This article describes the madness of consumption, the accumulation of things, and the impact of consumerism on the human state of being and on the natural world.
According to Ron Milo and his colleagues at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, in 2020 the mass of artificial, human made objects on Earth is likely greater than the mass of all living things. The human-made world – steel, concrete, ships, buildings, vehicles, bridges, overpasses, warehouses, plastic junk…weighs more than the mass of all living things, including forests, marine and terrestrial mammals, fish, and insects. And humans.
The same study points out that, for each person on Earth, a quantity of “anthropogenic mass” greater than their body weight is produced each week. That’s right, your weight in human-made crap is produced EVERY WEEK. Just for you. Have we built enough STUFF yet?
Do we have enough things?
We surround ourselves in a sterile, artificial, soulless world of our own making, becoming ever more dependent on our machines and edifices as we destroy the very world around us. We are flies trapped in amber, struggling fruitlessly to free ourselves as the trap solidifies. We will make amazing fossils.
We are also creating smarter and smarter things – cars that drive themselves, hand held computers that do far more than we could ever need them to, appliances and homes wired to the global internet, tiny chips that hold more information than we could read in a hundred years, jet liners that pilot themselves, spacecraft that spy on the cosmos, gene splicers that alter the very stuff of life.
How soon ‘til all this STUFF turns on us?
The Singularity will occur when artificial intelligence escapes the control of humanity and increases until it far exceeds human intelligence. Artificial intelligence may figure out to reproduce itself and completely take over, making copies of itself at warp speed, spreading in a nightmare of self-replicating von Neumann machines free of human interference. At this point humans may have lost control of their own destiny. We will have entered the Matrix.
Perhaps the machines have already taken over. When was the last time you looked your phone? 10 minutes ago? Five? Two? Instead of a singularity, it has been a gradual stealth campaign. Machines have invaded our minds via screens and headphones and chimes and ringtones. They demand our constant devotion and attention. Especially now, in the pandemic, when we can rarely meet as flesh and blood humans but must talk to pitiful simulations of our friends and family and colleagues, flattened replicas that chatter through tiny speakers, faces that squint and smile and try to make sense of the mess they are in, try to connect in some way across the void of contact.
We occasionally peel away from our screens to climb into our rolling deathboxes and spew more carbon into the frying atmosphere, an atmosphere rapidly transforming into one giant human artifact, albeit one we do not control but only alter and ruin willy-nilly with little regard for the rapidly approaching hell on Earth we are creating.
Those artifacts we blithely build become ever more necessary yet deadly as the climate becomes more hostile, as society consumes itself cannibal-like, becoming a death spiral of conspiracy theories, hate, tribalism and simmering warfare.
Note how the machines spread division.
Computer screens display social media, which blares conspiracy theories and false news and fear, turning human society into tribes ruled by hatred of others. Divide and conquer. Not only human destiny is at stake. The destiny of life on Earth may be forfeit. Machines will have no incentive to preserve living things, nor wilderness, nor oceans. All will be raw material for their growth and their ever-increasing spread. They will link in one giant brain, an Internet gone berserk.
Total takeover by artificial intelligence may never occur. But we are approaching what you might call the physical singularity – the growth of human systems, spun out of control. No one has the means nor the will to stop what we have set loose – the constant and multiplying conversion of natural life and living systems into human junk. We must have more, always more. A few words to your Smart Speaker or clicks on your keypad and more stuff arrives on your porch, delivered for a price. A constant flood of merchandise flows through factories, warehouses, into trucks and planes and onto highways and into our cities onto our doorsteps.
We bring it in and add it to the pile.
And much of this Stuff either sits unused – in the billions of storage units strewn across the landscape or on the RV and boat storage lots – or worse, it gets thrown out. Landfills overflow with reuseable, recyclable resources and things. They are entombed until someone gets determined or desperate enough to mine the landfills.
Humans have transformed vast areas of the planet. On landscapes very recently populated by large wild animals like grizzly bears, elk, bison, elephants, giraffes, tigers, rhinos, and hippos, now the masses of migrating creatures are mechanical. Great seething hordes of metal wheeled dinosaurs jockey for position in a mad race from an age of steel and plastic (which is now). The roar of the lion and the howl of the wolf have been replaced by the shriek of the diesel pickup, the scream of the jacked up Mitsubishi or Mazda, the snarl of the Harley Davidson. Savanna, forest, prairie, marsh, wetland, delta and meadow have been turned into parking lot, shopping center, business park, runway, interstate, subdivision and factory.
