Will Civilization Collapse Because It’s Running Out of Oil?

Will Civilization Collapse Because It’s Running Out of Oil?

by | Aug 1, 2022 | ANALYSIS, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change

Editor’s note: Oil has been called the “master resource” of industrial civilization, because it facilitates almost every other economic activity and subsidizes almost every other form of extraction. Chainsaws, for example, run on gasoline; tractors run on diesel fuel; and 10 calories of fossil fuel energy (mostly oil) is used to produce 1 calorie of industrial food. From transportation to shipping, industrial production, plastics, construction, medicine, and beyond, industrial civilization is a culture of oil.

Richard Heinberg presents an interesting conundrum for us. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on peak oil, and understands the energy dynamics (such as EROI, energy density, transmission issues, and intermittency) that make a wholesale replacement of fossil fuels by “renewables” impossible. And while he understands the depths of ecological crisis, he is not biocentric.

This leads to our differences from Heinberg. While he calls for mass adoption of “renewables” as part of the Post Carbon Institute, we advocate for dismantling the industrial economy — including the so-called “renewables” industry — by whatever means are necessary to halt the ecological crisis.

Nonetheless, Heinberg is an expert on peak oil, and we share this article to update our readers on the latest information on that topic.

by Richard Heinberg / CommonDreams

 

Will civilization collapse because it’s running out of oil? That question was debated hotly almost 20 years ago; today, not so much. Judging by Google searches, interest in “peak oil” surged around 2003 (the year my book The Party’s Over was published), peaked around 2005, and drifted until around 2010 before dropping off dramatically.

Keeping most of the remaining oil in the ground will be a task of urgency and complexity, one that cannot be accomplished under a business-as-usual growth economy.

Well, civilization hasn’t imploded for lack of fuel—not yet, at least. Instead, oil has gotten more expensive and economic growth has slowed. “Tight oil” produced in the US with fracking technology came to the rescue, sort of. For a little while. This oil was costlier to extract than conventional oil, and production from individual wells declined rapidly, thus entailing one hell of a lot of drilling. During the past decade, frackers went deeply into debt as they poked tens of thousands of holes into Texas, North Dakota, and a few other states, sending US oil production soaring. Central banks helped out by keeping interest rates ultra-low and by injecting trillions of dollars into the economy. National petroleum output went up farther and faster than had ever happened anywhere before in the history of the oil industry.

Most environmentalists therefore tossed peak oil into their mental bin of “things we don’t need to worry about” as they focused laser-like on climate change. Mainstream energy analysts then and now assume that technology will continue to overcome resource limits in the immediate future, which is all that really seems to matter. Much of what is left of the peak oil discussion focuses on “peak demand”—i.e., the question of when electric cars will become so plentiful that we’ll no longer need so much gasoline.

Nevertheless, those who’ve engaged with the oil depletion literature have tended to come away with a few useful insights:

  • Energy is the basis of all aspects of human society.
  • Fossil fuels enabled a dramatic expansion of energy usable by humanity, in turn enabling unprecedented growth in human population, economic activity, and material consumption.
  • It takes energy to get energy, and the ratio of energy returned versus energy spent (energy return on investment, or EROI) has historically been extremely high for fossil fuels, as compared to previous energy sources.
  • Similar EROI values will be necessary for energy alternatives if we wish to maintain our complex, industrial way of life.
  • Depletion is as important a factor as pollution in assessing the sustainability of society.

Now a new research paper has arrived on the scene, authored by Jean Laherrère, Charles Hall, and Roger Bentley—all veterans of the peak oil debate, and all experts with many papers and books to their credit. As its title suggests (“How Much Oil Remains for the World to Produce? Comparing Assessment Methods, and Separating Fact from Fiction“), the paper mainly addresses the question of future oil production. But to get there, it explains why this is a difficult question to answer, and what are the best ways of approaching it. There are plenty of technical issues to geek out on, if that’s your thing. For example, energy analytics firm Rystad recently downgraded world oil reserves by about 9 percent (from 1,903 to 1,725 billion barrels), but the authors of the new research paper suggest that reserves estimates should be cut by a further 300 billion barrels due to long-standing over-reporting by OPEC countries. That’s a matter for debate, and readers will have to make up their own minds whether the authors make a convincing case.

