Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27623809

Human-made global heating caused two in every three heat deaths in Europe during this year’s scorching summer, an early analysis of mortality in 854 big cities has found.

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Chinese miners are illegally extracting Congolese gold on a vast scale, according to a new report from the nonprofit PAX, which also accuses the Democratic Republic of the Congo of weak and ineffective governance.

The report, published Wednesday by the Netherlands-based peace advocacy group, said that semi-industrial gold mining operations have devastated at least 155 miles of rivers and streams in Haut-Uélé, a province where poverty is widespread and where armed conflict and violence have roiled the population for decades.

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Asked about whether Chinese nationals are engaged in illegal, semi-industrial gold mining in northeastern DRC, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said in a written statement: “I’m not aware of the specifics you mentioned. Please refer to the competent authorities for further comments.”

He added: “As a principle, the Chinese government consistently requires Chinese nationals abroad to abide by local laws and regulations and to refrain from any illegal activities.”

China’s Foreign Ministry said virtually the same thing in January when asked about similar illegal gold mining operations in a different DRC region, Kivu.

A surge in illegal gold mining in Haut-Uélé began in 2020, with Congolese mining enterprises presented as small-scale, artisanal “cooperatives” using Chinese financial and technical backing, the report said. Congolese law allows artisanal mining cooperatives of Congolese nationals to operate in certain areas if licensed.

In times of crisis, food is more than sustenance. It is a pillar of national stability. Finland has long understood this, not just because of policy, but because of who we are and where we live. Geography, a mild continental climate and our history have shaped a mindset where preparedness is essential. In a country with vast territory, a sparse population and long distances between communities, resilience must be built into everything we do.

This understanding is deeply rooted in our society, in individual households as much as government institutions. Today, Finland’s approach to preparedness is rightly seen as a model for Europe. But it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. What works for Finland, such as our high levels of food self-sufficiency, strong institutions and a culture of cooperation, may not work elsewhere. Still, our experience offers valuable lessons. Preparedness must be proactive, inclusive and deeply integrated into national strategy.

The violent weather that battered Europe this summer caused short-term economic losses of at least €43bn, according to an EU-wide estimate, with costs expected to rise to €126bn by 2029.

The immediate hit to the economy from a single brutal summer of heat, drought and flooding amounted to 0.26% of the EU’s economic output in 2024, according to the rapid analysis, which has not been submitted for peer review but is based on relationships between weather and economic data that were published in an academic study this month.

One and a half million Australians are at risk from sea levels rising by 2050 unless climate change can be limited, Australia’s first national climate risk assessment has warned.

It found under 1.5C of warming, sea levels would rise by 0.14m, but they would rise by 0.54m under a 3C scenario — with Queensland home to 18 of the 20 most-exposed regions.

The assessment, which is the single most-significant body of climate work by the Australian government, also warns that 597,000 people are living in areas that will become exposed to sea level rise by 2030.

The grim document has been released days ahead of the federal government committing to its emissions target for 2035, and a meeting at the United Nations where countries will update their commitments.

Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said the assessment was an honest warning of the cost of failing to act.

The Trump administration has already added nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies for oil, gas, and coal in 2025, a report released Tuesday finds, sending an additional $4 billion out the door each year for fossil fuels over the next decade. That new amount, created with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer, adds to $30.8 billion a year in preexisting subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. The report finds that the amount of public money the U.S. will now spend on domestic fossil fuels stands at at least $34.8 billion a year.

The increase amounts to “the largest single-year increase in subsidies we’ve seen in many years — at least since 2017,” says Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager for Oil Change International, an anti-fossil fuels advocacy organization and author of the report.

The U.S. has been subsidizing fossil fuel production for more than a century. Many of the tax subsidies logged in the report — including a tax break passed in 1913 that allows companies to write off large amounts of expenses related to drilling new oil wells — have been on the books for decades.

Fossil fuel subsidies have proven notoriously difficult to undo, even with a determined administration. After campaigning on ending tax breaks for Big Oil, President Joe Biden’s 2021 budget pledged to raise $35 billion over 19 years by eliminating certain fossil fuel subsidies; one of his first executive orders tasked agencies with getting rid of those subsidies. (“I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to Big Oil,” he said at a press conference announcing the order.)

But the phaseouts of these subsidies were nixed during climate legislation negotiations with then-senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who was the key swing vote in the Senate at the time and a recipient of fossil fuel money with lengthy ties to the coal industry. Meanwhile, the Inflation Reduction Act — the resulting compromise between Manchin and Democratic leadership, which was passed in August of 2022 — gave additional boosts to the fossil fuel industry in the form of subsidies for oil-and-gas-friendly technologies, like carbon capture and storage and certain types of hydrogen made with natural gas.

