19 May 2016

Noam Chomsky: Climate Change & Nuclear Proliferation Pose the Worst Threat Ever Faced by Humanity

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! – 16 May 16
Source: Reader Supported News

President Obama has just passed a little-noticed milestone, according to The New York Times: Obama has now been at war longer than any president in U.S. history—longer than George W. Bush, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Obama has taken military action in at least seven countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Just last month, President Obama announced the deployment of 250 more Special Operations troops to Syria in a move that nearly doubles the official U.S. presence in the country.
As war spreads across the globe, a record 60 million people were driven from their homes last year. Experts warn the refugee crisis may also worsen due to the impacts of global warming. Over the weekend, NASA released data showing 2016 is on pace to be by far the hottest year ever, breaking the 2015 record. Meanwhile, many fear a new nuclear arms race has quietly begun, as the United States, Russia and China race to build arsenals of smaller nuclear weapons.
These multiple crises come as voters in the United States prepare to elect a new president. We speak with one of the world’s preeminent intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught for more than 50 years. His latest book is titled “Who Rules the World?”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road here in New York, then on today to [Chicago], to Madison, Wisconsin, and then to Toronto, Canada.

The New York Times is reporting President Obama has just passed a little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than any president in U.S. history—longer than George W. Bush, longer than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, longer than Abraham Lincoln. Obama has taken military action in at least seven countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Just last month, President Obama announced the deployment of 250 more Special Operations troops to Syria in a move that nearly doubles the official U.S. presence in the country.

As war spreads across the globe, a record 60 million people were driven from their homes last year. Experts warn the refugee crisis may also worsen due to the impacts of global warming. Over the weekend, NASA released data showing 2016 is on pace to be by far the hottest year ever, breaking the 2015 record. April became the seventh month in a row to have broken global temperature records. Meanwhile, many fear a new nuclear arms race has quietly begun, as the United States, Russia and China race to build arsenals of smaller nuclear weapons. These multiple crises come as voters in the United States prepare to elect a new president.

To make sense of the challenges facing the globe and the state of the U.S. election, we’re joined today by one of the world’s preeminent intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he’s taught for more than half a century. His latest book is called Who Rules the World?

Noam Chomsky, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Glad to be with you again.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Noam, who rules the world?

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s, to a certain extent, up to us. It is possible for populations to rule the world, but they have to struggle to achieve that. And if they don’t, the world will be ruled by concentrations of power—economic power, state power—closely linked with consequences that are of the kind that you describe. But that’s a choice.

AMY GOODMAN: How does the United States set the terms of the global discourse and, overall, what’s happening in the world?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that’s basically an outcome of the Second World War. At the end of the Second World War, the United States had a level of power and comparative wealth that had never existed in history. It had literally half the world’s wealth. It had an incomparable position of security—controlled the hemisphere, controlled both oceans, controlled the opposite sides of both oceans. In military terms, it was overwhelmingly preeminent. Other industrial societies had been devastated or severely weakened. The war had actually greatly benefited the U.S. economy. It ended the Depression. Industrial production virtually quadrupled. There was a debt, which you could easily grow out of it by growth. So the United States was in fact in a position to pretty much set the terms for virtually the entire global system.

It couldn’t stay that way, of course, and it began to erode pretty quickly, though, with all the changes over the past years, the United States still is in a preeminent position with incomparable advantages and maybe now a quarter of the world’s wealth. In military terms, on that dimension, the United States is completely alone. It’s the only country that has hundreds, maybe a thousand, military bases around the world, troops all over the world. U.S. military spending is almost as great as the rest of the world combined, technologically much more advanced. And within that context of the past 70 years or so, the United States has had a—usually, a pretty dominant role in world affairs and setting the framework within which others operate—not without conflict, of course.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the two major threats facing the world today: nuclear war and climate change. Talk about each.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I might start by referring to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a clock that’s—since 1947, shortly after the atomic bombing, they established a Doomsday Clock. Every year, a panel of specialists make an estimate of how close we are to midnight. Midnight means termination for the species. It’s moved up and back over the years. Right now, it—just last year, it was moved two minutes closer to midnight because of the two threats that you mentioned, stayed there this year. That’s three minutes to midnight, close as it’s been since the early 1980s, when there was a major war scare. It was recognized then to be serious. Now that Russian archives have been opened, we see that it was far more serious than was assumed. We were at one point literally minutes away, several points in fact, minutes away from nuclear war. That’s where the Doomsday Clock stands now.

