US, UK called out on hypocrisy on climate pledges as they ramp up oil and gas exploration to record levels

Wealthy nations are ignoring the Paris Agreement and are ramping up oil production. The US alone has issued 1,453 new licences, constituting half of the global total and 83% of those issued by wealthy nations. The UK has issued more licences than any other country this year. / bne IntelliNews

By Ben Aris in Berlin July 29, 2024


The US and UK have been accused of hypocrisy as they blow through their carbon budget allowances and issue record amounts of oil and gas exploration licences, The Guardian reports, according to a new report from energy consultant Rystad and the IISD.

Both countries will see a significant increase in oil and gas exploration in 2024. The world is set to produce nearly 12 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, predominantly driven by the wealthiest nations such as the US and the UK, already two of the world’s biggest emitters of CO₂, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), shared exclusively with The Guardian.

As bne IntelliNews reported, the US has blown through its carbon budget allowance and emitted twice as much CO₂ as it is allowed under allocations granted as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The US is all but ignoring its climate targets and ramping up oil and gas production and exports to record levels.



The US, the EU and Russia have already burnt through their carbon budget allowance under the Paris Agreement obligations, whereas China and India are still in surplus, according to a study by Scientific American.

Conversely China and India, the biggest and third biggest emitters of CO₂, remain well within their carbon budget allowances, set by the Paris Agreements to allow a 50% chance of staying within the 1.5C increase in temperatures above the pre-industrial benchmark.

Both China and India are investing heavily into green energy and are increasingly looking like the grown-ups in the room. Indeed, China has emerged as the green energy global champion: two thirds of deployed solar panels are in China; in May alone China generated more green energy than any other country in the world produced in all of 2023; and China is rapidly approaching peak emissions, well ahead of any other country in the world.

The Paris Agreement set a 500 gigatonne allowable CO₂ emissions budget to keep temperature rises below 1.5C, but half of that has already been spent ahead of schedule. Last year was the hottest year ever, and this year has already recorded the hottest day since records began as the climate crisis accelerates faster than scientists were expecting.

The IISD reports the projected emissions from new oil and gas field licences to be awarded globally this year are anticipated to be the highest since 2018, coinciding with severe climate events worldwide.

The estimated 11.9 gigatonnes of emissions over the lifetime of these fields equates to the annual carbon output of China and twice that of the US. This includes licences issued as of June 2024, as well as those open for bidding, under evaluation, or planned for future licensing.

Despite a pledge to seek to reduce emissions and the use of fossil fuels at the COP28 last year, that summit, hosted by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was deemed a failure as energy companies did little more than play lip service to the crisis. Little is expected from this year’s COP29 summit, which is being hosted by Azerbaijan, another big oil and gas producer that is also ramping up production.

Fossil fuel companies intend to invest more in new developments this year than at any time since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the IISD reports.

Despite their wealth and pro-active green policies, countries such as the US, UK, Canada, Norway and Australia are collectively responsible for two thirds (67%) of all the new exploration licences issued since 2020 and lead the new wave of exploration.

IISD policy adviser Olivier Bois von Kursk criticised the continuation and increase in exploration activities, especially by countries with relatively low dependence on fossil fuel revenues. "Rich countries should be the first to stop issuing new licences," he told The Guardian. Study after study has criticised the slow pace of climate action. Scientists are now warning the world is on course to see temperatures rise by a catastrophic 2.5% and that the 1.5C goal has probably been already missed.

Under the Biden administration, the US alone has issued 1,453 new licences, constituting half of the global total and 83% of those issued by wealthy nations. This marks a 20% increase from the Trump era, despite Trump's pledge to intensify drilling activities. And if Trump wins re-election he is likely to take the US out of the Paris Agreement for a second time and is currently campaigning on a platform that includes a policy of “drill baby, drill”, to use his words.