“What happens is you have these policies in place, and then you have a constituency that strongly advocates and lobbies for them, it becomes harder and harder to unwind them, which I think is the situation that we’re in today,” says Matthew Kotchen, a professor of economics at Yale University, who was not involved in the new analysis.

That cycle is continuing in the new administration. Fossil fuel companies spent millions of dollars getting Trump elected last year; one report from the advocacy group Climate Power puts the total number at $445 million. Those companies are seeing benefits as the administration pursues an aggressive deregulatory agenda, hobbles renewable energy projects, and downplays the importance of climate change. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the president has taken to calling oil CEOs following their appearances on TV.

“It’s no secret that Trump and the Republicans are on the side of the fossil fuel industry and very much vice versa,” says Rees. “The fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting Republicans and Trump elected. They then presented their wish lists. Nearly everything on those wish lists was fulfilled, and in fact, they got a bunch of additional goodies that weren’t even in those wish lists.”

The new research builds on past work from Oil Change International, which last did the math on national fossil fuel subsidies in 2017, finding then that $20 billion was going out the door to the industry each year. To compile the new report, Rees and his colleagues combed through a variety of federal governmental sources on the amount of money going to the oil, gas, and coal industries each year.

The question of what, exactly, constitutes a federal subsidy is the topic of some debate. Environmental groups tend to have a broader scope in tallying up public money spent on fossil fuels, including federal money not distributed directly to oil companies. Conservative groups, meanwhile, take a much narrower approach. (For its report, Oil Change International used the definitions of subsidies set by the World Trade Organization in calculating domestic funding to fossil fuels.)

Due to a lack of transparency across the federal government, the calculations in this report are “likely to be an undercount,” Rees says. “There’s probably some things that we missed — some corners of the budget that are funding fossil fuels in different ways.”

The $4 billion in new yearly subsidies comes largely in the form of allocations contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed this summer. One of the biggest new subsidies — an expansion of the tax credit for carbon capture and storage — is, ironically, related to provisions from the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Trump campaigned on reversing. (The One Big Beautiful Bill Act did, however, crack down harshly on tax credits for wind and solar, carrying out part of Trump’s campaign promise.)

Carbon capture and storage is the process of capturing CO2 emissions and injecting them deep underground. The oil and gas industry has for decades injected CO2 underground to help recover difficult reserves that don’t respond well to traditional drilling methods. Environmentalists have long argued that the logic of replicating an oil and gas technique as a climate solution is seriously flawed — especially considering that a company could reap a climate tax credit from injecting CO2 that will then be used to create more fossil fuels.

In the original Inflation Reduction Act, which significantly expanded the existing carbon capture tax credit, there was a price differential baked into the tax credits: Producers got more money per ton of CO2 they sequestered underground without any oil production involved, and less for CO2 used specifically to produce more oil and gas. But the One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated this differential, allowing producers to collect on the full credit even if they are using CO2 to produce more fossil fuels. The total expansion of tax credits for carbon capture in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the analysis found, could send out more than $1.4 billion of public money to oil and gas companies each year.

The types of federal subsidies addressed in this report are just one kind of boost the government gives dirty industries. The analysis does not address state and local tax breaks for fossil fuel companies, nor does it add up international financing from publicly funded U.S. entities to overseas fossil fuel companies and projects. (Just before he left office, President Biden backed a limit on funding for dirty investments made by the U.S. Export-Import Bank, a part of the executive branch that facilitates the export of U.S. goods and services. President Trump promptly encouraged the Bank in April to resume funding for coal projects abroad.)

The fossil fuel industry also benefits financially from not having to address the negative side effects of their products: Coal companies don’t have to deal with the health impacts from people breathing polluted air, for example, while oil and gas companies don’t need to think about damages from extreme weather juiced up by climate change caused by their product. Kotchen, the Yale economist, calculated in a 2021 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a small handful of U.S. oil, gas, coal, and diesel giants, by not having to pay for the damage they cause, get $62 billion in what he calls “implicit subsidies” per year.

I asked him if, given the major environmental rollbacks overseen by the Trump administration, he’d expect that figure to increase if he redid his analysis in 2025. “The environmental externalities are higher, and production has gone up,” he says. “I think [the number] would be a lot higher.”

This article is about the coming collapse of a particular economic bubble but I also think it is emblematic of a broader process of collapse too. It is very telling about our future how FAR from reality our thinking has gotten about AI.

