Editor’s note: This article, which originally appeared in The Ecologist, clearly shows the strong contradiction between the bright green hope of a transition to “green energy” and the material reality. The dirty secret of “Green energy” is that it requires a lot of rare resources which have to be extracted by heavy mining.
By Hannibal Rhoades
Communities, organisations and academics write to the EU to reject plans for a mining-heavy EU Green Deal.
A global coalition of more than 180 community platforms, human rights and environmental organisations and academics from 36 nations is calling on the EU to abandon its plans to massively expand dirty mining as part of EU Green Deal and Green Recovery plans.
The EU policies and plans will drastically increase destructive mining in Europe and in the Global South if left unchanged, which is bad news for the climate, ecosystems and human rights around the world, the coalition explains.
“The EU is embarking on a desperate plunder for raw materials,” says Meadhbh Bolger, the resource justice campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe.
Transition
“Instead of delivering a greener economy, the European Commission’s plans will lead to more extraction beyond ecological limits, more exploitation of communities and their land, and new toxic trade deals. Europe is consuming as if we had three planets available.”
The signatories – coordinated by the European Working Group at the Yes to Life, No to Mining campaign – are united in support of an urgent and rapid transition to renewable energy.
However, they argue that relying on expanding mining to meet the material needs of this transition will replicate the injustices, destruction and dangerous assumptions that have caused climate breakdown in the first place.
Threats
“The EU growth and Green Deal plans must consider a deep respect of the rights of affected communities in the Global South, that are opposing the destruction of their lands, defending water and even their lives,” said Guadalupe Rodriguez, the Latin American contact person for the global Yes to Life, No to Mining solidarity network.
“A strong collective voice is arising from affected communities around the planet, denouncing hundreds of new mining projects for European consumption. Their urgent message needs to be heard in the North: yes to life – no to mining.”
Yvonne Orengo of Andrew Lees Trust, which is supporting mining affected communities in Madagascar, added: “Research shows that a mining-intensive green transition will pose significant new threats to biodiversity that is critical to regulating our shared climate. It is absolutely clear we cannot mine our way out of the climate crisis.
Circularity
“Moreover, there is no such thing as ‘green mining’. We need an EU Green Deal that addresses the root causes of climate change, including the role that mining and extractivism play in biodiversity loss.”
The statement sets out a number of actions the EU can take to change course towards climate and environmental justice, including recognising in law communities’ Right to Say No to unwanted extractive projects and respect for Indigenous Peoples’ right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent.
Joám Evans, from the Froxán community in Galicia, said: “Communities fighting at the frontlines of extraction are forcing minerals to stay in the ground. This is critical for helping us take circularity seriously and rethink the ideology of growth. Communities have a right to say no and will enforce it regardless of greenwashing, corruption and repression.”
Realign
Other recommendations take aim at EU overconsumption of minerals and energy, calling for binding targets to reduce EU material consumption of materials in absolute terms and for just de-growth strategies, not ‘green growth’ or ‘decoupling’, to be placed at the heart of EU climate and environmental action.
Diego Marin of the European Environmental Bureau concluded: “Simply put, we need to drastically reduce the amount of resources used and consumed in the EU and move to truly circular solutions.
“Legislation like the EU battery regulation is a step in the right direction, but must go further. Transport decarbonisation, decarbonisation of all kinds, in fact, can only be achieved with a strong reduction in demand. We need to realign our priorities to meet climate goals.”
This Author
Hannibal Rhoades is YLNM contact person for Northern Europe and head of communications at The Gaia Foundation (UK).
Editor’s note: While it’s true that “it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems”, the real root of human destructiveness lies further back in history, when groups of people started agriculture, building cities and forming human supremist ideologies that disconnected human cultures from all other living beings.
We thought climate catastrophe the main danger. Now we know there is another. A double-whammy ecological crisis threatens collapse into dystopian chaos.
“Pathogens, a great and terrible global threat to human and many a non-human alike, [are] as much a Sword of Damocles hovering above civilisation as climate change.”
Evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace wrote this in 2015. But he and many colleagues have been issuing increasingly urgent warnings since the 1990s that globalised agribusiness is breeding and spreading new, deadly, fast-transmission viruses.
The urgency around pandemics began to ramp up around the same time calls for climate action became mainstream. Many of us have been focused on the climate emergency – and nothing here should be taken to imply we were wrong – but the last year has taught a sharp lesson: deadly pathogens pose an equally menacing threat to human civilisation.
Catastrophe
Since the first United Nations COP conference on global warming in 1995, the climate emergency has got much worse. Carbon emissions have accelerated from 26 billion tonnes in 1995 to 37 billion tonnes in 2018. Atmospheric concentrations have risen from 350ppm in 1990 to 410ppm today. Half the increase in average global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution has occurred since 1995. The average volume of Arctic sea-ice has roughly halved in the last 40 years. Whatever the metric, the same story.
The effects are all around us. More frequent and more intense heat-waves are causing increases in wildfires, droughts, and desertification. Rising and warming seas are causing heavier rainfall, more serious flooding, more frequent mega-storms, and the inundation of coastal areas. These changes are driving the world’s sixth mass extinction, with species loss running at 1,000 times the normal rate. Climate change is destroying livelihoods, increasing disease, displacing people.
We stand on the brink of critical tipping-points when incremental shifts lead to sudden and irreversible lurches in the Earth’s ecosystem. Among the potential tipping-points are: abrupt collapse of the West Antarctic ice-sheet; abrupt collapse of the East Antarctic ice-sheet; abrupt collapse of the Greenland ice-sheet; thawing of Arctic permafrost and release of methane gas; rapid deforestation of the Amazon; and failure of the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Some scientists fear a ‘global cascade’ of interacting tipping-points.
The failure of the global political elite is systemic. It is not that we do not know what to do. It is not that the wrong policies have been adopted. It is that the economic and geopolitical system – the current world order – cannot deliver the radical action necessary.
The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), representing the world’s leading industrial economies, considered the pre-pandemic global growth rate of three percent to have been too low. Yet such annual growth rate means a doubling in the size of the world economy every quarter century.
The fossil-fuel corporations plan to extract twice the amount of coal, oil, and gas between now and 2030 than can be burned if we are to restrict global temperature rise to the 1.5ºC ‘aim’ of the Paris Agreement.
This ‘aim’ is not ambitious enough: most climate scientists predict severe damage to the Earth’s eco-system with this level of warming. But even this ‘aim’ falls well below the ‘pledges’ of the COP participants, which, even if implemented, are expected to result in a disastrous 3ºC of global warming. Many leading scientists think we are heading for at least 4ºC of global warming.
Metabolic
The term ‘metabolic rift’ has been used by some radical commentators, like John Bellamy Foster, to describe what is happening. I prefer ‘rupture’ because it better captures the violence of a corporate capitalist system that is out of control and tearing apart human societies and natural ecosystems.
Metabolism is a scientific word to do with how chemical changes reconfigure energy and sustain life. All of us need to get science-wise, to understand what is happening to our planet, to get a handle on what I am calling the ‘Dual Metabolic Rupture’.
Humans are part of Nature. On the one hand, we are animals with material needs and organic form. On the other, our actions impact upon the rest of Nature, sometimes degrading it, sometimes remodelling it, always having an effect.
All the products of human labour are therefore part of Nature. Everything we do to provide ourselves with a livelihood involves drawing upon the resources of Nature and refashioning them into new forms.
These processes are not reversible, but they may be repeatable. If a glacier melts because the temperature rises, the water of which it is formed flows away. If a new glacier forms in the same place when the temperature falls again, it must be comprised of another body of water. In Nature, as in Society, everything is process and motion.
The energy involved in natural processes is a constant: it can be endlessly recycled, but it cannot be destroyed, so whatever you do, it will still be there in one form or another. This is one of the basic laws of physics (known as ‘the First Law of Thermodynamics’).
