It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
Venezuela agrees to be guarantor in Colombia peace talks
NEWS WIRES - Yesterday
Leftist Venezuela has agreed to be a guarantor of future peace talks between Colombia and its last guerrilla group, both countries said Tuesday night.
This is the latest move toward strong new relations that had been severed until Gustavo Petro took power this month as the first leftist leader ever in Colombia.
Colombia has asked the Venezuelan government of President Nicolas Maduro to be guarantor of talks with the National Liberation Army, or ELN, the last active rebel group in a country torn by decades of conflict.
In a speech, Maduro said, "Of course we agree!"
It thus joins Chile and Cuba as guarantors of talks that the Bogota government hopes to hold with the ELN.
Colombia and its largest rebel group, the FARC, signed an historic peace accord in 2016 after decades of war.
Venezuela took part in that peace process, with Maduro involved at first as foreign minister in the government of the late socialist icon Hugo Chavez, then after 2013 as his successor.
"Peace in Colombia is peace in South America," Maduro said Tuesday.
Petro wants to resume talks with the ELN that his conservative predecessor Ivan Duque had started. They broke off after a rebel attack in 2019 that left 22 people dead.
Representatives of Petro's government and the ELN have already met in Havana.
Petro has said there would soon be a meeting with the ELN in Venezuela, which Colombian military intelligence has said is hosting senior ELN leaders.
After Petro took power in August, Colombia and Venezuela restored diplomatic relations after three years of rupture triggered by Colombia's recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president of Venezuela.
(AFP)
ISRAEL ETHNIC CLEANSING 40 years on, survivors recall horror of Lebanon's Sabra and Shatila massacre
Dylan Collins Tue, September 13, 2022
Forty years after Christian militiamen massacred Palestinian refugees and Lebanese nationals in the country's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, the horrors of the tragedy remain seared into survivors' memories.
Najib al-Khatib, whose father and 10 other family members were killed in the massacre, still remembers the stench of corpses.
It "lingered for more than five or six months. A horrible smell," the 52-year-old Lebanese survivor said.
"They would spray chemicals every day, but the smell stayed," he told AFP from the Sabra camp for Palestinian refugees, where he lives with his family.
From September 16 to 18, 1982, Christian militiamen allied with Israel massacred between 800 and 2,000 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps on Beirut's outskirts. They also murdered at least 100 Lebanese and some Syrians.
Israeli troops, who had invaded in June that year as Lebanon's civil war raged, sealed off the camp while the militiamen went on their killing spree, targeting unarmed civilians.
Camp residents have been readying to mark the massacre's 40th anniversary on Friday.
"Until today, the smell is still in our heads -- the smell of the dead," Khatib said.
- 'Horses and corpses' -
Khatib walked down an alleyway in the impoverished Sabra camp where he witnessed the atrocities four decades earlier.
"This is my grandmother's house. During the massacre, it was full" of dead bodies, he recalled. "They were piled up here. Horses and corpses, all on top of each other."
"This area was full of people they killed," he said.
One of Khatib's most harrowing memories was finding his father's body at the door of his house.
"He was shot in his legs," he said. "They had hit him in the head with a hatchet."
Despite global outcry, no one has ever been arrested or put on trial for the massacre. It came just days after the assassination of Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel -- seen as a hero by many Lebanese Christians but hated by many in Lebanon for his cooperation with Israel.
In Israel, an inquiry found a number of officials, including then defence minister Ariel Sharon, were indirectly responsible.
It laid blame on Elie Hobeika, intelligence chief of the Lebanese Forces -- a right-wing Christian militia -- for the killings.
The LF, then allied to Israel, has maintained silence, never responding to the accusations.
A group of survivors tried to launch a lawsuit in Belgium against Sharon, but the court threw out the case in September 2003.
- 'Unimaginable' -
Umm Abbas, a Lebanese resident of Sabra who witnessed the massacre, recalled the "unimaginable scenes" that have gone unpunished.
"What did I see? A pregnant woman who had her baby ripped out of her stomach, they cut her in two," the 75-year-old said.
Another woman, "she was also pregnant, they ripped the baby from her stomach too", she said.
Sitting in an alley, Umm Abbas recalled bulldozers scooping up dead bodies and dumping them on top of each other.