In the study, published in July, the think tank Model Evaluation & Threat Research randomly assigned a group of experienced software developers to perform coding tasks with or without AI tools. It was the most rigorous test to date of how AI would perform in the real world. Because coding is one of the skills that existing models have largely mastered, just about everyone involved expected AI to generate huge productivity gains. In a pre-experiment survey of experts, the mean prediction was that AI would speed developers’ work by nearly 40 percent. Afterward, the study participants estimated that AI had made them 20 percent faster.

But when the METR team looked at the employees’ actual work output, they found that the developers had completed tasks 20 percent slower when using AI than when working without it. The researchers were stunned. “No one expected that outcome,” Nate Rush, one of the authors of the study, told me. “We didn’t even really consider a slowdown as a possibility.”

No individual experiment should be treated as the final word. But the METR study is, according to many AI experts, the best we have—and it helps make sense of an otherwise paradoxical moment for AI. On the one hand, the United States is undergoing an extraordinary, AI-fueled economic boom: The stock market is soaring thanks to the frothy valuations of AI-associated tech giants, and the real economy is being propelled by hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on data centers and other AI infrastructure. Undergirding all of the investment is the belief that AI will make workers dramatically more productive, which will in turn boost corporate profits to unimaginable levels.

On the other hand, evidence is piling up that AI is failing to deliver in the real world. The tech giants pouring the most money into AI are nowhere close to recouping their investments. Research suggests that the companies trying to incorporate AI have seen virtually no impact on their bottom line. And economists looking for evidence of AI-replaced job displacement have mostly come up empty.

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The capability-reliability gap might explain why generative AI has so far failed to deliver tangible results for businesses that use it. When researchers at MIT recently tracked the results of 300 publicly disclosed AI initiatives, they found that 95 percent of projects failed to deliver any boost to profits. A March report from McKinsey & Company found that 71 percent of companies reported using generative AI, and more than 80 percent of them reported that the technology had no “tangible impact” on earnings.

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What makes the current situation distinctive is that AI appears to be propping up something like the entire U.S. economy. More than half of the growth of the S&P 500 since 2023 has come from just seven companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. These firms, collectively known as the Magnificent Seven, are seen as especially well positioned to prosper from the AI revolution.

That prosperity has largely yet to materialize anywhere other than their share prices.

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The dot-com crash was bad, but it did not trigger a crisis. An AI-bubble crash could be different. AI-related investments have already surpassed the level that telecom hit at the peak of the dot-com boom as a share of the economy. In the first half of this year, business spending on AI added more to GDP growth than all consumer spending combined. Many experts believe that a major reason the U.S. economy has been able to weather tariffs and mass deportations without a recession is because all of this AI spending is acting, in the words of one economist, as a “massive private sector stimulus program.” An AI crash could lead broadly to less spending, fewer jobs, and slower growth, potentially dragging the economy into a recession. The economist Noah Smith argues that it could even lead to a financial crisis if the unregulated “private credit” loans funding much of the industry’s expansion all go bust at once.

For the third year running toxic blue-green algae blooms that look like pea soup and smell like rotten eggs have covered much of Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the UK and Ireland.

But this summer, the thick green veneer -- so widespread it is visible from space -- has been worse than ever, according to locals living near the Northern Ireland landmark.

The algae growth -- fuelled by industrial, agricultural and sewage pollution, as well as climate change, according to experts -- has ravaged fishing and watersports, and prompted concerns about drinking water safety.

Though it was more than 25 years ago, I still feel the chill that ran through my body in a conference room in the wetlands of Northern California. I was a graduate student on a multi-university, interdisciplinary wetland restoration project team. We, a group of scientists from the south and west, had convened near one of our research sites, and a prominent plant biologist from Louisiana who spent her career researching the wetlands of New Orleans was presenting her work. It was four years prior to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, when we were naïve to the harsh reality that the government, at all levels, could and would devastatingly fail the most vulnerable Americans during an unprecedented natural disaster, leaving human tragedy in its wake.

Recall that in New Orleans, in the face of the catastrophic hurricane assigned the name Katrina, it was the levee system that did not hold, that burst sending water gushing back into the Lower Ninth Ward and other impoverished areas. Our project team was exploring what happens to wetland ecosystems when levee systems like the one that broke (i.e., an elevated humanmade barrier or embankment constructed to stop the natural flow of water often to create dry developable land) breach naturally over time. During her presentation, four years before Katrina, the plant biologist said she knew with certainty that if a massive storm hit, the levee systems in New Orleans would not hold. Four years prior to Katrina, she urgently shared this information with government officials, warning them of the imminent threat particularly to poor, elderly, and Black residents if the levee system broke. But instead of taking action to bolster the failing system, she was told: “We have the body bags ready.”