The nuclear threat is the threat of—on the Russian border, which happens to be the invasion route through which Russia was virtually destroyed twice last century by Germany alone—well, Germany as part of a hostile military alliance—on that border, both sides are acting as if a war is thinkable. The U.S. has just sharply increased; it quadrupled military expenses on its side. The Russians are doing something similar. There are constant near collisions, jets coming close to colliding with one another. A Russian jet a couple months ago virtually hit a Danish commercial airliner. U.S. troops are carrying out maneuvers virtually on the Russian border. That threat is escalating and very serious. William Perry, a respected nuclear specialist, a former defense secretary, recently estimated that the threat is higher than it was during the 1980s. There are also confrontations near the Chinese around China, South China Sea and so on. That’s one major threat.

The other is what you just described. The threat of global warming is very serious. Every time one reads a science journal, there’s an even more alarming discovery. Virtually all the ice masses are melting. The Arctic ice mass, which was assumed to be pretty stable, is actually melting very fast, much more than was thought. The glaciers are melting. There’s severe droughts. Right now already, about 300 million people in India are on the edge of starvation from drought, which has been going on for years. The groundwater is depleted as the Himalayan glaciers melt, as they’re doing. It will undermine the water supply for huge areas in South Asia. If people think there’s a migration crisis now, they haven’t seen anything. The sea level is rising. Chances are it could rise three to six feet, maybe more, by the end of the century—some estimate even sooner. It will have a devastating effect, not just on coastal cities, but on coastal plains, like, say, Bangladesh, where hundreds of millions of people will be severely threatened. I mean, this is a—we’re already killing other species at the level of the so-called fifth extinction. Sixty-five million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Earth, devastating consequences ended the age of the dinosaurs, opened the way for small mammals to develop, ultimately evolve, finally evolve into Homo sapiens, which now is acting the same way the asteroid did. That’s the fifth extinction. It’s going to get worse. All of these are—the rate of global warming today is far faster, maybe a hundred or more times as fast as any moderately comparable period that can be estimated in the geological record.

And to make it worse, of these two huge threats, we have an electoral—the quadrennial electoral extravaganza is going on right now, of course. And it’s pretty remarkable to see how the worst threats that the human species has ever faced, the most important decisions it must make—and soon—are virtually absent from the discussions and debates. On the Democratic side, there’s a couple of comments about it here and there, not much. On the Republican side, it’s much worse. Every single candidate either denies global warming altogether or, in one case, Kasich, admits that it’s taking place but says we shouldn’t do anything about it, which is even worse.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam—

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s 100 percent.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, we’re going to go to a break. When we come back, we’ll play the last remaining Republican in the race, Donald Trump’s comment on climate change, and also get your take overall on the 2016 presidential election here in the United States. Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, has a new book out; it’s called Who Rules the World? Stay with us.

5 March 2016

More Than Half a Million Could Die as Climate Change Impacts Diet – Report

Women selling vegetables at market in Guatemala. Fewer fruit and vegetables will be available as a result of climatic changes, the research found. Photograph: Alamy

Source: The Guardian

New research shows global warming’s effect on the quality of food available could kill more than 500,000 people a year around the world by 2050

Climate change could kill more than 500,000 people a year globally by 2050 by making their diets less healthy, according to new research published in the Lancet.

The research is the first to assess how the impacts of global warming could affect the quality of the diets available to people and found fewer fruit and vegetables would be available as a result of climatic changes. These are vital in curbing heart disease, strokes and diet-related cancers, leading the study to conclude that the health risks of climate change are far greater than thought.

Climate change is already judged by doctors as the greatest threat to health in the 21st century, due to floods, droughts and increased infectious diseases, with the potential to roll back 50 years of progress.

Peter Scarborough, at the University of Oxford and part of the new research, said these direct impacts would affect tens of thousands of people at particular times: “But everyone in the world eats, so small changes in diet can quickly add up” to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

“The health burden related to climate change is much bigger than we thought,” Scarborough said. But cutting carbon emissions and improving education and the availability of fruit and vegetables would reduce the number of deaths, he said.

“The Lancet [study] digs deeper, and reports the most advanced projections so far of the effects of climate change on food and health,” according to professors Alistair Woodward at the University of Auckland and John Porter at the University of Copenhagen in a commentary on the work.

