16 February 2016

Au Brésil, l’ombre de Monsanto derrière Zika

Le Nordeste brésilien, avec 1 447 notifications de microcéphalies, est l’épicentre du phénomène.
Photo : Reuters

Et si l’épidémie Zika n’était pas le bon coupable ? Des chercheurs argentins mettent en cause un pesticide, injecté dans l’eau et produit par une filiale de Monsanto, d’être à l’origine des microcéphalies.

Le virus Zika serait-il vraiment responsable de la multiplication des cas de microcéphalie au Brésil ?

Un groupe de chercheurs argentins et brésiliens, coordonné par le docteur Avila Vazquez, pédiatre spécialisé en néonatalogie (spécialité médicale qui s’attache à prendre en charge les nouveau-nés) a, en tous les cas, soulevé cette interrogation.
Dans une étude parue le 3 février dernier, ceux-ci ont en effet mis en doute la responsabilité du seul virus Zika dans l’augmentation exponentielle de microcéphalies enregistrées chez les nouveau-nés ces derniers mois. Selon eux, les cas de malformations à la naissance seraient dus, non pas au fameux moustique, mais à l’utilisation d’un pesticide : le Pyriproxyfen, produit par Sumitomo Chemical, filiale japonaise de la multinationale américaine Monsanto.
Ce pesticide utilisé plus particulièrement au Brésil, et injecté dans le réseau d’eau potable de certaines régions, sert à la lutte contre la prolifération du moustique-tigre, vecteur de la dengue.

Un futur scandale sanitaire et financier

Partis d’un simple postulat, les chercheurs se sont demandés pourquoi Zika (virus identifié dès les années 1950 en Ouganda), une maladie relativement bénigne, ne provoquait pas partout des malformations chez les nouveau-nés. Et de s’appuyer sur la constatation qu’en Colombie, où il sévit également, mais où le produit chimique n’est pas utilisé, aucun cas de microcéphalie n’a été enregistré jusqu’à ce jour.
Plus étonnant encore, ils font remarquer que, dans certaines zones où 75 % de la population a été testée positive à Zika, il n’y avait jamais eu de malformations comme celles observées au Brésil : « Les malformations détectées chez des milliers d’enfants nés de femmes enceintes dans des régions où l’État brésilien a ajouté du Pyriproxyfen ne sont pas une coïncidence et ce, même si le ministère de la Santé incrimine directement le virus Zika », ont déclaré dans un communiqué les chercheurs à l’origine peut-être d’un futur scandale sanitaire et financier.
La solution serait donc non pas à chercher dans les eaux stagnantes, mais dans l’eau potable des régions infectées et notamment celles du Nordeste brésilien, qui, avec 1 447 notifications de microcéphalies, est l’épicentre du phénomène. Depuis plus de dix-huit mois, les autorités brésiliennes, sur les recommandations de l’Organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS), y injectent dans le système hydrique cet insecticide.
Une solution pour le moins expéditive de lutter contre le virus, dans cette région qui est l’une des plus pauvres du Brésil où « 70 % des mères d’enfants atteints par la maladie vivent dans une extrême pauvreté », dixit le Diario de Pernambuco (quotidien du Nordeste).
Crise que ne connaît décidément pas le géant Monsanto, une nouvelle fois mis à l’index. Crise que ne connaîtront pas non plus les laboratoires pharmaceutiques, qui ont dix-huit mois pour trouver la solution et enlever le marché : « Une quinzaine de laboratoires et agences nationales de recherche sont sur les rangs », a déclaré la sous-directrice de l’OMS, le Dr Marie-Paule Kieny.
Dans le lot, deux vaccins sembleraient des plus prometteurs : l’un est développé par l’Institut national de la santé américain – institution gouvernementale – et l’autre par le laboratoire indien Bharat Biotech. Mais les États-Unis pourraient très vite avoir une longueur d’avance.
Barack Obama ne vient-il pas de demander au Congrès américain 1,8 milliard de dollars (1,6 million d’euros) pour combattre Zika ?

Le Brésil est en première ligne, mais l’épidémie s’étend. Le Brésil est aujourd’hui le pays le plus touché par le virus Zika. Ce sont en effet un million et demi de personnes qui ont été contaminées depuis 2015. Derrière lui se trouve la Colombie. Jusqu’en 2014, le virus n’était pas recensé sur le continent américain. Il est connu, en revanche, depuis les années 1950 en Afrique.