For readers who just want the bottom line, here goes. The most sensible figure for the aggregate amount of producible “conventional oil” originally in place (what we’ve already burned, plus what could be burned in the future) is about 2,500 billion barrels. We’ve already extracted about half that amount. When this total quantity is plotted as a logistical curve over time, the peak of production occurs essentially now, give or take a very few years. Indeed, conventional oil started a production plateau in 2005 and is now declining. Conventional oil is essentially oil that can be extracted using traditional drilling methods and that can flow at surface temperature and pressure conditions naturally. If oil is defined more broadly to include unconventional sources like tight oil, tar sands, and extra-heavy oil, then possible future production volumes increase, but the likely peak doesn’t move very far forward in time. Production of tight oil can still grow in the Permian play in Texas and New Mexico, but will likely be falling by the end of the decade. Extra-heavy oil from Venezuela and tar sands from Canada won’t make much difference because they require a lot of energy for processing (i.e., their EROI is low); indeed, it’s unclear whether much of Venezuela’s enormous claimed Orinoco reserves will ever be extracted.

Of course, logistical curves are just ways of using math to describe trends, and trends can change. Will the decline of global oil production be gradual and smooth, like the mathematically generated curves in these experts’ charts? That depends partly on whether countries dramatically reduce fossil fuel usage in order to stave off catastrophic climate change. If the world gets serious about limiting global warming, then the downside of the curve can be made steeper through policies like carbon taxes. Keeping most of the remaining oil in the ground will be a task of urgency and complexity, one that cannot be accomplished under a business-as-usual growth economy. We’ll need energy for the energy transition (to build solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, heat pumps, electric cars, mass transit, etc.), and most of that energy, at least in the early stages of the transition, will have to come from fossil fuels. If oil, the most important of those fuels, will be supply-constrained, that adds to the complexity of managing investment and policy so as to minimize economic pain while pursuing long-range climate goals.

As a side issue, the authors note (as have others) that IPCC estimates of future carbon emissions under its business-as-usual scenario are unrealistic. We just don’t have enough economically extractable fossil fuels to make that worst-case scenario come true. However, even assuming a significant downgrade of reserves (and thus of projected emissions), burning all of the oil we have would greatly exceed emissions targets for averting climate catastrophe.

One factor potentially limiting future oil production not discussed in the new paper has to do with debt. Many observers of the past 15 years of fracking frenzy have pointed out that the industry’s ability to increase levels of oil production has depended on low interest rates, which enabled companies to produce oil now and pay the bills later. Now central banks are raising interest rates in an effort to fight inflation, which is largely the result of higher oil and gas prices. But hiking interest rates will only discourage oil companies from drilling. This could potentially trigger a self-reinforcing feedback loop of crashing production, soaring energy prices, higher interest rates, and debt defaults, which would likely cease only with a major economic crash. So, instead of a gentle energy descent, we might get what Ugo Bardi calls a “Seneca Cliff.”

So far, we are merely seeing crude and natural gas shortages, high energy prices, broken supply chains, and political upheaval. Energy challenges are now top of mind for policymakers and the public in a way that we haven’t seen since oil prices hit a record $147 barrel in 2008, when peak oil received some semblance of attention. But now we run the risk of underlying, irreversible supply constraints being lost in the noise of other, more immediate contributors to the supply and price shocks the world is experiencing—namely lingering effects from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russian oil and gas, and far stricter demands for returns from domestic investors. Keeping the situation from devolving further will take more than just another fracking revolution, which bought us an extra decade of business-as-usual. This time, we’re going to have to start coming to terms with nature’s limits. That means shared sacrifice, cooperation, and belt tightening. It also means reckoning with our definitions of prosperity and progress, and getting down to the work of reconfiguring an economy that has become accustomed to (and all too comfortable with) fossil-fueled growth.

Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of fourteen books, including his most recent: “Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival”(2021). Previous books include: “Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy” (2016), “Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels” (2015), and “Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines“ (2010).

 

Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash.

Britain’s New Eco-Sabotage Group

Britain’s New Eco-Sabotage Group

by | May 27, 2022 | ACTION, Direct Action, Property & Material Destruction

Editor’s note: In these dire times, we are glad to see increasing adoption of and advocacy for eco-sabotage. However, when it comes to tactics and strategy, context matters. No tactic can be judged as “effective” or “ineffective” in isolation. Goals, assumptions, and political circumstances must be considered before selecting methods.

