, a PIK climate physicist lead author of the report, said in a statement that announced a “red alert.”
The health check also showed that ocean acidification, a seventh category, has reached a dangerous precipice, putting the foundations of the marine food web at risk. Ocean acidification, which can threaten coral reefs and phytoplankton populations, is caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and other human activities.
Caesar said a “safe operating space” threshold for acidification could be crossed in the next few years.
“Looking at the current evolution, I’d say it’s really, really difficult to prevent that [boundary] crossing,” she toldMongabay.
A graphic shows the status of nine environmental categories, four of which have been broken down into two control variables. Image from Planetary Health Check 2024. Design by Globaïa.
PIK director Johan Rockström, a co-author of the new report, helped develop planetary boundary research in the late 2000s. In a seminal 2009 paper in Nature, he and his co-authors found that three of the nine boundaries had already been crossed. That number has gradually gone up based on a series of studies over the last decade.
The planet boundary framework, which is often connected to the degrowth movement, emphasizes that the categories are interconnected.
“The interconnectedness of [planetary boundary] processes means that addressing one issue, such as limiting global warming to 1.5°C, requires tackling all of them collectively,” the new report says.
Boris Sakschewski, a climate scientist who, along with Caesar, is a lead author of the report said that, “We know that all planetary boundary processes act together and each one needs protection to protect the whole system.”
The consequences of continued ocean acidification, which is primarily measured by aragonite saturation, would be severe, the report warns.
Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold, with significant declines in surface aragonite saturation, particularly in high-latitude regions like the Arctic and Southern Ocean. These areas are vital for the marine carbon pump and global nutrient cycles, which support marine productivity, biodiversity, and global fisheries. The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems, especially those reliant on calcium carbonate for shell formation.
Some researchers believe that the ocean acidification threshold has already been crossed, especially given regional variability, with cooler polar waters absorbing more carbon dioxide, causing a faster drop in pH levels.
The report was written with a general audience in mind and is not peer-reviewed, though it’s based on peer-reviewed studies, the authors said.
The final pages of the report present solutions, especially agricultural. A radical overhaul of the global food system, heavily dependent on fertilizer and other harmful inputs, will be necessary to reverse the disturbing trends documented in the report, the authors wrote.
“Sometimes overlooked compared to the impacts of energy production and consumption—particularly the use of fossil fuels—the food systems we depend on are among the largest drivers of environmental degradation. The global food system is the single largest driver behind the transgression of multiple planetary boundaries,” the report says.
Editor’s note: Climate change is a symptom predicament of overshoot and is exploited by power elites to deflect from what is necessary, ending modern civilization. The slow death of nature started with civilization, it has exponentially sped up since the 1700s. The reason there are no more natural disasters is because they are all now man-made.
Rich countries have exported climate breakdown through extractive industries, creating a “carbon colonialism.”
Almost everything we buy exploits the environment and the people who depend on it to a greater or lesser extent. Almost everything we buy contributes to climate breakdown through emissions, local environmental degradation, or, most commonly, both. Yet, in a world where greenwashing is so commonplace that almost every product proclaims ecological benefits, it tends not to be seen that way. In fact, it tends not to be seen at all.
Carbon emissions and pollution are a phase that we all pass through, meaning that the ability—and crucially the money—to avoid the ratcheting risks of climate change is something we have earned, and others too will earn as each nation continues inexorably along its separate curve. Wealthy countries accept this narrative because it is comfortable and provides a logical and moral explanation of the relative safety and health of the rich world.
But what if it wasn’t true? What if one place was devastated because the other was clean? Just as carbon emissions are not acts of God, neither is exposure to the results of those emissions. In other words, you can’t remove money from the geography of disaster risk.
This is carbon colonialism: the latest incarnation of an age-old system in which natural resources continue to be extracted, exported, and profited from far from the people they used to belong to. It is, in many ways, an old story, but what is new is the hidden cost of that extraction: the carbon bill footed in inverse relation to the resource feast.
Most colonial economies were organized around extraction, providing the raw materials that drove imperial growth. As a result, even when the imperial administration is taken out, the underlying economic structures put in place by colonizers are very difficult to get away from and continue to hold newly independent countries back.
On a basic level, exporting raw materials adds less economic value to the country that does it than processing, manufacturing, and reselling those materials, so for every watt of energy, every hectare of land, and every hour of work used to make goods exported from the global North to the South, the South has to generate, use, and work many more units to pay for it.
Decolonizing Climate Change
We already have the ways and means to decolonize how we measure, mitigate, and adapt to climate change.
This task is as sizable as it is vital, but at its core are three priorities. First, carbon emissions targets based on national production must be abandoned in favor of consumption-based measures, which, though readily available, tend to be marginalized for rich nations’ political convenience. Secondly, with half of emissions in some wealthy economies now occurring overseas, environmental and emissions regulation must be applied as rigorously to supply chains as they are to domestic production.
By adopting these new viewpoints, we can aim towards a final priority: recognizing how the global factory manufactures the landscape of disaster. Our globalized economy is built on foundations designed to siphon materials and wealth to the rich world while leaving waste in its place.
Yet there is, as ever, another way. It is possible to reject the globalization of environmental value by giving voice to the people it belongs to. Environments do not have to be merely abstract commodities.
Giving greater value to how people think about their local environments is seen as a way to decolonize our environmental thinking, move away from extractivism, and perhaps forestall the slow death of nature that began in the 1700s.
Environmental Myths and How to Think Differently
One of the most widely shared myths in climate change discourse is that climate change increases the likelihood of natural disasters. This burden is ‘disproportionately’ falling upon poorer countries. Yet, it is fundamentally flawed. Climate change is not causing more natural disasters because disasters are not natural in the first place. They do not result from storms, floods, or droughts alone, but when those dangerous hazards meet vulnerability and economic inequality.
A hurricane, after all, means something completely different to the populations of Singapore and East Timor. This difference is no accident of geography but of a global economy that ensures that some parts of the world remain more vulnerable to climate change than others. Natural disasters are, therefore, economic disasters: the result of centuries of unequal trade and the specific, everyday impacts of contemporary commerce.
With rich countries doing an ever-diminishing share of their manufacturing, the responsibility to report real-world emissions is left to international corporations, which have little incentive to report accurate information on their supply chains.