It follows that human beings may interact with Nature in ways that are ‘renewable’ or ‘sustainable’ – where energy is recycled in essentially repetitive ways – or in other ways that cause a metabolic ‘rupture’ or ‘rift’ – where energy is reconstituted as a destructive force.
Let us take two contrasting examples. A hoe-cultivator who harvests a garden plot of cassava, feeds the tubers and leaves to her pigs, and then lets them roam to manure the plot, is engaged in a recycling of energy that is ecologically sustainable.
Corporations that extract oil, refine it into petroleum, and then sell it to other corporations to burn in jet engines are doing something quite different: theirs is not a renewable process, but a release of carbon waste into the atmosphere and a permanent remodelling of the Earth’s metabolism.
The basic rhythms of pre-capitalist societies were determined by the cycle of the seasons. But capitalism is a system of competitive capital accumulation hard-wired by the profit motive for exponential growth.
The former were always essentially local or regional, so that what happened in one place had limited impact in others: the latter is now a fully globalised system which has the whole of humanity and the entire global environment in its grasp.
In the end, it is simple: it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems.
But that’s not all it’s doing.
Anthropocene
The system – let’s define it: globalised, financialised monopoly-capitalism – is blind to everything except the balance sheet, the bottom line, the annual profit.
The lords of capital have turned the Earth – its lands, its waters, its minerals – into private property. They have commodified its ecosystems and appropriated its bounty. And in their wake they spew waste and pollution that become ‘externalities’ for which others must pay.
Where to start? The catalogue of devastation is so long. Forests are cut down, wetlands drained, soils eroded. Water extraction turns farmland into desert. Chemicals are dumped in oceans, lakes, and rivers. Toxins leak into groundwater. Fertilisers, herbicides, and pesticides contaminate food supplies.
Landfills overflow with synthetic waste. Nuclear power plants melt down and fill air, land, and sea with carcinogenic particles. A chemical smog fills urban streets and poisons children on the way to school. Plastic waste degrades into trillions of microscopic specks that infect every living organism.
Now, from deep within this mayhem, a second titan of destruction has emerged to stand alongside the mega-threat of climate change: pandemic disease.
Both titans are formed of trillions of tiny particles. Climate change is driven by atoms of carbon dioxide – tiny particles of dead organic matter pumped into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned. Pandemic disease is driven by microscopic parasites – tiny particles of living organic matter that breed, spread, and evolve by infecting the bodies of animals.
But that does not mean Covid-19 is a natural disaster, any more than carbon pollution. Nor is it an Act of God or a ‘Chinese’ conspiracy. Covid is a human-made catastrophe, as much an artefact of the Anthropocene as global warming.
I agree with colleagues who argue that the Holocene is over. This is the term we have used to describe the last 11,700 years of Earth history, since the end of the last Ice Age – until now. From around 1950, and at an accelerating rate since, the Earth system has been undergoing radical change as a result of human action. We have entered a new geological era in which Anthropos (the Greek word for human) is the primary agent of change. The primary form of change is metabolic rupture.
Covid-19 is a pandemic disease of the Anthropocene’s metabolic rupture.
Pandemic
Mainstream commentary on the pandemic is refracted through a neoliberal prism. Attention focuses on immediate problems and proximate causes. I am not talking about serial liars like Johnson and his third-rate cabinet of public-school toffs and corporate spivs. I am talking about more honest commentators keen to see through the spin and smoke-cloud that shields a corrupt and incompetent political class.
But it is not enough to expose the negligence, crony capitalism, and eugenicist experiments of the Tories – the failure of test-and-trace, the lack of PPE, the locking down too late and lifting too early, the discharging of the sick into care homes, the spreading of the virus in schools and universities, and so much more.
It is necessary, but not enough. The narcissistic charlatan who runs the government might eventually be thrown out. But so what? There is a much bigger issue: the metabolic rupture between corporate agribusiness and natural ecology that has created the multiple global incubators of new deadly diseases.
In 1950, a large proportion of the Earth’s people were peasant farmers, predominantly in the Global South. As recently as 1980, only 20 percent of China’s population was urban; the proportion today is 60 percent. A growing number of those who remain in the villages, moreover, have been transformed into wage-labourers.