The UK has issued more licences than any other country this year, with the potential to add 101mn tonnes of emissions. Despite the new Labour government’s pledge to halt new drilling, the status of licences granted by the previous Conservative government is still uncertain.

The political influence wielded by the oil and gas industry remains substantial, with over $1bn spent on lobbying and campaign contributions in the past decade, The Guardian reports.

Third union ballots ScotRail workers on strike action



A third union is to ballot ScotRail workers on strike action after failing to receive what it describes as a "credible" pay offer.

Unite, which represents more than 300 workers at the publicly-owned railway operator, said its members could walk out in September.

The Aslef and RMT unions recently announced they will also be balloting their ScotRail staff on industrial action in a dispute over pay.

Unite said its members, who include train cleaners, engineers, ticket agents, hospitality assistants and conductors, were yet to receive a formal and fair pay offer from the employer.


ScotRail travel misery over double disruption to trains

Why a lack of train drivers is causing a problem for ScotRail


The ballot will open on Wednesday and run until 20 August, the union said.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: "Unite has no option but to ballot our members across all grades. Disgracefully, ScotRail has not even made a formal pay offer let alone a fair one for our members.

"Unite's members are essential to keeping the trains running, yet many of them struggle to survive financially as they don't earn huge sums of money. They have Unite's full backing in the fight for better jobs, pay and conditions."

The pay dispute comes as rail customers face continued disruption due to a pay dispute between ScotRail and its train drivers.

A reduced timetable is already in place - with only about 50% of services running on Sundays after drivers declined to work overtime.

Transport Scotland said negotiations were a matter for ScotRail and the unions, but Scottish government ministers were being kept informed.

A spokesperson said it acknowledged the desire of rail unions to "negotiate a fair settlement for their members".

"Aslef's recent confirmation it will return to the negotiating table later this week is welcome." they said. "We would encourage all unions to do the same to engage in meaningful dialogue so that a mutually agreeable outcome can be reached as soon as possible.

ScotRail has been contacted for comment.

Hundreds more ScotRail workers to ballot on strike action in pay row

By PA News Agency

Hundreds of ScotRail workers could walk out in September unless they receive a “credible” pay offer, a union has warned.

Unite, which represents more than 300 workers at the publicly-owned railway operator, has become the latest union to announce a strike ballot for its ScotRail workers in a dispute over pay.


It says its members, who include train cleaners, engineers, ticket agents, hospitality assistants and conductors, are yet to receive a formal and fair pay offer from the employer.

The ballot will open on Wednesday and run until August 20, the union said.

ScotRail must formally table a credible pay offer which our members can seriously consider before this dispute escalates into nationwide strike actionUnite industrial officer Pat McIlvogue

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “Unite has no option but to ballot our members across all grades. Disgracefully, ScotRail has not even made a formal pay offer let alone a fair one for our members.

“Unite’s members are essential to keeping the trains running, yet many of them struggle to survive financially as they don’t earn huge sums of money. They have Unite’s full backing in the fight for better jobs, pay and conditions.”

Unite industrial officer Pat McIlvogue called on ScotRail and the Scottish Government to take action to avert potential strike action.

“ScotRail must formally table a credible pay offer which our members can seriously consider before this dispute escalates into nationwide strike action,” he said.

“The Scottish Government, who are the ultimate paymasters, and ScotRail need to get their heads together and quickly. There is still a window of opportunity to resolve this dispute through negotiation. If they fail to grasp this chance, then it will be full steam ahead towards autumn strike action.”

The Aslef and RMT unions recently announced they will also be balloting their ScotRail staff on strike action in a dispute over pay.

A Transport Scotland spokesperson said: “While pay negotiations are for ScotRail, as the employer, and the unions concerned, we acknowledge the desire of rail unions to negotiate a fair settlement for their members.

“Aslef’s recent confirmation it will return to the negotiating table later this week is welcome. We would encourage all unions to do the same to engage in meaningful dialogue so that a mutually agreeable outcome can be reached as soon as possible.