The environments of the rich world are becoming cleaner and safer, even in an increasingly uncertain environment. The resources needed to tackle the challenges of climate change are accruing and being spent to protect their privileged populations.
Yet, for most of the world, the opposite is true. Natural resources continue to flow ever outward, with only meager capital returning in compensation. Forests are being degraded by big and small actors as climate and market combine to undermine traditional livelihoods. Factory workers are toiling in sweltering conditions. Fishers are facing ever-declining livelihoods.
In other words, we have all the tools we need to solve climate breakdown but lack control or visibility over the production processes that shape it. From legal challenges to climate strikes and new constitutions, people are waking up to the myths that shape our thinking on the environment. They are waking up to the fact that climate change has never been about undeveloped technologies but always about unequal power.
As the impacts of climate breakdown become ever more apparent, this can be a moment of political and social rupture, of the wheels finally beginning to come off the status quo.
Demand an end to the delays. Demand an end to tolerance for the brazenly unknown in our economy. Demand an end to carbon colonialism.
Editor’s note: This article does not mention the subsidies going to “renewable” energy, which is in the trillions, and its environmentally harmful implementation. Also not mentioned are the costs associated with the loss of livelihood for those humans affected by these unsustainable “developments”, not to mention the harm done to more than human species.
Governments across the world now spend a total of $2.6 trillion per year on subsidies that harm the environment, jeopardizing global climate and biodiversity targets, according to an analysis released Tuesday.
The analysis came in an updated report from the research group Earth Track, which found that harmful fossil fuel subsidies top $1 trillion annually and harmful agricultural subsidies top $600 billion. Governments also fund pollution and destruction in sectors such as water, construction, transport, forestry, and fisheries.
The $2.6 trillion total, which the report authors said was likely an underestimate, marked an $800 billion increase—or about $500 billion in real dollars—from $1.8 trillion cited in the initial report, released in February 2022.
In December 2022, the world’s nations agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a deal that included, as target 18, a commitment to identify environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS) by 2025 and reduce them by $500 billion by 2030.
“Two years on from the signing of the landmark biodiversity plan, we continue to finance our own extinction, putting people and our resilience at huge risk,” Christiana Figueres, the United Nations’ chief climate diplomat when the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, told The Guardian. “Estimates are higher than previously thought—with at least $2.6 trillion now funding the destruction of nature, endangering the chances of meeting our nature and climate goals.”
Private interests usually benefit from the harmful subsidies. Bill McGuire, an emeritus professor of earth sciences at University College London, responded to Earth Track’s findings by spelling out this out.
“Want to know how criminally insane our political-economic system is?” he wrote on social media. “We are actually paying corporations to destroy the planet.”
The report shows the massive scale of government investment in EHS across the world, with the $2.6 trillion total for 2023 amounting to about 2.5% of global gross domestic product.
Other estimates of EHS have been even higher. An International Monetary Fund working paper last year estimated that fossil fuel subsidies alone amount to $7 trillion annually. Subsidies are difficult to quantify as some are implicit, such as not applying an excise tax on fossil fuels that damage the environment.
Report co-author Doug Koplow of Earth Track told Common Dream that the IMF paper included more externalities “rather than just fiscal subsidies,” based on his recollection.
The Earth Track report found that increased global fossil fuel subsidies following the Russian invasion of Ukraine were the main reason for the $800 billion increase since the last report was written. “This example highlights the sensitivity of EHS to macroeconomic conditions,” the report says.
In a statement, Koplow emphasized the importance of the cross-sectoral analysis, arguing that sectors, such as agriculture, are too often looked at in isolation. “It is the combined effect of subsidies to these sectors that compound to drive loss of nature and biodiversity resources,” he wrote.
The analysis comes amid an onslaught of extreme weather this year that’s been made more likely by fossil fuel-driven climate breakdown. Large-scale flooding devastated Central Europe this week, killing more than 20 people. The planet has seen record temperatures for 15 straight months.
Biodiversity loss also continues apace, with experts calling for strong action as the COP16 meeting of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity is set to begin in Colombia on October 21.
Almost 200 people were killed in 2023 for attempting to protect their lands and communities from ecological devastation, Global Witness revealed Tuesday.
This raises the total number of environmental defenders killed between 2012—when Global Witness began publishing its annual reports—and 2023 to 2,106.
“As the climate crisis accelerates, those who use their voice to courageously defend our planet are met with violence, intimidation, and murder,” Laura Furones, the report’s lead author and senior adviser to the Land and Environmental Defenders Campaign at Global Witness, said in a statement. “Our data shows that the number of killings remains alarmingly high, a situation that is simply unacceptable.”
At least 196 people were murdered in 2023, 79 of them in Colombia, which was both the deadliest country for defenders last year and the deadliest overall. In 2023, more defenders were killed in Colombia than have ever been killed in one country in a given year since Global Witness began its calculations.
While the government of left-wing President Gustavo Petro has promised to protect activists, organizers on the ground say the situation has only gotten worse for defenders in the past year. Colombia will host the 16th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in October and has promised to highlight the role of defenders in protecting nature. This presents a “historic opportunity” to stand up for the rights of environmental activists, Global Witness said.
Overall, Latin America is the deadliest region for defenders, making up 85% of killings in 2023. It was home to the four deadliest countries for defenders—Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, and Mexico—which together accounted for 70% of all killings. Honduras also saw the highest number of killings per capita, both in 2023 and over the past 11 years.
“It is the job of leaders to listen and make sure that defenders can speak out without risk.”
The fifth deadliest country for defenders in 2023 was the Philippines, which saw 17 people killed. Overall, nearly 500 people have been murdered in Asia since 2012, with the Philippines remaining the deadliest country in the region during that time. Global Witness recorded four deaths in Africa in 2023, and 116 since 2012, but noted that this is likely a “gross underestimate” as killings on the continent are more difficult to document due to a lack of information.
Global Witness cannot always link a particular industry to the murders of the land defenders who oppose environmental harm. In Colombia, for example, it estimates that half of people killed in 2023 were killed by organized criminal elements. However, for the deaths it was able to connect, most people died after opposing mining operations at 25. This was followed by logging (5), fishing (5), agribusiness (4), roads and infrastructure (4), and hydropower (2).