The advance of corporate agribusiness is relentless. As I write, the Hindu-chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi is facing an uprising of small farmers whose livelihoods are threatened with destruction by neoliberal ‘reform’. So desperate is their plight that record numbers of India’s small farmers have been committing suicide.
As well as destroying traditional communities, agribusiness is expanding into the wilderness, uprooting forests, destroying the diversity and balance of natural ecologies, and replacing them with vast monocultures. Half the habitable surface of the Earth is now devoted to agriculture, with millions of acres added every year.
Much of the crop-land produces animal feed for the hundreds of millions of cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry being fast-fattened for the global supply-chains that loop the world. The mega-complexes of Big Farm’s industrialised animal production are laced around and between the mega-slums of the Global South’s ever-growing urban proletariat.
This is what links a remote bat-cave in hinterland China with the morgues of New York and London. Big Farm batters down natural ecology, destroying diversity and firebreaks. Viruses that would have burnt themselves out in the forest for lack of carriers adapt to a new ecology of monoculture, animal factories, and slum cities; they mutate and evolve and then achieve fast-track transmission through mass concentrations of the same species.
The global supply-chains of giant transnationals with operations in half a dozen countries and markets in a thousand cities do the rest.
Once a new variant is established, it replicates by the trillion at hyper-speed, throwing up chance mutations, testing new ways of spreading. The disease becomes endemic and chronic – embedded in human society – and continues to evolve, waging a relentless life-or-death struggle against lockdowns and vaccines by constant shape-sifting in its efforts to breach the defences.
Warning
This – the pandemic diseases created and spread by corporate agribusiness – is then layered over societies mired in poverty and stripped of public health-provision by neoliberal ‘structural adjustment programmes’, privatisation, and austerity cuts.
The epidemiologists have been warning of the dangers for a quarter of a century. There have been dozens of outbreaks of different viruses or variants, all involving a similar basic mechanism: the introduction of a wild-animal virus, its transmission and evolution through factory-farm complexes, a jump from animal to human, often in mutant form, and rapid global spread through transnational supply-chains.
The warning, endlessly repeated, was that, sooner or later, one of the new diseases created by neoliberal capitalism would take off. But there is no profit in pandemic precaution.
The improvised plague cemeteries; the body-bags in the morgues; the patients breathing through ventilators; the traumatised and exhausted health workers; the everyday folk left grieving; the jobs lost, businesses gone bust, homes lost to the bailiffs; the swelling toll of mental breakdowns; the loneliness, the shrivelled lives, the sense of desolation and despair: all this and more amount to so many ‘externalities’ for the profit machine.
The machine carries on. It is being recalibrated. Some businesses may be shutting down, but big capital is highly mobile. The money moves at click-key speed. It flows from a place where profits are down to another where they are up.
America’s 660 billionaires, for example, are doing just fine right now. Since March last year, their wealth has increased 39 percent, from just under $3 trillion to more than $4 trillion today. It is the rest of us, of course, who pay for the system’s ‘externalities’.
Those ‘externalities’ now take the form of a Dual Metabolic Rupture between humanity and the planet, as industrial pollution destroys our ecosystem, and agribusiness generates wave after wave of killer pathogen. We are the inhabitants of a new geological age – the Anthropocene – in which globalised, financialised monopoly-capitalism has become an existential threat to life on Earth.
What happens next depends on what we do. The imperative to get active has never been greater.
In a recent May 29 Bend Bulletin article, Senator Merkley asserted he “wants to boost spending on forest management by $1 billion annually through work, such as thinning and prescribed burning, to reduce the prospects of catastrophic wildfires.”
An unexamined assumption is that thinning/logging work significantly reduces the pejoratively named “catastrophic” fires.
The Holiday Farm Fire burned the western slopes of the Cascades driven by extreme fire weather conditions, including high winds, charred acres of clearcuts, and other “fuel reductions.” Photo George Wuerthner.
