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      Idaho is going to kill 90% of the state’s wolves. That’s a tragedy – and bad policy | Kim Heacox

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      Nothing embodies wildness like wolves, our four-legged shadow, the dogs that long ago refused our campfire and today prefer freedom and risk over the soft sofa and short leash. The dogs that howl more than bark, add music to the land, and – if left alone to work their magic – make entire ecosystems healthy and whole.Witness Yellowstone, a national park reborn in the 1990s when wolves, absent for 70 years, were reintroduced. Everything changed for the better. Elk stopped standing around like feedlot cattle. They learned to run like the wind again. Streamside willows and other riparian vegetation, previously trampled by the elk, returned as well, and with it, a chorus of birds. All because of wolves.Yet in the state of Idaho, new legislation signed days ago by Governor Brad Little will allow professional hunters and trappers to use helicopters, snowmobiles, ATVs, night vision equipment, snares and other means to kill roughly 90% of the state’s wolves, knocking them down from an estimated 1,500 to 150. A group of retired state, federal and tribal wildlife managers wrote to Little asking him to veto the wolf kill bill, saying statewide livestock losses to wolves have been under 1% for cattle and 3% for sheep. The group further noted that the overall elk population has actually increased since wolves were reintroduced into Idaho more than two decades ago. It made no difference.Why exterminate the wolves? To make the country safe for cattle and sheep; more productive for deer, elk, caribou and moose. To better fill hunters’ freezers with winter meat. To sell the pelts.But there’s something more. Something nobody talks about.“The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination,” wrote the nature writer Barry Lopez in Of Wolves and Men. “It takes your stare and turns it back on you.”Maybe the wolf, freer than you or I will ever be, reminds us too much of our own self-domestication. That in a rush to create a stable environment, we’ve put ourselves in stables, and that paradox haunts people who see wolves as something to be feared, hated, destroyed.America’s demonization and slaughter of wolves has been going on for centuries – fed by myths, fairytales, Disney films and more – and continues today, full throttle from Wisconsin to Idaho to Alaska. This is our true forever war – the war on Nature, specifically on wildness and its sinister poster child. The wolf could be out there right now, sneaking under the barbed wire, stalking our profits.In November 2020, the Trump administration, as part of its rollback of environmental regulations, ordered the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list. Western ranchers and farmers were pleased; wildlife advocates called the decision “willful ignorance”. EcoWatch reported that the de-listing occurred “despite the enduring precarity of wolf populations throughout much of the country. According to the most recent USFWS data, there are only 108 wolves in Washington state, 158 in Oregon, and 15 in California, while wolves are ‘functionally extinct’ in Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.”“Wisconsin’s brutal wolf hunt in late February generated outrage – and for good reason,” Jodi Habush Sinykin, an environmental attorney, and Donald Waller, an ecologist and conservation biologist, wrote in the Washington Post. “Throngs of unlicensed hunters joined those with licenses with packs of dogs, snowmobiles and GPS technology. The wolves stood no chance. This unprecedented hunt took place during the breeding season, killing pregnant females and disrupting family packs at a time critical to pup survival. A full accounting of the hunt’s biological toll is impossible, as the state declined to inspect carcasses.”Who are we, as a species? Are we global gardeners, or might we be good guardians as well?As for Alaska: if you want to see a wolf this summer, skip Denali national park, where the Toklat pack – Alaska’s most famous wolf pack, studied since the late 1930s – has been decimated by hunters and trappers who bait the animals just outside park boundaries. The legendary wildlife biologist Adolph Murie, who studied the Toklat pack for three years and teased apart more than 1,700 scat samples, came to a stunning conclusion: wolves that prey on caribou and Dall sheep primarily take the old or infirm. In effect, they create strong prey populations. Wolves are nature’s chisel and lathe.And wolf attacks on humans are so rare as to be statistically non-existent.Over the past half-century, wildlife around the world has dropped 68%. The human race, together with our livestock, now accounts for more than 95% of all mammal biomass on Earth. Everything else – from whales to wolves to lions, tigers and bears – adds up to only 4.2%. And that percentage continues to fall.Knowing that, who are we, as a species? Are we global gardeners who manage everything – plant and animal – as crops on a sustained yield basis, where wildlife is game and wolves are pests? Or might we be good guardians as well, caretakers who regard others beyond ourselves as capable of love; of celebrating their young and mourning their dead?While writing Of Wolves and Men in the late 1970s, Barry Lopez raised two hybrid red wolves, Prairie and River, an experience that he said gave him “a fundamental joy”. He concluded: “I learned from River that I was a human being and that he was a wolf and that we were different. I valued him as a creature, but he did not have to be what I imagined he was. It is with this freedom from dogma, I think, that the meaning of the words ‘the celebration of life’ becomes clear.”
      Kim Heacox is the author of many books, including The Only Kayak, a memoir, and Jimmy Bluefeather, a novel, both winners of the National Outdoor Book Award. He lives in Alaska More