The threat of even more mining-related violence looms as nations scramble for the critical minerals necessary for the transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable forms of energy. This dovetails with another component of Global Witness’ findings: the disproportionate violence borne by Indigenous communities for defending their homes. Of the defenders killed in 2023, nearly half were Indigenous peoples or Afro-descendants, and almost half of the minerals needed for the energy transition are located on or near Indigenous or peasant land.
Jenifer Lasimbang, an Indigenous Orang Asal woman from Malaysia and executive director of Indigenous Peoples of Asia Solidarity Fund, explained the situation her community faces:
In Malaysia, as in many other countries, we Indigenous Peoples have been subject to wave after wave of destruction. First came the logging and oil palm companies. As a result, nearly 80% of the land surface in Malaysian Borneo has been cleared or severely damaged.
Now, as the world moves away from a fossil-fuel based economy, we’re seeing a rush for critical minerals, essential to succeed in the transition to a green economy.
With Malaysia the regional leader in aluminium, iron and manganese production, extracting rare minerals isn’t new to us. But our experience so far has been that this comes at a huge environmental cost.
The Malaysian government is issuing an increasing number of prospecting and mining licenses. We know what this new “green rush” means for us. We know it’s going to get worse while demand for resources remains high.
Lasimbang said that her community did not oppose development itself, but an “unsustainable and unequal global system” predicated on ever-increasing consumption, and that world leaders should learn from Indigenous communities like hers how to sustain a society without destroying the environment.
“There is only really one thing left to say: Trust us. Let us lead. We will take you with us,” Lasimbang said.
While global awareness of the climate crisis and commitments to address it should have translated into greater protections for those on the frontlines of defending biodiversity, that has not been the case. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, at least 1,500 defenders have been murdered, Global Witness said.
Even in wealthier countries like the U.K., E.U., and the U.S. where killings are less frequent, governments have increasingly repressed environmental activists by criminalizing protests. In 2023, Global Witness observed that the “global surge in anti-protest legislation persisted.”
For example, in 2023 the U.K. expanded its Public Order Act to allow police to prosecute certain protests that disrupted national infrastructure or caused “more than a minor” disturbance. In November of that year, police arrested at least 630 people for marching slowly on a public road to protest new fossil fuel projects.
In the U.S., more than 20 states have passed “critical infrastructure” laws that target protests against fossil fuel projects like pipelines. E.U. countries have passed similar laws as well.
Even in the developed world, the criminalization of protest can turn deadly: In January 2023, police in Georgia shot and killed 26-year-old defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, or Tortuguita, as they were camping out in a local forest to prevent it from being bulldozed to facilitate the construction of a “Cop City” training facility.
To protect defenders worldwide, Global Witness called on governments and businesses to document attacks and hold perpetrators to account.
“Governments cannot stand idly by; they must take decisive action to protect defenders and to address the underlying drivers of violence against them,” Furones said. “Activists and their communities are essential in efforts to prevent and remedy harms caused by climate-damaging industries. We cannot afford to, nor should we tolerate, losing any more lives.”
Nonhle Mbuthuma of South Africa, who won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2024, wrote in the report’s forward that both defenders and governments had a role to play in creating a more just and sustainable world as it teeters on the brink of climate and ecological breakdown.
“Now it is my role, as a defender, to push elite power to take radical action that swings us away from fossil fuels and toward systems that benefit the whole of society,” Mbuthuma wrote. “It is the job of leaders to listen and make sure that defenders can speak out without risk. This is the responsibility of all wealthy and resource-rich countries across the planet.”
Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast continue to suffer threats, kidnappings, torture and unlawful arrests while defending communal territory from illegal settlements and mining.
Residents say they’re worried about losing ancestral land as well as traditional farming, hunting and fishing practices as the forest is cleared and mines pollute local streams and rivers.
This year, there have been 643 cases of violence against Indigenous peoples, including death threats, the burning of homes, unlawful arrests, kidnappings, torture and displacement, according to Indigenous rights groups that spoke at an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights panel this month.
Increasing violence in northern Nicaragua this year has displaced rural families and led to calls for more drastic action from the international community, which activists say hasn’t done enough to hold the Ortega government accountable for human rights abuses.
For years, Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast have suffered threats, kidnappings, torture and unlawful arrests while defending communal territory from illegal settlements and mining. This year appears to be as bad as ever, and residents say they are desperate for help.
“Urgent measures must be taken to protect these communities,” said Gloria Monique de Mees, the OAS rapporteur on the rights of Afro-descendants and against racial discrimination. “Failure to address the crisis will only embolden the Nicaraguan government to continue its repressive campaign.”
Much of the violence is concentrated within the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region (RACCN), a jurisdiction communally governed and titled by Indigenous communities since the late 1980s. It’s home to Miskitus, Mayangnas, Ulwa, Ramas, Creole and Garífunas peoples, and contains mountain, rainforest and coastal ecosystems.
The area has attracted non-Indigenous Nicaraguans, known locally as colonos, looking to set up farms, logging operations and artisanal mines. Massive gold and copper deposits have also created opportunities for multinational mining corporations, with backing from the government.
Indigenous communities say they’re worried about losing ancestral land as well as traditional farming, hunting and fishing practices as the forest is cleared and mines pollute local streams and rivers.
An IACHR panel in March on unlawful arrests in Nicaragua. Photo by CIDH via Flickr. CC BY 2.0
Conflicts between Indigenous communities and the colonos, who are often armed, have led to tragedy in multiple instances this year, according to witnesses who spoke at a panel hosted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) this month.
“This situation was created particularly by the dispossession of our territories as part of a process of colonization that implies, in the words of the communities, an ethnocide, in which settlers deprive us of our food and exploit our natural resources, usurping Indigenous territories through acts of armed violence and strategies to destroy out traditional ways of life,” Tininiska Rivera, a community member now living in exile, said during the panel.
In the first six months of this year, there have been over 643 cases of violence against Indigenous peoples, including death threats, the burning of homes, unlawful arrests, kidnappings, torture and displacement, according to several Indigenous rights groups present at the panel.
Many of the communities where the violence occurred have protection measures in place from the IACHR, which involves asking for special intervention by the Nicaraguan government. Human rights advocates say officials haven’t complied.
In one instance this year, five people were killed and two were seriously injured in the Wilú community in the Mayangna Sauní As territory. During the same incident, other families saw their homes and crops burned down, resulting in their displacement. At least 75 Indigenous people have been killed in the area since 2013, according to the panel.