In the political context of 2022 Britain, the actions of the eco-sabotage group “Tyre Extinguishers” may be amplifying political pressure to reduce carbon pollution and curtail the hegemony of the automobile and building a cultural acceptance for more drastic illegal actions on behalf of the planet. This type of small-scale act of minor eco-sabotage may also be useful for training and propaganda. This is the best case outcome.

A more pessimistic view is that these actions could lead to an upper-class backlash, further empower surveillance and repression against environmentalists, and put activists at risk within the legal system. However, we largely discount this interpretation, as the upper classes are already hostile to environmental action, this type of illegal action would likely lead to minimal punishments if prosecutions did take place, and police in Britain are already harassing, infiltrating, and disrupting environmental movements.

A more valid critique—made in the spirit of solidarity—is that these actions are hitting the wrong targets and are inadequate to address the crisis we are facing. Halting global warming and reversing ecological decline will likely require massive, coordinated eco-sabotage against industrial infrastructure—not just individual cars. In that sense, these actions may represent a failure of target selection when compared to the Valve Turners or the DAPL eco-saboteurs.

The Tyre Extinguishers chose their targets based on the idea that pressure on governments can halt the climate crisis and the destruction of the planet. We at Deep Green Resistance put no faith in this line of reasoning; the UK government has not defended the planet thus far, and there is no evidence that it will. Based on this divergent analysis, our goal is different. Rather than political-social, our goal is physical-material: we advocate for strategic dismantling of global industrial infrastructure.

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

By  and / The Conversation

A new direct action group calling itself the Tyre Extinguishers recently sabotaged hundreds of sports utility vehicles (SUVs) in various wealthy parts of London and other British cities. Under cover of darkness, activists unscrewed the valve caps on tyres, placed a bean or other pulse on the valve and then returned the cap. The tyres gently deflated.

Why activists are targeting SUVs now can tell us as much about the failures of climate policy in the UK and elsewhere as it can about the shape of environmental protest in the wake of Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain.

The “mung bean trick” for deflating tyres is tried and tested. In July 2008, the Oxford Mail reported that up to 32 SUVs were sabotaged in a similar way during nocturnal actions in three areas of the city, with anonymous notes left on the cars’ windscreens.

In Paris in 2005, activists used bicycle pumps to deflate tyres, again at night, again in affluent neighbourhoods, again leaving anonymous notes. In both cases, activists were careful to avoid causing physical damage. Now it’s the Tyre Extinguishers who are deflating SUV tyres.

In the early 2000s, SUVs were still a relative rarity. But by the end of 2010s, almost half of all cars sold each year in the US and one-third of the cars sold in Europe were SUVs.

In 2019, the International Energy Agency reported that rising SUV sales were the second-largest contributor to the increase in global CO₂ emissions between 2010 and 2018 after the power sector. If SUV drivers were a nation, they would rank seventh in the world for carbon emissions.

At the same time, the Tyre Extinguishers’ DIY model of activism has never been easier to propagate. “Want to get involved? It’s simple – grab some leaflets, grab some lentils and off you go! Instructions on our website,” chirps the group’s Twitter feed.

Changing activist strategy

Though the actions led by the Tyre Extinguishers have numerous precedents, the group’s recent appearance in the UK’s climate movement does mark a change of strategy.

Extinction Rebellion (XR), beginning in 2018, hoped to create an expanding wave of mobilisations to force governments to introduce new processes for democratically deciding the course of climate action. XR attempted to circumvent existing protest networks, with its message (at least initially) aimed at those who did not consider themselves activists.

In contrast, activists in the Tyre Extinguishers have more in common with groups that have appeared after XR, such as Insulate Britain, whose members blockaded motorways in autumn 2021 to demand government action on the country’s energy inefficient housing. These are what we might call pop-up groups, designed to draw short-term media attention to specific issues, rather than develop broad-based, long-lasting campaigns.

After a winter of planning, climate activists are likely to continue grabbing headlines throughout spring 2022. XR, along with its sister group, Just Stop Oil, threaten disruption to UK oil refineries, fuel depots and petrol stations. Their demands are for the government to stop all new investments in fossil fuel extraction.