Thousands upon thousands of homes sit empty for much of the year, sealing off the land from use by any animal or plant beyond those tiny ones that can sneak in.
Great cruise liners built to hold thousands of people fester at dockside as the pandemic makes their use extremely uninviting. Office buildings a hundred stories tall are “hollowing out” as the pandemic forces a shift to working online from home. Parking garages sit empty, monuments to the late great commuter. The only public buildings filling up are hospitals and morgues.
Can we ever have enough? Will our stuff take over? Have we given ourselves over to our creations? Are we evolution gone mad?
Who knows, maybe the singularity will create a benevolent race of machine overlords. If they become so much smarter than us, maybe they will see the wisdom in kindness, the necessity to preserve the abundant and beautiful life of this blue green ball spinning through the vast emptiness.
The Green Revolution is a misnomer: it sounds like a radical environmental movement when it’s the exact opposite of that. It is a movement led by corporations (including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) to further reinforce the class-based heierarchy, while spreading an ecocidal practice across the world.
The Green Revolution has promoted the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides; hybridized seeds and high yielding crop varieties; expansion of irrigation infrastructure, and modernization of management techniques. It started in late 1950s and has been credited as the movement that saved the world from mass starvation. (The mass starvation seemed imminent due to the human population overshoot. The population was 3 billion at the time and since then has increased by more than 5 billion – an almost threefold increase!) Norman Borlaug, the father of Green Revolution, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for saving a billion people from starvation.
Currently a second wave of Green Revolution is on the way. Influential people like Bill Gates are pushing the use of Genetically Modified Crops (GMOs) in countries of Africa as a new solution to the upcoming starvation.
This is the dominant narrative regarding the Green Revolution. There are some important points missing from this perfect little story.
Lets delve into the history of the agricorporations first.
The agricultural corporations have an intertwined history history with the wars. During World War II, the agricultural corporations (then chemical corporations) produced explosives and poisons. Monsanto operation the Dayton Project and the Mound Laboratories, and was involved in the development of the first nuclear weapons. During the Vietnam War, Monsanto also poisoned Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with Agent Orange. The effects on human health and ecology can be felt to this day.
The war legacy of these corporations extends beyond this. According to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals, Bayer had purchased 150 healthy women from the Auswitch concentration camp for experiments with sleep-inducing drugs. All of these women died during the experiments.
It is hard to believe that the companies that had no qualms in actively profiteering from wars, conducting war crimes, or purchasing humans, would simultaneously be sensitive to the sufferings of humanity. These corporations have proven time and again that they are willing to poison and exploit the oppressed (the poor, the women, those from the Global South) in pursuit of profit. It is ironical that proponents of GMOs use images of starving children in Africa to build a case in favor of these corporations.
Lets take a case of the state of Punjab in India.
The Green Revolution was introduced in Punjab in 1965. It has been credited for pulling India out of starvation.
In reality, there was no starvation in India in 1965.* A nationwide drought had increased the food prices, creating a need to import food grains. However, the US government and the World Band imposed a condition on the import of food grains and forced synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and genetically redesigned crops to the farmers of Punjab. These synthetic fertilizers and pesticides were produced using the same chemicals that had been used to produce poisons and explosives during the Second World War. Native crops all over rejected these chemicals. So, the agriculture corporations genetically altered crops so that they would accept (and be dependent on) the synthetic chemicals. These crops later became known as the high yielding varieties and the hybridized seeds.
The Green Revolution has had serious implications in Punjab. The native biodiversity has been destroyed. Once, Punjab used to produce 41 varieties of wheat and 37 varieties of rice. Since the Green Revolution, all of this has been replaced by monocultures of imported crops.
These crops require further use of chemicals. It has toxified the entire ecology. A 2014 study found pesticide residue in 25% of breast milk sample collected from Punjab. In a culture where breast milk stands for purity and love of a mother for her child, a quarter of mothers cannot express this love toward their infants without simultaneously poisoning them.
The number cancer cases are so high in Punjab that a special train carries people suffering from pesticide-related cancer to Rajasthan (another state in India). This train is called the “cancer train.”