“Train planning and staff rotas are operational matters for ScotRail.

“However, we fully expect any timetable to give the best reliability and availability for passengers and that changes are communicated well in advance to enable effective journey planning.

“Although the Scottish Government is not at the negotiating table, Ministers are being kept informed of progress.”

ScotRail has been contacted for comment.

 

Steel industry’s net zero drive could make lower-grade iron ore viable

Heriot-Watt University

 

image: 

Slag deposit at Scunthorpe Steel Work.

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Credit: Phil Renforth

A decarbonised steel industry that includes carbon dioxide removal techniques in its net zero arsenal could use lower-grade iron ore, according to a new study. 

Steel accounts for 5-8% of carbon dioxide emissions globally. Its total emissions have risen over the past decade, largely due to increased demand. 

The International Energy Agency has stated that, without innovation, the scope to limit emissions is ‘limited’. Therefore, the commercialisation of new zero-emission production processes is critical. 

Innovative processes are the focus of the new research from Heriot-Watt University’s Research Centre for Carbon Solutions, published in the academic Journal of Cleaner Production. 

Professor Phil Renforth and team describe in the study how deep emissions mitigation in the steel industry, combined with financial levers, could not only result in steel becoming carbon negative - it could also make the use of lower-grade iron ore feasible. 

Professor Renforth said: “This could be the cherry on the cake for the steel industry and open up new opportunities for investment in the UK. 

“We developed a bespoke techno-economic model that stimulates scenarios where steel production is enhanced with climate change interventions. 

“We focused on measures like directly reduced iron, biomass-based reductants and carbon capture and storage, as they’ve been identified as the most likely net zero pathways by the International Energy Agency. 

“The UK has around 180 million tons of slag byproduct from steel production. If the industry used this material to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide, for example, coupling direct air capture with a mineral reaction system, it could remove up to one gigatonne of carbon dioxide per year by 2050. 

“This would need to be supported by strong government incentives -around 200-500 USD per tonne.  

“Decarbonising will drive up the cost of steel, so there has to be a driver for change. 

“Also, these are nascent technologies that require significant investment if they’re to be implemented on any meaningful scale. 

“Adding an incentive for carbon removal may offset the cost of decarbonisation.” 

Renforth’s model threw up one big surprise for the carbon researchers. 

“Surprisingly, the model shows that once financial incentives and carbon removal technologies are in place, lower-grade ores become commercially viable. 

“Current production favours higher purity ore, which is cheaper to use because it requires less energy and materials. 

“The UK doesn’t have any commercial-grade ore, and it’s becoming incredibly hard to find around the world. That’s a problem that’s not going away. 

“Our model shows that by integrating advanced emission reduction technologies and using lower-grade iron ore, we can create a sustainable, economically viable path towards a carbon-negative steel industry. 

“This is a critical step in addressing climate change while supporting industrial growth.

Slag deposit at Scunthorpe Steel Work.

Credit

Phil Renforth

Journal

Journal of Cleaner Production

Article Title

Carbon dioxide removal could result in the use of lower-grade iron ore in a decarbonized net-negative emission steel industry

 

Health: Short-term vegan diet associated

 with reductions in biological age estimates

BMC (BioMed Central)

Eating a vegan diet for eight weeks is associated with reductions in biological age estimations based on levels of DNA methylation — a type of chemical modification of DNA (known as an epigenetic modification) that alters gene expression but not DNA itself. Previous research has reported that increased DNA methylation levels are associated with ageing. The findings, which are based on a small randomised controlled trial of 21 pairs of adult identical twins, are published in BMC Medicine.

Varun Dwaraka, Christopher Gardner and colleagues investigated the molecular effects of a short-term vegan diet by instructing one half of each twin pair to eat an omnivorous diet for eight weeks — including between 170 and 225 grams of meat, one egg, and one and a half servings of dairy each day — and the other half to eat a vegan diet for the same length of time. The sample was 77 percent women (32), and participants were 40 years old on average and had an average body mass index of 26 kilograms per metres squared. For the first four weeks of the study participants ate meals that had been prepared for them and for the second four weeks participants ate meals that they had prepared themselves, after receiving nutrition classes from health educators.

