Paul DuginskiSat, September 25, 2021, 5:00 AM·4 min read
Almost half of California is in what the U.S. Drought Monitor calls “exceptional drought.”(Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)
Increasing evaporative demand is escalating summertime drought severity in California and the West, according to climate researchers.
Evaporative demand is essentially the atmosphere’s “thirst.” It is calculated based on temperature, humidity, wind speed and solar radiation. It’s the sum of evaporation and transpiration from plants, and it’s driven by warmer global temperatures, which can be attributed to climate change.
The meteorological summer of 2021 in the contiguous United States, which runs from June through August, tied the extreme heat of the Dust Bowl summer in 1936.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-6-0/html/r-sf-flx.html
Evaporative demand has propelled almost half of California into what the U.S. Drought Monitor calls “exceptional drought.” It causes faster drying soils and vegetation, making fuels more dangerously combustible during the summer and…
BEIJING—The health authority in southern China’s Guangdong province said on Wednesday that a single case of a human being infected with the H5N6 strain of bird flu has been reported in the city of Dongguan.
The infected patient, a 53-year-old male, is being treated in hospital, the Health Commission of Guangdong Province said in a statement, adding that experts considered the risk of transmission to be low at this stage. Reuters
Sunbirds are very important in an ecosystem as they pollinate flowers. Credit: Maximilian Vollstädt
Microorganisms, plants, and animals accomplish great feats every day. For example, by decomposing material, producing plant biomass, or pollinating flowers, they keep nature ‘up and running,” thereby securing the livelihood of humans. Numerous studies have shown that a high biodiversity can have a positive impact on these as well as on other ecosystem functions.https://909ed1af5af9e3f6f6b8ae24496999a8.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
“But there is another important factor at play. If the environmental conditions of an ecosystem are heterogeneous, for example, in terms of soil properties and climate, this could give an additional boost to the positive effect of biodiversity on ecosystem functions,” says Dr. Jörg Albrecht of the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre.
Teaming up with other researchers, Albrecht examined whether the degree of environmental heterogeneity influences the positive effect of biodiversity on ecosystem functions. To this end, the researchers analyzed data from 13 natural and man-made ecosystems on Africa’s highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro. It is one of the first studies to investigate such a question in real ecosystems along an elevational gradient of more than 3500 meters.
“The data show that the positive effect of biodiversity on ecosystem functions is about 20 percent higher in a heterogeneous environment,” explains Albrecht, and he continues, “This means that, if the global trend towards land-use intensification continues, the positive effect of biodiversity on ecosystem functions could be diminished.”
In addition, the researchers examined which aspect of biodiversity is most beneficial to the provision of ecosystem functions: Changes in species richness or species turnover, that is, changes in the species composition along the elevational gradient. It became apparent that species richness plays a greater role in ecosystem functions than species turnover.
“Frankly, this came as a surprise to us, since in theory, the opposite had been assumed. Moreover, species communities in the savanna at the foot of the mountain are completely different from those in the cloud forests or at the alpine summit. Thus, species turnover is very high. In contrast, species richness, that is, the number of species that co-occur in an ecosystem, changes to a lesser extent, but is far more important for ecosystem functioning,” says Dr. Marcell Peters of the University of Würzburg.
Ecosystem with alpine vegetation at Mount Kilimanjaro. Credit: Andreas Hemp
The researchers consider the results to be evidence that regional conservation efforts should focus on preserving species richness. “Our results confirm that biodiversity is not only important on a small scale as has been shown in experiments, but that these effects become even stronger in real, large-scale landscapes. We were thus able to show that protecting biodiversity is not a luxury, but essential for maintaining functional ecosystems,” concludes Peters.
By Leanne DelapSpecial to the KitFri., Sept. 24, 2021timer5 min. read
Billie Eilish threw down a Gen Z power move at the Met Gala last week.
The 19-year-old singer single-handedly forced the fashion house Oscar de la Renta to stop selling fur by making that a condition for her to wear one of the label’s gowns to the Met Ball, a peach tulle vision of Old Hollywood glamour with a 15-foot train, inspired by her childhood Barbies and Marilyn Monroe. Fashion’s biggest night saw other activism wrought in garment form — from congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s hotly debated “Tax the Rich” dress by Aurora James to Cara Delevingne’s Dior bustier emblazoned with “Peg the Patriarchy” — but Eilish’s effort achieved immediate and measurable change.
