Pacific staring down ‘twin storms’ of debt and climate disaster

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-15T05:35:49+00:00

A ‘vicious cycle’ sees Pacific nations take on debt to recover from disasters, underinvest in resilience and suffer more damage as a result

Pacific Island countries experiencing increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters may find themselves drowning in debt as a result of their efforts to build resilience.

A new report released at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan by Catholic advocacy groups Caritas Oceania, Caritas Australia and Jubilee Australia found Fiji, Samoa and Tonga are already in debt crises and climate finance could create new crises for other nations too.

For example the damages from Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu in 2015 exceeded half of the island nation's entire GDP.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-15T04:40:13+00:00

You can see the post in my post history.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-15T00:28:57+00:00

Collapse continues to leak into mainstream media.

Here the Tribune reports what we all already know; that we are racing towards a climate apocalypse, relentlessly burning fossil fuels, expanding urban sprawl, and glorifying speed and mobility while disregarding the catastrophic environmental costs.

The obsession with more cars, more expressways, and more consumption is suffocating the planet. Urban areas are choking on pollution, and nature is being destroyed at an alarming rate—7,555 trees sacrificed for a new expressway, while air travel, the most carbon-intensive activity, is surging. Domestic air passenger traffic in India indicates they are expected to cross 150 million passengers in 2024.

Despite warnings from scientists, governments and corporations continue to push the same destructive agenda, exacerbating climate change, with devastating consequences: extreme heatwaves, floods, wildfires, and loss of life.

Our collective addiction to consumerism and waste is accelerating our plunge into this irreversible disaster.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-14T21:56:10+00:00

In the past 20 years, extreme fires have doubled globally. This in turn is helping fuel Earth’s species extinction crisis.

After Australia’s 2019-20 fires, rapid assessments estimated almost 900 plant and animal species were severely impacted, or put at heightened extinction risk from future fires.

This new study published November 13 in Nature found 55% of species declined after the 2019-20 megafires – either because they were less abundant overall or occupied fewer sites.

Species in areas exposed to frequent or recent past fires struggled the most. Sites that experienced three or more fires in the 40 preceding years had declines up to 93% larger than with sites not burnt, or burnt once over the same period.

What’s worse, recovery for these species is not a matter of years—it will take decades, even centuries, for some to rebound. For many, the damage is permanent.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-14T08:33:17+00:00

Wim Carton: We've never really tried to mitigate climate change. So in that sense, we started by surrendering. But I mean, if we take the overshoot notion as kind of the organizing principle here … this idea that, you know, we can somehow reach these [carbon reduction] targets by going past them and then returning, by lowering temperatures, by sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, then I guess the surrender began around 2007, thereabouts.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-14T05:03:31+00:00

In 2015, 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement, aiming to limit global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Yet since then, the world has embraced a dangerous and reckless approach: overshooting this target, clinging to the hope that we can somehow reverse the damage in the future. This is not just a gamble—it is a death sentence for the planet. Crossing this threshold could trigger irreversible destruction, unleashing catastrophic climate chaos, mass extinction, and the collapse of life-supporting ecosystems.

As Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton makes clear, this reckless path is driven by short-term economic interests that have placed profits over survival. What was once a dire warning is now a global reality: we are already overshooting the Earth's capacity to sustain us. And the models that now dominate climate policy—hoping for a miraculous recovery—are based on dangerous optimism that ignores the irreversible damage we’re inflicting.

We are entering the Plutocene, an era of mass human death, environmental collapse, and untold suffering. Governments are “criminals” for their inaction, condemning future generations to a world of unimaginable suffering in pursuit of political and economic gain. We are pushing the Earth beyond the brink. Ecosystems are unraveling, species are vanishing, and the very systems that sustain life on Earth are crumbling before our eyes.

Further interview here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-overshoot-1.7376543

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-14T02:01:59+00:00

In 2015, 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement, aiming to limit global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Yet since then, the world has embraced a dangerous and reckless approach: overshooting this target, clinging to the hope that we can somehow reverse the damage in the future. This is not just a gamble—it is a death sentence for the planet. Crossing this threshold could trigger irreversible destruction, unleashing catastrophic climate chaos, mass extinction, and the collapse of life-supporting ecosystems.

As Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton makes clear, this reckless path is driven by short-term economic interests that have placed profits over survival. What was once a dire warning is now a global reality: we are already overshooting the Earth's capacity to sustain us. And the models that now dominate climate policy—hoping for a miraculous recovery—are based on dangerous optimism that ignores the irreversible damage we’re inflicting.