At least 58 of this year’s cases in protected communities involved sexual, psychological, or physical violence against women, the groups said.
There have also been 37 cases in which forest rangers have been targeted by the government while carrying out patrols, according to Camila Ormar, an attorney for the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). Eleven Mayangna people have been formally convicted while another 14 have outstanding arrest warrants.
Colonos have used high-caliber weapons and deprived their captors of food, according to the communities. They allegedly have connections to the government as well as various groups made up of former combatants from the revolution.
“One of the stopping points is not to engage with the dictatorship as if everything were normal, but rather to recognize the scale of the abuses that are ongoing, the imprisonment of not just the religious but the young people, the sexual violence against women and children, the dispossession of whole communities,” said OAS Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Arif Bulkan.
In 2022, the US issuedsanctions against state-owned mining company Empresa Nicaragüense de Minas (ENIMIENAS), saying that it was “using gold revenue to continue to oppress the people of Nicaragua.” But the country’s mining concessions have continued to expand, often in Indigenous communities that struggle to find adequate legal representation or don’t understand their rights.
Between October 2023 and April 2024, the government granted three Chinese companies 13 mining concessions in the country, eight of them in the RACCN, according to a Confidential investigation published earlier this year. All of them were approved within eight months, suggesting that proper environmental impact studies and consultation with the communities were never carried out.
The concessions last 25 years and gives the three companies — Zhong Fu Development, Thomas Metal and Nicaragua XinXin Linze Minera Group — exclusive rights to extract minerals in the area, according to the investigation.
The companies couldn’t be reached for comment for this article. The Ministry of Energy and Mines didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests.
Speakers at the IACHR panel said it’s important to continue to document the human rights abuses taking place on the northern Caribbean coast and to bring it to attention of the rest of the world. They also said that many protection measures are still working but also need to be improved.
For his part, Bulkan said that the international community has been “timid” in its response to the situation in Nicaragua. “[There has been] a shameless response from what we would think of as champions of human rights in the region,” he said. Adding, “One clear line of work has to be continuing with advocacy with the international community.”
Max Radwin is a staff writer covering Latin America for Mongabay. For updates on his work, follow him on Twitter via @MaxRadwin.
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On Friday, August 30, Applied Energy Services Corporation (AES), a global utility and power generation company, submitted a proposal to Santa Fe, New Mexico county commissioners to build a 700-acre solar facility with a battery energy storage system (BESS).
On September 5th, a thermal runaway fire started at the AES-built SDG&E (San Diego Gas and Electric) Battery Storage Facility in Escondido, California. (With a thermal runaway fire, excessive heat causes a chemical reaction that spreads to other batteries.) Authorities issued a mandatory evacuation order for the immediate area, and a “shelter in place” order for areas as far as over a mile away from the fire. (To shelter in place, people must go indoors, shut doors and windows, and “self-sustain” until emergency personnel provide additional direction.) Schools up to three miles away from the fire were evacuated Thursday and canceled for Friday. 500 businesses closed.
As of this morning, Saturday, September 7th, officials have not yet lifted orders to evacuate and shelter in place.
On social media, people have reported smelling “burning plastic” inside their homes (despite windows being closed) and feeling ill.
People from Oceanside to Encinitas encountered a strong chemical smell starting around 5 pm Friday, the 6th. Around 8:30 pm, San Diego County Air Pollution Control District officials said that this smell was not related to the BESS fire in Escondido. Due to the odors’ fleeting nature, they were unable to identify its source.
This is the 3rd AES BESS thermal runaway fire in five years. Officials predict that it could take up to 48 hours to extinguish.
A May 2024 battery fire in Otay Mesa, California kept firefighters on the scene for nearly 17 days. They sprayed eight million gallons of water on the site. The county’s hazmat team tested water runoff and smoke and reported no toxic or dangerous levels. (Is the keyword in this last sentence “reported?”)
For a list of battery energy storage “failure incidents,” see Electric Power Research Institute’s database. Globally, 63 utility and industrial-scale battery energy storage systems endured failure events from 2011 to 2023. After South Korea, the U.S. has experienced the most major battery energy storage-related fires, with California (six, with this Escondido fire) and New York (four) reporting the most incidents.
Back in Santa Fe County, petitioners emailed and hand-delivered a request to county commissioners on July 23 and August 23 to enact a moratorium on AES’s solar facility and battery energy storage system. Commissioners did not review these petitions before AES submitted its application on August 30th. A moratorium cannot apply to a pending application.
AES’s Escondido Battery Energy Storage facility has 24 BESS battery containers. The corporation plans to install 38 battery containers at its Rancho Viejo BESS facility.
Please also read my September 5th post, 21 questions for solar PV explorers, and check out Shauna and Harlie Rankin’s video, “Government announces 31 million acre land grab from U.S. ranchers (for solar and wind facilities).” It explains that federal officials and corporations have joined forces to install “renewable power” corridors—five miles wide, 70 miles long, and larger—around the U.S. by 2030. These corridors will cover farm and ranchland with solar and wind facilities.
I also highly recommend Calvin L. Martin’s August 2019 report, “BESS Bombs: The huge explosive toxic batteries the wind & solar companies are sneaking into your backyard.” Part 1 and Part 2. I recommend reading this report even though powers-that-be removed its videos.
According to basic engineering principles, no technology is safe until proven safe. Will legislators continue to dedicate billions of dollars to subsidizing solar power, wind power, battery storage and EVs? Will commissioners and regulators say, “We have to expect some thermal runaway fires in order to mitigate climate change threats?” Or, will they build safety features into BESS like this firefighter suggests? Will they protect the public and insist on certified reports from liability-carrying professional engineers that all hazards have been mitigated before they permit new facilities and new battery storage systems?
1. Do you agree with Herman Daly’s principles—don’t take from the Earth faster than it can replenish, and don’t waste faster than it can absorb?
2. Should solar PV evaluations recognize the extractions, water, wood, fossil fuels and intercontinental shipping involved in manufacturing solar PV systems?
3. How should a manufacturer prove that slave laborers did not make any part of its solar PV system?
4. Should evaluations of solar PVs’ ecological impacts include impacts from chemicals leached during PVs’ manufacture?
5. Should evaluations assess the ecological impacts of spraying large-scale solar facilities’ land with herbicides to kill vegetation that could dry and catch fire?