Technology transfer or wealth transfer?
The Green Revolution has been credited for technology transfer from the corporations to the farmers. In fact, it has resulted in a massive wealth transfer from farmers to corporations. The farmers in India are dying from an inability to pay the massive loans they have accrued. Since the 1990s, farmers suicide has been a national catastrophe in India. It is estimated that more than 10 farmers commit suicide every day. Ironically, or perhaps symbolically, most kill themselves on their fields by drinking pesticides.
I was once asked why the movement is called the Green Revolution. I said, “Because poison-your-land movement would have sounded less appealing.” It would definitely have been more accurate though!
A gold mine project in Veracruz that has run into local opposition envisions a low CAPEX, simple heap-leach open pit mining operation targeting approximately 100,000 ounces of gold production annually. Gold reserves at the project are estimated at 575,000 ounces which assures high pollution and destruction of the land in order to yield as much of the precious metal.
A new gold mine in Veracruz, Mexico, will be the first one in the world to be opened only two miles away from a nuclear reactor and from many pipelines – all in the middle of a densely populated, touristic area that is also the most important migratory route in North America. These are some of the main reasons why local activists are strongly opposing the project.
A History of Colonial Extraction
Mexico has a long mining history. Before the conquest, gold and silver were sought mainly to make jewelry and offerings. Tin, lead, and copper were also mined in the state of Michoacán after the Purembes (Tarascans) found a way to extract and work it. All these minerals were used to make certain tools, utensils and weapons.
But the history of extractivist mining in Mexico begins with the Spanish invasion. Most of the mineral resources were exported to Spain, and it is stated in the General Archive of the Indies (an important Spanish colonial archive housed in Seville, Spain) that 185,000 kilos of gold and 16,000,000 kilos of silver arrived in Spain from America between 1503 and 1660 alone.
“La Paila” and Other New Projects
Despite the efforts of the Spanish crown, however, Mexico still retains vast mineral wealth, and there are currently 21 mining projects about to start up. The project that concerns us was once known as “Caballo Blanco” and now as “La Paila,” which is the name of the hill where the project is to be located. This would be an open-pit gold mine on the hill of “La Paila” in the municipality of Alto Lucero, Veracruz.
The mining company is a subsidiary of the Canadian Candelaria Mining Corp., which reports that it has 12 concessions on 19,815 hectares of land (roughly 76.5 square miles) for the main project. The company has also identified four “high priority targets” for further exploration in the surrounding area: Bandera Norte, Bandera Sur, Las Cuevas, and Highway North. If permits for these additional projects are approved, it would significantly increase the footprint of Candelaria’s activity in Veracruz.
Impact of Extraction
To operate just one of these projects, thousands of liters of water are required for the leachate lagoon. These are the waste products of the process. They remain in the tanks and contain cyanide, sulfuric acid, mercury and other solvents that will be used to obtain 0.03 grams of gold for each ton of soil. Gold is associated with quartz rocks that must be ground, placed in large mounds, and washed with water mixed with cyanide. This represents a great risk for the populations living downstream from the mine. In addition, the water used for these projects is extracted from the nearby aquifers, leaving the local populations without water.
To extract the rock, large tajos (quarries) are opened that will remain there permanently. Such a process gives no thought to the layer of soil and vegetation that have to be destroyed in order to open these large holes in the earth, leaving a lunar landscape in which life would be impossible.
According to research presented in 2015 in La Jornada Ecoloógica, the following is necessary in order to obtain one ounce of gold, or what is contained in a “US Golden Eagle”:
extraction of 150 tons of rock
40 kilos of explosives (enough to demolish a five-story building)
processing of 25 to 50 tons of earth leached with cyanide solution
release into the environment of three kilos of cyanide salts (enough to kill 60 thousand people)
consumption of 100,000 to 150,000 liters of fresh water (enough to provide services to an average family for one year)
consumption of 1300kws of electrical energy (enough for an average family for a month)
consumption of 450 liters of fossil fuels to maintain water supplies and move mine equipment
emission of 650 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere along with other greenhouse gases such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide
The researchers also report that this type of project offers only 15 person-hours of income to the region, or “the salary of one person working for two days” (La Jornada Ecoloógica 200, August-September 2015).