The Tyre Extinguishers explicitly targeted a specific class of what they consider anti-social individuals. Nevertheless, that the group’s action is covert and (so far at least) sporadic is itself telling.

In his book How to Blow up a Pipeline, Lund University professor of human ecology Andreas Malm asked at what point climate activists will stop fetishising absolute non-violence and start campaigns of sabotage. Perhaps more important is the question that Malm doesn’t ask: at what point will the climate movement be strong enough to be able to carry out such a campaign, should it choose to do so?

Given the mode of action of the Tyre Extinguishers, the answer on both counts is: almost certainly not yet.

The moral economy of SUVs

For now, the Tyre Extinguishers will doubtless be sustained by red meat headlines in the right-wing press. It’s still probable, however, that the group will deflate almost as quickly as it popped up: this is, after all, what has happened with similar groups in the past.

The fact that activists are once again employing these methods speaks to the failure of climate policy. Relatively simple, technical measures taken in the early 2000s would have solved the problem of polluting SUVs before it became an issue. The introduction of more stringent vehicle emissions regulations, congestion charging, or size and weight limits, would have stopped the SUV market in its tracks.

SUVs are important because they are so much more than metal boxes. Matthew Paterson, professor of international politics at the University of Manchester, argues that the connection between freedom and driving a car has long been an ideological component of capitalism.

And Matthew Huber, professor of geography at Syracuse University in the US, reminds readers in his book Lifeblood that oil is not just an energy source. It generates ways of being which become culturally and politically embedded, encouraging individualism and materialism.

Making SUVs a focal point of climate activism advances the argument that material inequality and unfettered individual freedoms are incompatible with any serious attempt to address climate change.

And here lies the crux of the conflict. The freedom of those who can afford to drive what, where and when they want infringes on the freedoms of the majority to safely use public space, enjoy clean air, and live on a sustainable planet.

Graeme Hayes is a reader in Political Sociology at Aston University. Oscar Berglund is a lecturer in International Public and Social Policy at the University of Bristol.

The Non-Human Costs of War

The Non-Human Costs of War

by | Mar 18, 2022 | ANALYSIS

Editor’s Note: Industrial civilization is not a path to lasting peace and prosperity. By undermining the foundations of life on this planet, industrial society is creating unimaginable wealth for a small portion of people while creating a wasteland. This will not last. As Richard Heinberg has said, “The Party is Over.”

If this is indeed a party, it’s a ball on the deck of a slave ship—a hierarchical party in which amusement rides are built with planks from the hull. The party will only end when the whole ship sinks and everyone—slave and master alike—dies. Ecologically, industrial civilization amounts to this: a murder-suicide, bacchanalia purchased with the coin of atrocities.

For this article, we bring you two voices—Lierre Keith and Will Falk—on the ecological costs of war, and the war on the natural world.

The Non-Human Costs of War

  • Carbon emissions and fuel consumption (In 2018, the U.S. Defense Department purchased more than 3.5 billion gallons of fossil fuels).
  • Use of depleted uranium ammunition, defoliant herbicides, and other toxic substances.
  • Weapons testing that destroys habitat directly (for example, bombing ranges) or harms wildlife (for example, military sonar testing that kills marine mammals).
  • Pollution associated with military installations (more than 5,440 toxic sites inside the U.S. alone).
  • Nuclear weapons production, testing, and waste.

Lierre Keith: The War Against the Planet

In my lifetime, the earth has lost half her wildlife. Every day, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. “Ocean” is synonymous with the words abundance and plenty. Fullness is on the list, as well as infinity. And by 2048, the oceans will be empty of fish. Crustaceans are experiencing “complete reproductive failure.” In plain terms, their babies are dying. Plankton are also disappearing. Maybe plankton are too small and green for anyone to care about, but know this: two out of three animal breaths are made possible by the oxygen plankton produce. If the oceans go down, we go down with them.

How could it be otherwise? See the pattern, not just the facts. There were so many bison on the Great Plains, you could sit and watch for days as a herd thundered by. In the central valley of California, the flocks of waterbirds were so thick they blocked out the sun. One-quarter of Indiana was a wetland, lush with life and the promise of more. Now it’s a desert of corn. Where I live in the pacific northwest, ten million fish have been reduced to ten thousand. People would hear them coming for a whole day. This is not a story: there are people alive who remember it. And I have never once heard the sound that water makes when forty million years of persistence finds it way home. Am I allowed to use the word “apocalypse” yet?