"They put them all in a deep hole, I saw them," she said.
Survivors mark the massacre every year, some visiting the graveyard in Sabra where many of the victims were buried.
A simple stone memorial pays tribute to the "martyrs" of the massacre.
Palestinian Amer Okkar prayed at the site, where the makeshift graves still bear no tombstones.
"We found everyone slaughtered on the ground, in all the alleyways and along this street," the 59-year-old former militant remembered.
"We found pills and machetes and hashish and drugs on the ground -- no one could kill like that unless they were on drugs," he said.
dco/ho/aya/lg/smw
French court to rule on deadly 2009 Yemenia Airways crash
Anne LEC'HVIEN Tue, September 13, 2022 A French court on Wednesday will issue its verdict on involuntary homicide charges against Yemenia Airways over a 2009 crash that killed 152 people -- but miraculously left a 12-year-old girl alive.
The Yemeni national airline faces a maximum fine of 225,000 euros ($225,000) if found guilty of insufficient pilot training that led to fatal mistakes by the crew onboard, as prosecutors have alleged.
On June 29, 2009, flight Yemenia 626 was on approach to Moroni, the capital of the Comoros islands that lie between Mozambique and Madagascar, after departing from the airport in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
France's overseas territory of Mayotte is also part of the Comoros archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the eastern coast of Africa. Among the 142 passengers and 11 crew were 66 French citizens.
Just before 11:00 pm the Airbus A310 plunged into the Indian Ocean with its engines running at full throttle, killing everyone on board except Bahia Bakari, then just 12 years old.
"I started to feel the turbulence, but nobody was reacting much, so I told myself it must be normal," Bakari told a Paris courtroom in May during the trial, attended by dozens of friends and relatives of the victims.
Suddenly "I felt something like an electric shock go through my body," she recalled, before blacking out and then finding herself in the water among the wreckage.
She had left Paris to attend a wedding in the Comoros with her mother, who perished in the crash. - Series of errors? -
Investigators and experts found there was nothing wrong with the aircraft, blaming instead "inappropriate actions by the crew during the approach to Moroni airport, leading to them losing control".
According to analyses of the "black box" flight data recorders found on the ocean floor several weeks later, a series of erroneous decisions was made by pilots over nearly five minutes before the crash.
No one from Yemenia Airways appeared at the trial, where prosecutors accused the company of pilot training programmes "riddled with gaps" and of continuing to fly to Moroni at night despite several non-functioning landing lights.
Yemenia is charged with involuntary homicide and injuries. The company's lawyers have denied any wrongdoing, saying the airline is being made a "scapegoat".
Around 560 people have joined the suit as plaintiffs, many of them from the region around Marseille in southern France, home to many of the victims.
Several people aboard were travelling to the Comoros to celebrate the islands' extravagant wedding parties, which often bring together entire villages.
"It's an entire community that was on this plane," a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, Claude Lienhard, said during the trial.
alv/js/jh/imm/smw
Hunger returns to haunt Brazil amid divisive vote
Joshua Howat Berger Tue, September 13, 2022
In a small cement house crumbling to ruins in Brazil's parched Sertao region, Maria da Silva, a graying matriarch struggling to feed her family, opens her empty refrigerator and breaks down in sobs.
The 58-year-old widow, whose creased brown face betrays her burdens, lost her family's main breadwinner when her brother, who worked in Sao Paulo, died of Covid-19 last year.
Now she and her family of eight, who are squatting in an abandoned shack, are among the 33.1 million Brazilians living in hunger.
The figure -- a 73-percent increase in the past two years, according to the Brazilian Network for Research on Food Security -- has become the subject of a bitter political battle as Latin America's biggest economy heads for elections on October 2.
Holding a nearly empty can of powdered milk for the three young grandchildren who live with her, ages three, two and 15 months, Da Silva gives a tour of her dilapidated house, which has no bathroom or running water.
"There are times when (the children) ask for food and I don't even have a biscuit or bread to give them," she says through tears on the small plot of land the family farms in Poco da Cruz, in the northeastern state of Pernambuco.
Soaring food prices have forced the family to turn to begging, she says.
"I just pray to God to end my suffering."
The presidential front-runner, leftist ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, regularly attacks far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro over the fact Brazil reappeared on the World Food Programme's "Hunger Map" last year, with 28.9 percent of the population living in "moderate or severe food insecurity."