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      The right’s new bogeyman: that Biden will take America’s hamburgers away | Art Cullen

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      First President Obama was coming for your guns. Didn’t happen. Then President Trump said the socialists were going to take away our energy. The lights are on after 100 days, although it got dicey in Texas for awhile (and no, wind turbines didn’t cause the ice storm).But whoa, Nellie! We hear a Hamburglar will steal your right to beef before you can say “pass the ketchup”.Since I don’t even own a BB gun, I was not alarmed by Obama. Since I barely have enough energy to get out of bed I ignored Trump’s warning. But I can get worked up if you have your eyes on my ribeye.Turns out Fox News had to eat crow and retract a story claiming that Joe Biden will foreclose your divine right to slay a fatted calf. It was a Big Lie like all the rest – that your property rights will be denied for the sake of the endangered Topeka shiner minnow; that the election was fraudulent, except in Iowa where Trump won in a rout; that Obamacare would divorce you from your doctor.This lie started in the Daily Mail, which of course would know exactly what the US secretary of agriculture is thinking. The Daily Mail insisted that meat consumption would need to be cut 90% to meet President Biden’s climate goals, citing part of a University of Michigan study.Meanwhile, here is what the secretary, Tom Vilsack, is really thinking about: cow burps and pig poop. He wants more cattle on grass as part of a system with reduced emissions resilient to extreme weather. He is proposing money for methane digesters on hoghouses to power farms and sell dry compost – and getting a ton of flak from the left for it.After Biden’s first 100 socialist days, Tyson is running full tilt cranking out pork and turkey from Storm Lake with non-union labor. Hoghouses are going up everywhere, spreading up the Missouri into South Dakota. Chicken hind quarters were only 69¢ a pound at the grocery store last week.There are a fair number of NRA members deeply suspicious of Obama and Hillary Clinton who also want cleaner rivers and lakes, more grass buffers for habitat and limits on livestock confinements. They know the difference between BS and apple butter.The ‘take away your meat’ scare belies the fear felt by Big Meat when its own system crashedAnd they sense the real threat to their way of life – including Saturday night sirloin – is an ossified oligopoly food system that teetered on the brink of collapse last spring when its workers were overcome by Covid. Meat prices shot up 50% when the Waterloo and Sioux Falls pork plants shut down for a week. There was no way they could let the squeal go out of Storm Lake. For the first time in my life, meat counters were empty. The system failed. We have wrung the diversity out of the food supply chain. Just a few producers and packers stand, and when one of them falls we are all the hungrier.The “take away your meat” scare belies the fear felt by Big Meat when its own, unsustainable system crashed up against its limits.Livestock can be sheltered humanely for efficient food production and better protection from disease. We can finish a lot more cattle on grass for the benefit of the planet. We can enhance food security with more diversity in production and open, competitive markets. Almost everyone in the midwest understands those basic facts.So when the meat scare is propagated it makes the messenger look stupid. It’s not going to sell, just like the idea that wind turbines kill geese. We know better.Eventually, the stupidity becomes obvious to the semi-zealous. The rush on bullets turned out to be a ruse from the ammo makers. It took a lot of shine off the gun lobby as the dues-paying members figured out they were getting played so prices could take a nice run. The organization’s membership dues are drying up accordingly.The more lies they tell, the worse they get.Eventually, people figure it out. Even the “QAnon shaman” who crashed the Capitol wearing a horn helmet realized he got duped when they didn’t serve organic in jail.Vilsack reassured the public that USDA loves it some more red meat. Biden gave a shout-out to cover crops in his address to Congress – foretelling a huge step in environmental progress broadly supported by agribusiness. In Iowa, Republicans and Democrats are working to strengthen small meat processors.Despite several fish kills from floods of manure in north-west Iowa rivers this spring, nothing will be done to prevent the next one. A meager fine will be assessed. People do care about that. They do care about antibiotic resistance and viral pandemics inherent in our system. They want reasonable solutions based on science and reality. When there is enough BS, they begin to think it stinks. That can have consequences.
      Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland More

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      ‘Decades ahead of his time’: history catches up with visionary Jimmy Carter