They say that given the uncertainties involved in the complex analysis, it is understandable to limit projections to the next 35 years. But they warn that the worst-case impacts beyond 2050 could be even greater.

As an example, they cite work indicating that failure of the rice crop in southern China due to heatwaves could change from a one-in-a-100-year event to a one-in-four-year event in 2100. “A worst-case analysis is not unusual in risk assessments in other areas [such as national security] when the stakes are high,” they note.

The new research involved linking a series of computer models, which covered crop production, economic development, trade and climate change, to consider a range of scenarios. The current trend in global nutrition is for fewer people to die from inadequate diets each year, due to increasing crop yields and poverty reduction.

But a continued rapid rise in carbon emissions would cut heavily into that positive trend. Severe climate change would cause changes in food availability, leading to 529,000 more people dying in 2050 than would have without warming, the research found. Even with very ambitious climate action, including sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, there would be 154,000 extra deaths in 2050.

The research found that severe climate change would cut the fruit and vegetable available to people in 2050 by 4%, the calories available by 3% and the red and processed meat by 0.7%. By far the biggest cause of deaths was the reduction in fruit and vegetables, particularly in rich countries.

The reduction in calories resulted in more people dying from lack of food, especially in India and China. However, almost exactly the same number of deaths were prevented elsewhere by reductions in obesity. The cut in red meat eating prevented 29,000 deaths.

Nearly all nations are projected to suffer an increase in deaths due to the diet changes caused by climate change. But a few, in central America and southern Africa, could see a reduction in deaths as the reductions in obesity outweigh other factors.

Scarborough accepted there are significant uncertainties in the projections and the study says the projected deaths in 2050 ranges between 314,000 and 736,000. But he said it is the best estimate so far and clearly shows that action to tackle climate change would have large-scale health benefits.

Prof Andy Challinor, at the University of Leeds and not involved in the new work, said: “This is a valiant attempt to quantify the effects of climate change on the future of food production. It’s very difficult to estimate exactly what those impacts will be [but] what we can say for certain is that the pressures on agricultural production will certainly be greater because of climate change.”

“Year-to-year variability of food production will become greater, which will make global food markets more unpredictable,” Challinor said. “And extreme climatic events will become more common, such as the wheat harvest failure in Russia in 2010 which affected UK food prices. The effects of such events on global food availability and prices will be felt in the UK and around the world.”

The research was funded by the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food.

24 February 2016

Climate Justice and Palestine: the New Intersectionality

Source: Counter Punch

by Alice Rothchild

On February 9, 2016, the US Supreme Court in a troubling example of shortsighted hubris halted Obama’s latest climate change resolutions which had emerged from the December Paris Agreement on global warming, thus also threatening commitments made by other top polluters, India and China. While China has now surpassed the US as the number one polluter, the decades of fossil fuel use by the US stills makes us the largest contributor to the climate crisis. The decision to freeze the resolutions which sought to decrease greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants until legal challenges are resolved, threatens to imperil an already inadequate approach to climate change. The Paris Agreement included what advocates call “false solutions.” These involve technological fixes such as carbon markets, genetically modified seeds, and industrial agriculture. The Agreement also lacked a financial commitment to ameliorate the irreparable harm that has already been done or to support climate refugees in the future.

The repeated failures of international and governmental agencies to effectively deal with the disastrous changes that threaten the entire planet have sparked local indigenous and small farmer activism from Bolivia to Palestine. It is already clear that global warming will disproportionately affect the poorest of the poor who are the least able to cope and the least responsible for the rising temperatures. The activism and discourse around our warming planet is increasingly grounded in a deep understanding of the intimate relationship between food sovereignty, climate justice, and resource rights, as well as the critical role for small farmers, local solutions, and the centrality of human rights and transitional justice.

There is growing evidence that climate change and resource wars lead to major conflict. The Rwandan genocide was preceded by crop failure; the war in Sudan by drought. The Syrian disaster was triggered by one of the worst droughts in Middle East history, five years of crop failures and dead livestock that lead to 1.5 million desperate rural people flocking to the cities where they were met with water shortages and no work. This led to serious political unrest, massive repression by President Bassar al-Assad, and a desperate radicalization of the populace. Hunger and hopelessness are powerful motivators and now the country lies in shambles. Half the Syrian population is displaced, four million people are living in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, most in heartbreaking poverty, and the European Union is facing a destabilizing refugee crisis that is provoking both the best altruism and the worst xenophobia that countries have to offer. As the US anxiously grapples with the Syrian refugee crisis, it is becoming more evident that we are all in this together.

