fossil fuel – Page 9 – Desdemona Despair

Aerial view of JERA's Hekinan thermal coal power station in Hekinan, central Japan on 18 October 2021. Picture taken October 18, 2021. Photo: Yuka Obayashi / REUTERS

November 6, 2021

COP26 aims to banish coal. Asia is building hundreds of power plants to burn it – “You can have the cake of coal and an icing of solar”

By Sudarshan Varadhan and Aaron Sheldrick31 October 2021 UDANGUDI, India/TOKYO (Reuters) – On the coastline near India’s southern tip, workers toil on a pier carrying a conveyor belt that cuts a mile into the Indian Ocean where the azure waters are deep enough for ships to berth and unload huge cargoes of coal. The belt […]

South African environmental activist Fikile Ntshangase was assassinated by four gunmen in her own home on 22 October 2020. “Mama” Ntshangase was a leading member of the Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation, which is taking legal action against the proposed expansion of an open-cast coal mine operated by Tendele Coal near Somkhele, situated near Hluhluwe–Imfolozi park, the oldest nature reserve in Africa. Photo: Rob Symons / All Rise

September 13, 2021

Record number of environmental activists murdered in 2020 – “Fighting the climate crisis carries an unbearably heavy burden for some, who risk their lives to save the forests, rivers, and biospheres”

By Claire Marshall 13 September 2021 (BBC) – A record number of activists working to protect the environment and land rights were murdered last year, according to a report by a campaign group. 227 people were killed around the world in 2020, the highest number recorded for a second consecutive year, the report from Global […]

Global Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) capacity, 2010-2020. Twenty years ago, the fossil fuel industry told you that by today, CCS would capture 5,000 million tons of CO2 per year. Today, the world can barely capture 10. Which is so far off target you can’t even see it on this graph. And when you remember that our global emissions are 36 BILLION tonnes each year, even if it had met its target, it would contribute approximately FUCK ALL. Data: IEA. Graphic: The Juice Media

September 3, 2021

Honest Government Ad: Carbon Capture and Storage – “CCS is a complex mining process whereby fossil fuel companies inject donations into the arseholes of politicians to delay climate action”

1 September 2021 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the Australien Government with an important announcement as we enter the next stage of the climate crisis: MASSIVE FIRES, MASSIVE FLOODS, MASSIVE BULLSHIT. As things fall apart and calls grow for us to urgently reduce our emissions we’ve come up with a PR campaign – […]

Time series of climate-related responses to anthropogenic drivers, 1990-2020. Out of the 31 tracked planetary vital signs, 18 were at new all-time record lows or highs in 2020. Data obtained before and after the publication of Ripple and colleagues (2020) are shown in gray and red respectively. For variables with relatively high variability, local regression trend lines are shown in black. The variables were measured at various frequencies (e.g., annual, monthly, weekly). The labels on the x-axis correspond to midpoints of years. Sources and additional details about each variable are provided in the supplemental material. Graphic: Ripple, et al., 2021 / BioScience

July 31, 2021

World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2021 – Humans face untold suffering from “the consequences of unrelenting business as usual”

28 July 2021 (BioScience) – In 2019, Ripple and colleagues (2020) warned of untold suffering and declared a climate emergency together with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from 153 countries. They presented graphs of planetary vital signs indicating very troubling trends, along with little progress by humanity to address climate change. On the basis of […]

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions under current policy with energy market and economic uncertainty, 2005-2021 and projected to 2030. Under current trends, the U.S. will miss both of its Paris Agreement reduction targets in 2025 and 2030. Graphic: Rhodium Group

July 18, 2021

Taking Stock 2021: U.S. will miss Paris Agreement emissions reduction targets – Cheap natural gas threatens renewable energy transition

By Hannah Pitt, Kate Larsen, Hannah Kolus, Ben King, Alfredo Rivera, Emily Wimberger, Whitney Herndon, John Larsen, and Galen Hiltbrand 15 July 2021 (Rhodium Group) – For the past seven years, Rhodium Group has provided an independent annual outlook for US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under current federal and state policy. This current policy baseline […]