6. Does your fire department have a plan for responding to a large-scale solar facility fire on a sunny day—when solar-generated electricity cannot be turned off?
7. Since utilities can’t shut off rooftop solar’s power generation on a sunny day, firefighters will not enter the building: they could be electrocuted. Meanwhile, every solar panel deployed on a rooftop increases a building’s electrical connections and fire hazards. How/can your fire department protect buildings with rooftop solar?
8. Solar panels are coated with PFAs in four places. Panels cracked during hailstorms can leach chemicals into groundwater. Who will monitor and mitigate the chemicals leached onto land under solar panels?
9. To keep clean and efficient, solar panels require cleaning. Per month, how much water will the solar PV facility near you require?
10. Covering land with paved roads, parking lots, shopping malls, data centers…and large solar facilities…disrupts healthy water cycling and soil structure. Should evaluations assess the impact of these losses? How/can you restore healthy water cycling and soil structure?
11. Since solar PVs generate power only when the sun shines—but electricity users expect its availability 24/7—such customers require backup from the fossil-fuel-powered grid or from highly toxic batteries. Should marketers stop calling solar PVs “renewable,” “green,” “clean,” “sustainable” and “carbon neutral?”
12. Inverters convert the direct current (DC) electricity generated by solar panels to alternating current (AC)—the kind of electricity used by most buildings, electronics and appliances. (Boats and RVs do not connect to the grid; they use DC—batteries—to power their appliances.) Inverters “chop” the electric current on building wires, generating a kind of radiation. What are the hazards of such radiation? How/can you mitigate it?
13. At their end-of-usable-life, solar PVs are hazardous waste. Who pays the ecological costs to dispose of them?
14. Who pays the financial bill to dispose of solar PV systems at their end-of-usable-life? If you’ve got a large-scale solar facility, did your county commissioners require the corporation to post a bond so that if/when it goes bankrupt, your county doesn’t pay that financial bill?
15. After a solar facility’s waste has been removed, how/will the land be restored?
16. From cradles-to-graves, who is qualified to evaluate solar PVs’ ecological soundness? Should the expert carry liability for their evaluation? Should consumers require a cradle-to-grave evaluation from a liability-carrying expert before purchasing a solar PV system?
17. Do solar PVs contribute to overshoot—using water, ores and other materials faster than the Earth can replenish them?
18. If overshoot is a primary problem, and climate change, loss of wildlife species and pollution are consequences of overshoot, do we change our expectations of electric power, devices, appliances and the Internet?
19. Can you name five unsustainable expectations about electric power?
20. Can you name five sustainable expectations about electric power?
21. In your region (defined by your watershed), who knows how to live sustainably?
RELATED NEWS
SUBSIDIZING SOLAR
U.S. subsidies of semiconductor and green energy manufacturers could reach $1 trillion.
When it opened in 2014, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in the Mojave Desert was the world’s largest solar thermal power station. Read about its daily consumption of natural gas, the subsidies it used to fund its $2.2 billion cost, its devastation of 3500 acres of desert habitat, its fire, and its annual production of electricity.
END-OF-LIFE-E-WASTE
End-of-life-e-waste (including from solar panels) poisons Ghana, Malaysia and Thailand —and harms children who scour junkyards for food and schooling money. Actual end-of-life-e-waste rises five times faster than documented e-waste. Of course, the vast majority of e-waste occurs during manufacturing (mining, smelting, refining, “doping” of chemicals, intercontinental shipping of raw materials, etc.).
INSPIRATION
The new Just Transition Litigation Tracking Tool from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has documented, up to 31 May 2024, 60 legal cases launched around the world by Indigenous Peoples, other communities and workers harmed by “renewable” supply chains. Cases brought against states and/or the private sector in transition mineral mining and solar, wind and hydropower sectors challenge environmental abuses (77% of tracked cases), water pollution and/or access to water (80%), and abuse of Indigenous Peoples’ rights (55%), particularly the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC – 35% of cases). These cases should warn companies and investors that expensive, time-consuming litigation can quickly eat up the benefits of such shortcuts.
For two decades, a small group of nuns in rural Kansas has taken on Netflix, Amazon and Google on social issues. Even when their stocks amount to only $2,000, the nuns propose resolutions at shareholders’ meetings. For example, the sisters have asked Chevon to assess its human rights policies, and for Amazon to publish its lobbying expenditures.
When Rio Tinto proposed mining lithium in Serbia’s Jadar Valley (whose deposits could cover 90% of Europe’s current lithium needs), the corporation claimed that mining would meet environmental protection requirements. Locals learned about the mining’s potentially devastating impacts on groundwater, soil, water usage, livestock and biodiversity from tailings, wastewater, noise, air pollution and light pollution. 100,000 Serbians took to the streets, blocked railways—and moved President Aleksandar Vucic to promise that mining will not proceed until environmentalists’ concerns are satisfied.
Editor’s note: Protecting the ocean means life protection, our ecosystems depend on intact and clean oceans. Even though the aim is to protect 30% of the planet, it’s not clear what conservation actually means worldwide. That leads to ineffective conservation measures and demands more knowledge about oceanic ecosystems and also implementing it. For the most part protected areas don’t need to be managed, they just need to have humans leave them alone.
There’s never been more momentum for protecting the ocean, but new research finds that many efforts fail to protect endangered species — or have barely gotten off the drawing board.
Ocean ecosystems and the marine wildlife that depend on them are under threat as never before. Between overfishing, climate change, plastic pollution, and habitat destruction, it’s a bad time to be a prawn, cod, seabird, or whale.
There’s no single silver bullet solution to the biodiversity crisis, but in recent years, many people in the environmental community have focused on the goal of “30 x 30”: protecting 30% of the planet by the year 2030. Many nations have made promises toward that goal, including the United States, which has adapted it into the “America the Beautiful” initiative.
Measurable goals like this provide nations with clear, quantifiable conservation goals that others in the international community can follow, verify, or use to identify shortfalls and push for more action.
At the same time, many experts warn that number-based targets like “protect 30%” lend themselves to incentives to arguably-kinda-sorta protect as much as possible, rather than protecting the most ecologically important areas. Governments, for instance, can use what’s euphemistically referred to as “creative accounting” — counting things as protected that probably should not be considered protected.