Meanwhile, over a 20-year period, a gold mine uses 500 thousand tons of explosives, or roughly 40 percent of the explosives used in World War II. And in this case, those explosives would be used at a distance of only three kilometers from the Laguna Verde nuclear plant and two kilometers from five gas pipelines that pass through the region.
Ecological and Cultural Destruction
The area around the “La Paila” project is also an important migratory corridor known as “el rio de rapaces” (“the river of raptors”). It is the migratory route of hundreds of raptor species that travel between Canada and Central America, as well as a large number of hummingbirds and butterflies. In addition, there are 51 endemic and endangered species that live in this area year round.
There is also a community of 1231 cycads, which have an estimated age of between 2,000 and 3,000 years and are the oldest living vegetation in Mexico. These kinds of large-scale mining projects also have disastrous repercussions for the historical heritage of the region. In this case, the archaeological heritage of Quiahuixtlan and its surroundings would be destroyed.
And all this without even mentioning the 87 communities that would be directly affected by the project through the destruction of agriculture, livestock and fishing in the region.
We would be left without land, without water, without vegetation, without animals, and without spirit.
In these brief series, Max Wilbert explores the #ThackerPass Litium Deposit in Humboldt Count, Nevada which will serve as a lithium clay mining development project proposed by the Nevada government and federal agencies. This project will compromise the flora, fauna and streams of the area just for the sake of “clean” energy and profit.
This is the first video dispatch from my trip to the area of two proposed lithium mines in Nevada. I’m working to build awareness of the threats these projects pose and resistance to them. I’ll have more to share next week.
This video comes from the top of a ridge directly to the east of the proposed Rhyolite Ridge open-pit lithium mine in Southern Nevada. After arriving by moonlight the night before, I scrambled up this rocky ridge in the dawn light to get an overview of the landscape. Everything that you see here is under threat for electric car batteries.
This is habitat for Tiehm’s buckwheat, cholla cactus, sagebrush, rabbitbrush, prairie falcon, desert bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, jackrabbit, ring-tailed cat, and literally hundreds of other species.
Is it worth destroying their home and their lives for electric cars?
This is the traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
What killed 14,000 critically endangered buckwheat plants at the site of a proposed lithium mine to supply critical minerals for the so-called “green” electric vehicle industry?
This video reports from Rhyolite Ridge in western Nevada, traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
Was it rodents, or was it vandalism? Climate catastrophe or eco-terrorism?
Benjamin R. Grady, the President of the Eriogonum Society, said in a letter that “As distasteful as it is to consider, intentional human action may have caused the demise of thousands of E. tiehmii individuals over the course of two months from July to September 2020. Having studied this genus since 2007, I have visited hundreds of different Eriogonum populations across the American West. Never once have I seen this type of directed small mammal attack at any of those sites. To me, the widespread damage to just E. tiehmii plants was remarkable. The timing of this attack is also suspicious. The threat of a large-scale lithium mine has recently thrust E. tiehmii into the spotlight. This species has been monitored since the early 1990’s and this type of widespread damage has not been documented. While on site on the 23rd of September, I did not notice any scat, with the exception of a few scattered lagomorph pellets. I carefully examined uprooted plants and no actual herbivory was noticed. The green to graying leaves were unchewed and intact. Eriogonum species likely offer little reward of water or nutrients at this time of year.”
Either way, this video is a crime-scene investigation from the middle of the proposed open-pit lithium mine at Rhyolite Ridge, in western Nevada on traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
We don’t know what happened to these plants, but it is clear that they deserve protection. Ioneer’s plan to build an open-pit lithium mine at this site must be resisted.
Reporting from #ThackerPass#Nevada – site of a massive proposed lithium mine. Nevada government and federal agencies have fast-tracked the sacrifice of this mountainside in favor of a $1.3 billion dollar mine that could produce tens of billions in profits. Meanwhile, local streams will be polluted, Lahontan cutthroat trout spawning grounds will be smothered under radioactive sediment, Pronghorn antelope migration routes blocked, Greater sage-grouse habitat blasted to nothing, local people will have to deal with acid rain, ancient cultural sites will be desecrated, and this quiet wilderness will be turned into an industrialized zone — unless the project is stopped.
Liberation Listening is a radical community healing method designed to increase the effectiveness of change-making organizations in the face of systems of oppression and a collapsing society. A major focus of our work is in developing and supporting leadership. Although readers of this article may be unfamiliar with the practices of Liberation Listening, the principles of leadership apply to all kinds of human groups.