11 August 2015

Hot Takes: The Top Climate Change Reporting of the Past Year

An iceberg melts in Kulusuk, Greenland near the arctic circle. (John McConnico/AP)

A compilation of some of the best journalism in the months leading up to Barack Obama’s historic action to address climate change.

by Marcelo Rochabrun, ProPublica, Aug. 11, 2015

Last week, President Obama unveiled the Clean Power Plan, a pillar of his legacy project and his most ambitious exercise of executive authority to combat climate change. The proposed regulations are designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by almost a third from 2005 levels within the next 15 years. The potential for the biggest climate change victory in years follows a banner year for climate change journalism. We’ve compiled some of the best stories:

How Climate Change Will End Wine As We Know It

BuzzFeed, November 2014

Harvest of Change

Des Moines Register, September 2014

Iowa farmers are facing pressures from all sides to do something about climate change, and even those who don’t believe in it are being forced to respond. The federal government wants to prevent fertilizers used on Midwestern farms from flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. Big box retailers want protection against price shocks. Meanwhile, Iowa farmers seek to protect their land from increased rain, which causes erosion and strips nutrients from the soil. Acting on all these pressures can be costly and, sometimes, detrimental to production.

Inside the War on Coal

Politico, May 2015

An army of Sierra Club lawyers who appear at obscure state and local hearings in the Midwest – where small commissions debate the future of individual coal plants – has managed to shut down one coal plant every 10 days for the past 5 years thanks to the unlikely funding of large corporations. The spirit of the funders, however, has little to do with environmental concern and a lot to do with the escalating costs of producing coal, a result of the government’s ever-tougher environmental regulations.

Coal Crash: How Pension Funds Face Huge Risk From Climate Change

The Guardian, June 2015

Some of the world’s largest pension funds – including those of organizations like the United Nations, which advocate for urgent action to prevent climate change – have historically invested generously in coal companies. But now those investments, which used to produce handsome returns, could collapse.

The Making of a Climate Change Refugee

Foreign Policy, January 2015

After Ioane Teitiota, a native from the sinking island nation of Kiribati in the South Pacific, sought a work visa extension in New Zealand, his lawyer argued that Teitoiota was a victim of climate change in need of permanent refugee status. The campaign was ultimately unsuccessful but drew significant international attention to the reality and potential effects of rising ocean levels.

Exxon’s Gamble: 25 Years of Rejecting Shareholder Concerns on Climate Change

Inside Climate News, June 2015

Oil companies have long fought against anyone who demands change based on apocalyptic predictions of climate change, including their own investors. In fact, over the past 25 years, top executives at Exxon, Chevron and ConocoPhillips battled a combined 113 proposals from activist investors that ranged from adding board members with climate change expertise to establishing ceilings for greenhouse emissions. Not a single proposal passed.

27 April 2015

Obama Finally Gets Angry At Climate Science Deniers …

…And It’s Hilarious

President Obama brings out actor Keegan-Michael Key from “Key & Peele” to play “Luther, President Obama’s anger translator” during his remarks at White House Correspondents’ dinner Saturday night.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Source: Think Progress

by Joe Romm Posted on April 26, 2015

President Barack Obama just gave pitch-perfect delivery to one of the most brilliant pieces of writing on climate change you are ever going to see. At the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night in DC, Obama used devastating humor to express rare passion and anger over climate science denial.

Obama is famously low key. That’s why on the hit Comedy Central show “Key & Peele,” Keegan-Michael Key plays “Luther, President Obama’s anger translator.” The Correspondents’ dinner, however, is a rare place where the President can cut loose — as long as he uses humor.

In a hilarious admission that he has been too low key to convey the moral outrage justified by humanity’s myopic march toward self-destruction — and by the brazen denial of climate science by many conservatives — Obama brought out “Luther” to express that outrage. And then, in an ingenious twist, Obama became so outraged that he didn’t need Luther and in fact Luther himself couldn’t take the genuinely angry Obama, who says of denial, “What kind of stupid, shortsighted, irresponsible, bull–”

Watch it:

But this was not only Obama’s best “speech” on climate change to date, it was delivered to the perfect audience — the DC elite and the panjandrums of the media. The “not-so-intelligentsia” have been wildly underplaying the story of the century for a long, long time.