Two new research papers examine some of this creative accounting in the ocean. Together, they stress important things to keep in mind when creating protected areas and when assessing their usefulness.
To Protect a Species, Protect Areas Where They Actually Live
A surprisingly common issue in area-based conservation happens when a government declares a new protected area to help save a threatened species of concern…without first checking to see if the species actually lives within those boundaries.
It happens more often than you might think. A new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology looked at 89 marine protected areas in Europe that are supposed to protect diadromous fish species (those that migrate between ocean and fresh water, like salmon or some eels) of conservation concern.
Their findings are shocking: Many of these areas protect habitats where those fish species do not live, and very few of them protect the most important core habitat for any diadromous fish species.
“A marine protected area should be an area that protects part of the marine environment,” says Sophie Elliott of the Wildlife Conservation Trust, the study’s lead author. “I say ‘should’ because there are a lot of parks that don’t have enough thought put into them. Quite often things are done quickly without thinking or understanding the situation.”
Sometimes this happens because of limited resources for scientific study. In other words, according to Elliot, we simply don’t know enough about species’ habitat use to protect their key habitat, at least not yet. This is known as the rare-species paradox: Endangered species are often hard to find and study, especially in the vast ocean, so it can be hard to understand what habitat qualities they need to thrive, even if we can hypothesize that protecting certain regions will mitigate some of the threats the species face.
Other times government officials, in search of positive publicity, announce a new protected area that was studied but wasn’t intended to protect a species.
“We had a series of MPAs that were supposed to have measures in place to protect certain species,” Elliott says. “But then an extra species got tacked on to the stated goals of the MPA, and it wasn’t effective for that species.” She declined to identify examples, given the political sensitivities of some of these protected areas.
In addition to gathering more data and always basing protected-area design on the best available data, Elliott recommends a more holistic approach to designating future protected areas.
“When people think about putting MPAs in place, look at the whole range of biodiversity that exists within it, because there might be many endangered and protected species,” she says. “You need to know what’s in that MPA and do ecosystem-based management” — management focusing on the whole ecosystem and not just individual species. It’s the difference between protecting cod by establishing fishing quotas versus protecting cod by also managing their habitat and predators and food and other things that eat that food. “We’ve long been calling for that, but we aren’t really working toward it at all,” she says.
What Counts As ‘Protected’ Varies More Than You Think
Another key issue in marine protected area management is what should count as “protected.”
Some areas restrict oil and gas extraction but allow any and all fishing. Some allow swimmers and other recreation, while others say people can’t even go scuba diving.
In one glaring recent example, the advocacy group Oceana U.K. found evidence that the United Kingdom allows bottom trawling in many of its MPAs. Bottom trawling is a fishing method that’s extremely destructive to sensitive habitat types; it’s been compared to clear-cutting forests to catch rabbits.
“At the end of the day … there’s no one clear definition of what conservation means around the world,” says Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has studied the issue. “One of the negative externalities of the global push to protect 30% of the ocean is that some governments are more concerned with being able to say that they protected 30% of the ocean than they are concerned with delivering meaningful biodiversity protections.”
Villagomez and his colleagues have identified another big issue: According to their new analysis in the journal Conservation Letters, fully one-quarter of the 100 largest marine protected areas — as cataloged in the United Nations and IUCN’s world database of protected areas — are announced but not yet implemented. Many have no clear timeline of when the formal protections might be put into place, or what those regulations might look like.
For now, those areas exist on paper but remain unprotected in the real world. For example, the paper cites the OSPAR MPA network covering 7% of the Northeast Atlantic, which currently appears to have no concrete protections.
This wide range of rules and inconsistent protections makes it harder to protect the ocean — or to count it toward 30×30 goals.
Governments are not supposed to submit anything to the world database of protected areas until something is designated, “but they do, and that’s just the reality,” says Villagomez.
But here’s the biggest problem: The study found that many of the world’s largest MPAs lack the scientific knowledge, funding, and political support to be effective.
“We know that MPAs work when they are well designed and provided the funding to operate,” Villagomez told me. “But for about one-third of the MPAs we studied, based on everything we know about protected area science, they will never result in positive outcomes for biodiversity.”
The conclusions of these two papers are clear: Too many marine protected areas are poorly designed and sited in places where the species they’re ostensibly trying to protect do not actually live. Also, too many allow destructive extractive industries to operate, limiting the benefits of any protection.
Despite these setbacks, Villagomez remains optimistic about the future of MPA-based protections.
“The good news is that this works really well about one-third of the time — if you play baseball and you hit the ball 300 out of 1,000 times, you’re going to the Hall of Fame,” he says. “There’s a ton of science that shows that well-designed well-implemented MPAs work, and for one-quarter of the MPAS we looked at, they’re well designed and are just lacking funding for implementation.”
David Sherman is a marine biologist specializing in the ecology and conservation of sharks. He received his Ph.D. in environmental science and policy from the University of Miami. Follow him on Twitter, where he’s always happy to answer any questions anyone has about sharks.
Editor’s note: We know what needs to be done but will it be done? No, the system will not allow it so the system must go. The sooner the better. Join a social movement advocating for a real energy transition, one that strives to guarantee that civilization will not emerge from this century.
Humanity’s transition from relying overwhelmingly on fossil fuels to instead using alternative low-carbon energy sources is sometimes said to be unstoppable and exponential. A boosterish attitude on the part of many renewable energy advocates is understandable: overcoming people’s climate despair and sowing confidence could help muster the needed groundswell of motivation to end our collective fossil fuel dependency. But occasionally a reality check is in order.
The reality is that energy transitions are a big deal, and they typically take centuries to unfold. Historically, they’ve been transformative for societies—whether we’re speaking of humanity’s taming of fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, or our adoption of fossil fuels starting roughly 200 years ago. Given (1) the current size of the human population (there are eight times as many of us alive today as there were in 1820 when the fossil fuel energy transition was getting underway), (2) the vast scale of the global economy, and (3) the unprecedented speed with which the transition will have to be made in order to avert catastrophic climate change, a rapid renewable energy transition is easily the most ambitious enterprise our species has ever undertaken.
As we’ll see, the evidence shows that the transition is still in its earliest stages, and at the current rate, it will fail to avert a climate catastrophe in which an unimaginable number of people will either die or be forced to migrate, with most ecosystems transformed beyond recognition.
Implementing these seven steps will change everything. The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier.