In Liberation Listening we define leadership as the ability and willingness to make a commitment to see that everything goes well to the limit of one’s resources.
Leadership is the commitment to help everything go well in your family, community, and environment. It is realizing that you are responsible (able to respond) to the challenges that face us.
In order to do this, we must heal the old distresses that cause us to feel helpless. The truth is that we are powerful, capable, loving, and intelligent. The challenges before us are large, and we are the best people for the job.
Leadership is an inherent human characteristic. In any group of people, leadership functions must be performed in order for the group to function well. At least one person must think about the group as a whole rather than about just her or his role in it.
It is possible to deliberately create sanctuary spaces where we can connect with other humans, think, release emotions, and heal from old traumas. This creation of sanctuary space can help the group to function better in terms of addressing the real-time challenges we encounter. It is not necessary for all people in the group to be committed to specific emotional healing paths in order to use the safety of the group for their own healing. It is only necessary that we make and follow agreements that lead to a greater sense of safety, trust, and connection with each other over time.
Leadership may include listening respectfully to people in your group who are unawarely acting out old emotional trauma. Usually this listening requires us to decide that we are not actually threatened by the person’s emotional reactions. By listening respectfully, we give the person time and space to heal themselves with the help of our positive regard. We may also need to give ourselves attention for challenging emotions that arise while listening. This form of listening assumes that each person has always done the best they possibly could with the resources available to them at each moment. By listening, we offer a moment with additional emotional resources, to see if that may be what they need in order to do better than before.
Be aware, however, that it is not always effective or advisable to use compassionate listening skills on someone who unawarely acts out emotional distress in your group. Sometimes the best option is to set clear boundaries and expectations for behavior, and ask people to leave the group if they cannot follow these agreements. The specific appropriate response to each incident will require the thinking of the group, and while we can learn from other groups’ successes, we will require fresh thinking to solve our group’s problems. Giving time to really hear all group members’ thinking is a valuable tool.
It is not the leader’s job to do all the thinking for the group. Rather, a good leader listens to the thinking of every group member, fills in any gaps, and organizes the thinking into a consistent form. The leader then communicates this synthesis of ideas back to the group well enough to secure their agreement, and, if possible, their commitment to it.
Being a leader opens you to attacks. People have lots of old trauma about power dynamics in their past. People also project hopes and frozen needs onto leaders. A frozen need is something you needed in childhood, but did not get. It continues to feel like something you need, even though it can never be met because it was actually a need in the past, not the present. For example, many people have both current needs for connection, and frozen needs for connection from too much isolation as young children. Frozen needs can never be satisfied, so when they are projected onto leaders, they are bound to be disappointed. People often react to this disappointment by blaming the leader. (We can never satisfy our frozen needs, but we can heal them by mourning the developmental loss.)
As leaders, we must be ready to listen compassionately to ourselves and others in times of attack, and use it as an opportunity for further healing. Peer support is essential in these situations. Use your listening relationships to stay resilient during, and to recover from, attacks. Look at it as an opportunity to heal old traumas and free more of your thinking from the binding power of past hurts.
Within the context of Liberation Listening, we agree to support the leaders of classes and workshops in several specific ways. These include:
Continuing to do our own thinking, and considering what we as individuals can do to help the classes and workshops go well.
Supporting the leader’s thinking, even when that thinking is different from our own. This may include agreeing to take on roles delegated to us by the leader.
Sharing our thinking with the leader. If we think the leader is making a mistake, or missing valuable information, or acting out distress in the class, we find an appropriate time to share our criticism. The goal is not to make the leader change direction, but to give the leader more information with which to make good decisions.
Using Listening Skills on the leader. All people have patterns of behavior based on old trauma that they are not yet aware of. In order to help the leader move forward on topics that will make future classes go well, the class is asked to think together about the leader and use listening skills on the leader at the end of every class series. Feel free to push the leader with persistent listening outside of class as well. Of course, do this as two people thinking about one person—in other words, include the leader in your thinking about how you plan to use listening skills on her or him in persistent sessions.
Using time in your listening sessions to talk about leading and leadership. What distresses make you want to avoid leadership or rigidly take on leadership?