It is a major setback for a country that had been removed from the map in 2014, after an economic boom and landmark social programs helped lift 30 million people from poverty during Lula's administration (2003-2010).
Bolsonaro has aggressively counter-attacked, accusing Lula of bankrupting Brazil with corruption.
Courting low-income voters, the incumbent has upscaled and rebranded Lula's signature welfare program, and is campaigning extensively in the impoverished northeast, home to a quarter of Brazil's 213 million people.
- Hard-won gains -
Sprawled across the northeastern interior, the Sertao, or hinterland, is a semi-arid expanse of brown-and-olive-green scrubland.
Known for cyclical droughts, it is a harsh but beautiful land with an outsize role in Brazilian literature, music and film.
Each generation here remembers its worst drought -- 1960, 1993, 2010 -- and the misery it caused.
Joao Alfredo de Souza, a community leader in the rural township of Conceicao das Crioulas, weathered all those.
"It cost us a lot of sweat and tears to overcome," says De Souza, a spry 63-year-old who heads a community founded by ex-slaves in the 18th century.
Gesturing from his front porch to a paved street lined with neat, trim houses, De Souza describes Lula's time in office as a watershed of ambitious programs promoting housing, electricity, water, welfare, education and "Zero Hunger."
But the retired farmer says times have been "very tough" since Covid-19 hit Brazil, killing 680,000 people and triggering an economic implosion followed by soaring inflation.
He says Bolsonaro has won some northeasterners' support by super-sizing Lula's "Family Stipend" welfare program -- rebranded "Auxilio Brasil."
Bolsonaro recently tripled the average payment from Lula's day, to 600 reais ($115) a month, and is now pledging to increase it to 800 reais.
De Souza is unimpressed by the election-year spending spree.
"Why is he doing this only now? It's shameful," he says.
He says Lula, a Pernambuco native, "understands the northeast," where he leads in the polls in every state.
"He's one of us."
- 'Africa of Brazil' -
A half-hour drive away down a bone-jarring dirt road, in Regiao de Queimadas, a settlement still dotted with traditional mud-and-stick houses, signs of progress are harder to find.
A team of officials in four-by-four trucks from the federal government's National Health Foundation is going door-to-door asking whether people have bathrooms.
Many don't.
"This place is the Africa of Brazil," says one of the officials, reflecting a widespread perception of the region among government bureaucrats in Brazil.
The program's ostensible goal is to build adequate facilities for those who need them.
The head of the local farmers' association, Edineia de Souza, is skeptical.
"These guys only come around at election time," says the 40-year-old corn and bean farmer.
"We're still waiting on the bathrooms from last time."
De Souza, who helps organize food donations for needy families with a grass-roots charity called Amigos no Sertao, hopes things will change if Lula wins.
"When he was in office, projects got done," she says.
But she doesn't place much faith in politics.
"Politicians never even come here," she says.
jhb/wd
How the tide turned on data centres in Europe
by Joseph BOYLE
Ireland was once the darling of the data industry but now has a de facto moratorium on new centres.
Every time we make a call on Zoom, upload a document to the cloud or stream a video, our computers connect to vast warehouses filled with servers to store or access data.
Not so long ago, European countries were falling over each other to welcome the firms that run these warehouses, known as data centers or bit barns.
Wide-eyed politicians trumpeted investments and dreamt of creating global tech hubs.
But then the dream went sour.
The sheer amount of energy and water needed to power and cool these server farms shocked the public.
The industry sucked up 14 percent of Ireland's power last year, London warned home builders that power shortages caused by bit barns could affect new projects, and Amsterdam said it simply had no more room for the warehouses.
Then things got worse.
The war in Ukraine helped spark an energy crisis across the continent, leaving consumers facing rocketing bills and countries contemplating energy shortages.
"Data centers will be a target," critical blogger Dwayne Monroe told AFP, saying the focus would only grow if Europe cannot fix its energy crisis.
Grassroots campaigns and local opposition have already helped to halt projects this year by Amazon in France, Google in Luxembourg and Meta in the Netherlands.
The Irish government, while reaffirming support for the industry, put strict limits on new developments until 2028.