So how does this relate to Palestine? Palestine is faced with a double challenge, global and local. Due to climate change, the average rainfall is decreasing and the Jordan River will soon run dry. The Gazan aquifer is so over-utilized and salinated, experts have been saying that there will be no drinkable water for 1.9 million people by 2016 which is, after all, now. These same people are also crippled by a crushing economic siege and an environment poisoned by toxic munitions. At the same time, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is characterized by water confiscation and contamination. The Israeli government refuses to allow Palestinians to drill wells or build dams and repeatedly destroys water and waste treatment infrastructure, massively uproots olive trees, and bulldozes farm lands, sometimes for settlements or the separation wall or bypass roads and sometimes, just because.

Israel’s state owned water company, Mekorot, diverts 90% of the water in the West Bank aquifers to Israel and then brags about Israeli water innovation and independence. Israeli per capita water use is four to five times greater than Palestinians. Their access, which is controlled by Israel, is below the minimum standard set by the World Health Organization. Gazans have also endured repeated assaults to civilians and infrastructure and environmentally catastrophic attacks. They are thwarted by severe limitations on fishing as well as the contamination of the Mediterranean by untreated raw sewage due to the bombing of the treatment plants and the harsh restrictions on imports of reconstruction materials. There are increasing reports of hopeless, angry young men traumatized by repeated wars and the loss of a viable future, now turning from Hamas who has failed them to ISIL. Desperation breeds radicalization. Jewish settlements in the West Bank also include massive industrial zones that ignore Israeli environmental regulations, often dumping toxic waste into Palestinian farms and water sources. The industries also profit from poorly paid and poorly protected Palestinian workers.

Several years ago there was much talk from Netanyahu of an economic peace in Palestine. Just like a purely big business, economic focus will not successfully address climate change, a strengthening of markets and investment will not bring tranquility to Palestine. The much trumpeted economic development of the West Bank goes nowhere without addressing the brutal facts of occupation.

Palestinians understand this. The Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) talks of their defense of land and water for Palestinian farmers as partly resistance to Israeli occupation and partly fighting climate change. They help farmers rebuild after Israeli attacks, build gray water infrastructure, cisterns for irrigation, and hydroponic sprouting units, and have developed the most far reaching seed bank in the region. The seed banks preserve the local seed biodiversity and the independence and steadfastness of the farmers; this is a struggle for food sovereignty as well as a resistance economy. As Abu Saif from UAWC states, “There’s no national sovereignty without seed sovereignty.”[i] Local seed banks challenge the powerful seed companies that rely on a system of genetically modified and hybridized seeds that is grounded in industrial practices based on petroleum.

In addition the UAWC supports women’s empowerment and indigenous human rights with their focus on sustainable agriculture through locally based agroecology, challenging the impact of occupation and the racist policies that privilege the Jewish settler with a green lawn and swimming pool over the thirsty Palestinian living in the valley below. At the same time the focus on small farmers and local markets reduces global greenhouse emissions and more reliably meets the food needs of the population. Hiba Al-Jibeihi of UAWC notes, “We all as humans fight for food sovereignty, climate justice and gender justice…Climate change’s effects on Palestinians are double because the Israeli occupation takes our resources, including land and water. Climate justice means resource rights, land justice, gender justice, food sovereignty and peace.”[ii]

It is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the steady rise of temperatures, sea levels, and the fierce and wild weather changes that are becoming common place as climate change deniers, global corporations, and national governments block any meaningful progress towards stopping global warming and fossil fuel based economies. But there is clearly much to be done on the local as well as international levels and the climate changes are becoming harder and harder to deny. Likewise, when it comes to Palestine, there is growing awareness of the evils of the occupation, the horrors of each Gaza invasion, and the interconnections between the mushrooming settler movement, the use of water as a weapon to subdue and control the Palestinian population, and the importance of local solutions as well as international support.

In the US, groups like Grassroots International, an organization mobilizing resources from progressive US donors, look to the climate justice movement in Palestine as a source of information and inspiration. “They are advancing a powerful vision of climate justice, by developing sustainable livelihoods, protecting the environment and fighting against the Israeli occupation, all at the same time. As the just transition movement grows in the US, calling for a transition from the extractive, exploitative economy to resilient, thriving communities, stronger solidarity with Palestine’s climate justice movement will be key to achieving that vision.”[iii] Activists are also drawing links between the growing boycott, divestment, sanction movement against Israel and the call for divestment from fossil fuels and the industries that extract and deliver them.

