nigerian oil spillThe chief executive of Shell is scheduled to visit Nigeria, according to a recent article, to win support for clean-up efforts in the Niger Delta.

This after a Unep report called for $1 billion to clean up oil spills in Ogoniland, which, according to Nigerian government data, number more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000 alone.

After decades of inaction, Shell is finally making some moves in the right direction. Undermining such moves, however, is the fact that Shell blames spills on attacks on its installations – rather than on decades of lax environmental standards, evident in the flaring of methane that is a part of everyday life for residents of the Delta.

A-slum-in-India-010Two days ago, two teenage girls were gang raped and then murdered outside a village in Uttar Pradesh in India. The girls were looking for a place to defecate.

According to a report by WaterAid, 2.5 billion people live without access to a domestic toilet. This forces women and girls to walk to isolated spots, often early in the morning, in order to relieve themselves. This is precisely what these two girls were doing when they were waylaid and attacked.

The Times of India quoted the police in another district of Uttar Pradesh as saying that 95% of cases of molestation and rape occur while women are seeking sites to defecate.

One in three people around the world lack access to basic sanitation.

As WaterAid puts it:

Being forced to defecate by rivers, in fields or in alleyways not only puts women and girls at greater risk of sexual violence and harassment; it is also a major public health risk. The practice pollutes natural waterways and spreads diseases, notably diarrhoea, a major cause of death in children in the developing world. Every day, around 1,400 mothers will lose a child to this disease, brought about because of a lack of access to basic sanitation, clean water and hygiene services. Research estimates that just putting an end to open defecation worldwide would see this figure drop by over a third.

WaterAid and other charities are calling for new Sustainable Development goals to address this global crisis. It’s worth remembering, however, that lack of access to basic sanitation and the sexual violence that it helps perpetrate are a product of increasing global inequality. Global institutions of governance such as the World Bank have been exacerbating rather than ameliorating these conditions.

antarticaHard on the heels of news that the Western Antarctic ice sheet has already begun to collapse, and that this collapse is now unstoppable, satellite observations have revealed that Antartica is shedding twice as much ice as previously estimated.

160 billion tonnes of water are currently finding their way into the world’s oceans, a new report reveals. Nearly 90% of this huge meltdown is coming from the Western ice sheet. The new images reveal that significant melt off is taking place across the continent.

The collapse of the Western ice sheet would cause a calamitous 13 feet of sea level rise.

The implications for the world’s cities, the great majority of which lie in coastal areas, are terrifying.

austerity doesn't workAusterity doesn’t work, according to an article in today’s New York Times. The article focuses on the fact that the middle class in the US is falling behind its peers in other developed countries.

What is particularly interesting about the article is buried in the graph reproduced here. The nations – like the US, Britain, and Greece – where harsh austerity measures were introduced following the financial crash of 2008 all demonstrate a sharp downturn in the economic status of their middle classes, while those that did not implement such measures have continuously rising curves of middle class affluence.

The central assumptions behind the article are that growth is essential to maintaining middle class status. Seen from an environmental angle, the economic downturn has actually been a beneficial phenomenon since it has put the brakes on the developed world’s headlong expansion. But this is not much of a salve to the situation of struggling people in places like the US. And elites have continued to expand their grossly large incomes by investing in developing countries, meaning that carbon emissions have continued their inexorable, suicidal rise.

We clearly need an alternative economic system, one that benefits average people while not wrecking the planet’s ecosystems.

Two recent articles in the New York Times suggest not just how far we are from where we should be on the environmental front, but how much we are backsliding.

In one, entitled “Industry Awakens to Threat of Climate Change,” details of how US multinational corporations like Coca-Cola and Nike are feeling the impact because of global shortages in, respectively, water and cotton. The article mentions a report that is currently being drafted, to be entitled Risky Business, which will discuss the financial risks associated with climate change (a sort of update of the Stern Review). According to the article, many business leaders are coming round to the necessity of imposing a carbon tax in order to mitigate emissions.

A few days before this article appeared, however, the Times ran a piece that detailed the European Union’s impending decision to back away from stringent climate controls. The article’s title explains the drift of the piece: “Europe, Facing Economic Pain, May Ease Climate Rules.” The shortsightedness is mind boggling, but illustrates the fundamental disconnect between the relatively brief temporality of the electoral cycle and the longer term vision necessary to address the climate crisis.

This temporal disconnect is one of the key problems which threatens global civilization.

images-1My friends at the Superstorm Research Lab have just released an amazing white paper on the impact of Hurricane Sandy. Titled A Tale of Two Sandys, the report focuses on the uneven impact of the storm on NYC.

In the words of the report,

On one hand, the crisis was seen as an extreme weather event that created physical and economic damage, and temporarily moved New York City away from its status quo. On the other hand, Hurricane Sandy exacerbated crises which existed before the storm, including poverty, lack of affordable housing, precarious or low employment, and unequal access to resources generally. A Tale of Two Sandys describes these two understandings of disaster and discuss their implications for response, recovery, and justice in New York City.