The necrophiliac insists we are mechanical components, that rivers are an engineering project, and genes can be sliced up and arranged at whim. He believes we are all machines, despite the obvious: a machine can be taken apart and put back together. A living being can’t. May I add: neither can a living planet.

Understand where the war against the world began. In seven places around the globe, humans took up the activity called agriculture. In very brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, and then you plant it to human use. Instead of sharing that land with the other million creatures who need to live there, you’re only growing humans on it. It’s biotic cleansing. The human population grows to huge numbers; everyone else is driven into extinction.

Agriculture creates a way of life called civilization. Civilization means people living in cities. What that means is: they need more than the land can give. Food, water, energy have to come from someplace else. It doesn’t matter what lovely, peaceful values people hold in their hearts. The society is dependent on imperialism and genocide. Because no one willing gives up their land, their water, their trees. But since the city has used up its own, it has to go out and get those from somewhere else. That’s the last 10,000 years in a few sentences.

The end of every civilization is written into the beginning. Agriculture destroys the world. That’s not agriculture on a bad day. That’s what agriculture is. You pull down the forest, you plow up the prairie, you drain the wetland. Especially, you destroy the soil. Civilizations last between 800 and maybe 2,000 years—they last until the soil gives out.

What could be more sadistic then control of entire continents? He turns mountains into rubble, and rivers must do as they are told. The basic unit of life is violated with genetic engineering. The basic unit of matter as well, to make bombs that kill millions. This is his passion, turning the living into the dead. It’s not just individual deaths and not even the deaths of species. The process of life itself is now under assault and it is losing badly. Vertebrate evolution has long since come to a halt—there isn’t enough habitat left. There are areas in China where there are no flowering plants. Why? Because the pollinators are all dead. That’s five hundred million years of evolution: gone.

He wants it all dead. That’s his biggest thrill and the only way he can control it. According to him it was never alive. There is no self-willed community, no truly wild land. It’s all inanimate components he can arrange to this liking, a garden he can manage. Never mind that every land so managed has been lessened into desert. The essential integrity of life has been breached, and now he claims it never existed. He can do whatever he wants. And no one stops him.

Can we stop him?

I say yes, but then I have no intention of giving up. The facts as they stand are unbearable, but it’s only in facing them that pattern comes clear. Civilization is based on drawdown. It props itself up with imperialism, conquering its neighbors and stripping their land, but eventually even the colonies wear out. Fossil fuel has been an accelerant, as has capitalism, but the underlying problem is much bigger than either. Civilization requires agriculture, and agriculture is a war against the living world. Whatever good was in the culture before, ten thousand years of that war has turned it necrotic.

Lierre Keith: The Girls and the Grasses

Will Falk: An Armistice With the Natural World

The news about war in Ukraine causes me to think about how some human cultures have waged a war on the natural world for millennia. War begins with a willingness to exploit the natural world. And, no actually, war is not as old as humanity. Conflict, yes. Violence, too. Sometimes atrocious violence. But, not large scale mobilizations of a population, with professional killers, to invade and permanently dominate distant lands. When you live in balance with your own land base, you don’t need to steal resources from somewhere else.

The horrifying truth is: Human populations have so thoroughly exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity that the so-called resources humans exploit to support the population overshoot are being depleted. When those resources are no longer available, human populations will collapse and humans will suffer on a scale we’ve never seen. Currently, the dominant culture is just imposing that suffering on the rest of life.

There’s no way out of this mess without extreme suffering. We can voluntarily dismantle the dominant culture that is based in destroying the natural world for the benefit of some humans. This dismantling will be incredibly painful if we are truly going to honor the rest of the natural world’s ability to survive and thrive. If we don’t dismantle the dominant culture, these resource wars are only going to intensify, more places like Ukraine will be plunged into brutal wars, and it just becomes ever-more likely that some humans will choose to use the technologies we now possess to seriously threaten Earth’s ability to support life in the future.

And no, I am not advocating for killing people off. I am, however, insisting that we recognize the suffering the dominant culture causes the countless other beings we share this battered, but still beautiful planet with. I am insisting that we recognize that procrastinating on the very difficult changes we need to make in the name of preserving the dominant culture just pushes the problem on to the natural world and the much more populous, vulnerable, future generations of humans.