Despite assertions from the Forest Service and others who will gain financially from inflated budgets to log our forests, one needs to ask if “fuel reductions” work to halt wildfires when burning under extreme fire weather conditions. That qualifier is important. All large blazes, like those that charred the western Cascades last Labor Day, burn swiftly through logged sites and other “fuel reductions.”
All such blazes occur under drought conditions, high temps, low humidity, and high winds. Thinning/logging and prescribed fires will not significantly preclude large blazes burning under extreme fire weather conditions.
This fire in the Scratchgravel Hills by Helena, Montana, driven by 50 mph, burned through this forest that had been thinned just six months prior to the blaze. Photo George Wuerthner.
I have traveled extensively around the West to view the aftermath of the largest fires, and every single one occurred during extreme fire weather conditions. Nothing, including thinning, logging, and prescribed burns, works to contain such fires when you have these conditions. I know of no exceptions.
Such blazes are only contained when the weather conditions change. Logging does not change the weather.
When it “appears” that fuel reductions worked under extreme conditions, you need to examine the actual burn circumstances during the blaze—the intensity of fire changes hour by hour.
Proponents of forest thinning, including Merkley, suggest previous thinning projects saved Sisters, Oregon from the 2017 Milli Fire that burned within 2-3 miles of town. Yet if you read the Fire Incident Report carefully, such conclusions are questionable.
Thinned ponderosa pine stand near Sisters, Oregon, has resulted in a mono-culture of nearly even-aged forest that degrades the forest ecosystem and doesn’t stop fires burning under extreme fire weather. Thinning kills trees to preclude natural processes from killing trees. Photo George Wuerthner.
The Milli Fire burned through two previous burns (Pole Creek and Black Crater), presumably “fuel reductions.” It also burned through some thinned stands before thinning “saved” Sisters.
The red outline shows the wind-driven effect of the Milli Fire. A change in wind direction “saved” Sisters—photo USFS.
What happened is that the wind that had been moving the fire towards Sisters shifted, pushing the fire west and north into lava fields in the Three Sisters Wilderness.
Did thinning save Sisters? Maybe? However, a more nuanced analysis might conclude that a change in weather patterns is what “saved” Sisters.
Worse for our communities is that the Forest Service is “selling” a myth. Thinning/logging has been shown to increase fire spread. Thinning opens the forest to more wind penetration and more soil drying—both factors are conducive to fire spread during extreme fire weather.
Logging/thinning on the Deschutes NF leaves many fine fuels on the ground, often exacerbating fire spread. Photo George Wuerthner.
What burns in wildfires are the fine fuels: grass, shrubs, pine needles, small trees, and so forth. Large trees that thinning removes typically do not burn. That is why we have “snags” after a severe fire.
While thinning and prescribed burning treatments might lower fire intensity briefly immediately after the treatment, the chances that a fire will encounter a treatment is extremely rare.
Ironically, fuel reduction often increases the percentage of fine fuels on a site, ensuring that a blaze can readily spread if driven by high winds.
Ignored in the race to log our forests is that high severity fires are essential to healthy forest ecosystems. The biodiversity they produce often exceeds what is found in “green forests.”
Snags are critical to a healthy forest ecosystem. This is a sign of forest “health.” Photo George Wuerthner.
So the “story” the FS sells that thinning is “improving” forest health is another inaccurate statement. Dead trees resulting from fires, bark beetles, and other natural factors are critical to healthy forest ecosystems.
A sanitized forest stand (restoration) on the Deschutes NF, Oregon. Note the lack of small trees, lack of species diversity, lack of snags, down wood, and even shrubs. Photo George Wuerthner.
Thinning/logging is not benign. There are many impacts to the forest ecosystem from “restoration,” “fuel reductions,” and other euphemisms used to justify commercial logging. These include the spread of weeds, sedimentation in streams from logging roads, displacement of sensitive wildlife, loss of biomass, and loss of carbon storage.
Ultimately, we must deal with the GHG emissions that drive climate change, increasing drought, variable weather, and the conditions that favor large blazes.