The data industry says it feels unfairly targeted, stressing its efforts to source green energy and arguing that outsourcing storage to bit barns has helped slash consumption.
'Veil of shadow'
These arguments are playing out most spectacularly in Ireland.
Activists are campaigning on a broad range of topics and using local forums to push their case.
"They take up a huge amount of space but provide basically no employment," says Madeleine Johansson, a Dublin councilor for the People Before Profit party, which is campaigning on the issue.
Johansson recently had a motion passed in her council area banning the centers, sparking an almighty row with the national government that is yet to be resolved.
Dylan Murphy of Not Here, Not Anywhere, one of several climate groups pushing the issue in Ireland, has filed a motion in his local council in Fingal calling for companies to reveal the kind of information they are holding.
"There's a complete lack of transparency... about what data is actually being stored in these data centers," he said, calling it a "veil of shadow".
The tech industry continues to innovate new products that invariably require vast amounts of processing power and data storage.
The data industry says revealing that information would be impossible.
Michael McCarthy of Cloud Infrastructure Ireland, a lobby group, said activists had lost the argument on sustainability and were now throwing everything at the wall.
"Data centers definitely are large energy users but they're part of a cohort of larger energy users," he said.
McCarthy and industry figures in other countries say the real problem is years of underinvestment in national energy infrastructure.
He also pointed out that the industry in Europe had pledged to become carbon neutral by 2030.
And there are still countries hankering to get data firms to locate there—particularly Iceland and Norway.
Questions over metaverse
Against this backdrop, the tech industry continues to innovate new products that invariably require vast amounts of processing power and data storage.
Machine-learning tools, for example, are hugely energy hungry—Google said earlier this year they accounted for between 10 and 15 percent of its total energy usage.
The metaverse, an emerging concept for a 3D internet championed by Facebook owner Meta, would also be hugely energy intensive.
Critical blogger Monroe reckons the metaverse will buckle under its own weight, partly because of its data requirements.
"The construction of the metaverse would require Facebook to build out a distribution of data centers that would rival what Amazon, Microsoft and Google have done for their clouds," he said.
AFP contacted Meta for a response.
As far as the carbon footprint of such innovation goes, energy experts interviewed by AFP said it would be difficult to assess.
The metaverse, for example, could help to reduce emissions in other areas by reducing the need for travel.
An energy official who did not want to be named questioned whether data centers were the best target for criticism when cryptocurrencies were so wasteful.
While data centers used about one percent of global energy output in 2020, cryptocurrency mining used about half that amount, according to the International Energy Agency.
McCarthy said those who opposed data centers needed to reckon with just how embedded they had become in everyday life, particularly since the pandemic.
"They facilitate how we can work and live online, that's the reality of it," he said.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said temperatures in Europe had been the "highest on record for both the month of August and the summer [June-August] as a whole."
August 2022 hottest month recorded
Data showed August was the hottest month yet recorded by a "substantial margin" of 0.4 degrees Celsius.
"An intense series of heatwaves across Europe, paired with unusually dry conditions, have led to a summer of extremes with records in terms of temperature, drought and fire activity in many parts of Europe, affecting society and nature in various ways," senior C3S scientist Freja Vamborg said.
"Data shows that we've not only had record August temperatures for Europe but also for summer, with the previous summer record only being one year old," she added.
In addition, August 2022 was generally much drier on average in Western Europe and parts of the East. In Southeastern Europe and parts of Scandinavia, there was more rain than usual.
CLIMATE CRISIS: A WORLD LACKING WATER Famine risk on the Horn of Africa Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are currently experiencing their worst drought in over 40 years after successive failed rainy seasons. The dry conditions have led to a severe food security issue in the region, with 22 million people at risk of starvation. More than 1 million people have been forced to leave their homes during the drought, which is expected to continue for months. 123456789
Heatwaves, droughts and wildfires in Europe and elsewhere
Pakistan floods threaten food security as critical crops destroyed
Agricultural land inundated by flooding is set to have long-term humanitarian and economic impacts in Pakistan. Billions of dollars worth of rice, sugar and wheat have already been lost.
International donors are providing food assistance as Pakistan's breadbasket has been flooded
The country could soon face food shortages if thousands of acres of cropland aren't restored.