Oscar de la Renta’s designers, Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia, had already stopped using fur on the runway, telling the New York Times they didn’t find it “chic, modern or relevant.” But fur sold in stores represented “a meaningful and significant profit,” said the label’s CEO Alex Bolen in the same article. So the brand took a financial hit in this deal with Eilish, which has reignited the antifur movement.
As recently as 2015, the New York Times declared fur was back in fashion, in response to a trend for coloured, chubby furs on the runway. Gucci led the way on the antifur movement within the industry in 2017, dropping pelts on the runway because designer Alessandro Michele decreed fur was “not modern.” Versace, Giorgio Armani, Michael Kors, Diane von Furstenberg and Coach followed suit. That momentum has been building ever since.
In 2019, we saw another wave of designers, retailers, fashion weeks, even entire cities banning the use of fur. After a sustained email campaign by the Fur Free Alliance, Prada joined the ranks. Holt Renfrew, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman stopped selling fur. London Fashion Week went fur-free. The same year, the State of California banned fur sales, and proposals are pending in Hawaii and Rhode Island. (Earlier this year, Israel became the first country to ban fur sales. England is on the verge of such a move: polls show 72 per cent of citizens support a ban.)
Kim Kardashian, long denounced by protestors as a “fur hag,” wrote on Instagram that she’d had all of her “fave furs” replicated in faux form in 2019. The same year, the Queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly, wrote in her book that the monarch had decided she would no longer wear “new” fur. She didn’t toss her existing pieces and will continue to wear her ceremonial ermines, but the fur linings on many of her older garments have been replaced with faux.
Even Anna Wintour is wavering. The all-powerful Vogue editor, who was long a steadfast champion of fur (fur ads used to contribute big bucks to Vogue magazine publisher Condé Nast’s bottom line), has long been a target for antifur protestors. She’s had cream pies tossed in her face, paint thrown on her, maggot-infested guts mailed to her office and, most memorably, had a dead raccoon thrown on her plate during a power lunch. In the past year or two, she has been wearing faux furs by Gucci and long-time animal-rights-activist Stella McCartney. Notably, the meals at last week’s Met Gala, which is Wintour’s baby, were plant-based.
Here in Canada, activists have placed a lot of focus on fur-trimmed winter garments. Canada Goose has announced it will stop purchasing new fur for its products by 2022 and will use reclaimed existing fur instead; Moose Knuckles has also committed to eliminating fur from its collections.
The notable exception to this movement is the concurrent rise in profile of Indigenous designers in the fashion industry. For many Indigenous artists, fur, skins and feathers are an integral part of their culture and heritage, weaving meaning into the work. Toronto-based Indigenous Fashion Week prefaces the following statement on all its sites and materials: “IFWTO supports the use of fur and other animal products as vital for the survival and sovereignty of Indigenous cultures, land and people.”
Outside of Indigenous usage, fur’s reputation as a signifier of decadence and luxury is fading fast. But fur is still big money. It accounts for a billion dollars annually for the Canadian economy, according to the Fur Institute of Canada. It is a $40-billion (U.S.) market worldwide, according to the Fur Information Council of America, which also reports that the number of designers using fur is actually increasing (albeit not marquee names like Oscar de la Renta).
The big holdout is China, which accounts for some 80 per cent of the international fur trade and represents more than a third of the overall luxury market. Russia, the U.S. and South Korea remain major fur markets as well, according to market research firm Euromonitor. Much of this fur is used for smaller trim elements for accessories, not full-length coats like the kind in the old Blackglama mink ads starring Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Janet Jackson.
Fashion designers are hired to pay attention to the horizon and the horizon is shifting. Fashion is a business, after all, and big decisions like fur use are driven by consumers’ shopping habits. Nine out of 10 Gen Z consumers “believe companies have a responsibility to address environmental and social issues,” according to a 2019 McKinsey report called “The influence of ‘woke’ consumers on fashion.” This is a shift from the millennial generation, “which had a greener focus.” The report says that Gen Z and millennials together represent some $350 billion (U.S.) in spending power.
Older consumers care about what brands do and represent, too. McKinsey found that two-thirds of all consumers worldwide “say they would switch, avoid, or boycott brands based on their stance on controversial issues.” That is a lot of passion — and wallet power — riding on companies’ values.
Speaking of power, Eilish has over 91 million followers on Instagram. She has used the platform in the past for her activism: sharing graphic videos of minks being killed for clothing and items like false eyelashes, as well as images of how sheep can be injured in wool harvesting.