Perhaps we should take heart that boycotting products made in the Israeli settlements, challenging the massive Israeli blue and green washing propaganda machine, and supporting activists replanting olive saplings on the ancient terraces where they have been uprooted, not only supports the struggle against Israeli occupation. This activism also contributes to climate justice and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions at the most local and intimate level.

Notes.

[i] http://www.grassrootsonline.org/news/articles/planting-seeds-sovereignty-palestine

[ii] http://www.grassrootsonline.org/news/blog/road-climate-justice-goes-through-palestine

[iii] Personal communication, Chung-Wha Hong, executive director, Grassroots International

22 May 2015

Fossil Fuels Subsidised by $10m A Minute, Says IMF

[Gerry Machen/Flickr]

Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3 trillion (€4.74 tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3 tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.

The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused to local populations by air pollution as well as to people across the globe affected by the floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change.

Nicholas Stern, an eminent climate economist at the London School of Economics, said, “This very important analysis shatters the myth that fossil fuels are cheap by showing just how huge their real costs are. There is no justification for these enormous subsidies for fossil fuels, which distort markets and damages economies, particularly in poorer countries.”

Lord Stern said that even the IMF’s vast subsidy figure was a significant underestimate: “A more complete estimate of the costs due to climate change would show the implicit subsidies for fossil fuels are much bigger even than this report suggests.”

The IMF, one of the world’s most respected financial institutions, said that ending subsidies for fossil fuels would cut global carbon emissions by 20%. That would be a giant step towards taming global warming, an issue on which the world has made little progress to date.

Ending the subsidies would also slash the number of premature deaths from outdoor air pollution by 50% – about 1.6 million lives a year.

Furthermore, the IMF said the resources freed by ending fossil fuel subsidies could be an economic “game-changer” for many countries, by driving economic growth and poverty reduction through greater investment in infrastructure, health and education and also by cutting taxes that restrict growth.

Another consequence would be that the need for subsidies for renewable energy – a relatively tiny $120bn a year – would also disappear, if fossil fuel prices reflected the full cost of their impacts.

“These [fossil fuel subsidy] estimates are shocking,” said Vitor Gaspar, the IMF’s head of fiscal affairs and former finance minister of Portugal. “Energy prices remain woefully below levels that reflect their true costs.”

David Coady, the IMF official in charge of the report, said: “When the [$5.3tn] number came out at first, we thought we had better double check this!” But the broad picture of huge global subsidies was “extremely robust”, he said. “It is the true cost associated with fossil fuel subsidies.”

The IMF estimate of $5.3tn in fossil fuel subsidies represents 6.5% of global GDP. Just over half the figure is the money governments are forced to spend treating the victims of air pollution and the income lost because of ill health and premature deaths. The figure is higher than a 2013 IMF estimate because new data from the World Health Organisation shows the harm caused by air pollution to be much higher than thought.

Coal is the dirtiest fuel in terms of both local air pollution and climate-warming carbon emissions and is therefore the greatest beneficiary of the subsidies, with just over half the total. Oil, heavily used in transport, gets about a third of the subsidy and gas the rest.

The biggest single source of air pollution is coal-fired power stations and China, with its large population and heavy reliance on coal power, provides $2.3tn of the annual subsidies. The next biggest fossil fuel subsidies are in the US ($700bn), Russia ($335bn), India ($277bn) and Japan ($157bn), with the European Union collectively allowing $330bn in subsidies to fossil fuels.

The costs resulting from the climate change driven by fossil fuel emissions account for subsidies of $1.27tn a year, about a quarter, of the IMF’s total. The IMF calculated this cost using an official US government estimate of $42 a tonne of CO2 (in 2015 dollars), a price “very likely to underestimate” the true cost, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The direct subsidising of fuel for consumers, by government discounts on diesel and other fuels, account for just 6% of the IMF’s total. Other local factors, such as reduced sales taxes on fossil fuels and the cost of traffic congestion and accidents, make up the rest. The IMF says traffic costs are included because increased fuel prices would be the most direct way to reduce them.

Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate change chief charged with delivering a deal to tackle global warming at a crunch summit in December, said: “The IMF provides five trillion reasons for acting on fossil fuel subsidies. Protecting the poor and the vulnerable is crucial to the phasing down of these subsidies, but the multiple economic, social and environmental benefits are long and legion.”