"We are concerned that if the farmlands aren't drained right now, we won't be able to plant crops for winter season, the most important of which is the wheat crop," Nazia Bibi, a farmer in Balochistan's Pishin district, told DW.
The damage to the agricultural sector has caused the government to warn of a looming food security crisis. It is already having to import tomatoes and onions from neighboring Afghanistan and Iran.
A vendor in the capital Islamabad told DW that he was currently unable to buy new stocks of vegetables to sell.
"I am waiting for the imported stock of onions and tomatoes to reach the warehouses so we can sell those," he said, sitting next to his cart full of onions, which were mostly rotten.
Food assistance needed
Pakistan's National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) is leading relief efforts in coordination with the United Nations and other international organizations.
The United Nation's World Food Programme (WFP) has so far provided over 464,000 people in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Sindh with relief food assistance.
The WFP added that it aims to expand this to 1.9 million people facing food insecurity in flood-affected districts, according to a September situation report.
Displaced flood-affected people stand in a queue to receive food in Sindh province
"The intensity of the situation in villages is such that people are snatching ration packs from each other during distribution drives," said Abid Mir, a social activist and professor at a university in Sindh. "It's really heartbreaking to see that."
Some of the food relief is coordinated by the National Disaster Management Agency, who organizes the distribution of aid to their provincial counterparts.
Other food relief is being distributed directly by international organizations, said Muhammad Younas, an official at Balochistan's Provincial Disaster Management Authority.
"International NGOs have their own local partners who they give their aid to. They have their own mechanism and ways of assessing the damages and victims' needs," he told DW.
"They, however, must get permission from the government to work in a particular area.".
Although Pakistan's government plans to provide cash payments to over 4.5 million flood-affected households through the Benazir Income Support Programme, it has been criticized for not doing enough to prepare for the monsoon season.
Saqlain Abbas, a farmer in Punjab state's Rajanpur district, said the government hadn't done enough to protect people's homes and land.
"For years, my family has been reliant on cultivating rice and wheat to feed ourselves and now all our crops have been submerged in water," he said.
The WFP said it will begin climate resilience programs next year in Pakistan by "improving community infrastructure."
However, economist Kaiser Bengali, says that it won't be easy for the Pakistani government to attract a large amount of aid to make the country more flood resilient.
"One, there is a donor fatigue," he said. "Two, Pakistan needs to slash non-development expenditure, including the non-combatant defense budget, ration petrol and ban non-essential
Pakistan is also a major exporter of agricultural products and the flood damage will likely cut into a vital source of income.
Pakistan is the world's fourth-largest exporter of rice, for example.
According to the nation's Bureau of Statistics, Pakistan exported a record $2.5 billion (€2.5 billion) worth of rice during the 2021-22 fiscal year.
Flood-stricken Sindh province accounts for 42% of that rice production. A report assessing crop loss in Sindh conducted by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, a Nepal-based research organization, shows that flooding was particularly severe in rice-growing areas.
This has resulted in the estimated loss of 1.9 million tons (1.7 million tonnes) of rice, equivalent to an 80% loss of the province's forecast rice production.
Combined with an 88% loss of sugarcane and 61% loss of cotton, the total economic impact is worth $1.3 billion in Sindh alone, according to the report.
Three key vegetable crops in several districts in Sindh — tomatoes, onions and chili — face losses of $374 million, it added.
Edited by: Wesley Rahn
Study: Four major climate tipping points close to triggering
By SETH BORENSTEIN
September 8, 2022
A boat navigates next to a large iceberg in eastern Greenland on Aug. 15, 2019. Even if the world somehow manages to limit future warming to the strictest international temperature goal, four Earth-changing climate “tipping points” are still likely to be triggered like the irreversible collapse of the Greenland ice sheets, with a lot more looming as the planet heats more after that, a new study said.
(AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)
Even if the world somehow manages to limit future warming to the strictest international temperature goal, four Earth-changing climate “tipping points” are still likely to be triggered with a lot more looming as the planet heats more after that, a new study said.
An international team of scientists looked at 16 climate tipping points — when a warming side effect is irreversible, self-perpetuating and major — and calculated rough temperature thresholds at which they are triggered. None of them are considered likely at current temperatures, though a few are possible. But with only a few more tenths of a degree of warming from now, at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming since pre-industrial times, four move into the likely range, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science.