The paper, along with many of the other resources gathered on the SRL site, is must reading. The SRL project is an incredible example of militant collaborative research.

sn-temperaturesA new report out in Nature reveals that the Earth is far more sensitive to greenhouse gases than scientists previously thought. The situation we find ourselves in, it turns out, is even more grave than we thought.

The report suggests that “because some climate models don’t accurately represent the formation of low-altitude clouds, Earth is likely to warm at the high end of the range estimated by 3 decades of research as carbon dioxide levels grow.”

Put in lay terms, what this means is that most of the estimates for global warming that have circulated in recent years have been far too conservative. The environmental crisis we face is actually far worse than we have been imagining, it turns out.

zapatistas2This new year brings a date that’s worth remembering: the 20th anniversary of the Zapatista Uprising. This struggle to resist NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and neo-liberalism helped to catalyze the global justice movement that went on to challenge the WTO process in Seattle in 1999. The lineage of this movement was evident in Occupy Wall Street, and in the many popular uprisings of the last year.

It’s worth remembering on this twentieth anniversary of the EZLN that the Zapatista struggle was a key expression of Global South environmentalism. As Anne Petermann reminds us in this post published on the eve of the 20th anniversary, the uprising was sparked by a struggle to preserve the Lacandon rainforest from exploitation by multinational companies. The post includes a link to a film that documents the EZLN’s struggle against illegal logging oil drilling, and hydro-electic dams in the Lacandon.

The Zapatistas are still struggling to preserve the jungles in which they live from greedy developers. Their battle reflects resource wars unfolding with greater severity around the world today.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw8T7wMPW5M#t=89]

imagesUNFCCC’s COP19 in Warsaw, Poland is the most corrupt climate meeting yet. This is saying a lot. As I recorded when attending COP17 in Durban, previous COPs have see wholesale backtracking from the Kyoto Accord, the only international agreement mandating reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. But COP19 sets a new record for corporate influence.

Perhaps most egregiously, the Warsaw Climate Summit is scheduled in tandem with the World Coal Association’s Coal and Climate Summit. Coal, of course, is the most polluting form of fossil fuel. All burning of coal should cease immediately if greenhouse gas emissions are to be mitigated.

This overlap between the Climate Summit and the Coal Summit is no accident. The confluence was actually organized by the Polish government, which obtains around 80% of its power from coal.

In addition, as Pascoe Sabido of the European Corporate Observatory explains in today’s episode of Democracy Now, COP19 was explicitly sponsored by a bevvy of polluting corporate behemoths, from auto manufacturer BMW to Emirates Airlines.

These corporate-funded meetings will never be a venue for climate justice. Makes me wanna holler!

STORM-REFER-articleLargeTwo days ago, cyclone Phailin barreled out of the Bay of Bengal and slammed into India in the rural state of Odisha. Thanks to amazing emergency measures taken by the Indian government, including the dramatic evacuation of nearly a million people, very few lives were lost to the torrential rains and lashing winds of Phailin.

Cyclone Phailin, like so many other extreme weather events, needs to be linked to climate change. We know from works like Christian Parenti’s Tropics of Chaos, that climate change is already affecting the people of the global South dramatically. Phailin is undoubtedly an instance of this tropical climatic chaos, although it also demonstrates the importance of various forms of social organization – including preparedness on the part of nation-states – in heading off the most damaging impacts of climate change on human communities.

As is often the case, writers have already warned us of the perils of tropical climate chaos. Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant novelthe-hungry-tide1 The Hungry Tide tells the story of the impact of a cyclone on the vulnerable people and ecosystems of the Sundarbans, a series of low-lying islands in the delta area of Bangladesh and West Bengal that is rich in mangrove forests. One of the novel’s primary narrative threads tells the story of an American-born South Asian scientist who returns to her family’s native land to study the rare river dolphin that inhabits the waters surrounding the Sundarbans. She quickly gets sucked into the perilous lives of the islands’ inhabitants. The novel has much to say about the hubris of Western science and the suffering of what Ramachandra Guha calls ecosystem people: those whose lives are intimately intertwined with the natural world, to the extent that threats to the natural world are inextricably threats to their collective existence.

In an editorial published following the passing of Cyclone Phailin, the historian Sunil Amrith discusses the long history of human movement within and across the Bay of Bengal, making a fascinating argument for the need for regional cooperation in order to head off the potentially grievous impacts of climate change in the area. The editorial builds on work in his recently published book Crossing the Bay: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. The message of Amrith’s work is one that is also central to Ghosh’s fiction: the urgent need to recognize human connectedness in the face of potentially devastating natural forces. It is a message that we all – including and above all those of us who live in the global North – need to take to heart.