I know this is US focused but I think Hurricane Katrina is one of the clearest visions of the future of collapse "from within the empire" and is worth contemplating in a broader context.

His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. “When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don’t see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,” he says. This was a form of evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. “Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.”

Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women. He says that, like the biblical warrior slain by David’s slingshot, Goliaths began in the bronze age, were steeped in violence and often surprisingly fragile.

Throughout the 20th Century, humanity demanded more and more land leading to the loss of vast areas of natural forest and grassland. Today, around half the world's land is farmed, used to grow crops or graze animals.

However, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global agricultural land use peaked in the early 2000s and has been slowly falling ever since. Around the world, farmland is being replaced by grasslands, trees and bush. Wild animals are returning to abandoned pasturelands in areas they had once dominated.

Reaching "peak agricultural land" does not mean the problem of deforestation is solved. Growing demand for products like beef, soy, cocoa and palm oil has put increasing pressure on land across South America, South East Asia and Africa. In the last decade, the world lost an area of tropical forest twice the size of Spain.

Still, acre-for-acre across the world there has been yet more farmland abandonment, driven by reforestation in Europe and North America and the abandonment of pastures in Australia and Central Asia.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27377775

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1251170

Canada's record-breaking 2023 wildfires exposed more than 350 million people in North America and Europe to air pollution that likely contributed to tens of thousands of deaths, according to new estimates published Wednesday.

And voters keep voting for politcans to extract more fossil fuels and make this worse. ..

FA and FO I guess.

Four African countries are set to run out of vital emergency food supplies in the next three months, putting the lives of millions of malnourished children at risk, new research has found.

The analysis, which was carried out by the charity Save the Children and shared exclusively with The Independent, were described as “unthinkable” by Moazzam Malik, CEO for Save the Children UK.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1247073

Charleston is one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities – and one of the most flood-prone. As climate change prompts sea levels to rise and storms to grow more intense, this historic city has become a warning bell for what’s to come along America’s coasts:

WTF ? Is this sheer stupidity something citizens are proud of ?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/41953366

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A group of 87 Russian scientists has called on President Vladimir Putin to block a controversial bill that would allow clear-cut logging along the shores of Lake Baikal, the Kommersant business newspaper reported Tuesday, citing their collective letter.

The government reportedly signed off on long-stalled amendments this summer, allowing so-called sanitary logging in the area around Baikal — a practice meant to curb damage from fires, pests and other threats. Scientists say they repeatedly raised objections during two years of debate but were ignored.

In July, two environmental protection committees in Russia’s lower-house State Duma demanded that the bill be reworked before lawmakers scheduled votes on passing the amendments.

In their letter, the group of scientists warned Putin that the measure could encourage arson of healthy forests for profit, destabilize soil and pollute the UNESCO-protected lake. They said allowing the removal of felled wood from Baikal’s protected area would effectively commercialize its forests, while artificial reforestation could worsen erosion and wash nutrients into the water.

The letter also criticizes provisions that would allow the construction of tourism infrastructure across more than 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres) of the protected area and remove Baikal’s water protection zone from its ecological buffer. That, the scientists warn, would open shoreline land to development.

[...]

Experts [are] warning that heavy machinery, soil runoff and “forest amnesty” rules will damage Baikal’s ecosystem. They say the bill’s opaque system for reclassifying land risks prioritizes development over conservation.

UNESCO, which granted Baikal World Heritage status in 1996, earlier this year raised concerns over the “uncertain legal protection” of the lake. A Change.org petition against the bill has been signed by more than 115,000 people.

Sweden's indigenous Sami fear they will lose their livelihood and culture if plans go ahead to mine a large rare earths deposit located on their traditional reindeer grazing grounds in the far north.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/41826094

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"Based on current [satellite] images, the area [of the slick] already measures 350 square kilometers. In my entire career, I’ve never seen such an extensive film of pollution on the sea. The film remains quite thick for this type of petroleum product. This means that the slick currently contains at least 10 metric tons of petroleum products. It’s located west of Anapa, with a small chance of some reaching the shore north of Anapa. The slick is moving toward Crimea, but for now it’s passing south of the Kerch Strait." -- Sergei Statichny, remote sensing expert at Russia’s Marine Rescue Service, according to pro-Kremlin agency TASS