The study said slow but irreversible collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, more immediate loss of tropical coral reefs around the globe and thawing of high northern permafrost that releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases trapped in now frozen land are four significant tipping points that could be triggered at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, which is three-tenths of a degree (half a degree Fahrenheit) warmer than now. Current policies and actions put Earth on a trajectory for about 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times, according to some projections.
“Let’s hope we’re not right,” said study co-author Tim Lenton, an Earth systems scientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. “There’s a distinct chance some of these tipping points are going to be unavoidable. And therefore it’s really important we do some more thinking about how we’re going to adapt to the consequences.”
Timing is a key issue for tipping points in two ways: when they become triggered and when they cause harm. And in many cases, such as ice sheet collapses, they could be triggered soon but their impacts even though inevitable take centuries to play out, scientists said. A few, such as the loss of coral reefs, cause more harm in only a decade or two.
“It’s a future generation issue,” said study lead author David Armstrong McKay, a University of Exeter Earth systems scientist. “That ice sheets collapsing is kind of that thousand-year timescale, but it’s still bequeathing an entirely different planet to our descendants.”
The concept of tipping points have been around for more than a decade but this study goes further looking at temperature thresholds for when they may be triggered and what impacts they would have on people and Earth and in the past 15 years or so “the risk levels just keep going up,” Lenton said.
Lenton likes to think of tipping points like someone leaning back on a folding chair.
“When you start tipping over backwards you have in that case a very simple kind of feedback on the forces of gravity operating on propelling you backwards until SPLAT,” Lenton said.
Study co-author Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, likened it to someone lighting a fuse on a bomb “and then the fuse will burn up until the big bang and the big bang may be further down the line.”
While the ice sheets with several meters or yards of potential sea rise can reshape coastline over centuries, Rockstrom said to him the loss of coral reefs is his biggest concern because of the “immediate impacts on human livelihoods.” Hundreds of millions of people, especially poorer tropical area residents, depend on fisheries linked to the coral reefs, McKay said.
With just a few more tenths of a degree new tipping points become more possible and even likely that includes a slow down of northern polar ocean circulation that can ripple into dramatic weather changes especially in Europe, loss of certain areas of Arctic sea ice, glaciers collapsing worldwide and utter failure of the Amazon rain forest.
Some of these tipping points, like the permafrost thaw, add to and accelerate existing warming, but don’t think “it’s game over” if temperatures hit 1.5 degrees of warming, which is quite likely, McKay said.
“Even if we do hit some of those tipping points, it will still lock in really substantial impacts we want to avoid, but it doesn’t trigger some sort of runaway climate change process,” McKay said. “That’s not the case at 1.5 degrees. And that means that how much further warming occurs beyond 1.5 is still mostly within our power to effect.”
That’s a crucial point that these are tipping points for individual regional disasters not the planet as a whole, so it’s bad, but not world ending, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t part of the study, but said it was important nuanced research that quantified tipping points better than before.
“Have we really contemplated what happens when you mess with our global and ecological systems to that degree?” said University of Miami climate risk scientist Katharine Mach, who wasn’t part of the study. She said it shows ripples and cascades that are troublesome. “This is a profound reason for concern in a changing climate.” ___
Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Germany: Economists and activists call for climate fund
Economists, scientists and environmental campaigners have said that Berlin should take its inflation-driven tax revenues and invest it in the country's environmentally-friendly future.
Leading German economists and activists are urging more public financial
expenditures to fight climate change
Economists, scientists and environmental campaigners came together in Berlin on Tuesday to demand Germany earmark €100 billion ($100 billion) for a climate change fund.
Marcel Fratzscher, the president of the German Institute for Economic Research, said the money is needed partly because of Germany's failure to invest enough in solar and wind power. Adequate funding would have made the country less dependent on fossil fuel imports that are now contributing to energy poverty, Fratzscher said.
"These mistakes need to be corrected now,'' he told journalists.
The Fridays for Future youth movement, which is helping to coordinate a global climate protest planned for next week, also supported the idea. Prominent member Luisa Neubauer said that Berlin could take a cue from Washington, where President Joe Biden recently signed a bill setting aside $375 billion in federal investments to fight climate change over the coming decade.