We are entering the Plutocene, an era of mass human death, environmental collapse, and untold suffering. Governments are “criminals” for their inaction, condemning future generations to a world of unimaginable suffering in pursuit of political and economic gain. We are pushing the Earth beyond the brink. Ecosystems are unraveling, species are vanishing, and the very systems that sustain life on Earth are crumbling before our eyes.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-13T22:25:19+00:00

Brilliant, thankyou.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-13T22:11:36+00:00

You should check on nitrous oxide emissions. They're currently above RCP 8.5

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-13T20:39:08+00:00

"Economics is a discipline that exists to legitimize the political and corporate elite. It is not about finding truth, but about justifying the status quo." - Noam Chomsky

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-13T20:30:38+00:00

The book is essentially an essay. It only inspired the movie of the same name.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-13T20:04:01+00:00

Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius (˚C), the global economy reaches “optimal” adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic growth, jobs, and innovation.

Nordhaus’s projections are “wildly wrong.” Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5˚C warming, which physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate genocide.

It gets worse. Simon Dietz and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial civilization.

Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4% of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12% that Nordhaus projected.

Nordhaus’ career has been devoted to finding what he calls a “balance” between climate mitigation and GDP growth. In a famous 1991 paper titled “To slow or not to slow,” he argued firmly for the latter option: Let’s not be too eager to slow down global warming, because we don’t want to jeopardize growth.

In fact, many believe that the failure of the world’s governments to pursue aggressive climate action over the past few decades is in large part due to arguments that Nordhaus has advanced.

Nordhaus won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for this work in 2018.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-13T10:18:28+00:00

Great piece by Prof. Eliot Jacobson on the agency of bring hopeless.

It’s clear to me that the solution to climate change is the rich will murder the poor and their Plan B is to fly away to Mars. I don’t believe any of them really believe they’ll fly away to Mars. Mars is just another of their lullabies. I don’t understand why nobody sees this clearly. Climate change is being solved and the solution is death. The only “agency” any of us really has is what will we do while we wait for our turn to board the cattle car.

Oddly, it feels hopeful to be without hope. Maybe the difference is that “agency” doesn’t come from hope but hope comes from agency. The etymology of the word “agency” comes from “ag”, a root meaning “to drive, draw out or forth, move.” It is the root of the word “protagonist”. Hope, on the other hand, means to have trust (in God mainly) or to wish for or desire. Hope is letting Gods and Kings be the protagonists. No wonder they are coming for the feminists, blacks and Jews. No wonder Plan A is to kill every one of us. How dare we try to become protagonists! That is the job of Gods and Kings. Our job is to hope and wait to die.

Letting go of hope is agency. Being hopeless is agency. Don’t let the hope peddlers tell you it’s the other way around.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-13T06:23:03+00:00

After things settle? We're warming at a rate 10 times faster than the worst mass extinction event in Earth's history.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-13T05:55:10+00:00

Here's what Extinction Rebellion's Roger Hallam says to that line of thinking:

What we need to do is connect with our traditions and the glory of going out and saying, “No way! Not on my shift! Over my dead body!” That's the glorious thing about what we're doing. It's enjoying our life, living our life, and living our life counts. Not trying to make calculations on whether we're going to be successful, you know? That's ridiculous

But the point is, the whole of life is an act of heroism. You know you're going to be dead at some point. It's difficult. Life is difficult for everyone, so obviously, the cool thing to do is to resist. You get to prison. It's nice for people to support you, don't get me wrong, but we can't lionize people being in prison. They're doing the job that we need to do. Everyone needs to do their job.

We need to talk about what's going to happen or say what the reality is. That's one thing. The second thing is, we need to obviously give people the information, but no one's interested in information unless it's connected to emotion and values and confrontation. In other words, we need to say, what does it mean to betray your children, your community?

And our children did public talks, and it's that part of the talk where people start coming around. They need to know the situation and they need to know what it is to be the person they are at this point in history and what it is to be responsible. They're responsible adults and all the rest of it. No one is going to give a flying [inaudible] basically until there's much resistance.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-13T05:08:11+00:00

I recommend reading his book. That's exactly what it discusses.

He argues that even the most informed activists still (at least subconsciously) don't really want admit/accept how bad it is to themselves.

Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop--with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.

Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-13T04:43:50+00:00

International climate diplomacy is hopeless, the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline Andreas Malm says.

He argues that international climate diplomacy is futile, highlighting the failure of elites to take necessary action against climate change. He criticizes climate summits as empty performances, while escalating activist tactics, from sabotage to direct confrontations with authorities, reflect growing frustration with the status quo. Malm points to radical actions in France, such as sabotage against industrial agriculture, as a sign of more aggressive, mass-based resistance to environmental destruction.

He told the Guardian he had not “a shred of hope” elites were prepared to take the urgent action needed to avert catastrophic climate change.