The brash, paint-throwing animal-rights activism tactics of the past no longer shock. The “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” PETA billboards of the ’90s, which featured supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Tatjana Patitz, and celebrities such as Pamela Anderson in the buff, feel out of touch now, too (partly because objectification is no longer in vogue) — and, in fact, PETA retired the 30-year campaign in 2020, saying it was no longer necessary.
Eilish has demonstrated a new way to wield celebrity power to effect change and likely represents a large chunk of her generation in doing so. Following the Met Gala, she wrote: “I’m honoured to have been a catalyst and to have been heard on this matter. I urge all designers to do the same.”
Leanne Delap is a Toronto-based freelance contributor for the Star and The Kit,
Writing in 2003, the American environmentalist Bill McKibben observed that although “some small percentage” of scientists, diplomats and activists had known for 15 years that the Earth was facing a disastrous change, their knowledge had almost completely failed to alarm anyone else.
It certainly alarmed McKibben: in June 1988, the scientistJames Hansentestified to the US Congress that the world was warming rapidly and human behaviour was the primary cause – the first loud and unequivocal warning of the climate crisis to come – and before the next year was out, McKibben had published The End of Nature, the first book about climate change for a lay audience. But few others seemed particularly worried. “People think about ‘global warming’…
Framed by a backdrop of volcanoes, a semi-circle of gigantic fans in Iceland are sucking in air, super-heating it, then filtering out the carbon dioxide.
This carbon capture and storage facility, named Orca, turned on two weeks ago…
In mid-September, theNational Park Servicefinalized a General Management Plan Amendment (GMPA) for thePoint Reyes National Seashore, changing aruleto allow livestock production to continue for 20 years in this national park in the San Francisco Bay area of California. This rule change, and the ranching it enables, poses an immediate threat to the local environment, the global climate and the people of San Francisco, especially its underserved communities. It also sets an alarming precedent for degrading national parks throughout the country.
Northern California is facing some of themost dangerous climate impacts in the United States. This region leads the nation in terms of drought, wildfires, smoke and ocean degradation. Our summers are gone, and each year is worse than the last. Livestock production in Point Reyes directly…
Climate activists with Stop the Money Pipeline protest outside Chase Bank branches in midtown Manhattan on June 2, 2021, to demand the banking giant stop investing in fossil fuel projects.
At the United Nations this week, President Joe Biden sought to distance his administration from the Trump administration’s attacks on climate policy. Biden announced that the United States will double its contribution to international climate finance to $11.4 billion annually by 2024 under the Paris Agreement to help poorer nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate disruption.
But Indigenous and climate justice activists largely characterized the new pledge as falling far short of what is needed to truly address the ongoing climate disaster. They are also calling on Biden to appoint climate leaders as financial regulators, and separately, to stop Trump-approved pipelines including the Dakota Access Pipeline and Canadian oil giant Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline.
“President Biden is attempting to turn the page from the Trump administration, but until he uses his authority to stop all Trump-era fossil fuel projects, our communities will continue to raise the red flag,” said Joye Braun, national pipelines organizer for Indigenous Environmental Network, in a statement.
Get our free emails
Email
Biden’s pledge comes as a new UN report on global emissions targets found that the planet is still on track to warm 2.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100 — far above the 1.5 degrees that scientists and the Paris Agreement established the world should be targeting, and as Arctic sea ice has reached its annual low, the 12th lowest on record.
Congressional progressives including Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Ilhan Omar are using the moment to pressure Congress and Biden, calling on them this week to support the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act, or “Make Polluters Pay” bill, and to incorporate the bill as part of Biden’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package.
The bill would require companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron and other major climate polluters to pay a combined $500 billion at minimum into the Polluters Pay Climate Fund based on their respective percentage of global emissions. The money would be dedicated to helping vulnerable and marginalized communities adapt to climate impacts, transition to renewable energy and advance environmental justice.
“I’ve witnessed my district and community be devastated by recent storms and climate impacts that were the direct result of global emissions from major fossil fuel companies like Exxon, Shell, and Chevron,” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman this week. “Polluters must take full responsibility for their destruction and pay up now.”“Polluters must take full responsibility for their destruction and pay up now.” —Rep. Jamaal Bowman
The lawmakers called the legislation a straightforward way to generate revenue for President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, calling on him not cut the reconciliation bill without first adopting their “polluters pay” approach. Still, leading climate activists have noted that the bill would only account for a fraction of the fossil fuel industry’s damages while allowing the industry to continue to pollute.