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      When I reach Jimmy Carter’s grandson by Zoom, he answers wearing a Raphael Warnock campaign T-shirt. Jason Carter is a lawyer and politician himself, mid-40s, animated and well-read, with blue eyes reminiscent of his grandfather’s. He’s just got off the phone with his 93-year-old grandmother, Rosalynn. It’s a special day; Joe Biden is on his way to the Carter house in Plains, Georgia.“My grandfather has met nearly everyone in the world he might want to,” Jason Carter says. “Right now, he’s meeting with the president of the United States. But the person he’d say he learned the most from was Rachel Clark, an illiterate sharecropper who lived on his family’s farm.“He didn’t pity her,” Carter says. “He saw her power. My grandfather believes in the power of a single human and a small community. Protect people’s freedoms, he says, and they can do great things. It all comes back to an enormous respect for human beings.”Carter is openly moved speaking about his grandfather, though it’s also clear he does so often. A spate of recent biographies and documentaries shows not just a renewed interest in the former president, but a willingness to update the public narrative surrounding his time in office. Recent biographer Jonathan Alter calls Carter “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history”.Carter, who lost his bid for re-election in a so-called landslide to Reagan in 1980, is often painted as a “failed president” – a hapless peanut farmer who did not understand how to get things done in Washington, and whose administration was marked by inflation, an energy crisis and the Iran hostage disaster.Subsequent presidents, especially fellow southern Democrat Bill Clinton, kept a distance – assumably not wanting to be seen as part of a political narrative that emphasized piety over getting things done. Even Obama was apparently wary of being associated with the sort of soft-hearted ineffectuality ascribed to Carter.But was Carter actually so ineffectual?In his 2020 biography of Carter, Alter speaks to a more nuanced interpretation of Carter, calling him “a surprisingly consequential president – a political and stylistic failure, but a substantive and far-sighted success”. It is, perhaps, the far-sighted nature of Carter’s ambitions, particularly around energy, that allows us to appreciate him more four decades after his term concluded.Born in 1924, Carter is now 96. Americans must process his mortality and the onset of climate change, which Carter explicitly warned the nation about 40 years ago.Carterland, a just released documentary, offers a particularly sharp focus on Carter’s extensive work on conservation, climate and justice.[embedded content]“Here’s what people get wrong about Carter,” Will Pattiz, one of the film’s directors tells me. “He was not in over his head or ineffective, weak or indecisive – he was a visionary leader, decades ahead of his time trying to pull the country toward renewable energy, climate solutions, social justice for women and minorities, equitable treatment for all nations of the world. He faced nearly impossible economic problems – and at the end of the day came so very close to changing the trajectory of this nation.”Will’s brother, Jim, agrees. “A question folks should be asking themselves is: what catastrophes would have befallen this country had anyone other than Jimmy Carter been at the helm during that critical time in the late 1970s?”Those late 1970s were defined by inflation, the cold war, long lines at gas pumps, and a shift in cultural mores. Carter himself showed a willingness to grow. Although Carter served in the navy himself, he pardoned Vietnam draft-dodgers. Though from a segregated and racist background in Georgia, Carter pushed for affirmative action and prioritized diversity among judicial nominees, including the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Amalya Lyle Kearse. He employed Mary Prince, a Black woman wrongly accused of murder, as his daughter Amy’s nanny, a move criticized by some contemporary thinkers as perpetuating domestic servitude.What was radical in the 1970s can appear backwards decades later; the public narrative works in both directions. Carter is, in some respects, difficult to narrativize because he could be both startlingly conservative – financially, or in his appeal to the deep south’s evangelicals – and progressive, particularly on human rights and climate. He seemed to act from his personal compass, rather than a political one.He startled the globe by personally brokering the critical Middle East peace treaty between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David. He ceded access to the Panama canal, angering conservatives who thought he was giving away an American asset. Through the Alaska Natural Interests Lands Conservation Act, he doubled the national park system and conserved over 100m acres of land – the most sweeping expansion of conserved land in American history.He was not afraid to make unpopular moves, or ask for personal sacrifice. He was old-fashioned and a futurist, and nowhere did his futurism matter more, or seem more prescient, than on climate and conservation. He risked speaking directly to the American public, and asking them to do a difficult thing – focus on renewable energy and reduce reliance on oil.He paid the price for this frank ask, and so did we.In advance of his trip to Plains, Georgia, Biden participated in a video tribute to Carter, joining an all-star cast of Georgia politicians, the familiar faces of Senator Jon Ossoff, Senator Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams serving as an affirming nod to Georgia’s return to political importance.The messages address the substance of the film, but also serve as a heartfelt thank you to a former president who has only recently begun to look prescient on climate, and singular in his moral bearing.