In the meantime, increasing thinning and prescribed burning, except in the immediate area around communities, does little to protect homes. A much better way to spend scarce funds is to assist communities and homeowners in reducing the flammability of homes, burying power lines, and precluding new home construction in fire-prone areas.
SIXTEEN MILLION YEARS AGO, a volcano erupted over the Yellowstone hotspot near the present-day border of Oregon and Nevada. The blast expelled 1,000 cubic kilometers of rhyolite lava as the land collapsed into a 30-mile-long, keyhole-shaped caldera. Magma, ash, and other sediments entered the keyhole, and for the next million years the clay-rich land rose and reformed like bread dough in a proofing drawer. Water mixed with the clay, bringing to Earth’s surface a swirl of chemical elements like uranium, mercury, and another metal that, when isolated and cut, shines silvery white — lithium.
Today, above ground, the McDermitt Caldera is a remote landscape of rocky outcrops, high-desert plateaus, and meadows of wild rye. As in much of the Great Basin, desert plants fill the “currents, tides, eddies, and embayments” of this “sagebrush ocean,” as writer Stephen Trimble once described it. Lithium rests beneath this dynamic sea.
On the southwest edge of the caldera, in Humboldt County, Nevada, nestled between the Double H Mountains to the south and the Montana range to the north, Thacker Pass rides the crest of a sagebrush wave. The pass is a corridor for herds of migrating pronghorn and mule deer. Overhead, golden eagles hunt for kangaroo rats. Below, greater sage grouse perform their mating dance. In the nearby springs and drainages, an endemic snail called the Kings River pyrg and the imperiled Lahontan cutthroat trout persist on precious water.
Editor’s note: The company has already sold a handful of its onshore oil blocks over the past 10 years, citing the need to cut risk due to community unrest and continued sabotage attacks on its oil installations. These blocks had been snapped up by Nigerian indigenous operators including Seplat Petroleum, Aiteo E&P, First Hydrocarbons and NPDC.
Climate campaigners in Africa and around the world on Friday continued demonstrations against Total, with activists accusing the French oil giant of ecocide, human rights violations, and greenwashing in connection with fossil fuel projects in Uganda.
On the 145th week of Fridays for Future climate strike protests, members of the movement in Uganda global allies drew attention to the harmful effects of fossil fuel development on the environment, ecosystems, communities, and livelihoods.
Friday’s actions followed protests at Total petrol stations in Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, and Uganda on Tuesday—celebrated each year as Africa Day—against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), now under construction, and the Mozambique Liquefied Natural Gas project.
“Total’s fossil fuel developments pose grave risks to protected environments, water sources, and wetlands in the Great Lakes and East Africa regions,” said Andre Moliro, an activist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during Tuesday’s pan-African protests.
“Communities have been raising concerns on the impact of oil extraction on Lake Albert fisheries and the disastrous consequences of an oil spill in Lake Victoria, that would affect millions of people that rely on the two lakes for their livelihoods, watersheds for drinking water, and food production,” he added.
In Uganda, opposing oil development—an expected multi-billion-dollar boon to the landlocked nation’s economy—can be risky business. On Monday, police in Buliisa arrested Ugandan human rights defender Maxwell Atuhura and Italian journalist Federica Marsi.
According to Energy Voice, Atuhura—who works with the African Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), one of half a dozen NGOs that have pursued legal action against Total—and Marsi were about to meet with local community members when they were apprehended.
Marsi was released Monday and reportedly told to leave the oil region “before bad things happen.” She was briefly rearrested later in the day. Atuhura remains in police custody. The World Organization Against Torture has issued an urgent appeal for intervention in his case.
United Nations special rapporteurs and international human rights groups have previously expressed serious concern over abuses perpetrated against land defenders and journalists in Uganda. Despite the risks, actions against EACOP and the related Tilenga Development Project continue.
“We cannot drink oil. This is why we cannot accept the construction of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline,” Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate, founder of the Rise Up Movement, said during the Africa Day action. “It is going to cause massive displacement of people [and the] destruction of ecosystems and wildlife habitats.”