The authors investigated the impacts of diet on levels of DNA methylation by analysing blood samples collected from participants at baseline, week four, and week eight of the study. They used DNA methylation levels to infer the biological ages of participants and their organ systems.

By the end of the study the authors observed decreases in estimates of biological age — known as epigenetic ageing clocks — in participants who ate a vegan diet but not among those that ate an omnivorous diet. They also observed decreases in the ages of the heart, hormone, liver, and inflammatory and metabolic systems of participants who ate a vegan, but not an omnivorous diet, for eight weeks.

The authors caution that the extent to which the differences observed between participants who ate different diets can be attributed to their dietary compositions is unclear. They note that participants who ate a vegan diet lost two kilograms more on average than those who ate an omnivorous diet due to differences in the calorie contents of meals provided during the initial four weeks of the study. They suggest that these weight loss variations could have contributed to the observed differences in epigenetic age between both groups. Further research is needed to investigate the relationship between dietary composition, weight and ageing, in addition to the long-term effects of vegan diets, they add.

-ENDS-

Notes for editors:

1. Authors Dr. Dwaraka, Dr. Carreras-Gallo, Aaron Lin, Logan Turner, Dr. Mendez, Hannah Went, and Ryan Smith are all employees of TruDiagnostic Inc. Dr Gardner reported receiving funding from Beyond Meat outside of the submitted work. Dr J. L. Sonnenburg is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator. No other disclosures were reported.

###

Article details

Unveiling the epigenetic impact of vegan vs. omnivorous diets on aging: insights from the Twins Nutrition Study (TwiNS)

DOI: 10.1186/s12916-024-03513-w

Corresponding Author:

Varun Dwaraka
TruDiagnostic Inc., Lexington, KY, USA
Email: varun@trudiagnostic.com

Christopher Gardner
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA
Email: cgardner@stanford.edu

 

---

Journal

BMC Medicine

DOI

10.1186/s12916-024-03513-w 

Article Title

Unveiling the epigenetic impact of vegan vs. omnivorous diets on aging: insights from the Twins Nutrition Study (TwiNS)

A Non-Conformist of the Power Elite:  Lewis Lapham, 1935-2024

by Nicholas Levis

July 26, 2024
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Following his death at age 89 on July 23 in Rome, Harper’s today compares its long-time editor and essayist Lewis H. Lapham to Montaigne, Twain, and Mencken, and quotes from him a truism as relevant as ever in these days of interminable praises for Biden farewell speeches and worse: “What so annoys people about the media is not its rudeness or its stupidity but its sanctimony.”[1]

A fine chunk of my own life has been spent reading and rereading Lewis Lapham’s unsanctimonious thoughts in Notebook, the opening column in Harper’s, and most everything else in the great American magazine he revived and reshaped into a monthly pleasure as its editor-in-chief from 1976 until 2006, except for an interregnum in 1981-83.[2]

To hear him tell it, Lapham’s non-conformism almost cost him the Harper’s job soon after he started it. “I’m the editor who refused to print the scoop poured into the ears, or if you like a different metaphor, stuffed into the mouths of Woodward and Bernstein.” He rejected an offer for Harper’s to excerpt All the President’s Men, the best-selling book by the reporters who famously broke the Watergate scandal. “They didn’t name a single source,” Lapham recalls in his 2005 film, The American Ruling Class, likening this to Pravda.

A consummate insider as media critic, it is apropos Lapham authored an introduction to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, in which he wrote:

Much of what McLuhan had to say makes a good deal more sense in 1994 than it did in 1964, and even as his book was being remanded to the backlist, its more profound implications were beginning to make themselves manifest on MTV and the Internet, in Ronald Reagan’s political image and the re-animation of Richard Nixon, via television shopping networks and e-mail—all of them technologies that McLuhan had presupposed but didn’t live to see shaped in silicon or glass.