“He has always lived his values,” Abrams says in the video.“Our world cries out for moral and ethical leadership,” Warnock offers. “Few have embodied it as clearly and consistently as Carter.”“He showed us what it means to be a public servant, with an emphasis on servant,” Biden says.[embedded content]Many Americans can’t help but spot a link between Carter and Biden – who became the first elected official outside of Georgia to support Carter’s bid for the presidency in 1976. Biden’s colleagues decried him as an “exuberant” idealist at the time.There’s also an increasingly stark comparison between the Carter and the Trump administration.James Gustave Speth served as the chairman of Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality. As Carter’s chief adviser on environmental matters, Speth helped brief Carter on climate change and direct policy. He finds the contrast between Carter and Trump “striking”.“People see now that Carter was at a pole,” Speth tells me. “Carter was the opposite of Trump – and everything that people despised about him. Carter had integrity, honesty, candor and a commitment to the public good of all else. Carter was a different man, totally.”Carter’s vice-president, Walter Mondale, died a month ago at 93, perhaps putting an exclamation mark on the need to expedite overdue praise and understanding. Speth agrees that it would be best to speed up our recognition of Carter. “So many fine things are said over the bodies of the dead,” Speth said. “I’d love to have the recognition occur now.”Speth is also working on his own book on the Carter administration, that covers the Carter and subsequent administrations on climate and energy and highlights the failure to build on the foundation that Carter laid. His project, soon to be published with MIT, carries a damning title: They Knew.One of the most profound– even painful – parts of watching documentaries like Carterland is bearing witness to the fact that Carter was right on asking us to drive less, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to focus on conservation and renewable energy. Not only was Carter’s vision a path not taken, it was a path mocked. Reagan removed the solar panels from the White House, politicized the environmental movement and painted it as a fringe endeavor.“Carter was our only president who had a visceral environmental and ecological attachment. That was part of his being,” Speth says. “We had an opportunity in 1980 – but we’ve lost 40 years in the pursuit of a climate-safe path. We can no longer avoid serious and destructive changes, period. That didn’t have to happen.”I ask Speth why getting Carter’s legacy right matters. First, Speth says, it’s important to recognize the example Carter set for looking ahead, in a culture that prizes soundbites and short-term gains. “Carter was a trained engineer who believed in science,” Speth points out. “He understood things on a global scale, and believed in forecasting. Preparing for the long run is rare in politics.”Carter’s biographer Alter agrees. “If there is a gene for duty, responsibility and the will to tackle messy problems with little or no potential for political gain,” he writes, “Jimmy Carter was born with it.”While none of these recent documentaries or biographies seeks to portray Carter as a saint or even politically savvy, they do insist that his presidency was more successful than history has acknowledged, particularly on the energy, conservation and human rights fronts. Still, there are aspects of his single term that will probably remain embedded in his narrative, such as his tenuous relationship with Congress, early catering to segregationists to win votes, and Iran’s hostage crisis.What can we learn from the shifting narrative around Carter’s presidency?“You can talk about how Carter was an underrated president,” film-maker Jim Pattiz says. “But can you ask yourself: what qualities do you actually want in a leader? Do you want someone who will challenge you to be better, or speak in catchphrases and not ask much of you?“This film is a cautionary tale,” Pattiz says. “We can elect another Carter. Let’s reward leaders willing to do the right thing.”Jason Carter has lived with the nuances and inconsistencies in the narrative surrounding his grandfather’s presidency his entire life. “Stories are always summaries,” he says. “They leave out so much so that we can understand them in simple terms. Public narrative, these days, is so often about politics. It should really be about the great, public problems we’re solving. There’s a difference.“I don’t want history to be kind to my grandfather,” Jason Carter tells me. “I just want history to be honest.” More