Inflation-boosted tax revenue could finance fund
Fratzscher suggested that additional tax revenue that the German government is receiving because of rampant inflation could go toward the fund, which would echo a similar financial vehicle the government recently created to boost the military. Treasury coffers already were up €29 billion in the first half of the year, he said.
Volker Quaschning, a prominent climate scientist at Berlin's University of Applied Sciences for Engineering and Economics, said the idea was a good start. However, he pointed out, €100 billion was only a fraction of the total sum required to transform Germany into a low-carbon economy and make the country resilient to the impacts of global warming.
Quaschning added that part of the money would have to go to developing countries, whose resources had been exploited by the West and now needed help in making their economies and infrastructures resistant to the problems climate change will bring. He pointed to the recent floods in Pakistan as an example.
es/wd (AP, AFP)
Health groups call for fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty
Around 200 health organisations and more than 1,400 health professionals on Wednesday called for governments to establish a binding international treaty on phasing out fossil fuels, which they said pose "a grave and escalating threat to human health". The health community is calling for a binding international treaty to phase out fossil fuels
A letter proposing the "fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty" said it could work similarly to the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control -- except this time the harmful controlled substances would be coal, oil and gas.
The WHO was among the health organisations from around the world who signed the letter.
"The modern addiction to fossil fuels is not just an act of environmental vandalism. From the health perspective, it is an act of self-sabotage," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
The letter called on national governments to develop and implement a legally binding mechanism that would immediately stop all future fossil fuel expansion, as well as phasing out existing production.
It emphasised that the transition should be carried out in "a fair and equitable manner," and that high-income countries should support lower-income nations to ensure the change "reduces poverty rather than exacerbating it".
Air pollution, mostly from burning fossil fuels, has been linked to the deaths of seven million people a year.
Climate change has also spurred more frequent and severe extreme weather events, which can have a lasting impact on health even beyond those initially affected by the disasters, including smoke from wildfires and diseases spread after floods.
The letter also pointed to the heightened health risks faced by the workers who extract, refine, transport and distribute fossil fuels and related products.
Phasing out fossil fuels would prevent 3.6 million deaths a year from air pollution alone, the letter said, adding that "the same cannot be said for proposed false solutions, such as carbon capture and storage".
- Either fossil fuels or health -
Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, the head of the WHO's climate change unit, said that "from a health point of view, you can't fix a disease without calling out what is causing it".
The call for a treaty was important because it did not "try to use false accounting or imaginary solutions to continue to prop up the burning of fossil fuels," he told AFP.
"We can either have fossil fuels or we can have health -- we can't have both."
Courtney Howard, an emergency physician in Canada's sub-Arctic region who signed the letter, said that the city of Yellowknife had some of the worst air quality in the world when it was ringed by wildfires in 2014.
"We had a doubling of emergency department visits for asthma, a 50 percent increase in pneumonia and one of our pharmacies ran out of one of the breathing medicines," Howard told AFP.
She said that phasing out fossils fuels is "something we need to do for everybody -- for everybody's kids."
Jeni Miller, the executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance which helped coordinate the letter, called for international dialogue and negotiation to make the treaty a reality.
"The costs of inaction are increasing," she said.
Fossil fuel ban treaty would save lives, say global health groups
Air pollution linked to carbon emissions causes millions of deaths every year. A coalition of health groups have called for a nonproliferation treaty to end fossil fuel use around the world.
Air pollution linked to fossil fuel use is responsible for more than 6.5 million deaths every year, according to the WHO
More than 1,000 health workers and 200 organizations have demanded that governments worldwide create and enact a legally binding nonproliferation treaty to end the global dependence on fossil fuels, which are known to be harmful to human health.
"The modern addiction to fossil fuels is not just an act of environmental vandalism. From the health perspective, it is an act of self-sabotage," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, which backed the initiative along with the Global Climate and Health Alliance, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Health Care Without Harm and other groups.
In a public letter released Wednesday, they called for an immediate end to new fossil fuel exploration, production and infrastructure. Existing production should be phased out in a "fair and equitable manner" to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) climate goal set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement, with "financial, technological and other support" for low- and middle-income countries to ensure a"just transition"to a sustainable future.