We’ll unpack the reasons why the transition is currently such an uphill slog. Then, crucially, we’ll explore what a real energy transition would look like, and how to make it happen.
Why This Is (So Far) Not a Real Transition
Despite trillions of dollars having been spent on renewable energy infrastructure, carbon emissions are still increasing, not decreasing, and the share of world energy coming from fossil fuels is only slightly less today than it was 20 years ago. In 2024, the world is using more oil, coal, and natural gas than it did in 2023.
While the U.S. and many European nations have seen a declining share of their electricity production coming from coal, the continuing global growth in fossil fuel usage and CO2 emissions overshadows any cause for celebration.
Why is the rapid deployment of renewable energy not resulting in declining fossil fuel usage? The main culprit is economic growth, which consumes more energy and materials. So far, the amount of annual growth in the world’s energy usage has exceeded the amount of energy added each year from new solar panels and wind turbines. Fossil fuels have supplied the difference.
So, for the time being at least, we are not experiencing a real energy transition. All that humanity is doing is adding energy from renewable sources to the growing amount of energy it derives from fossil fuels. The much-touted energy transition could, if somewhat cynically, be described as just an aspirational grail.
How long would it take for humanity to fully replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, accounting for both the current growth trajectory of solar and wind power and also the continued expansion of the global economy at the recent rate of 3 percent per year? Economic models suggest the world could obtain most of its electricity from renewables by 2060 (though many nations are not on a path to reach even this modest marker). However, electricity represents only about 20 percent of the world’s final energy usage; transitioning the other 80 percent of energy usage would take longer—likely many decades.
However, to avert catastrophic climate change, the global scientific community says we need to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050—i.e., in just 25 years. Since it seems physically impossible to get all of our energy from renewables that soon while still growing the economy at recent rates, the IPCC (the international agency tasked with studying climate change and its possible remedies) assumes that humanity will somehow adopt carbon capture and sequestration technologies at scale—including technologies that have been shown not to work—even though there is no existing way of paying for this vast industrial build-out. This wishful thinking on the part of the IPCC is surely proof that the energy transition is not happening at sufficient speed.
Why isn’t it? One reason is that governments, businesses, and an awful lot of regular folks are clinging to an unrealistic goal for the transition. Another reason is that there is insufficient tactical and strategic global management of the overall effort. We’ll address these problems separately, and in the process uncover what it would take to nurture a true energy transition.
The Core of the Transition is Using Less Energy
At the heart of most discussions about the energy transition lie two enormous assumptions: that the transition will leave us with a global industrial economy similar to today’s in terms of its scale and services, and that this future renewable-energy economy will continue to grow, as the fossil-fueled economy has done in recent decades. But both of these assumptions are unrealistic. They flow from a largely unstated goal: we want the energy transition to be completely painless, with no sacrifice of profit or convenience. That goal is understandable since it would presumably be easier to enlist the public, governments, and businesses in an enormous new task if no cost is incurred (though the history of overwhelming societal effort and sacrifice during wartime might lead us to question that presumption).
But the energy transition will undoubtedly entail costs. Aside from tens of trillions of dollars in required monetary investment, the energy transition will itself require energy—lots of it. It will take energy to build solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, electric vehicles, electric farm machinery, zero-carbon aircraft, batteries, and the rest of the vast panoply of devices that would be required to operate an electrified global industrial economy at current scale.
In the early stages of the transition, most of that energy for building new low-carbon infrastructure will have to come from fossil fuels, since those fuels still supply over 80 percent of world energy (bootstrapping the transition—using only renewable energy to build transition-related machinery—would take far too long). So, the transition itself, especially if undertaken quickly, will entail a large pulse of carbon emissions. Teams of scientists have been seeking to estimate the size of that pulse; one group suggests that transition-related emissions will be substantial, ranging from 70 to 395 billion metric tons of CO2 “with a cross-scenario average of 195 GtCO2”—the equivalent of more than five years’ worth of global carbon CO2 emissions at current rates. The only ways to minimize these transition-related emissions would be, first, to aim to build a substantially smaller global energy system than the one we are trying to replace; and second, to significantly reduce energy usage for non-transition-related purposes—including transportation and manufacturing, cornerstones of our current economy—during the transition.
In addition to energy, the transition will require materials. While our current fossil-fuel energy regime extracts billions of tons of coal, oil, and gas, plus much smaller amounts of iron, bauxite, and other ores for making drills, pipelines, pumps, and other related equipment, the construction of renewable energy infrastructure at commensurate scale would require far larger quantities of non-fuel raw materials—including copper, iron, aluminum, lithium, iridium, gallium, sand, and rare earth elements.
While some estimates suggest that global reserves of these elements are sufficient for the initial build-out of renewable-energy infrastructure at scale, there are still two big challenges. First: obtaining these materials will require greatly expanding extractive industries along with their supply chains. These industries are inherently polluting, and they inevitably degrade land. For example, to produce one ton of copper ore, over 125 tons of rock and soil must be displaced. The rock-to-metal ratio is even worse for some other ores. Mining operations often take place on Indigenous peoples’ lands and the tailings from those operations often pollute rivers and streams. Non-human species and communities in the global South are already traumatized by land degradation and toxification; greatly expanding resource extraction—including deep-sea mining—would only deepen and multiply the wounds.
The second materials challenge: renewable energy infrastructure will have to be replaced periodically—every 25 to 50 years. Even if Earth’s minerals are sufficient for the first full-scale build-out of panels, turbines, and batteries, will limited mineral abundance permit continual replacements? Transition advocates say that we can avoid depleting the planet’s ores by recycling minerals and metals after constructing the first iteration of solar-and-wind technology. However, recycling is never complete, with some materials degraded in the process. One analysis suggests recycling would only buy a couple of centuries worth of time before depletion would bring an end to the regime of replaceable renewable-energy machines—and that’s assuming a widespread, coordinated implementation of recycling on an unprecedented scale. Again, the only real long-term solution is to aim for a much smaller global energy system.
The transition of society from fossil fuel dependency to reliance on low-carbon energy sources will be impossible to achieve without also reducing overall energy usage substantially and maintaining this lower rate of energy usage indefinitely. This transition isn’t just about building lots of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. It is about organizing society differently so that it uses much less energy and gets whatever energy it uses from sources that can be sustained over the long run.
