Putin’s war shows autocracies and fossil fuels go hand in hand. Here’s how to tackle both

‘Autocrats are often directly the result of fossil fuel.

 Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images

Democracies are making more progress than autocracies when it comes to climate action. But divestment campaigns can put pressure on the most recalcitrant of political leaders


Bill McKibben
@billmckibben

Mon 11 Apr 2022

At first glance, last autumn’s Glasgow climate summit looked a lot like its 25 predecessors. It had:

A conference hall the size of an aircraft carrier stuffed with displays from problematic parties (the Saudis, for example, with a giant pavilion saluting their efforts at promoting a “circular carbon economy agenda”).

Squadrons of delegates rushing constantly to mysterious sessions (“Showcasing achievements of TBTTP and Protected Areas Initiative of GoP”) while actual negotiations took place in a few back rooms.

Earnest protesters with excellent signs (“The wrong Amazon is burning”).

But as I wandered the halls and the streets outside, it struck me again and again that a good deal had changed since the last big climate confab in Paris in 2015 – and not just because carbon levels and the temperature had risen ever higher.

The biggest shift was in the political climate. Over those few years the world seemed to have swerved sharply away from democracy and toward autocracy – and in the process dramatically limited our ability to fight the climate crisis. Oligarchs of many kinds had grabbed power and were using it to uphold the status quo; there was a Potemkin quality to the whole gathering, as if everyone was reciting a script that no longer reflected the actual politics of the planet.

Now that we’ve watched Russia launch an oil-fired invasion of Ukraine, it’s a little easier to see this trend in high relief – but Putin is far from the only case. Consider the examples.

Brazil, in 2015 at Paris, had been led by Dilma Rousseff, of the Workers’ party, which had for the most part worked to limit deforestation in the Amazon. In some ways the country could claim to have done more than any other on climate damage, simply by slowing the cutting. But in 2021 Jair Bolsonaro was in charge, at the head of a government that empowered every big-time cattle rancher and mahogany poacher in the country. If people cared about the climate, he said, they could eat less and “poop every other day”. And if they cared about democracy, they could … go to jail. “Only God can take me from the presidency,” he explained ahead of this year’s elections.

A climate activist holds a sign depicting Jair Bolsonaro with the slogan ‘Exterminator of the Future’. 

Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

Or India, which may turn out to be the most pivotal nation given the projected increases in its energy use – and which had refused its equivalent of Greta Thunberg even a visa to attend the meeting. (At least Disha Ravi was no longer in jail).

Or Russia (about which more in a minute) or China – a decade ago we could still, albeit with some hazard and some care, hold climate protests and demonstrations in Beijing.

 Don’t try that now.

Or, of course, the US, whose deep democratic deficits have long haunted climate negotiations. The reason we have a system of voluntary pledges, not a binding global agreement, is that the world finally figured out there would never be 66 votes in the US Senate for a real treaty.

Joe Biden had expected to arrive at the talks with the Build Back Better bill in his back pocket, slap it down on the table, and start a bidding war with the Chinese – but the other Joe, Manchin of West Virginia, the biggest single recipient of fossil fuel cash in DC, made sure that didn’t happen. Instead Biden showed up empty-handed and the talks fizzled.

And so we were left contemplating a world whose people badly want action on climate change, but whose systems aren’t delivering it. In 2021 the UN Development Programme conducted a remarkable poll, across the planet – they questioned people through video-game networks to reach humans less likely to answer traditional surveys. Even amid the Covid pandemic, 64% of them described climate change as a “global emergency”, and that by decisive margins they wanted “broad climate policies beyond the current state of play”. As the UNDP director, Achim Steiner, summarized, “the results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender and education level”.

The irony is that some environmentalists have occasionally yearned for less democracy, not more. Surely if we just had strongmen in power everywhere they could just make the hard decisions and put us on the right path – we wouldn’t have to mess with the constant vagaries of elections and lobbying and influence.

But this is wrong for at least one moral reason – strongmen capable of acting instantly on the climate crisis are also capable of acting instantly on any number of other things, as the people of Xinjiang and Tibet would testify were they allowed to talk. It’s also wrong for a number of practical ones.

Those practical problems begin with the fact that autocrats have their own vested interests to please – Modi campaigned for his role atop the world’s largest democracy on the corporate jet of Adani, the largest coal company in the subcontinent. Don’t assume for a minute that there’s not a fossil fuel lobby in China; right now it’s busy telling Xi that economic growth depends on more coal.

And beyond that, autocrats are often directly the result of fossil fuel. The crucial thing about oil and gas is that it is concentrated in a few spots around the world, and hence the people who live on top of or otherwise control those spots end up with huge amounts of unwarranted and unaccountable power.

Boris Johnson was just off in Saudi Arabia trying to round up some hydrocarbons – the day after the king beheaded 81 folks he didn’t like. Would anyone pay the slightest attention to the Saudi royal family if they did not possess oil? No. Nor would the Koch brothers have been able to dominate American politics on the basis of their ideas –when David Koch ran for the White House on the Libertarian ticket in 1980 he got almost no votes. So he and his brother Charles decided to use their winnings as America’s largest oil and gas barons to buy the GOP, and the rest is (dysfunctional) political history.

The most striking example of this phenomenon, it hardly need be said, is Vladimir Putin, a man whose power rests almost entirely on the production of stuff that you can burn. If I wandered through my house, it would be no problem to find electronics from China, textiles from India, all manner of goods from the EU – but there’s nothing anywhere that would say “made in Russia”. Sixty per cent of the export earnings that equipped his army came from oil and gas, and all the political clout that has cowed western Europe for decades came from his fingers on the gas spigot. He and his hideous war are the product of fossil fuel, and his fossil fuel interests have done much to corrupt the rest of the world.

Vladimir Putin and Alexei Miller, CEO of Russian natural gas giant Gazprom, attend a ceremony to mark the launch of the Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok natural gas pipeline in 2011. 