Total greenhouse gas emissions from China and OECD nations, 1990-2019. In 2019, China’s GHG emissions passed the 14 gigaton threshold for the first time, reaching 14,093 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MMt CO2e). This represents a more than tripling of 1990 levels, and a 25 percent increase over the past decade. As a result, China’s share of the 2019 global emissions total of 52 gigatons rose to 27 percent. Data: Rhodium Group / UNFCCC. Graphic: Rhodium Group

July 8, 2021

China’s greenhouse gas emissions exceeded the developed world for the first time in 2019

By Kate Larsen, Hannah Pitt, Mikhail Grant, and Trevor Houser 6 May 2021 (Rhodium Group) – Each year Rhodium Group provides the most up-to-date global and country-level greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions estimates through the ClimateDeck (a partnership with Breakthrough Energy). In addition to our preliminary US and China GHG estimates for 2020, Rhodium provides annual estimates of economy-wide emissions—including all […]

Screenshot from the video, “Honest Government Ad | We Make Everything Good Sh!t”, by The Juice Media, 2 July 2021. Photo: The Juice Media / YouTube

July 7, 2021

Honest Government Ad: We Make Everything Good Sh!t – Australia science agencies “infiltrated and hollowed” out by fossil fuel industry

2 July 2021 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the Australien government. In today’s episode of “We Make Everythig Good Shit”, we look at the CSIRO, your trusted science agency, which has earned a reputation for great inventions: wifi, space stuff, Aeroguard. Unlike gas companies, which have earned a reputation for poisoning aquifers, ripping […]

Senior ExxonMobil lobbyist on Capitol Hill Keith McCoy describes how ExxonMobil bribes U.S. Senators to kill climate policies in the U.S. During a secretly recorded interview 7 May 2021, McCoy names eleven U.S. senators who he says are “crucial” to ExxonMobil for sabotaging government action to save the planet: Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Senator Joe Manchin, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Senator Jon Tester, Senator Maggie Hassan, Senator John Barrasso, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Steve Daines, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Mark Kelly, and Senator Marco Rubio. Photo: Greenpeace / Channel 4 News

July 3, 2021

Revealed: ExxonMobil’s lobbying war on climate legislation – Senior lobbyist caught on camera, names 11 U.S. senators who are “crucial” to ExxonMobil attacks on climate policy

By Alex Thomson 30 June 2021 (Channel 4 News) – The explosive footage was obtained by Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative platform, who posed as head-hunters to obtain the information from one of ExxonMobil’s most senior Washington lobbyists. The recordings appear to reveal the secretive behind-the-scenes activities of a lobbyist for a company that claims in […]

Graph showing Earth Overshoot Day, 1970-2021. Each year, Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year. Humanity currently uses 74% more than what the planet’s ecosystems can regenerate—or “1.7 Earths.” From Earth Overshoot Day until the end of the year, humanity operates on ecological deficit spending. This spending is currently some of the largest since the world entered into ecological overshoot in the early 1970s, according to the National Footprint & Biocapacity Accounts (NFA) based on UN datasets. Graphic: Global Footprint Network

June 20, 2021

Earth Overshoot Day creeps back to July 29 in 2021 – “With almost half a year remaining, we will already have used up our quota of the Earth’s biological resources for 2021 by July 29th”

GLASGOW, UK, 4 June 2021 (Global Footprint Network) – Earth Overshoot Day 2021 lands on July 29, Councillor Susan Aitken, the Leader of Glasgow City Council, announced today on behalf of Global Footprint Network and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). “With almost half a year remaining, we will already have used up our quota […]

Uyghur men imprisoned at the Lop County #4 Re-Education Camp, Xinjiang, China. They are forced to listen to “de-radicalization” lectures. Photo: Weixin

May 15, 2021

Forced labor from China’s Uighur Muslims “behind global supply of solar panels”

By Sam Courtney-Guy 15 May 2021 (MetroUK) – A huge chunk of the world’s solar panels production depends on forced labour from China’ Uighur Muslims, according to new research. An investigation by Sheffield Hallam University estimates almost half of global supplies of polysilicon are produced by Uighurs under conditions ‘tantamount to enslavement’ in their home […]