"The proposal for a treaty aims to support what the international community has been pushing on for years but focusing on the supply side," Jeni Miller, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, told DW. "A treaty will allow the Paris Agreement to be stronger by creating a legally binding international mechanism that focuses on the heart of the problem: extracting fossil fuels. If we do not end extraction, it will be much more difficult to end use of these fuels."
"While everybody is aware that we need to end fossil fuel production and use in order to limit climate change, there is less awareness about the huge health bill that has come with decades of coal, oil and gas use," said Anne Stauffer, deputy director at the Brussels-based Health and Environment Alliance.
"With the pandemic, policy makers have placed health protection to the top of their agendas. Now, they need to bring their commitment to preventing ill-health to the area of fossil fuels."
Poor air quality causes millions of deaths each year
Air pollution linked to fossil fuel use causes more than 6.5 million deaths around the world each year, according to a May 2022 study in The Lancet Planetary Health journal. More than 90% of these deaths are happening in rapidly developing countries in Africa and Asia. Almost no one on Earth is spared. According to the latest WHO figures, 99% of the world's population lives in places where the air they breathe exceeds quality limits set by the global body.
The link between fossil fuel emissions and health was made clearer during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, when cities across the world essentially shut down. With businesses closed, roads empty and many people staying home, carbon emissions decreased and air quality improved in many major centers, if only for a short time.
A recent study comparing 46 European cities during those months estimated that 800 deaths linked to air pollution in those cities may have been prevented in the first half of 2020. While just a snapshot of an unprecedented moment in time, the results do reflect how better air quality could improve the health of billions of people worldwide.
The results of the study are backed by moves to phase out coal in other parts of the world over the last 20 years. After the closure of coal-fired power plants in California and Ontario, Canada, for example, surrounding communities saw significant decreases in premature deaths, preterm births and hospital admissions.
Exiting fossil fuels to protect human and ecosystem health
The proposed treaty, to be negotiated by participating countries, would follow the example set by the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The international accord, which entered into force in 2005, aims to raise awareness of the dangers of tobacco and limit its use.
A fossil fuel treaty would seek to do the same for the use of coal, oil and gas, which are known to be harmful to human and ecosystem health. The letter points out the numerous health effects of fossil fuel use that go beyond the direct impact of air pollution. A warming climate, for example, also increases the risk of heat-related illness and death and favors the spread of food and waterborne illnesses. At the same time, health care systems and medical supply chains are also coming under increasing strain.
The effects of air pollution in major cities like Dhaka, as seen here, are worse for children and the elderly
"Communities around the world have been paying the health price for our dependence on fossil fuels for far too long," said Miller. "Every stage of the fossil fuel cycle puts people's health at risk, from mining and fracking to transport through pipelines, to processing and finally to burning fossil fuels for transport, electricity, and industrial use," she said.
New treaty would be a 'tangible sign' that governments are serious
Stauffer of the Health and Environment Alliance told DW the call for a new treaty comes at a crucial time, pointing out that despite increased commitments in recent years from entities like the G20 and the European Union, progress on cutting back on fossil fuels has been too slow. The current geopolitical crisis in Europe isn't helping matters, with countries scrambling to find oil and gas from sources other than Russia rather than strengthening renewables.
"With the many short-term measures to deal with the implications from the war in Ukraine, we're risking a fossil fuel lock-in in Europe, despite all commitments to climate neutrality and energy transition," Stauffer said.
"A fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty would be a tangible sign and commitment by governments that they're serious about protecting our health and tackling a top cause of ill health," she added.
Miller said clean energy alternatives to fossil fuels are readily available, but remain out of reach for many. Developed countries, which have profited from decades of growth based on polluting power, now "have the resources and moral responsibility not only to make the clean energy transition, but to support developing countries to do the same," she said.
"For decades we've depended on the capacity of fossil fuels to provide energy, but we now have alternatives that are cleaner and more sustainable — and compatible with the healthier future we want," she added.
7 WAYS HELPING THE ENVIRONMENT WILL BENEFIT HUMAN HEALTH Link between CO2 and less nutritious food Cutting greenhouse gas emissions would not only slow global heating, it would also ensure our food remains nutritious. When plants absorb excess CO2, they produce less protein and fewer nutrients like zinc and iron. Deficiencies in those nutrients can result in many health problems, especially in children. If CO2 keeps rising, hundreds of millions more people will face chronic undernutrition. 1234567