Photograph: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

It’s worth remembering that Donald Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, wears the Order of Friendship, personally pinned on his lapel by Putin in thanks for the vast investments Tillerson’s firm (that would be Exxon) had made in the Arctic – a region opened to their exploitation by the fact that it had, um, melted. And these guys stick together: it’s entirely unsurprising that when Coke, Pepsi, Starbucks and Amazon quit Russia last month, Koch Industries announced that it was staying put. The family business began, after all, by building refineries for Stalin.

Another way of saying this is that hydrocarbons by their nature tend towards the support of despotism – they’re highly dense in energy and hence very valuable; geography and geology means they can be controlled with relative ease. There’s one pipeline, one oil terminal.

Whereas sun and wind are, in these terms, much closer to democratic: they’re available everywhere, diffuse instead of concentrated. I can’t have an oilwell in my backyard because, as with almost all backyards, there is no oil there. Even if there was an oilwell, I would have to sell what I pumped to some refiner, and since I’m American, that would likely be a Koch enterprise. But I can (and do) have a solar panel on my roof; my wife and I rule our own tiny oligarchy, insulated from the market forces the Putins and the Kochs can unleash and exploit. The cost of energy delivered by the sun has not risen this year, and it will not rise next year.

Hydrocarbons by their nature tend towards the support of despotism

As a general rule of thumb, those territories with the healthiest, least-captive-to-vested-interest democracies are making the most progress on climate change. Look around the world at Iceland or Costa Rica, around Europe at Finland or Spain, around the US at California or New York. So part of the job for climate campaigners is to work for functioning democratic states, where people’s demands for a working future will be prioritized over vested interest, ideology and personal fiefdoms.

But given the time constraints that physics impose – the need for rapid action everywhere – that can’t be the whole strategy. In fact, activists have arguably been a little too focused on politics as a source of change, and paid not quite enough attention to the other power center in our civilization: money.

If we could somehow persuade or force the world’s financial giants to change, that would yield quick progress as well. Maybe quicker, since speed is more a hallmark of stock exchanges than parliaments.

And here the news is a little better. Take my country as an example. Political power has come to rest in the reddest, most corrupt parts of America. The senators representing a relative handful of people in sparsely populated western states are able to tie up our political life, and those senators are almost all on the payroll of big oil. But money has collected in the blue parts of the country – Biden-voting counties account for 70% of the country’s economy.

That’s one reason some of us have worked so hard on campaigns like fossil fuel divestment – we won big victories with New York’s pension funds and with California’s vast university system, and so were able to put real pressure on big oil. Now we’re doing the same with the huge banks that are the industry’s financial lifeline. We’re well aware that we may never win over Montana or Mississippi, so we better have some solutions that don’t depend on doing so.

The same thing’s true globally. We may not be able to advocate in Beijing or Moscow or, increasingly, in Delhi. So, at least for these purposes, it’s useful that the biggest pots of money remain in Manhattan, in London, in Frankfurt, in Tokyo. These are places we still can make some noise.

And they are places where there’s some real chance of that noise being heard. Governments tend to favor people who’ve already made their fortune, industries that are already ascendant: that’s who comes with blocs of employees who vote, and that’s who can afford the bribes. But investors are all about who’s going to make money next. That’s why Tesla is worth far more than General Motors in the stock market, if not in the halls of Congress.

Moreover, if we can persuade the world of money to act, it’s capable of doing so quickly. Should, say, Chase Bank, currently the biggest lender on earth to fossil fuel, announce this year that it was quickly phasing out that support, the news would ripple out across stock markets in the matter of hours. That’s why some of us have felt it worthwhile to mount increasingly larger campaigns against these financial institutions, and to head off to jail from their lobbies.

The world of money is at least as unbalanced and unfair as the world of political power – but in ways that may make it a little easier for climate advocates to make progress.

Putin’s grotesque war might be where some of these strands come together. It highlights the ways that fossil fuel builds autocracy, and the power that control of scarce supplies gives to autocrats. It’s also shown us the power of financial systems to put pressure on the most recalcitrant political leaders: Russia is being systematically and effectively punished by bankers and corporations, though as my Ukrainian colleague Svitlana Romanko and I pointed out recently, they could be doing far more. The shock of the war may also be strengthening the resolve and unity of the world’s remaining democracies and perhaps – one can hope – diminishing the attraction of would-be despots like Donald Trump.

But we’ve got years, not decades, to get the climate crisis under some kind of control. We won’t get more moments like this. The brave people of Ukraine may be fighting for more than they can know.

This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story

‘Black carbon’ threat to Arctic as sea routes open up with global heating


As climate crisis allows new maritime routes to be used, sooty shipping emissions accelerates ice melt and risk to ecosystems

Shrinking polar ice has allowed shipping traffic in the 

Arctic to rise by 25% between 2013 and 2019 and the

 growth is expected to continue. 

Photograph: Viacheslav Misiurin/Getty/iStockphoto


Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by


Karen McVeigh
@karenmcveigh1

Sun 10 Apr 2022 15.00 BST

In February last year, a Russian gas tanker, Christophe de Margerie, made history by navigating the icy waters of the northern sea route in mid-winter. The pioneering voyage, from Jiangsu in China to a remote Arctic port in Siberia, was heralded as the start of a new era that could reshape global shipping routes – cutting travel times between Europe and Asia by more than a third.

It has been made possible by the climate crisis. Shrinking polar ice has allowed shipping traffic in the Arctic to rise 25% between 2013 and 2019 and the growth is expected to continue.

But Arctic shipping is not only made possible by the climate crisis, it is adding to it too. More ships mean a rise in exhaust fumes, which is accelerating ice melt in this sensitive region due to a complex phenomenon involving “black carbon”, an air pollutant formed by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels.

An iceberg off Greenland. Though soot from forest fires and algae are also responsible for darkening ice, shipping emissions are a major cause. 

Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters

When black carbon, or soot, lands on snow and ice, it dramatically speeds up melting. Dark snow and ice, by absorbing more energy, melts far faster than heat-reflecting white snow, creating a vicious circle of faster warming.

Environmentalists warn that the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the global average, has seen an 85% rise in black carbon from ships between 2015 and 2019, mainly because of the increase in oil tankers and bulk carriers.

The particles, which exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular illness in towns, are short-term but potent climate agents: they represent more than 20% of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from ships, according to one estimate.
We’re hitting this cascading tipping point for the climate … we need to do something about black carbon urgentlyDr Lucy Gilliam, Seas at Risk

Yet unlike other transport sectors, including road, rail and inland waterways, where air-quality standards curb emissions, no regulations exist for shipping. Last November, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) adopted a resolution on the use of cleaner fuels in the Arctic to reduce black carbon, but left it as a voluntary move.

Last week, the IMO was once again in the spotlight. A coalition of environmental groups warned a meeting of its pollution, prevention and response subcommittee that its resolution did too little to tackle the Arctic’s climate crisis. They submitted a paper calling on governments to agree mandatory regulations to slash shipping’s emissions of black carbon in the region.

“We’re hitting this cascading tipping point for the climate,” said Dr Lucy Gilliam, senior shipping policy officer of Seas at Risk. “With the IPCC report, we are seeing again why we need to do something about black carbon urgently.”

Last Monday, scientists from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned it was “now or never” for action to stave off climate breakdown. They concluded that the international community was underperforming on climate commitments, but singled out the shipping sector and the IMO for particular criticism.

The pollution from global shipping increased by 4.9% in 2021, according to a report by the shipbrokers Simpson Spence Young.

The Russian diesel-electric icebreaker Admiral Makarov in the Arctic. Water vapour condensing around particles from exhaust fumes can cause a thick fog. 

Photograph: Mauritius Images/Alamy

“IMO member states must agree on ambitious and urgent global action to dramatically reduce ship-source black carbon emissions this decade, in order to mitigate the climate crisis in the Arctic,” said Dr Sian Prior, lead adviser to the Clean Arctic Alliance, a coalition of 21 non-profit groups lobbying governments to protect Arctic wildlife and people. She urged states and regions to do their part by acting immediately to cut black carbon from ships.

If all shipping using heavy fuel oil in the Arctic switched to cleaner distillate fuel, it would cut their black carbon emissions by 44%, the Alliance said. Heavy fuel oil or bunker fuel is a viscous, low-grade, cheap oil contaminated with substances including nitrogen and sulphur, which make it more polluting than distillate.

If all ships also installed diesel particulate filters, which reduce emissions by capturing and storing soot, black carbon could be cut by a further 90%.


UN shipping summit criticised for ‘dangerous’ delay on emissions plan

However, others argue that the IMO’s 2021 ban on heavy fuel oils in the Arctic – a move aimed at reducing the risk of spillage and expected to come into effect in 2029 – will see a reduction in black carbon.

“The tide is swimming in the same direction already,” said Paul Blomerus, director of Clear Seas: Centre for Responsible Marine Shipping, an independent research institute in Canada funded by industry and government. “Many Canadian-flagged ships are moving towards distillate fuels, ahead of the IMO ban, which will have the added effect of reducing black carbon emissions.

“You could argue that the IMO only has a certain amount of bandwidth and we should concentrate on decarbonisation and how to get to net zero by 2050.”

He also noted the major role that Russia played in Arctic shipping. “Whether they would abide by the IMO’s regulation is anyone’s guess in the current circumstances,” he said.

New Mexico's water outlook for summer, fall: On the edge


Scott Wyland, The Santa Fe New Mexican
Sun, April 10, 2022, 

Apr. 10—Another year, another growing season that will need summer monsoon rains to avoid water shortages.

After a promising snowy start in late December, the weather became drier as expected under La Niña, with the regional snowpack and precipitation falling to levels below a year ago and the 30-year median, according to a newly released federal report on March conditions.

Lower temperatures this year have been a double-edged sword, causing more powdery snowfall with less water content. But the sometimes-frigid conditions have also kept the snowpack from melting too early — as it has done in recent years — so the runoff flows when New Mexico farmers need it for their spring planting.

Water managers say March offers the first accurate forecast of the upcoming runoff because that's when the biggest snowpack buildup occurs.

This year's snowpack would be sufficient if not for the reservoirs being low, as the state owes Texas a hefty amount of water. There's also this problem, experts say: Climate change raises temperatures and increases evaporation.

The spring runoff should be enough to get irrigators through to July, but after that they'll need robust summer rainstorms to boost water supply for the rest of the growing season, said Jason Casuga, acting CEO and chief engineer for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.

"I expect it to be difficult during the hot months," Casuga said. "Without late-season storage, if we don't get rain in the monsoon season, it's going to be very difficult in the back half of the irrigation season."

It's a similar situation to 2021, also beset by a La Niña, a Pacific Ocean weather pattern that pushes precipitation north and causes drier-than-normal conditions in Southwestern states.

Nearly all of New Mexico is immersed in drought conditions ranging from severe to exceptional, with Santa Fe County grappling with extreme drought. Although far better than a year ago, when half the state was mired in exceptional drought, it's a sharp downturn from January's more favorable picture after the heavy snowfall.

Last year, some much-needed summer rainstorms came, replenishing water resources enough for most farmers to irrigate into the fall, in clear contrast to 2020, when almost no rain fell during the summer, resulting in severe water shortages by September.

'Tough situation' Data shows the Upper Rio Grande Basin's snowpack is at 90 percent of the "long-term normal" and down 18 percent from a year ago, said Jaz Ammon, hydrological technician at the U.S. Natural Resource Conservation Service, who helped compile the report. This basin is the closest survey area to Santa Fe, with data collected at weather stations in Taos, at Ski Santa Fe and at other spots in the area, Ammon said.

Precipitation in the basin between October and April was 79 percent of the long-term normal, versus last year when it was 90 percent, Ammon said.