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      Dare we hope? Here’s my cautious case for climate optimism | Rebecca Solnit

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      That we are living in science fiction was brought home to me last week when I put down Kim Stanley Robinson’s superb climate-futures novel The Ministry for the Future and picked up Bill McKibben’s New Yorker letter on climate, warning of the melting of the Thwaites Glacier, “already known as the ‘doomsday glacier’ because its collapse could raise global sea levels by as much as three feet”. Where we are now would have seemed like science fiction itself 20 years ago; where we need to be will take us deeper into that territory.Three things matter for climate chaos and our response to it – the science reporting on current and potential conditions, the technology offering solutions, and the organizing which is shifting perspectives and policy. Each is advancing rapidly. The science mostly gives us terrifying news of more melting, more storms, more droughts, more fires, more famines. But the technological solutions and the success of the organizing to address this largest of all crises have likewise grown by leaps and bounds. For example, ideas put forth in the Green New Deal in 2019, seen as radical at the time, are now the kind of stuff President Biden routinely proposes in his infrastructure and jobs plans.It’s not easy to see all the changes – you have to be a wonk to follow the details on new battery storage solutions or the growth of solar power in cheapness, proliferation, efficiency and possibility, or new understanding about agriculture and soil management to enhance carbon sequestration. You have to be a policy nerd to keep track of the countless new initiatives around the world. They include, recently, the UK committing to end overseas fossil fuel finance in December, the EU in January deciding to “discourage all further investments into fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure projects in third countries”, and the US making a less comprehensive but meaningful effort this spring to curtail funding for overseas extraction. In April, oil-rich California made a commitment to end fossil fuel extraction altogether – if by a too-generous deadline. A lot of these policies have been deemed both good and not good enough. They do not get us to where we need to be, but they lay the foundation for further shifts, and like the Green New Deal many of them seemed unlikely a few years ago.We have crossed barriers that seemed insurmountable at the end of the last millenniumThe US itself has, of course, made a huge U-turn with a presidency that has begun by undoing much of what the previous administration did, reregulating what was deregulated, restarting support for research, and rejoining the Paris climate accords. The Biden administration is regularly doing things that would have been all but inconceivable in previous administrations, and while it deserves credit, more credit should go to the organizers who have redefined what is necessary, reasonable and possible. Both technologically and politically far more is possible. There are so many moving parts. The dire straits of the fossil fuel industry is one of them – as the climate journalist Antonia Juhasz put it recently: “The end of oil is near.”The organization Carbon Tracker, whose reports are usually somber reading, just put out a report so stunning the word encouraging is hardly adequate. In sum, current technology could produce a hundred times as much electricity from solar and wind as current global demand; prices on solar continue to drop rapidly and dramatically; and the land required to produce all this energy would take less than is currently given over to fossil fuels. It is a vision of a completely different planet, because if you change how we produce energy you change our geopolitics – for the better – and clean our air and renew our future. The report concludes: “The technical and economic barriers have been crossed and the only impediment to change is political.” Those barriers seemed insurmountable at the end of the last millennium.One of the things that’s long been curious about this crisis is that the amateurs and newcomers tend to be more alarmist and defeatist than the insiders and experts. What the climate journalist Emily Atkin calls “first-time climate dudes” put forth long, breathless magazine articles, bestselling books and films announcing that it’s too late and we’re doomed, which is another way to say we don’t have to do a damned thing, which is a way to undermine the people who are doing those things and those who might be moved to do them.The climate scientist Michael Mann takes these people on – he calls them inactivists and doomists – in his recent book The New Climate Wars, which describes the defeatism that has succeeded outright climate denial as the great obstacle to addressing the crisis. He echoes what Carbon Tracker asserted, writing: “The solution is already here. We just need to deploy it rapidly and at a massive scale. It all comes down to political will and economic incentives.” The climate scientist Diana Liverman shares Mann’s frustration. She was part of the international team of scientists who authored the 2018 “hothouse Earth” study whose conclusions were boiled down, by the media, into “we have 12 years”.The report, she regularly points out, also described what we can and must do “to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System – biosphere, climate, and societies – and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.” It was a warning but also a promise that if we did what science tells us we must, we would not preserve the current order but form a better one.Another expert voice for hope is Christiana Figueres, who as executive secretary of the United Nations framework convention on climate change negotiated the Paris climate accords in 2015. As she recently declared: “This decade is a moment of choice unlike any we have ever lived. All of us alive right now share that responsibility and that opportunity. The optimism I’m speaking of is not the result of an achievement, it is the necessary input to meeting a challenge. Many now believe it is impossible to cut global emissions in half in this decade. I say, we don’t have the right to give up or let up.” She speaks of how impossible a treaty like the one she negotiated seemed after the shambles at the end of the 2009 Copenhagen meeting.Each shift makes more shifts possible. But only if we go actively toward the possibilities rather than passively into the collapseThe visionary organizer adrienne maree brown wrote not long ago: “I believe that all organizing is science fiction – that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle …” All these voices have taken the side of hope in the imagination battle, offering choices and possibilities and the responsibilities that come with those things, as does the actual science fiction in The Ministry for the Future, which takes a turn for the utopian by the end. When I began reading it, apocalyptic news seemed to chime in with the novel. But as I finished it I ran across stories about Scotland’s plans to rewild much of its land, which could have come from the book. And I saw the astonishing news that on the afternoon of Saturday 24 April, California got more than 90% of its energy from renewables.That we cannot see all the way to the transformed society we need does not mean it is impossible. We will reach it by not one great leap but a long journey, step by step. If we see how impossible our current reality might have seemed 20 years ago – that solar would be so cheap, that Scotland would get 97% of its electricity from renewables, that fossil fuel corporations would be in freefall – we can trust that we could be moving toward an even more transformed and transformative future, and that it is not a set destination but, for better or worse, what we are making up as we go. Each shift makes more shifts possible. But only if we go actively toward the possibilities rather than passively into the collapse. More

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      Targets like 'net-zero' won't solve the climate crisis on their own | Mathew Lawrence