“We have no future in extraction of oil because it only means destroying the livelihoods of the people and the planet,” Nakate added. “It is time to choose people above pipelines. It is time to rise up for the people and the planet.”
If completed, the $3.5 billion, nearly 900-mile EACOP will transport up to 230,000 barrels of crude oil per day from fields in the Lake Albert region of western Uganda through the world’s longest electrically heated pipeline to the Tanzanian port city of Tanga on the Indian Ocean.
In partnership with China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and the Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC), Total is also leading the Tilenga Development Project, which involves the drilling of 400 wells in dozens of locations, including iniside the richly biodiverse Murchison Falls National Park.
Total says the project will “generate a positive net impact on biodiversity,” a claim vehemently rejected by environmentalists.
“Imagine a tropical version of the Alaskan oil pipeline,” environmental author Fred Pearce wrote of EACOP last year. “Only longer. And passing through critical elephant, lion, and chimpanzee habitats and 12 forest reserves, skirting Africa’s largest lake, and crossing more than 200 rivers and thousands of farms before reaching the Indian Ocean—where its version of the Exxon Valdez disaster would pour crude oil into some of Africa’s most biodiverse mangroves and coral reefs.”
Although Total claims it chose the EACOP route to “minimize the number of residents relocated,” local residents and international NGOs say the pipeline’s impact will be anything but minimal.
According toMongabay, more than 12,000 families will be displaced from their ancestral lands to make way for the pipeline, two-thirds of which will pass through agricultural zones. Farmers in the pipeline’s path and the Lake Albert oil region have joined civil society groups and international organizations in voicing their opposition to the EACOP and Tilenga projects.
The #StopEACOP coalition, which is made up of local and international activists and organizations, is attempting to block funding of the project by appealing to banks, investors, and insurance companies. A March open letter signed by more than 250 groups urged 25 commercial banks to not finance the pipeline.
In 2017, WWF Uganda published a report warning that the pipeline “is likely to lead to significant disturbance, fragmentation, and increased poaching within important biodiversity and natural habitats” that are home to species including chimpanzees, elephants, and lions.
Wildlife forced from natural habitats by oil development has in turn caused severe disruptions to farming families.
“We have always had a problem of human-wildlife conflict in this village, but with drilling and road construction across the park, the invasions are more frequent,” Elly Munguryeki, a farmer living just outside Murchison Falls National Park, told South Africa’s Mail & Guardian earlier this month.
“We keep reporting the losses to park authorities but nothing happens,” said Munguryeki. “Each night a herd of buffalo, baboons, and hippos from the park would invade my farm and neighbouring plots and eat our crops until dawn. Whatever they left would be eaten by baboons and wild pigs during the day, forcing us to harvest premature crops.”
A 2020 Oxfam report (pdf) noted the EACOP “will cross poor, rural communities in both Uganda and Tanzania that lack the political and financial capital of the project stakeholders.”
“The lopsided complications of this power dynamic are well-documented in similar extractive industry projects,” the report stated. “Powerful companies are often able to hide their operations behind local contractors and permissive government authorities. Often the only hope that local communities have for remediation or justice is through local government bodies that are often weak, fragile, or captured by corporate and national interests.”
Mary, an Ugandan farmer in Rakai near the Tanzanian border who was interviewed for the report, said that “when this pipeline project came, they promised us too many things. Up to now they have done nothing.”
“What makes me worried is that they took my land but I have not yet been compensated,” she claimed.
A community member from Rujunju village, Kikuube District in Uganda told the report’s authors that “the government and oil companies have not informed us about the negative impact that the EACOP will have on our well-being. All they tell us are good things that the EACOP will bring like roads and jobs. We also want to know the negative impact of the pipeline so that we can make informed decisions.”
While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken draws attention to climate change in the Arctic at meetings with other national officials this week in Iceland, an even greater threat looms on the other side of the planet.
New research shows it is Antarctica that may force a reckoning between the choices countries make today about greenhouse gas emissions and the future survival of their coastlines and coastal cities, from New York to Shanghai.