The long-term median, or normal, covers the period from 1991 to the present, he said.

State Engineer Mike Hamman said the agency recently moved the starting time up a decade, cutting out the wetter period in the 1980s, which created a drier scale that has made the drought years appear less arid.

"The bar is lower," Hamman said.

A recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change says the West is experiencing the driest 22-year period since A.D. 800, putting the region, which includes New Mexico, in a megadrought.

Human-driven climate change is compounding the drought's severity and lengthening its duration, the researchers say, estimating it could drag on to the 30-year mark before it finally passes.

The previous megadroughts predated the industrial revolution, when heat-trapping greenhouse gases began to be spewed en masse into the atmosphere, showing the West can have severe natural droughts independent of climate change, the study's authors stated.

However, the cumulative greenhouse emissions of the past two centuries have clearly worsened the West's current drought, they said.

The changing climate has raised average temperatures roughly 2 degrees since the 1990s and decreased precipitation, leading to what scientists call aridification.

It has intensified evaporation and parched the soil, making it soak up water like a sponge. That in turn has reduced the amount of runoff going into the Rio Grande and flowing downstream to farmers and Elephant Butte Reservoir, the main hub for passing water to Texas to pay the debt and meet obligations in a multistate water-sharing pact.

Meanwhile, back-to-back La Niña patterns are further depleting water sources.

Rolf Schmidt-Petersen, director of the Interstate Stream Commission, said the overall picture the federal report paints is bleak — unless the region gets a healthy monsoon.

"It indicates a tough situation coming our way," Schmidt-Petersen said. "I see as difficult a year coming up to us as last year with less stored water available."

No backup supply

Water storage will be greatly reduced this year because El Vado Dam's renovation will get underway by summer.

The work will take out the main reservoir for keeping the Rio Grande's "native" or natural water, as opposed to Colorado River water that flows through dams and tunnels in the federal San Juan-Chama system into the Rio Grande.

At the moment, losing the reservoir means there's no place to store native water for irrigation, leaving the conservancy district no buffer to supply farmers in the latter part of the season, Casuga said. Having no backup water in a drought season can be problematic, he added.

State officials want to store additional native water in Abiquiú Lake but must overcome some hurdles. The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees Abiquiú Dam, must sign off on it, and all Rio Grande Compact commissioners must approve.

Texas has opposed New Mexico expanding storage until it pays down its water debt to the Lone Star State of roughly 127,000 acre-feet, or 41 billion gallons. An acre-foot is enough to submerge a football field in a foot of water.

Hamman, the state engineer, said he wrote a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers asking to store 20,000 acre-feet, or 6.5 billion gallons, at Abiquiú to serve the pueblos' water needs. He's confident the corps will agree to it.

In addition, the state wants to store 45,000 acre-feet, or 14.6 billion gallons, at the reservoir to help cover irritation needs.

Hamman believes he can work through the impasse with Texas.

"We'll continue to talk with the state of Texas to see if there are other scenarios that might benefit the entire basin," he said.

Meanwhile, the irrigation district has staggered water deliveries to various areas since March, so growers get their supply early rather than late, as they did last year, Casuga said, adding that timely distribution is important as they face another challenging season.

"We wanted to make sure we were more on top of that and were more efficient than we were last year," Casuga said.

Ammon said the only way to really solve the drought-induced problems is to have two or three above-average wet years in a row.

Robust snowpacks and precipitation would be required in all those years, he said.

"One or the other is not enough to cut it," Ammon said.

Amazon workers made up almost half of all warehouse injuries last year

Mitchell Clark -
The Verge
© Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon workers only make up a third of US warehouse employees, but in 2021, they suffered 49 percent of the injuries for the entire warehouse industry, according to a report by advocacy group Strategic Organizing Center (or SOC). After analyzing data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the union coalition found that Amazon workers are twice as likely to be seriously injured than people who work in warehouses for other companies.

The report considers “serious injuries” to be ones where workers either have to take time off to recover or have their workloads reduced, following OSHA’s report classification (pdf) of “cases with days away from work” and “cases with job transfer or restriction.” The data shows that, over time, the company has been shifting more toward putting people on light duty, rather than having them take time off. The report authors also note that Amazon workers take longer to recover from injuries than employees at other companies: around 62 days on average, versus 44 across the industry.


© Graph: Strategic Organizing Center

A graph showing Amazon’s injury rates over the past five years.

Amazon employees have said it’s not the work itself that’s particularly dangerous but rather the grueling pace the company’s automated systems demand. Amazon actually had workers go slower in 2020 to help combat COVID-19, which accounts for the notably lower injury rates that year. But, as the report notes, the injuries increased by around 20 percent between 2020 and 2021 as the company resumed its usual pace — though the injury rates for 2021 were still lower than they were in 2019.

It’s also worth noting that even with that slowed pace of work in 2020, Amazon has been criticized for how it treated workers in its response to COVID-19, especially in New York, where organizers were motivated to start working toward unionizing at the company’s warehouses. New York Attorney General Letitia James has also filed a suit against Amazon, alleging it failed to protect workers and retaliated against them (which included firing lead organizer Christian Smalls) after they spoke out.

Unfortunately, this study’s results tell the same story we’ve been hearing for years. Even with its reduced injury rates in 2020, Amazon workers were still hurt twice as often as other warehouse workers, according to SOC. Tuesday’s report also shows that Amazon’s human workers (whom it’s called “industrial athletes”) are more at risk for injuries when working at warehouses that have been automated — a fact Amazon knew years ago, according to internal documents. As CNBC points out, Amazon says it wants to become the safest place to work, but the company may need to overhaul its entire system to meet that goal.

Amazon didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on the report.

Amazon warehouse workers suffer serious injuries at twice the rate of rivals, study finds

Annie Palmer -

Amazon warehouse workers in the U.S. suffered serious injuries at twice the rate of rival companies in 2021, according to a new study.