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      Last week was a critical time in the global response to the climate emergency: the US vowed to cut its emissions by at least 50% by 2030, while the UK government committed to reducing emissions by 78% by 2035, relative to a 1990 baseline. Both announcements were important steps that reflected the significance of one particular tool in climate governance: the target. From the legally binding targets in the UK’s Climate Change Act (2008) to those of the 2015 Paris agreement, targets define a sense of direction and signpost of ambition. Alone, however, targets are not enough. We need more than just targets to transition to a post-carbon future. We need planning.Despite what free-market economists may suggest, markets are not “free”, nor do they emerge spontaneously. They are created and sustained by governments, laws and political institutions, which plan how they operate and whose interests they serve. What’s more, the global economy, far from being organised by the anarchy of competition, is itself structured by institutions with vast planning power. Targets may dominate the headlines, but it’s these institutions of planning that are central to the climate struggle.Central banks are at the apex of economic planning. The actions of central banks during the Covid-19 emergency, such as buying assets to stabilise turbulent financial markets and controlling interest rates, reflect the coordinating function they perform. Financial institutions, from banks to treasuries, also structure the global economy and plan our economic and environmental future by choosing which businesses and activities to invest in. Decisions about who gets liquidity and who doesn’t are the difference between a business living or dying, stagnating or thriving.These economic institutions all have a common theme. They are responsible for planning, and therefore bringing to life one particular version of the future that is accelerating environmental breakdown and stark inequality. The world’s biggest 60 banks, for instance, have provided $3.8tn of financing for fossil fuel companies since 2015. The Bank of England’s corporate bond holdings as of June 2020 are consistent with – and contribute towards – catastrophic average temperature increases of 3.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2100, and provide no-strings attached finance to carbon-intensive companies. These priorities are also reflected in the UK’s public policies; while the government has committed itself to climate targets, it still supports the development of fossil fuel extraction and carbon-intensive infrastructure, while providing inadequate support for low-carbon public transport or net-zero housing.Announcing new climate targets without rethinking how our global economy is planned can quickly amount to “greenwashing”. In 2018, the increase in fossil fuel production was more than three times higher than in renewables. Since then, fossil fuel giants have announced “net-zero” goals that still envisage a critical role for oil, gas and coal in 2100. In this way climate targets can give a green veneer to plans that merely continue the carbon-intensive status quo.The political challenge is to ensure that planning itself is more democratic and centred on meeting our needs and decarbonising our economy. To reach the UK and world’s climate targets, we’ll need to reimagine planning: the tools we use, the time horizons involved, the voices and values that shape these plans, and how they are enacted. This is not about centralising power in an unresponsive and overweening state, turning our futures over to algorithmic decision-making, or further concentrating corporate power. Instead, it’s about prioritising our ability to plan for the common good: in our homes, in our communities, and in a democratic economy, from workplaces and markets to the state.What might this look like? As John Maynard Keynes foresaw when he called for the steady socialisation of finance and the “euthanasia of the rentier” in 1936, investment should be organised by needs, rather than short-term profits. In our era of sustained economic stagnation, we can’t afford to wait for a revival of capitalist dynamism to trigger investment. Instead, governments should be coordinating a green industrial strategy and heavily investing to build the low-carbon infrastructures, industries and institutions we need. There is so much to be done, and yet current plans fall dangerously short; even Biden’s much-trumpeted infrastructure plan fails to deliver the levels of public investment needed to decarbonise at the pace and scale the climate emergency requires.If we’re to rethink how planning works, central banks will play a crucial role. By consciously embracing their planning function, central banks could steer societies toward rapid decarbonisation. They could do this through changing the relative cost of “green” versus “dirty” capital, for example, by enforcing higher capital requirements for carbon-intensive industries and guiding credit to low-carbon activities. They could also introduce new, socially just rules for carbon pricing that would ensure private investment is geared towards tackling the climate crisis.Part of rethinking planning will also involve rethinking the tools that are used to organise the global economy: the legal contracts, accounting and auditing processes, property claims and financial flows at the heart of it. Currently, these tools and processes are geared towards maximising short-term returns in an economy that excludes ordinary workers and communities from decision-making. We need to refocus these on securing social and environmental wellbeing.Targets are necessary, but they’re only half of the picture. In addition to setting ambitious goals, governments now need to decarbonise the global economy and democratise how it is planned and organised. Our economy isn’t a natural state, but a malleable creation. We still retain the power to reimagine what version of the future it is hurtling towards – and now we must urgently embrace this. More

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      Republicans falsely claim Biden wants to restrict meat in climate crisis fight