Barack Obama and the G20 nations called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies in 2009, but little progress had been made until oil prices fell in 2014. In April, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, told the Guardian that it was crazy that governments were still driving the use of coal, oil and gas by providing subsidies. “We need to get rid of fossil fuel subsidies now,” he said.

Reform of the subsidies would increase energy costs but Kim and the IMF both noted that existing fossil fuel subsidies overwhelmingly go to the rich, with the wealthiest 20% of people getting six times as much as the poorest 20% in low and middle-income countries. Gaspar said that with oil and coal prices currently low, there was a “golden opportunity” to phase out subsidies and use the increased tax revenues to reduce poverty through investment and to provide better targeted support.

Subsidy reforms are beginning in dozens of countries including Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco and Thailand. In India, subsidies for diesel ended in October 2014. “People said it would not be possible to do that,” noted Coady. Coal use has also begun to fall in China for the first time this century.

On renewable energy, Coady said: “If we get the pricing of fossil fuels right, the argument for subsidies for renewable energy will disappear. Renewable energy would all of a sudden become a much more attractive option.”

Shelagh Whitley, a subsidies expert at the Overseas Development Institute, said: “The IMF report is yet another reminder that governments around the world are propping up a century-old energy model. Compounding the issue, our research shows that many of the energy subsidies highlighted by the IMF go toward finding new reserves of oil, gas and coal, which we know must be left in the ground if we are to avoid catastrophic, irreversible climate change.”

Developing the international cooperation needed to tackle climate change has proved challenging but a key message from the IMF’s work, according to Gaspar, is that each nation will directly benefit from tackling its own fossil fuel subsidies. “The icing on the cake is that the benefits from subsidy reform – for example, from reduced pollution – would overwhelmingly accrue to local populations,” he said.

“By acting local, and in their own best interest, [nations] can contribute significantly to the solution of a global challenge,” said Gaspar. “The path forward is clear: act local, solve global.”

Source: EurActiv
In partnership with The Guardian

14 February 2015

We Dump 8 Million Tons of Plastic Into the Ocean Each Year…

…Where Does It All Go?

By Brad Plumer, Vox, 13 February 15
Source: Reader Supported News

What happens to all our plastic bottles and lids and containers after we toss them out?

The vast majority of plastic trash ends up in landfills, just sitting there and taking thousands of years to degrade. A smaller fraction gets recycled (about 9 percent in the United States).

But there’s another big chunk that finds its way into the oceans, either from people chucking litter into waterways or from storm-water runoff carrying plastic debris to the coasts. And scientists have long worried that all this plastic could have adverse effects on marine life.

Now we can finally quantify this problem: A new study in Science calculates that between 5 and 13 million metric tons of plastic waste made it into the ocean in 2010 alone. What’s more, the authors estimate this amount could more than quadruple by 2025 without better waste management.

Plastic debris in the Mediterranean Sea. (photo: Alan Bachellier/Flickr)
Plastic debris in the Mediterranean Sea. (photo: Alan Bachellier/Flickr)

And here’s another surprise twist: We still don’t know where most of that ocean plastic actually ends up. A separate study last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified massive swirling garbage patches in each of the world’s oceans that contain up to 35,000 tons of plastic.

Yet those patches accounted for less than 1 percent of the plastic thought to be in the oceans — and no one quite knows where the other 99 percent went. One possibility is that marine creatures are eating the rest of the plastic and it’s somehow entering the food chain. But that’s still unclear.

China accounts for one-quarter of plastic ocean waste

Jenna R. Jambeck of the University of Georgia shows plastic waste from each country. (photo: Jambeck et al 2015)
Jenna R. Jambeck of the University of Georgia shows plastic waste from each country. (photo: Jambeck et al 2015)

The new Science study, led by Jenna R. Jambeck of the University of Georgia, was the first since the 1970s to try to quantify how much of our plastic waste on land ends up in the ocean each year.

The authors looked at plastic production rates, data on waste management and disposal in 193 different coastal countries. Putting this all together, they estimated that the world threw out 275 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2010 (much of it from plastic packaging).

They then estimated that between 4.7 and 12.7 million metric tons made its way to sea — with a best estimate of 8 million tons. That’s enough to cover the world’s entire coastline.