There were 6.8 serious injuries for every 100 Amazon warehouse workers, compared with 3.3 serious injuries per 100 workers at all other employers in the warehouse industry, the Strategic Organizing Center wrote in a new report published Tuesday.

Amazon has pledged to become "Earth's Safest Place to Work," with the aim of cutting worker injuries by 50%.


© Provided by CNBC  An Amazon warehouse

Amazon warehouse workers in the U.S. suffered serious injuries at twice the rate of rival companies in 2021, according to a new study.

There were 6.8 serious injuries for every 100 Amazon warehouse workers. That's more than twice the rate of all other employers in the warehouse industry, which had 3.3 serious injuries per 100 workers, the Strategic Organizing Center said in a report released Tuesday.

The SOC, which is a coalition of labor unions including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union, analyzed data Amazon submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about its warehouses in 2021.

Even as Amazon set its sights on improving workplace safety, including a pledge to become "Earth's Safest Place to Work," injuries at its U.S. warehouses increased between 2020 and 2021.

Amazon reported approximately 38,300 total injuries at its U.S. facilities in 2021, up about 20% from 27,100 injuries in 2020. The vast majority of injuries in 2021 were categorized as serious, or injuries "where workers were hurt so badly that they were either unable to perform their regular job functions (light duty) or forced to miss work entirely (lost time)," according to the report.

Amazon was responsible for a "staggering" amount of worker injuries in the U.S., the report found. In 2021, Amazon accounted for almost half of all injuries in the industry, while making up a third of all U.S. warehouse workers.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel pointed to the company's pandemic-induced hiring spree as one catalyst behind the increase in recordable injuries between 2020 and 2021. Amazon's recordable injury rate last year dropped roughly 13% compared to 2019, Nantel added.

"While we still have more work to do and won't be satisfied until we are excellent when it comes to safety, we continue to make measurable improvements in reducing injuries and keeping employees safe, and appreciate the work from all of our employees and safety teams who are contributing to this effort," Nantel said in a statement.

In January, Amazon disclosed it spent $300 million on worker safety improvements in 2021. It said the rate of employees who missed work due to a workplace injury dropped by 43% in 2020 from the prior year.

Still, Amazon has faced pressure from lawmakers and its own employees to address the breakneck pace of work inside its warehouses. Last fall, California's state Senate passed a landmark bill aimed at curbing Amazon's use of productivity quotas in its facilities.

Warehouse and delivery workers have routinely spoken out against the company, arguing its "customer obsession" and focus on speedy delivery have created an unsafe working environment. They've claimed the pace of work doesn't allow for adequate breaks and bathroom time.

Those concerns have come into greater focus as unionization efforts have ramped up at Amazon warehouses. This month, Amazon workers on New York's Staten Island voted to form the first union at an Amazon warehouse. The union has called for Amazon to put in place "more reasonable" productivity rates in the warehouse, among other demands.

Last year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laid out a vision for improving the company's workplace safety, acknowledging it needed "a better vision for our employees' success." Amazon also launched a series of wellness programs, with the aim of cutting recordable incident rates by 50% by 2025.

Brazil's Lula promises indigenous tribes he will reverse Bolsonaro measures

Brazil's former President Lula joins the indigenous people Free Land camp, in Brasilia


BRASILIA (Reuters) - Former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Tuesday promised Brazil's indigenous people that he would stop illegal mining on their reservations and recognize their land claims if he wins the presidential election in October.

Lula visited a protest camp in Brasilia where several thousands members of 200 tribes have gathered to oppose plans by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro to allow commercial agriculture, mining and oil exploration on their lands.

"Everything this government has decreed against indigenous peoples must be repealed immediately," said Lula, who held the presidency for two terms from 2003 to 2010.

"Nobody did more for indigenous people than our Workers Party governments, and now everything has been dismantled by this unscrupulous government," Lula told a cheering crowd.

Bolsonaro is trailing Lula in early polls ahead of the Oct. 2 election. The president vowed in 2018 not to recognize a single centimeter of indigenous reservation land, winning him the backing of Brazil's powerful farm lobby.

Indigenous leaders called on Lula to rebuild the government's indigenous affairs agency Funai, which has had its funding cut and staff depleted under Bolsonaro.

"Lula, we are unprotected. Our rights are being trampled on," said Joenia Wapichana, the country's only indigenous representative in Congress.

She said illegal occupations of protected indigenous lands are being legalized and wildcat miners are invading reservations where they destroy forest and pollute rivers.

Illegal mining grew 46% on the Yanomami reservation last year as high gold prices and tacit support from Bolsonaro set off a gold rush, bringing disease, violence and rights abuses, a report published on Monday said.

The critical situation faced by tribes has led a record number of more than 30 indigenous people to run for Congress this year, said Sonia Guajajara, head of APIB, the main umbrella organization for Amazonian tribes.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

PHOTOS © Reuters/AMANDA PEROBELLI

THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS

JUST PREVENTABLE INCIDENTS

U.S. government agency accidentally killed almost 3,000 animals in 2021

Dina Fine Maron 
National Geographic
© Photograph by MELISSA GROO, 

Nat Geo Image Collection


A little-known U.S. government agency tasked with killing or removing animals that may threaten livestock, crops, or public safety accidentally killed almost 3,000 animals in 2021.

Wildlife Services, which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, killed 1.76 million animals in fiscal 2021. But its many unintentional victims included federally protected species such as a harbor seal, three golden eagles, and a bald eagle, according to a National Geographic review of the data. Other unintentional casualties included 12 black bears, four mountain lions, and 17 alligators.


© Provided by National GeographicU.S. government agency accidentally killed almost 3,000 animals in 2021

THE POWER GIVEN AGRIBUSINESS OVER WILDLIFE 

BY THE STATE

For the most part, state and local authorities call on Wildlife Services to trap or remove animals that might kill livestock, eat crops, or cause other damage. The agency uses a variety of traps, such as neck snares, foothold traps, and body grips designed to crush the animal caught inside.