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterAt a major summit hosted by Joe Biden last week, a procession of world leaders fretted over the spiraling dangers of the climate crisis, with some pledging further cuts to planet-heating emissions, others touting their embrace of electric cars and a few vowing the end of coal.In the US, however, Biden’s political opponents were focused on one pressing matter – meat.“Bye, bye burgers” screamed an on-screen graphic on Fox News, which ran the false claim that the US president would tyrannically allow Americans to devour just one burger a month. Larry Kudlow, a former economic adviser to Donald Trump now Fox Business host, baselessly envisioned Fourth of July celebrations where people would only be allowed to “throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts” on the barbecue.Prominent Republicans seized upon the supposed Biden climate diktat – which does not exist. The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, retweeted a claim of a 4lb-a-year meat allocation with the comment: “Not gonna happen in Texas!” The far-right conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican representative, called Biden the “Hamburglar” while Garret Graves, ostensibly a more moderate House Republican, said the president’s plan amounted to “dictatorship”.The unfounded claims, which appear to have somehow sprouted from a University of Michigan study on the impact of meat eating, do not reflect Biden’s actual proposals to tackle global heating, which make no mention of personal meat consumption. But they have dealt a hefty blow to Republicans’ latest efforts to present themselves as committed to taking on the climate crisis.A week prior to the White House climate summit, Republicans released what they framed as a sensible, market-based alternative to Biden’s climate plan. “Democrats often dismiss Republicans as disinterested in address global climate change – this is just false,” said Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader. McCarthy said that Republicans have been “working for years to develop thoughtful, targeted legislation” to reduce emissions that, unlike Democratic proposals, “won’t kill American jobs”.Cognizant of growing voter alarm over the climate crisis – a majority of Republican voters now support the regulation of carbon dioxide – McCarthy has brushed aside the objections of some colleagues to recast the party’s beleaguered environmental reputation by promoting various tax breaks for renewable energy, making it easier to import minerals for clean technology and supporting a push to plant one trillion trees around the world.Critics, however, say the proposals are wildly inadequate to avoid disastrous global heating, which scientists say must involve sharply cutting emissions this decade before reaching net zero by the middle of the century. In lieu of any mention of phasing out fossil fuels – the primary cause of the climate crisis – the Republican plan instead calls for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, an oil project halted by Biden.“Getting to net zero requires extraordinary and sustained effort across all of society, not just the federal government, so you can’t just take a piecemeal approach like this, clap your hands and say, ‘We’re done here’,” said Nate Hultman, an expert in public policy at University of Maryland who helped draw up emissions reduction targets for Barack Obama’s administration. “This is a sort of mishmash of proposals, not a comprehensive strategy. I just don’t see how you get to a 50% cut by 2030 or to net zero with this.”Neither McCarthy’s office nor Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES), a conservative group that created a website for the plan, responded to questions on what emissions reductions the assorted proposals would achieve. Last week, Heather Reams, executive director of CRES, accused Biden of “radically impacting our already battered economy” by promising to cut US emissions in half by the end of the decade.During Trump’s presidency, Republicans laid siege to various climate regulations, largely backed his decision to remove the US from the Paris climate accords and acquiesced as the president repeatedly mocked climate science. Despite moves by some younger, more moderate conservatives to prod the party to respond to the increasingly severe wildfires, storms and heatwaves strafing the US, the party’s rhetoric has barely shifted following Trump’s election loss, according to Robert Brulle, a visiting professor of the environment and society at Brown University.“These guys need to get a new PR agency, it’s like they are talking about climate change in the 1990s,” said Brulle. “It’s just recycled arguments from the past or, on the meat thing, just outright lies. These arguments may have worked in the past to delay climate action but it’s so exhausted now. It’s different day, same old shit.”Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, said it was pleasing to see most Republicans shift away from outright denial of climate science but that a “new climate war” was opening up involving “reassuring sounding but empty rhetoric” to stymie regulations to reduce emissions.“They have the same intent as outright denial – to keep us addicted to fossil fuels as long as possible so that fossil fuel interests, who now have such great influence over the Republican party, can continue to make trillions of dollar profits, at our collective expense,” Mann said.Last week’s climate summit, which featured more than 40 world leaders, offered a stark illustration of the extreme position Republicans now find themselves in the global political landscape.During the virtual gathering, even leaders considered climate villains by environmentalists called for greater action on global heating, with Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, warning the “fate of our entire planet, the development prospects of each country, the well-being and quality of life of people largely depend on the success of these efforts” to reduce emissions.“The GOP is an extraordinary outlier in the political spectrum around the world, they have backed themselves into a political and rhetorical cul de sac,” said Brulle.“They are stuck in a really bad position that no other major political party in the world is in. Climate obstructionism is now a core part of Republican creed, much like opposition to abortion and gun control. As long as they remain competitive in elections I don’t see that changing.” More

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      in World Politics

      Does Afghanistan Have a Green Future?

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      Everyone has a different doomsday scenario for Afghanistan once US and NATO troops withdraw by September 11. The Taliban will take over and reimpose their repressive social agenda. Al-Qaeda will multiply rapidly and again become a global threat. Rival warlords will split apart the country. Another wave of Afghan refugees will overwhelm Europe. And then there’s the scenario in which China basically takes over the country, or at least the most sought-after parts of the country: the resources that lie beneath Afghan soil.

      “Afghanistan is one of the richest mining regions in the world, holding untapped mineral wealth and rare Earth elements estimated at roughly $3 trillion,” writes Chris Dolan in The Hill. “Competition with China over mineral wealth is intensifying and Afghanistan presents China with a new opportunity to expand its mining and transportation projects in the Belt and Road initiative.”