How We Could Actually Do It, In Seven Concurrent Steps
Step one: Cap global fossil fuel extraction through global treaty, and annually lower the cap. We will not reduce carbon emissions until we reduce fossil fuel usage—it’s just that simple. Rather than trying to do this by adding renewable energy (which so far hasn’t resulted in a lessening of emissions), it makes far more sense simply to limit fossil fuel extraction. I wrote up the basics of a treaty along these lines several years ago in my book, The Oil Depletion Protocol.
Step two: Manage energy demand fairly. Reducing fossil fuel extraction presents a problem. Where will we get the energy required for transition purposes? Realistically, it can only be obtained by repurposing energy we’re currently using for non-transition purposes. That means most people, especially in highly industrialized countries, would have to use significantly less energy, both directly and also indirectly (in terms of energy embedded in products, and in services provided by society, such as road building). To accomplish this with the minimum of societal stress will require a social means of managing energy demand.
The fairest and most direct way to manage energy demand is via quota rationing. Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) is a system designed two decades ago by British economist David Fleming; it rewards energy savers and gently punishes energy guzzlers while ensuring that everyone gets energy they actually need. Every adult would be given an equal free entitlement of TEQ units each week. If you use less than your entitlement of units, you can sell your surplus. If you need more, you can buy them. All trading takes place at a single national price, which will rise and fall in line with demand.
Step three: Manage the public’s material expectations. Persuading people to accept using less energy will be hard if everyone still wants to use more. Therefore, it will be necessary to manage the public’s expectations. This may sound technocratic and scary, but in fact, society has already been managing the public’s expectations for over a century via advertising—which constantly delivers messages encouraging everyone to consume as much as they can. Now we need different messages to set different expectations.
What’s our objective in life? Is it to have as much stuff as possible, or to be happy and secure? Our current economic system assumes the former, and we have instituted an economic goal (constant growth) and an indicator (gross domestic product, or GDP) to help us achieve that goal. But ever-more people using ever-more stuff and energy leads to increased rates of depletion, pollution, and degradation, thereby imperiling the survival of humanity and the rest of the biosphere. In addition, the goal of happiness and security is more in line with cultural traditions and human psychology. If happiness and security are to be our goals, we should adopt indicators that help us achieve them. Instead of GDP, which simply measures the amount of money changing hands in a country annually, we should measure societal success by monitoring human well-being. The tiny country of Bhutan has been doing this for decades with its Gross National Happiness (GNH) indicator, which it has offered as a model for the rest of the world.
Step four: Aim for population decline. If population is always growing while available energy is capped, that means ever-less energy will be available per capita. Even if societies ditch GDP and adopt GNH, the prospect of continually declining energy availability will present adaptive challenges. How can energy scarcity impacts be minimized? The obvious solution: welcome population decline and plan accordingly.
Global population will start to decline sometime during this century. Fertility rates are falling worldwide, and China, Japan, Germany, and many other nations are already seeing population shrinkage. Rather than viewing this as a problem, we should see it as an opportunity. With fewer people, energy decline will be less of a burden on a per capita basis. There are also side benefits: a smaller population puts less pressure on wild nature, and often results in rising wages. We should stop pushing a pro-natalist agenda; ensure that women have the educational opportunities, social standing, security, and access to birth control to make their own childbearing choices; incentivize small families, and aim for the long-term goal of a stable global population closer to the number of people who were alive at the start of the fossil-fuel revolution (even though voluntary population shrinkage will be too slow to help us much in reaching immediate emissions reduction targets).
Step five: Target technological research and development to the transition. Today the main test of any new technology is simply its profitability. However, the transition will require new technologies to meet an entirely different set of criteria, including low-energy operation and minimization of exotic and toxic materials. Fortunately, there is already a subculture of engineers developing low-energy and intermediate technologies that could help run a right-sized circular economy.
Step six: Institute technological triage. Many of our existing technologies don’t meet these new criteria. So, during the transition, we will be letting go of familiar but ultimately destructive and unsustainable machines.
Some energy-guzzling machines—such as gasoline-powered leaf blowers—will be easy to say goodbye to. Commercial aircraft will be harder. Artificial intelligence is an energy guzzler we managed to live without until very recently; perhaps it’s best if we bid it a quick farewell. Cruise ships? Easy: downsize them, replace their engines with sails, and expect to take just one grand voyage during your lifetime. Weapons industries offer plenty of examples of machines we could live without. Of course, giving up some of our labor-saving devices will require us to learn useful skills—which could end up providing us with more exercise. For guidance along these lines, consult the rich literature of technology criticism.
Step seven: Help nature absorb excess carbon. The IPCC is right: if we’re to avert catastrophic climate change we need to capture carbon from the air and sequester it for a long time. But not with machines. Nature already removes and stores enormous amounts of carbon; we just need to help it do more (rather than reducing its carbon-capturing capabilities, which is what humanity is doing now). Reform agriculture to build soil rather than destroy it. Restore ecosystems, including grasslands, wetlands, forests, and coral reefs.
Implementing these seven steps will change everything. The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier.
Granted, this seven-step program appears politically unachievable today. But that’s largely because humanity hasn’t yet fully faced the failure of our current path of prioritizing immediate profits and comfort above long-term survival—and the consequences of that failure. Given better knowledge of where we’re currently headed, and the alternatives, what is politically impossible today could quickly become inevitable.
Social philosopher Roman Krznaric writes that profound social transformations are often tied to wars, natural disasters, or revolutions. But crisis alone is not positively transformative. There must also be ideas available for different ways to organize society, and social movements energized by those ideas. We have a crisis and (as we have just seen) some good ideas for how to do things differently. Now we need a movement.
Building a movement takes political and social organizing skills, time, and hard work. Even if you don’t have the skills for organizing, you can help the cause by learning what a real energy transition requires and then educating the people you know; by advocating for degrowth or related policies; and by reducing your own energy and materials consumption. Calculate your ecological footprint and shrink it over time, using goals and strategies, and tell your family and friends what you are doing and why.
Even with a new social movement advocating for a real energy transition, there is no guarantee that civilization will emerge from this century of unraveling in a recognizable form. But we all need to understand: this is a fight for survival in which cooperation and sacrifice are required, just as in total war. Until we feel that level of shared urgency, there will be no real energy transition and little prospect for a desirable human future.