© Photograph by MICHAEL FORSBERG, Nat Geo Image Collection

Almost two dozen raccoons were among Wildlife Service’s accidental fatalities from cyanide bombs last year.

Critics say the traps are not only inhumane and deadly but also indiscriminate.

Wildlife Services declined a request for an interview but said in a statement that last year, “more than 99.8 percent of the animals lethally removed were intended targets.”

Wildlife Services also uses poison in the form of spring-activated M-44 cyanide capsules. They resemble the head of a garden sprinkler and are baited with a sweet scent, attracting a “bite and pull” response from animals such as coyotes, according to Wildlife Services. Any animal that tugs on an M-44 triggers it to spray its lethal poison.

“Death is very quick, normally within 1 to 5 minutes after the device is triggered,” a Wildlife Services fact sheet says. Yet in 2017 a pet dog suffered an excruciating and slow death after exposure to one of these “cyanide bombs,” National Geographic reported. Between 2000 and 2012, more than 1,100 dogs were killed by the devices, an investigation by the Sacramento Bee found.


© Provided by National GeographicU.S. government agency accidentally killed almost 3,000 animals in 2021

Animals sprayed by M-44s can suffer from internal bleeding, seizures, or lung failure before they die, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based conservation nonprofit.

Last year’s M-44 unintentional deaths included 266 gray foxes, 16 red foxes, and 23 raccoons, according to data from Wildlife Services. The animals were either killed by the devices directly or had to be euthanized after being exposed to them.
Collateral damage is unavoidable


© Provided by National Geographic

U.S. government agency accidentally killed almost 3,000 animals in 2021

“There’s no way around catching other species as collateral damage,” says Carter Niemeyer, who worked as a trapper and supervisor for Wildlife Services for 26 years before he transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2000. He’s now retired.


© Photograph by IRA BLOCK, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION

More than a dozen alligators were killed by Wildlife Services unintentionally in 2021.

When trappers are deployed, their approaches—and results—can vary widely. “We are the professionals, so the people contracting with us assume we would be humane and check our traps [quickly],” but that’s not always the case, especially with the large number of traps Wildlife Services puts out, Niemeyer says.

Some states require traps to be checked within a certain period, and a 2021 Wildlife Services directive says all traps and devices must be checked “no less frequently than required by state law, unless specific exemptions are obtained.”

If any animal—a pet dog or cat, for example—stumbles into a trap and doesn’t die immediately, dehydration or constriction injuries likely will kill it within a couple of days, Niemeyer says.
Counting unintended deaths

Wildlife Services reported more than 2,700 unintended deaths of native animals in 2021, a figure slightly more than in each of the previous three years. (The 2021 count reaches 2,795 when species it labels as invasive, such as some snakes, feral dogs, and rats, are included.)

“We track and report unintended removal and make adjustments to field operations, wherever possible,” the agency's statement said. “Four out of every five unintentional captures are released or relocated unharmed.”

Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, says trapped animals initially may appear to be unharmed because of a surge of adrenaline caused by the stress of entrapment. “Not until they get to safety do they realize their foot was crushed,” she says.

Any unintentional deaths by Wildlife Services “cannot accurately be called accidents because the agency is fully aware of the indiscriminate nature of their lethal tools,” says Michelle Lute, national carnivore conservation manager at Project Coyote, a California-based nonprofit.
Death by body-grip

Animals will go to extremes to free themselves from traps, Adkins says. “Sometimes the only evidence an animal was caught was that its toes are still there.”

One of the agency’s “unintentional removals” last year was a harbor seal that died after it was caught in a body-grip trap. Harbor seals, like all marine mammals, are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

A body-grip trap is a metal device intended to kill any animal that enters and tries to pass through. “It just crushes the body and squeezes the life out of them,” Niemeyer says. They’re sometimes set underwater to catch animals such as beavers, he says.

But with a larger animal, such as a harbor seal, the trap might snap shut on its face or its neck, Niemeyer says. “A seal would have a pretty firm neck, so it would probably die from a combination of strangulation and drowning.”

In 2021 alone, the devices unintentionally killed 544 river otters, 11 eastern cottontail rabbits, 44 raccoons, and three white-crowned sparrows, among other animals.
Alternative approaches

Adkins and Lute describe other proven—and more humane—ways to mitigate problems wild animals may cause. To safeguard livestock, ranchers can build better fences around their animals and deploy bright lights and guard dogs, though government support may be needed to help defray some of these costs, Lute says.

Other measures, such as quickly removing carcasses and cleaning up farm animals’ afterbirth could help keep predators away from livestock, Adkins says.

“The only way to address conflict is to target the individual [animal] involved, site where predation occurred, and time when it occurred,” Lute says. Interventions that occur long after the incident are imprecise and won’t solve the problem.

“It simply results in a dead animal,” she says—“not necessarily the one that was involved, and most certainly opens up a territory to a new individual.”

Will the Ukraine war be a catalyst for our climate change targets?

Updated / Monday, 11 Apr 2022 

The Department of Environment said the crisis in Ukraine 

was helping to galvanise action on climate change

By Oonagh Smyth

RTE.IE
Prime Time

The consequences of Russia's war in Ukraine are difficult to predict. While much has been made of how President Vladimir Putin’s invasion has united the West, it has also disrupted the global order and fractured long-standing economic ties.

On the one hand, that could complicate international cooperation on climate change, which has always been described as a global fight.

On the other, the spike in energy prices has escalated the case for ending fossils fuel imports and a faster shift to renewable energy.

Europe, for instance, relies on Russia for about one-third of its oil – and around 40% of its natural gas.

The Department of Environment, Climate and Communications told Prime Time that the crisis in Ukraine, combined with the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, was now galvanising action under the Climate Action Plan 2021.

The plan, which the Department described as "ambitious" and "transformative", aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 51% by 2030 – and to net-zero by 2050.