They should have called “Bull–” on deniers a long time ago. Kudos to the President for finally doing so.

27 February 2015

Survey: Morality of Climate Action More Popular than Science

WHO Global environmental change

27.2.2015

Source: teleSUR

Climate action advocates might be better off framing their message as a moral, rather than scientific cause.

Although the science behind climate change remains unpopular in the United States, a new poll released Friday suggested the moral implications of reducing emissions is less contentious.

Seventy-seven percent of respondents to a recent Reuters/IPSOS said they felt “personally morally obligated” to reduce emissions in their own lives. Sixty-six percent said they believed world leaders likewise have a moral duty to do what they can to reduce emissions.

According to the American Values Network’s director Eric Sapp, action on climate change has “broader appeal” when viewed as a moral choice rather than scientific dispute.

“The climate debate can be very intellectual at times, all about economic systems and science we don’t understand. This makes it about us, our neighbors and about doing the right thing,” said Sapp.

The poll itself found only 64 percent of respondents believed climate change is actually happening – meaning more respondents felt morally obligated to reduce emissions than believed the science.

When it came to understanding “global warming,” U.S. politicians ranked lower than United Nations scientists as credible sources, despite the fact the U.N.-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has consistently warned climate change is happening and that it is man-made.

Second only to U.N. scientists as a credible source of information was popular science guru Bill Nye, “the science guy.” A total of 31 percent of respondents said Nye was an “authority about global warming,” while just 18 percent said the same of Al Gore and President Barack Obama.

Despite the scientific consensus that human made climate change is a reality, in recent years polls have shown climate change denial is on the rise.

A poll released last month by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Pew Research Center found nearly half of respondents disagreed with the IPCC, and believed no evidence exists to support the scientific consensus. The results were first published in the journal Science.

The percentage of respondents that disagreed with the majority of the world’s climate scientists was higher than the number of survey participants that rejected another solid scientific consensus – the theory of evolution. A full 31 percent of respondents rejected evolutionary science, claiming modern humans have existed since the beginning of time.

16 February 2015

Obama is Right: Climate Change Kills More People Than Terrorism

floods

By Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, 16 February 15
Source: Reader Supported News

In an interview with Vox this week, President Barack Obama said the media “absolutely” overstates the risk of terrorism, when climate change and epidemics affect far more people. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest elaborated on Obama’s remarks on Tuesday, saying that “[t]here are many more people on an annual basis who have to confront the impact of climate change or the spread of a disease” than have to face terrorism.

Conservatives like Mike Huckabee ridicule Obama for linking climate change to national security. “I assure you that a beheading is much worse than a sunburn,” Huckabee told Fox News on Monday. They will be disappointed to learn that climate change is, in fact, more dangerous.

Twenty governments commissioned an independent report in 2012 from the group DARA International to study the human and economic costs of climate change. It linked 400,000 deaths worldwide to climate change each year, projecting deaths to increase to over 600,000 per year by 2030. When scientists attribute deaths to climate change, they don’t just mean succumbing to a heat wave or, as Huckabee put it, to sunburn. Heat waves kill many, to be sure, but global warming also devastates food security, nutrition, and water safety. Since mosquitoes and other pests thrive in hot, humid weather, scientists expect diseases like malaria and dengue fever to rise. Floods threaten to contaminate drinking water with bacteria and pollution.

When the report looked at the added health consequences from burning fossil fuels—aside from climate change—the number of deaths jumps from 400,000 to almost 5 million per year. Carbon-intensive economies see deaths linked to outdoor air pollution, indoor smoke from poor ventilation, occupational hazards, and skin cancer.

You can see which countries are most vulnerable to climate change in this map:

And look at the associated deaths worldwide, broken down by cause:

Now, compare that to terrorist incidents between 2000-2013, compiled in the 2014 Global Terrorism Index by the Institute for Economics and Peace. There were 18,000 deaths from terrorist attacks in 2013, a peak year. Over the 13-year period studied, 100,000 people died. Unlike the widespread impacts of climate change, terrorist threats are targeted. Most of the attacks in 2013 affected just five countries—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria.

The ultimate irony of Republicans brushing off the impact of climate change: Drought and extreme weather can destabilize developing regions, making climate change one of the factors that drives terrorism.