That reckoning may come much sooner than people realize.
Scientists have long known that the Antarctic ice sheet has physical tipping points, beyond which ice loss can accelerate out of control. The new study, published in the journal Nature, finds that the Antarctica ice sheet could reach a critical tipping point in a few decades, when today’s elementary school kids are raising their families.
The results mean a common argument for not reducing greenhouse gas emissions now – that future technological advancement can save us later – is likely to fail.
A satellite image shows the long flow lines as a glacier moves ice into Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf, on the right. The red patches mark bedrock. USGS
The new study shows that if emissions continue at their current pace, by about 2060 the Antarctic ice sheet will have crossed a critical threshold and committed the world to sea level rise that is not reversible on human timescales. Pulling carbon dioxide out of the air at that point won’t stop the ice loss, it shows, and by 2100, sea level could be rising more than 10 times faster than today.
The tipping point
Antarctica has several protective ice shelves that fan out into the ocean ahead of the continent’s constantly flowing glaciers, slowing the land-based glaciers’ flow to the sea. But those shelves can thin and break up as warmer water moves in under them.
As ice shelves break up, that can expose towering ice cliffs that may not be able to stand on their own.
There are two potential instabilities at this point. Parts of the Antarctic ice sheet are grounded below sea level on bedrock that slopes inward toward the center of the continent, so warming ocean water can eat around their lower edges, destabilizing them and causing them to retreat downslope rapidly. Above the water, surface melting and rain can open fractures in the ice.
The study used computer modeling based on the physics of ice sheets and found that above 2 C (3.6 F) of warming, Antarctica will see a sharp jump in ice loss, triggered by the rapid loss of ice through the massive Thwaites Glacier. This glacier drains an area the size of Florida or Britain and is the focus of intense study by U.S. and U.K. scientists.
Other projections don’t account for ice cliff instability and generally arrive at lower estimates for the rate of sea level rise. While much of the press coverage that followed the new paper’s release focused on differences between these two approaches, both reach the same fundamental conclusions: The magnitude of sea level rise can be drastically reduced by meeting the Paris Agreement targets, and physical instabilities in the Antarctic ice sheet can lead to rapid acceleration in sea level rise.
The disaster doesn’t stop in 2100
The new study, led by Robert DeConto, David Pollard and Richard Alley, is one of the few that looks beyond this century. One of us is a co-author.
It shows that if today’s high emissions continued unabated through 2100, sea level rise would explode, exceeding 2.3 inches (6 cm) per year by 2150. By 2300, sea level would be 10 times higher than it is expected to be if countries meet the Paris Agreement goals. A warmer and softer ice sheet and a warming ocean holding its heat for centuries all prevent refreezing of Antarctica’s protective ice shelves, leading to a very different world.
The vast majority of the pathways for meeting the Paris Agreement expect emissions will overshoot its goals of keeping warming under 1.5 C (2.7 F) or 2 C (3.6 F), and then count on future advances in technology to remove enough carbon dioxide from the air later to lower the temperature again. The rest require a 50% cut in emissions globally by 2030.
Although a majority of countries – including the U.S., U.K. and European Union – have set that as a goal, current policies globally would result in just a 1% reduction by 2030.
It’s all about reducing emissions quickly
Some other researchers suggest that ice cliffs in Antarctica might not collapse as quickly as those in Greenland. But given their size and current rates of warming – far faster than in the historic record – what if they instead collapse more quickly?
Second, allowing global warming to overshoot 2 C is not a realistic option for coastal communities or the global economy. The comforting prospect of technological fixes allowing a later return to normal is an illusion that will leave coastlines under many feet of water, with devastating economic impacts.
Third, policies today must take the long view, because they can have irreversible impacts for Antarctica’s ice and the world. Over the past decades, much of the focus on rapid climate change has been on the Arctic and its rich tapestry of Indigenous cultures and ecosystems that are under threat.
As scientists learn more about Antarctica, it is becoming clear that it is this continent – with no permanent human presence at all – that will determine the state of the planet where today’s children and their children will live.
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