"The Ukraine crisis could be a catalyst for the kind of disruptive change deemed necessary" by the report, which was produced by a group of experts convened by the United Nations, said Dr David Styles, Associate Professor in Agri-sustainability at NUI Galway.

Energy

In May, the European Commission is due to publish a proposal to phase out the use of Russian fossil fuels in the European Union by 2027.

In a joint statement with US climate envoy John Kerry, Frans Timmermans, the EU’s climate commissioner, said last week that the war had "strengthened the imperative of staying on track and accelerating the clean energy transition".

Under the Climate Action Plan, 80% of Ireland’s electricity should be generated from wind and solar energy by the end of the decade – up from the current level of 43%.

In recent weeks, the Oireachtas Committee on Environment and Climate Action has been trying to determine whether that is actually achievable.

Frans Timmermans, the EU's climate commissioner,

 believes the war has strengthened the climate imperative

What has emerged is that wind and solar energy firms believe the target is in jeopardy unless several key Government agencies – such as An Bord Pleanála, Eirgrid, and the Commission for Regulation of Utilities – are better resourced.

It’s also clear that, in some respects, our targets aren’t ambitious enough.

Pat Keating, the CEO of the Shannon Foynes Port Company, said analysis by his company concluded that Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard could produce 80GW of offshore wind energy per year.

The Climate Action Plan has a target of just 5GW of offshore wind energy per year, and, even in the long term, the Programme for Government references the potential for just 30GW of offshore wind energy.

Agriculture

Cutting our Agriculture emissions – our largest emitting sector – by up to 30% under the Climate Action Plan is widely considered to be one of our biggest challenges.

Tom O’Dwyer, from Teagasc, a state agency that researches the agri-food sector, told Prime Time that recent events had not impacted on the sector’s climate action strategy.

He said, however, that less than half of the target will be met using existing strategies, such as a reduction in fertliser use and the early slaughter of animals. The rest will come from technical solutions "still under development".

However, Dr John Garvey, a lecturer in risk management at the University of Limerick, said that recent events should be a "wake up" call. Our existing strategy, which is hugely reliant on the export of dairy products, is neither good for our climate goals nor for food security, he said.

"All the data is pointing to extreme disruption to Ireland’s agri-food system in the coming years. Our existing strategy is not fit for purpose, as it is focused on generating economic value from food exports," he said.

Both Russia and Ukraine are major global producers of agriculture products, such as fertiliser WHICH BELARUS PRODUCES THE MOST OF

"Research activity needs to focus on building the technical skills to grow crops and provide the training for farmers to improve crop productivity for the national population, not for animal fodder," Dr Garvey noted.

To improve the country's food security, he said, the Government must provide farmers with "volume/price guarantees for several important crops". The Government should also emphasise supply chain efficiencies, he said.

But recent initiatives by the Department of Agriculture, launched in response to concerns about fodder and fertiliser shortages – which are traditionally imported from Ukraine and Russia – are likely to assist the sector in reaching its climate goals, Dr Styles said.

A €10m tillage incentive scheme and a plan to encourage the use of red clover swards instead of synthetic fertiliser will help cut emissions, he said.

"Reduced fertiliser use reduces emissions of nitrous oxide. For every 100kg of nitrogen saved, almost 1 tonne of CO2-equivalent emissions are avoided."

Transport

Under the Climate Action Plan, Ireland is hoping to cut our transport emissions by up to 50% by 2030.

The plan hopes that more people will walk, cycle, use electric cars, or ditch cars altogether in favour of public transport.

Recent fuel spikes have shown us that higher costs are one of the most effective ways of reducing the number of car journeys, said Professor Brian Caulfield, who researches transport emissions at Trinity College Dublin.

"I suppose you could say that increasing fuel costs, AKA "the stick", has been shown to work," he said.

He notes that, before the Ukraine crisis, the National Transport Agency reported in February that traffic levels had returned to pre-Covid levels.
The Climate Action Plan hopes to cut transport emissions by 50%

But, in March, when fuel prices shot up, car journeys dropped. Between 13 March and 20 March, there were 800,000 fewer car journeys, Prof Caulfield said.

"This is the type of decrease in driving that is stated must happen in the Climate Action Plan," he said.

Recent pandemic-related supply chain issues have also complicated the target to put 845,000 electric vehicles on our roads, Prof Caulfield noted.

Complications in car manufacturing and a shortage of lithium for batteries are both to blame, he said.

As a result, electric vehicles are unlikely to reach price parity with their petrol and diesel counterparts before the end of the decade, something that would be a "game changer" for their uptake.

Global context

While the shock to food and energy prices and the recent report may galvanise climate action both here and abroad, there’s concern that the emergence of a changed global order and a new "Cold War" may have a counter-balancing negative effect.

"There is no doubt that a cooperative, benign international order would be better for global climate action," said Dr Diarmuid Torney, who researches climate change politics at Dublin City University.

The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change highlights that "international cooperation is a critical enabler for achieving ambitious climate change mitigation goals", said Marie Donnelly, the chairperson of the Climate Change Advisory Council.

And while this is true, Dr Torney said there is still hope for positive action despite the changed global order.

"Many countries around the world, including big emitters like China," he said, "are moving away from fossil fuels – albeit not fast enough – because it makes sense domestically, not because the global community tells them to do so."

This is the first in a series of articles from Prime Time focusing on Ireland's Climate Action Plan and how the country can achieve its climate goals. Watch Prime Time's special programme on climate change on Thursday at 9:35pm on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player.

Will Russia’s War Derail Global Emissions Ambitions?

By Haley Zaremba - Apr 09, 2022

• Russia’s war and the sanctions that followed have worsened the world’s growing energy crisis.
• Experts are predicting that the war could set the world’s climate goals back for years.
• The tight energy market is driving more countries to ramp up their coal consumption, putting global climate goals in extreme risk.