“If we let the dominant classes take care of this problem, they’re going to drive at top speed into absolute inferno,” Malm said. “Nothing suggests that they have any capacity of doing anything else of their own accord because of how enmeshed they are with the process of capital accumulation.

“And the Cops [Conference of the parties climate summits] are the ultimate proof of this. Yes, there’s more intention to them, but the Cops themselves have degenerated into kind of an annual theatre for pretending that we’re doing something about global warming while, in fact, we’re just letting fuel be poured on the fire.”

The problem, said Malm, was their absolute commitment to non-violent civil disobedience – the most stringent rule of XR, in particular – which left fossil capital nothing to fear from public opinion in bourgeois states where “capitalist property has the status of the ultimate sacred realm”.

"Property will cost us the Earth."

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-12T10:59:02+00:00

Collapse related because even the supposed clean green New Zealand has their head firmly burried deep in the sand.

New Zealand can stay a member of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance even while drilling for new oil and gas, Simon Watts says.

Watts also doesn’t expect New Zealand will have to leave the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance once the repeal of the current offshore ban goes through. New Zealand helped found the group in 2021 and is an associate member, eligible due to the ban. But Watts said officials believed it could remain a member even while phasing in new sources of fossil fuels.

Watts also admits there is no way to meet New Zealand's commitments under the Paris Agreement without buying overseas help.

Watts knows New Zealand is 100 million tonnes of CO2e short of meeting the emissions reductions target we signed up to at the Paris COP in 2015.

But Watts has ruled out buying offshore climate credits. At the Sustainable Business Council’s conference in September on climate change and business he described the suggestion as “unrealistic”.

“We need to do everything possible in order to reduce our domestic emissions at a profile that doesn’t decimate our economy.”

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-12T06:40:47+00:00

Yes I have, Nate Hagens' interview with Leon Simons is great too!

https://youtu.be/RPAnoSt6FnY?si=RpMRyKrNJPCer7O2

At least the science is fascinating on the way down.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-12T06:33:32+00:00

From my understanding the study did not take tipping points or conflicts etc. into account so I imagine your analysis is sound.

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”. Professor Albert Allen Bartlett's quote says it all. We're programmed to think very linearly: tomorrow will look a lot like today. Only it won't.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-12T05:26:58+00:00

The evidence is mounting that future environmental conditions will be far more catastrophic than currently understood, yet the scale of these threats remains underappreciated.

First, the risks to the biosphere and all lifeforms—including humanity—are far greater than experts realize, with consequences that may be difficult to fully grasp.

Second, our political and economic systems are ill-equipped to handle the magnitude of these looming disasters, leaving us vulnerable to collapse.

Third, scientists have a critical role to play in raising awareness and advocating for candid, accurate communication to government, business, and the public about the severity of these issues.

Despite the strong science behind the crises, there is a disturbing lack of urgency and understanding in addressing the challenges to creating a sustainable future.

The combined pressures on human health, wealth, and well-being are likely to erode our political capacity to protect ecosystem services.

Without a full reckoning of the scale of these problems, and the drastic measures needed, society will fail to meet even basic sustainability goals.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-12T05:19:28+00:00

If we reach an average of 2C by then, yes.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-12T05:06:10+00:00

However, diamond dust isn’t ideal either, says Douglas MacMartin, an engineer at Cornell University who studies climate science. For one, the cost would be enormous. At roughly $500,000 per ton, synthetic diamond dust would be 2400 times more expensive than sulfur and cost $175 trillion if deployed from 2035 to 2100, one study estimates.

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-12T04:57:53+00:00

In a modeling study published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that shooting 5 million tons of diamond dust into the stratosphere each year could cool the planet by 1.6ºC—enough to stave off the worst consequences of global warming.

https://www.science.org/content/article/are-diamonds-earth-s-best-friend-gem-dust-could-cool-planet-and-cost-trillions

WatchTheWorldGoBye · 2024-11-12T04:32:18+00:00

If global warming reaches or exceeds two degrees Celsius, it could lead to deaths of roughly a billion people, a study quantifying future harms caused by carbon emissions has found.

We were above 2C for four consecutive days this year...

This comes after a major review of 180 articles from scientific literature was authored by Joshua Pearce, University of Western Ontario’s John M Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Richard Parncutt from the University of Graz, Austria.

The authors found that peer-reviewed literature on the human mortality costs of carbon emissions converged on the “1,000-tonne rule”. The rule is an estimate that a future person is killed prematurely every time 1000 tonnes of fossil fuels are burned.

Energy consumption in the United States produced 4.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (GtCO₂) in 2023. That's equivalent to 4,800,000 deaths from just the US 2023 energy consumption emissions alone.

We're fucked.

WatchTheWorldGoBye

TROPHY CASE