Meanwhile, climate activists are also ramping up a pressure campaign demanding major Wall Street banks stop financing fossil fuels by the start of the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 1. Among COP26’s major goals are global emission reductions of about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and $100 billion in annual financial aid from rich to poor countries — with half of that going to poor nations to help adapt to climate disruption’s worst impacts.
Climate activists say the U.S. won’t be able to meet its emissions targets or climate finance goals, however, unless financial regulators force banks, insurers and asset managers to stop financing fossil fuels. With the Biden administration set to release its climate-related financial risk strategy, climate campaigners are renewing calls for President Biden to appoint a progressive climate leader to head the Federal Reserve and staging direct actions outside major fossil fuel financers.
More than 40 climate activists were arrested in New York City while blocking the entrances of JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Bank of America on the 10-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and in the run-up to New York Climate Week and today’s global climate strike. Dozens more risked arrest at Chase, Bank of America and the Canadian consulate in Seattle to demand the institutions stop bankrolling tar sands pipelines.
That’s why it’s so important, campaigners say, for the Fed to step in and why Stop the Money Pipeline is intensifying an internal White House push to replace Republican Fed Chair Jerome Powell at the end of his four-year term in February 2022.“We need a new Fed chair who’s more willing to take action on this critical threat to financial stability.”
“Frankly, the Federal Reserve is the most powerful financial regulator and it has done very, very little on climate, basically nothing, and it’s pretty clear Jerome Powell is not looking to do more than the bare minimum on climate, so we need a new Fed chair who’s more willing to take action on this critical threat to financial stability,” says Yevgeny Shrago, who is policy counsel for Public Citizen’s Climate Program.
A Fossil-Free Fed
Last week, another set of progressive House Democratic representatives, Mondaire Jones, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, introduced the Fossil Free Finance Act, which would force the Federal Reserve to break up banks if they do not reduce the carbon emissions they finance in line with the Paris Agreement.
Under Powell, the central bank has created several committees focused on climate-related financial risks, but has refused to turn the committees’ recommendations into regulatory requirements. Powell has rejected calls to use the Fed as a tool in the fight to mitigate the climate disaster, insisting it is not appropriate for the Fed to step beyond its mandate.“We cannot be originalists and textualists when it comes to monetary policy.”
“Congress has the power to increase or shrink the mandate of the Fed. That is fully within their province, so there’s a lot of detractors [of the bill], especially Republicans, saying, ‘That’s not the Fed’s place.’ Well, you know what, the Fed also weighs in on cryptocurrency and matters around racial justice and … issues that didn’t exist when the Fed was first formed,” says Tracey Lewis, a climate finance policy analyst with 350.org. “We cannot be originalists and textualists when it comes to monetary policy…. It gives an air of preserving a history that may not be worthy of preservation.”
She tells Truthout that the Fossil Free Finance Act would protect the stability of the financial system as a whole by protecting against the financial threats banks and insurers increasingly face from unfolding climate disasters, including floods, droughts, wildfires, polar vortexes and heat domes. “Increasing events means increasing loss, which means not just physical loss but financial loss,” she says. “Where we have smaller banks, regional banks, will they be able to absorb that loss? It’s very doubtful.”
Lewis says most campaigners for a Fossil Free Fed want to see Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard replace Powell as Fed chair. Brainard’s strong commitment both to full employment and to strong financial regulation could prove monumental in the success of the Biden administration’s stated agenda of mitigating the financial impacts of the pandemic and climate crisis, as well as addressing deepening structural racism and inequality. Her record stands in strong contrast to Powell’s, whose Fed has weakened Dodd-Frank reforms as well as tools that federal bank regulators use to monitor bank risk-taking and law compliance.
Fossil-free Fed campaigners also want to see progressive economists Sarah Bloom Raskin and Lisa Cook replace Randy Quarles and Richard Clarida as Federal Reserve vice chair of supervision and vice chair, respectively. Cook would be first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s board.
Lewis cited Cook’s work to study the pandemic’s disproportionate impacts on women, especially women of color, from job losses and insufficient caregiving supports that resulted in almost 1.8 million fewer women in the labor force as of May 2021. She says these are the kinds of perspectives the administration should be focused on bringing in to the Fed Reserve board, not the same “white, heteronormative hegemons” whose neoliberal, Milton Friedman-style fiscal policies got us here in the first place.