China was the biggest contributor by far, accounting for roughly one-quarter of the marine debris produced each year. (Note that these figures only include plastic waste on land that makes its way to sea. It doesn’t include things like plastic waste from fishing vessels, which makes up an unknown fraction.)

What’s more, the researchers find, the amount of plastic waste could quadruple (or worse) by 2025 unless better waste-management techniques are adopted — like recycling or a reduction in packaging materials used.

Every ocean now has a massive plastic garbage patch

Concentrations of plastic debris in surface waters of the global ocean. Colored circles indicate mass concentrations. (photo: Cozar et al, 2014.)
Concentrations of plastic debris in surface waters of the global ocean. Colored circles indicate mass concentrations. (photo: Cozar et al, 2014.)

So where does this ocean plastic go?

Many people have heard of the Great Pacific garbage patch — a massive patch of trash that’s accumulated in a swirling subtropical gyre in northern Pacific Ocean. Ocean currents carry trash from far and wide into this vortex.

And it turns out that there are at least five of these floating garbage patches around the world. That’s according to a separate 2014 study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by Andres Cózar of the Universidad de Cadiz based on the results of a 2010 circumnavigation cruise.

These garbage patches aren’t visible from up high — or even from a passing boat — since most of the plastic is bobbing just beneath the surface, and most of the particles are smaller than 1 centimeter in diameter. Over time, the plastic bits get broken down into ever smaller pieces as they get battered by waves and degraded by the sun.

Even so, these gyres have a lot of garbage, collectively holding some 7,000 to 35,000 tons of plastic in all. The patch in the North Pacific was by far the biggest — containing about one-third of all the floating plastic found. (Much of the plastic debris from eastern China, for instance, collects here.)

And yet, what was most surprising to researchers was that these plastic garbage patches weren’t even bigger. There should be millions of tons of plastic in the oceans. But these subtropical gyres only contained up to 35,000 tons. In particular, there seemed to be much less plastic smaller than 1 millimeter in diameter than expected. So where did the rest go?

99% of plastic in the ocean is missing. Where did it go?

Organisms living in the ocean are absorbing the pollutants that enter the ocean water. (photo: Bo Eide/Flickr)
Organisms living in the ocean are absorbing the pollutants that enter the ocean water. (photo: Bo Eide/Flickr)

In the PNAS paper, the authors offer a couple of possible explanations for why they didn’t find nearly as much floating plastic as they expected. The most troubling is that fish and other organisms are eating all the plastic:

1.Maybe the plastic is washing back ashore. The problem with this hypothesis is that most of the “missing” plastic is less than 1 millimeter in diameter. It’s unclear why only smaller bits would have washed up ashore.

2.Perhaps the plastic somehow breaks down into really, really tiny, undetectable pieces. This is possible, although the authors note that “there is no reason to assume that the rate of solar-induced fragmentation increased since the 1980s.”

3.Maybe small organisms are growing on some of the plastic bits, causing them to get heavier and sink deeper into the ocean. This is also possible, although other studies have found that when these plastic pieces sink, the organisms on them typically die and the plastic bobs back up to the surface.

4.Plankton and fish are eating the plastic. This one’s a more plausible hypothesis. After all, the tiny plastic bits that seem to have vanished are small enough to be eaten by zooplankton, who are known to munch on plastic. The authors also argue that mesopelagic fish beneath the surface may be eating a lot of plastic too — and, perhaps, pooping it out down to the ocean bottom. This needs further testing though.

5.Assuming fish are eating all that plastic and it’s entering the food chain, it’s still unclear how dangerous that is. Obviously some marine organisms, like seabirds, can get digestive problems (and can die) if they eat large pieces of plastic. But what about very tiny pieces? There’s some evidence that toxic chemicals can cling to plastic in the ocean and accumulate — but there’s still scant research on how much harm this might actually do as it passes through the food chain.

6.Plastic is accumulating in the ice caps. Meanwhile, a separate 2014 study in Earth’s Future suggested that a great deal of microplastic is accumulating in the polar ice caps. As sea ice forms and expands, the argument goes, it essentially “scavenges” the plastic from the seawater. This, too, might be part of the story.

7.Someone’s estimating wrong. Alternatively, it’s always possible that scientists’ best estimates of how much plastic is actually entering the oceans are incorrect. That might help explain the discrepancy.

Either way, something doesn’t add up — the current numbers suggest that the vast majority of plastic trash in the ocean is vanishing, and no one seems to know where it went.