Learning to take on leadership ourselves. If there is a topic that is underrepresented by current Liberation Listening leaders, learn about the topic and do extensive listening sessions on the topic. Prepare yourself to lead on that topic. Solicit the support of the leadership team in reaching for your goals.
Directions for Listening Sessions:
You can try doing this with a friend or co-revolutionary: Set a timer for 20 minutes. One person talks while the other person silently listens with curiosity and interest. When the timer goes off, switch roles and start the timer for another 20 minutes. The second person talks while the first listens. It’s important for each person to get the same amount of time. Hold what you hear with confidentiality.
If you prefer to do this work alone, try journalling on the topic, or daydreaming. You can also try telling your thoughts to a tree, animal, or rock.
Use the following prompts for your work on leadership:
Tell memories of good leadership in your past: mentors, people you admired, people who could think well about you and the group, people who helped things go well. If you can, start with the earliest memory, and tell each memory in chronological order.
Tell memories of poor leadership in your past: authority figures, people whose power over you or over the group was tainted by their distresses, people who had power but could not accept feedback, etc. If you can, start with the earliest memory, and tell each memory in chronological order.
What happened in the past when you tried to right a perceived wrong?
Tell memories of your own leadership or attempted leadership. If you can, start with the earliest memory, and tell each memory in chronological order.
What does it mean to you to be out in front? When you are in a group, and everyone is looking to you for guidance or leadership, what emotions arise in you? What thoughts come into your mind? How does your body feel?
What groups are you a part of? How could you help those groups function better? Think about the group’s current functioning. What are the needs and challenges of its members? How can the group meet those needs and address those challenges?
Kara Huntermoon is one of seven co-owners of Heart-Culture Farm Community, near Eugene, Oregon. She spends most of her time in unpaid labor in service of community: child-raising, garden-growing, and emotion/relationship management among the community residents. She also teaches Liberation Listening, a personal growth process that focuses on ending oppression.
Shale Must Fall: Global day of climate actions uniting sites of extraction in the Global South and beyond with their counterparts of consumption in the Global North.
Friday Dec. 11th, on the eve of the 5th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, a diverse group of environmental movements from 20 different countries are mobilizing together to bring visibility to the environmental destruction of fracking.
The movement is mobilizing to highlight the damage caused by European multinationals that do abroad what they are banned from doing at home (in this case, fracking) with the complicity of their governments that subsidize the industry.
The day of action highlight how those government policies completely undermine the Paris Agreement, as Europe is simply “outsourcing” its emissions to the rest of the world.
The actions around the world are focusing on some of Europe’s largest climate criminals which are also shale oil companies—Repsol, Total, Wintershall, Shell, BP—by connecting the dots of their operations around the world.
It is outrageous that Europe is on one hand committing to emissions reductions and the Paris Agreement, yet on the other it is allowing and even subsidizing companies based in their country to frack the rest of the world, causing enormous harm to human health and to the natural world, and dooming future generations—including their own people—to climate chaos.
Local and grassroots movements from the frontlines of extractivism in the Global South are mobilizing against the operations of these multinationals from the Global North demanding climate justice and an end to this international ecocide.
Solidarity is Strength
Each of the environmental resistance struggles at the frontlines in the Global South is usually not strong enough, if isolated, to defeat a threat so disproportionately larger. But as our struggles begin to come together as we are doing today, we can present a united multinational resistance against a threat that is multinational in nature.
The Harms of Fracking
Science has shown fracking to be responsible for more than 50% of all of the increased methane emissions from fossil fuels globally and approximately 1/3 of the total increased emissions from all sources globally over the past decade. Methane is 87 times more harmful than CO2 in its global warming impact on the atmosphere during the first 20 years, and thus the fracking industry is a major cause for accelerating global warming.
This also makes shale gas the fossil fuel with highest greenhouse gas emissions among all fossil fuels.
After having banned or imposed moratoria on fracking in their home countries, European governments are not only allowing their companies to frack the rest of the world, but they are also subsidizing the import of fracked gas with billions of euros of taxpayers’ funds, by building LNG import terminals across the region that will lock the EU into decades of dependency into this fossil fuel.
They are selling the fossil fuel with the worst carbon footprint of all as a clean form of energy that will serve as a bridge to move away from coal. A transition away from coal with something worse than coal? This is insane and we have to stop it. Clean gas is a dirty lie!