The Stop the Money Pipeline coalition is also ramping up engagement with the Biden administration as Treasury officials are set to issue a report on the tools available for addressing climate risk in the financial system just after the Glasgow talks.“It’s a really important report because it could very well serve as a blueprint for regulatory action for federal agencies if it’s bold and meets the Biden administration’s rhetoric on climate.”
“It’s a really important report because it could very well serve as a blueprint for regulatory action for federal agencies if it’s bold and meets the Biden administration’s rhetoric on climate,” Public Citizen’s Shrago says. “It could be a path forward for appointees, including a new Federal Reserve chair, to protect the financial system from the advance of the climate crisis.”
He cautioned that it’s Treasury officials who should be leading the drafting of the report and urged a strong final draft that meets Biden’s climate commitments, rather than a watered-down draft that would come out of a consensus process with the Financial Stability Oversight Counsel, which consists of federal and state financial regulators and insurance experts, including three appointed by Trump. “We don’t think [Treasury] should strive for a consensus document when there’s three people appointed by someone who took no action on climate change and withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement,” Shrago says.
The push for the bills comes as Chinese President Xi Jinping announced Tuesday that his country will stop building coal-fired power plants overseas. Climate activists cautiously celebrated the announcement by far the biggest domestic producer of coal and the largest financier of coal-fired power plants around the world.
“One of the common criticisms of the climate finance regulation work is that as long as there’s demand for energy or fossil fuels, cutting off money or definancing it really isn’t going to work, because people will just go somewhere else for money, but what you see is even national governments like China are recognizing that these projects aren’t profitable and if you cut off the flow of financing now, it’s going to reduce the amount of fossil fuels in the air later,” Shrago tells Truthout.“National governments like China are recognizing that these projects aren’t profitable and if you cut off the flow of financing now, it’s going to reduce the amount of fossil fuels in the air later.”
The Chinese commitment comes as banks, asset managers and insurance companies continue to issue much less impactful or meaningless climate commitments that environmentalists are calling out as predictable greenwashing and cynical climate PR ahead of COP26. Bank of America, for instance, while sponsoring New York Climate Week, recently closed a deal to underwrite a new $1.5 billion Canadian, “sustainability-linked” bond for Enbridge, the company behind the Line 3 tar sands pipeline.
Moreover, Saudi Arabia’s $430 billion sovereign wealth fund is expected to announce its first green debt issuance, which raises funds for environmental investments by borrowing money from “green” bonds. It also announced that it will work with notorious fossil fuel funder and shadow bank BlackRock on developing an “environmental social and governance” framework, which Shrago called a climate “net negative” as long as Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, continues to extract fossil fuels.
Lastly, Royal Dutch Shell’s recent announcement that it will sell all of its assets in West Texas’s Permian basin to ConocoPhillips for around $9.5 billion is being described a “carbon shell game” by journalists who note that the company is simply offloading fossil fuel production to another company that will continue extraction in the Permian.
“There a bit of a ‘last-one-out’ problem in fossil fuels that it’s important for regulators to think about,” Shrago says. “As more and more people divest from fossil fuels, there’s going to be fewer and fewer buyers, so the next time someone wants to divest, fewer companies will pick up their assets and eventually you’re just going to see a market that dries up, and whenever that happens, whoever is left holding the potato is going to be in a lot of trouble, and there’s going to be a lot of banks, private equity funds, hedge funds and insurance companies that are behind the curve if regulators don’t act.”
The best way to ensure regulators do act, climate finance analysts say, is to retool the most influential financial institution in the country — the Federal Reserve. “This may be the absolute last chance that a Democratic president has to make real changes to the Fed and Fed policy,” 350’s Lewis tells Truthout. “President Biden has an opportunity that was not present for President Obama, not for President Clinton, not for President Carter.”
Reuters
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/life/fashion_style/2021/09/24/how-billie-eilish-has-reignited-the-anti-fur-movement/billie.jpg)
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/life/fashion_style/2021/09/24/how-billie-eilish-has-reignited-the-anti-fur-movement/kim.jpg)
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/life/fashion_style/2021/09/24/how-billie-eilish-has-reignited-the-anti-fur-movement/queen.jpg)
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/life/fashion_style/2021/09/24/how-billie-eilish-has-reignited-the-anti-fur-movement/peta_pam.jpg)