If we want to build a world without war, then the first armistice we need to sign is with the natural world.

Image: public domain.

Chris Hedges: The Human Cost of War

Chris Hedges: The Human Cost of War

by | Mar 18, 2022 | ANALYSIS

Dividing the world into worthy and unworthy victims is a tactic used to justify our crimes and demonize our enemies. Conflicts will not be solved until all nations abide by international law and all victims are deemed worthy.

‘Laundering machine’: Furniture giant Ikea implicated in logging protected Siberian forests

‘Laundering machine’: Furniture giant Ikea implicated in logging protected Siberian forests

by | Aug 18, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction

  • The world’s biggest furniture retailer, Ikea, has for years sold children’s furniture made from wood linked to illegal logging in protected forests in Russia, an Earthsight investigation has found.
  • The brand’s popular Sundvik children’s range are among the items likely tainted with illegal wood. Investigators estimate that shoppers around the world have on average been purchasing an Ikea product containing the suspect Russian lumber every two minutes.
  • Using undercover meetings, visits to logging sites, satellite imagery analysis and scrutiny of official documents, court records and customs data, Earthsight traced wooden furniture on sale in Ikea stores around the world to forests in Siberia, finding that they were controlled by companies owned by one of Russia’s wealthiest politicians, Evgeny Bakurov.

This article originally appeared in Mongabay.
Featured image: Evgeny Bakurov, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen-politicians, ranked 44th on a Forbes list of Russia’s highest-earning civil servants or legislators in 2019. Source: Forbes.ru / Earthsight

Ikea has allegedly been sourcing timber for its products from Russian companies engaged in illegal logging of pine trees in Russia’s protected Siberian boreal forests, a new investigation has revealed.

In a year-long probe by London-based investigative group Earthsight, the Swedish flatpack furniture manufacturer was the most well-known of several Western firms found to have sourced lumber for its products from ExportLes Group, a collection of companies owned by Evgeny Bakurov, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen-politicians.

Bakurov reportedly once boasted that an Ikea representative said the company chose to do business with him because he sent Ikea “logs faster than we can transfer the money.”

“Earthsight estimates that shoppers have been purchasing an Ikea product containing the suspect Russian lumber somewhere on earth every two minutes,” the group said.

Ikea said it had ended purchases from ExportLes in June after Earthsight shared its findings with the company, though it maintained the timber was “legally harvested” and said it had dropped Bakurov’s firm from its list of suppliers over unspecified “practices of concern”.

Russia’s boreal forests, also known as the taiga, include a majority of the world’s conifers and store about half of the northern hemisphere’s terrestrial carbon, so play a vital role in regulating climate change. The country is one of the world’s largest timber exporters, shipping almost a quarter of all lumber traded globally in 2019.

ExportLes had justified its logging of the trees in a protected area through a process known as “sanitary felling”, where loggers falsely claim trees are already dead, diseased, dying or damaged and so need to be cleared to preserve a forest’s health.

In late June, Ikea said it was placing a temporary ban on sourcing timber from firms engaged in “sanitary felling” in Russia’s Far East and Siberia.

Bakurov, a prominent figure in Russia’s Irkutsk region, had managed to secure the stamp of approval of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading global sustainable timber certification body. Bakurov did not respond to the findings.

But Earthsight’s investigation alleges that the politician had signed several illegal deals to secure harvesting rights to more than 2 million cubic meters of timber in protected forests.

In response to the findings, the FSC denied wrongdoing but also invalidated Bakurov’s certifications.

According to the report, many of the trees entered the Ikea product chain primarily via an Indonesian manufacturer that supplies stores in western Europe and North America. Russian and Chinese intermediaries were also used.

Many of the products likely made with the illegal timber were marketed for children, the findings showed, with Earthsight drawing attention to the popular Sindvik line of children’s furniture.

A previous Earthsight investigation, published last year, linked the FSC and Ikea to the sale of illegally sourced wood from Ukraine.

“These are systemic problems, requiring systemic solutions, which go beyond one buyer, one supplier or one country,” Sam Lawson, Earthsight’s director, said in a statement. “Governments in Europe and the US need to act urgently to stem the flow of stolen wood once and for all.”