Thirty years further on and McLuhan, and Lapham’s riffs on his work—on how politics has been supplanted by prophecy, how in the electronic world sequence becomes additive not causative as it allegedly is with print—both make even more sense; in lieu of summary or further excerpt, I direct the reader to Lapham’s own words on what we now call by names like post-reality or post-truth, online.[3]

Also online and recommended is The American Ruling Class,[4] advertised as “the world’s first documentary musical.” Before everything was online, I had to arrange to screen it at an Episcopal Church in Queens during an “Occupy” film festival in 2012, and that gave me occasion to write the following review:

Lapham plays a tweed-jacketed Mephistopheles who takes two Yale graduates of differing temperaments (played by acting students who actually went to Harvard) on a guided tour of key institutions of American power: Wall Street, the Pentagon, Hollywood, the Council on Foreign Relations, the right country clubs, etc.

The boys meet real-life members of the American ruling class: bankers, potentates, and the all-important consultants, fixers and lawyers to bankers and potentates. Among the latter is James Baker, the former Secretary of State and Bush Family consigliere who rendered legal services for the 2000 Florida electoral coup that placed George W. Bush in the White House.

Baker and the other big shots interviewed by Lapham all ritually insist that this country is a democracy, that, of course, there is no ruling class. This invocation out of the way, they are then happy to explain how this ruling class works. Their careers consistently display a knack for moving seamlessly, and shamelessly, back and forth between high public and private functions.

As the two young men consider what they should do with their own lives, and the value of their own souls, Lapham introduces them also to Howard Zinn, Walter Cronkite, Pete Seeger and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. We meet journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who reprises for the film an earlier job she held as a waitress, which she had taken while on assignment from Harper’s for an article on the life of low-wage labor.

As her editor, Lapham told Ehrenreich that if she was going to write about the most precarious and lowest-paid people of the working class, she’d have to get a job and report from the field while trying to live on the wages she was earning from it. The results were later expanded into her book, Nickel and Dimed (2001). In Lapham’s film,

soon enough the waiters, the kitchen staff, the taxi driver, the hotel cleaning lady and what finally looks like the entirety of the US service sector sing a number with the chorus of “Nickel and Dimed,” adding up their wages, expenses and tribulations in verse. Ehrenreich explains that the real philanthropists are the ones who work for less than they need to get by, so that the more fortunate are well-served.

Other memorable numbers include “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” on the relationship of the corporate media and the imperial state… What results is a low-budget cross between C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite and Guys and Dolls [a Hollywood classic musical with Frank Sinatra].

A Life

Lapham was the child of a San Francisco old-money banking and oil family. Brought along starting at age 10 to teas where he reportedly met Allen Dulles, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, Saudi Prince Faisal, and Prime Minister Nehru, among others, he got to watch the creation of the United Nations and the postwar world order.

Being born to the power elite does not force one to fulfill its pedestrian fate, to become one of its enterprising yet interchangeable villains, or to join its rent-collecting “self-made” nobility. As he recollected in an interview with Le Figaro, in 1957 Lapham applied to the CIA, as young (Anglo) men of means were supposed to do after graduating from Yale if they were idealistic and foolish enough. He came prepared to impress, to discourse on Lenin, Stalin, and the geostrategic significance of the Black Sea, but the interviewer instead asked him which golf club he’d choose for driving on the 13th hole of the National Golf Links at Southhampton.[5]

The CIA rejected him, and his subsequent work indicates a move beyond the desire to please their likes. His books and the lion’s share of his essays were dedicated to dissecting the madness and folly of the American ruling class. Like Gore Vidal or Henry Wallace, Lapham’s is the case of an American leadership that could have been, that might have helped make a better world, or that might have failed in the effort for being too genuinely civilized. His role instead, like Montaine, Twain and Mencken, was as a witty and worthy and acute curmudgeon, a chain-smoker of high conscience to the end.