“Compared to previous oil shocks, this is a different world.” Vehicle industry expert John DeCicco, an engineer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says that history may not teach us much about how consumers are going to respond to skyrocketing oil prices. In the past, oil price sticker shock has reliably caused consumers to drive less and to purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles in order to ease the sting of high prices at the pump. This time, however, increasingly dramatic wealth gaps in many countries around the world may break this pattern. According to DeCicco, the demographic of consumers who are likely to buy new cars is wealthier than in decades past, meaning that purchasing patterns may not shift as dramatically as we have seen before.  This is just one small facet of a massively and rapidly changing economic landscape, however. Economic and geopolitical turmoil has turned the global economy on its head and made the future unpredictable. Big energy companies are not rushing to invest in fossil fuels in spite of the current factors favoring the sector. In addition to the wealthy’s buoyed ability to keep buying gas guzzlers, continued volatility in the energy sector due to continued fallout from the novel coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine has driven the world back to fossil fuels with a vengeance. In fact, even as the world has rushed to condemn Putin’s acts of aggression and apparent war crimes in Ukraine and put economic pressure on the Kremlin, Europe’s consumption of Russian oil and gas has actually increased since the onset of the war. According to Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, Europe bought US$24 billion worth of oil and gas in March alone.

Related: Rising Energy Costs Could Push Metal Prices Even Higher

Early last month, the European Commission released a plan to reduce Russian gas imports to Europe by two-thirds this year, with the suggestion to replace 60% of that 101.5 billion cubic meters with gas from other countries, most notably the United States and Qatar, and 33% from renewable energy and conservation efforts. The European Commission cannot enforce this plan, however, and it’s unclear whether European nations will decide to comply. To be sure, weaning Europe off of Russian oil and gas will be a Herculean feat. In the meantime, Ukraine is continuing to plead with the EU to embargo Russian oil and gas completely.

Despite the fact that global oil demand is set to surpass pre-pandemic levels in the short term, Big Oil is well aware that long-term policy targets and public opinion favor renewables. Even in the context of a global energy supply crunch, energy companies have been hesitant to put money into increased fossil fuel production. “The market is scared,” Harvard University economist Ricardo Hausmann was quoted by Nature. 

All of this points to the reality that the end of the energy supply crunch is not in sight. Bearish leadership in the fossil fuels sector and soaring consumption have left the energy sector in quite a bind. The fallout from sustained sky-high energy prices will be sweeping and devastating in myriad ways. High energy costs and fuel shortages (which translates to fertilizer shortages), in combination with the loss of Russian and Ukrainian grain on the global market, could lead to food price shocks, which are historically one of the most dependable drivers of conflict and political and social unrest. While the world has enough grain to supplement the loss from Ukraine and Russia, price hikes, even if short-lived, will put enormous strain on countries that are already hungry.

What’s more, the tight energy market is driving more and more countries to ramp up their coal consumption, putting global climate goals in extreme risk. While many experts are hopeful that the war in Ukraine will actually catalyze the clean energy transition as the world scrambles to shore up its energy security and independence without reliance on Russian oil and gas, in the short term the trends toward high-emissions fossil fuels are alarming. 

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

Hubble Snaps Stunning Image of Messier 91
Apr 11, 2022 by Enrico de Lazaro



NASA has released a stunning image snapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the barred spiral galaxy Messier 91.

This Hubble image shows Messier 91, a barred spiral galaxy some 56 million light-years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / J. Lee / PHANGS-HST Team.

Messier 91 is located approximately 56 million light-years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices.

This galaxy was discovered in 1781 by the French astronomer Charles Messier who described it as nebula without stars, fainter than Messier 90.

Messier 91 resides in the Local Supercluster and is part of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies.

Also known as M91, NGC 4548, IRAS 12328+1446, and LEDA 41934, it is classified as a barred spiral galaxy.

“While Messier 91’s prominent bar makes for a spectacular galactic portrait, it also hides an astronomical monstrosity,” Hubble astronomers said.

“Like our own Galaxy, Messier 91 contains a supermassive black hole at its center.”

“A 2009 study using archival Hubble data found that this central black hole has a mass between 9.6 and 38 million solar masses.”

The new image of Messier 91 is made up of observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in the ultraviolet, near-infrared, and optical parts of the spectrum.

Five filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.

“This observation is part of an effort to build a treasure trove of astronomical data exploring the connections between young stars and the clouds of cold gas in which they form,” the researchers said.

“To do this, we used Hubble to obtain ultraviolet and visible observations of galaxies already seen at radio wavelengths by the ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).”

“Observing time with Hubble is a highly valued, and much sought-after, resource for us,” they explained.

“To obtain data from the telescope, we first have to write a proposal detailing what they want to observe and highlighting the scientific importance of their observations.”

“These proposals are then anonymized and judged on their scientific merit by a variety of astronomical experts.”

“This process is incredibly competitive: following Hubble’s latest call for proposals, only around 13% of the proposals were awarded observing time.”

'Blood sport:' Observers say purported emails suggest decline of Alberta politics

EDMONTON — Observers say emails suggesting a former Alberta justice minister hired a political fixer to obtain a reporter's phone logs show how the province's politics have deteriorated.

The Canadian Press has reported on emails and documents that seem to show Jonathan Denis hired a man to discover who tipped a reporter that his wedding reception may have broken COVID-19 protocols.

Denis, in an email from his lawyer, has denied that he or his clients talked to the self-described fixer, David Wallace.

MacEwan University political scientist Chaldeans Mensah says the documents, if authentic, demonstrate how public debate in the province has become a "blood sport" where personal attacks are common.

Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Calgary's Mount Royal University, calls the purported documents "a nasty affair."

He adds that Denis was once in charge of law enforcement in Alberta and remains closely tied to Premier Jason Kenney and the governing United Conservative Party.

University of Alberta political scientist Laurie Adkin suggeststhe documents look like an attempt to intimidate the press.

She says they show how the province has become so polarized that partisans feel any tactic against their opponents is justified.

The Canadian Press