Having been hired to edit the venerable and declining Harper’s in the years before it was rescued and converted into a non-profit by the MacArthur Foundation and a philanthropic oil company,(!) Lapham was bounced out again in 1981-1983 for being too “harshly critical of American society,” according to John Otis in the Washington Post.[6] It may not be incidental that those years corresponded to the Reagan-Thatcher-Volcker “revolution,” when almost every major periodical in the Anglo-American world that was not already on the right just happened to adopt a neocon or neoliberal editorial line.

Harper’s sales numbers tanked, and Lapham, who turned out to be the favorite among the subscribers after all, was brought back to save it, this time with carte blanche. Ten years before the World Wide Web would initiate the mass Internet revolution, he introduced a set of snappy, short-form collage features like the famed Harper’s Index, Annotations, and Readings (a variety of documentary excerpts), making for unpredictable, often brilliant and drily humorous opening pages that usually served also as an oblique rundown of enough of the recent news fit to think about.

But Harper’s never seemed to skimp on writers’ fees, or on allocating adequate space for the long-form investigative journalism, essays, “forums” (debate rounds among big thinkers and scoundrels), and short stories that still filled most of the magazine.

The overall formula worked, at least well enough that despite serious crises the magazine has survived the first 30 years of the Internet maelstrom, did not fall to enshittification, and is still in print today. I’m not sure if the latter can be said of certain American Pravdas that once seemed to be eternal fixtures of the newsstand and the mailbox, like Time and Newsweek.

In 2006, entering his 70s, Lapham went emiritus and turned to tilling and editing his own garden journal, Lapham’s Quarterly, each issue a themed collage of longer excerpts from several thousand years of historical source material and world literature. Allow me for a moment the corny projection, inspired by the place of his death, to think of this move as akin to Marcus Aurelius retiring to his villa to meditate, grumble, and stay away from all that noise.

As it happened, however, Lapham’s actual move to Italy earlier this year came right after his 15-year project to counteract “the hyperactive pace and frivolous emphasis of internet culture” was forced to go on a “temporary hiatus” due to “financial challenges,” as Otis reports.

Lapham is survived by “his wife of more than 50 years, the former Joan Reeves, of Rome; three children, Andrew Lapham of Toronto, Delphina Boncompagni Ludovisi of Rome, and Winston Lapham of Denver; and 10 grandchildren.”[7]

Notes

[1] “Lewis Lapham, 1935-2024,” Harper’s online, July 24, 2022, at https://harpers.org/2024/07/remembering-lewis-lapham/

[2] I first picked up on Harper’s around 1983, while in college.

[3] Lewis H. Lapham (1994), “The Eternal Now,” introduction to the 30th anniversary edition of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, MIT Press, accessed at https://worrydream.com/refs/Lapham_1994_-_The_Eternal_Now.pdf.

[4] The American Ruling Class, dir. John Kirby, viewable at https://archive.org/details/the-american-ruling-class.

[5] Charles Jaigu, «Ploutocratie en Amérique», Le Figaro Magazine, semaine du 23 mars 2018, p. 40, accessed at https://editions-saintsimon.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/FMAG_20180323_page040.pdf.

[6] John Otis, “Lewis Lapham, editor who revived Harper’s magazine, dies at 89,” The Washington Post, July 24, 2024, accessed via Boston Globe online, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/07/24/metro/lewis-lapham-editor-who-revived-harpers-magazine-dies-89/

[7] Otis, ibid.

Nicholas Levis, who teaches history, has pretty much had it, and the Google ate the contact e-mail he created just for these articles (true story). So there is no way for you to contact him, not even to offer him money for his nest-egg against imminent obsolescence. You’re on your own.