      Shaping the Future of Energy Collaboration

      READ MORE

      So far, the China “threat,” like all the others, is hypothetical since Beijing has been hesitant to invest a lot into the war-torn country. In 2007, China contracted to build a large copper mine at Mes Aynak but has done so little to set up operations there that the Afghan government is considering retendering the contract to another investor. The Chinese have their own complaints about the Mes Aynak arrangement, particularly around security and renegotiating some of the terms of the contract. Other than the stalled copper mine and some oil exploration, Chinese investments in Afghanistan have been minimal compared to what Beijing is pouring into neighboring Pakistan.

      Whether to block China, thwart al-Qaeda or muscle through a power-sharing deal with the Taliban, the United States has no plans to abandon Afghanistan completely. The Biden administration is looking to move US bases there to another country, perhaps in Central Asia. In the meantime, Washington will maintain its air war from aircraft carriers or from more distant points in the Middle East, and it will continue to train and provide financial support for the Afghan army.

      Embed from Getty Images

      As for ensuring that Afghanistan rises from the bottom of the world’s social and economic indices — currently, it’s the least peaceful, one of the most corrupt and one of the worst-off countries in terms of human development — the US appears to be washing its hands of any responsibility. So much for the Pottery Barn rule. From Washington’s perspective, Afghanistan was broken long before the 2001 invasion. Mission (never-to-be) accomplished.

      Indeed, in his remarks last week on “the way forward in Afghanistan,” President Joe Biden had very little to say about Afghanistan itself, aside from its military and the various threats the country poses to the United States. He said virtually nothing about the Afghan economy, Afghan society or the Afghan people. At most, the United States appears to be bracing for the worst-case scenario and preparing to minimize the impact on US national interests.

      A Different Future for Afghanistan

      When Seth Warren Rose looks at Afghanistan, he doesn’t see red, he sees green: the green of money, yes, but more importantly the green of environmental sustainability. “I grew up with Vietnam being considered a war not a country,” he told me. “Afghanistan is the same. Americans think of Afghanistan only as a war. But there are 30 million-plus people living there.”

      Rose’s outfit, the Eneref Institute, is gathering support from Afghan politicians for a bold initiative to make Afghanistan carbon-neutral. “If you look at the carbon footprint of Afghanistan, it’s minimal,” Rose continued. “They haven’t really industrialized. Obviously, they’ll let the world in once they establish a peace. But why don’t they establish a mechanism, as long as they’re selling their resources, to do so in a way that’s non-toxic, energy-efficient, and net-carbon zero?”

      As Rose explained to me, Eneref’s proposal is to keep Afghanistan’s oil in the ground but to develop methods of extracting other valuable underground resources in an environmentally more sustainable manner. In this way, the country could “use its mineral wealth to leapfrog industrialization.” This Lead the Leap campaign has lined up a number of prominent Afghans as advisers and secured the support of the Afghan senate.

      Extracting Afghanistan’s mineral wealth in a carbon-neutral fashion is easier said than done. Extractive industries are notoriously dirty, responsible for 80% of the planet’s biodiversity loss and half the world’s carbon emissions (and that’s just in the extraction process). Workers die in large numbers in the mining sector, whether immediately in accidents or through exposure to dangerous substances over the long term. Communities around mines have to deal with often-horrifying pollution in their air, land and water. And wherever mines extract valuable substances, conflict is sure to follow (see, for example, “blood diamonds”).

      Nor is it so easy to leapfrog over the extraction industry into a clean energy future. Many green technologies, such as solar panels, are dependent on an array of minerals like copper and zinc, while wind turbines and electric vehicles require inputs like cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements.

      Eneref’s bid to green Afghanistan’s mining sector is part of a much larger effort to make the entire production chain of the extraction industry sustainable. The World Bank, for instance, has launched a Climate Smart Mining initiative that focuses on using renewable energy in mining operations, preventing deforestation and promoting sustainable land-use strategies, and reusing minerals to minimize waste.

      The mining industry is also responsible for its share of “greenwashing,” making only cosmetic changes before proceeding with business as usual. Civil society organizations, shareholders and committed politicians can put pressure on companies to adhere to international regulations and corporate codes of conduct. But particularly in poor countries like Afghanistan, which are desperate enough for revenue in the short term to overlook longer-term environmental consequences, mining companies are more willing to cut corners when it comes to carbon emissions.

      But there’s another option.

      The Next OPEC?

      Afghanistan has little leverage over mining operations beyond the $3 trillion of natural resources beneath its soil. That wealth is useless, however, if Afghanistan can’t get it out of the ground. Perhaps the Chinese reluctance to invest more into copper extraction is a godsend. China, after all, pays little attention to sustainability in its extraction operations overseas.

      Many countries, like Congo and Venezuela, are in the same position as Afghanistan. If they rebuff China or any other potential investor, the latter can turn to more amenable investment opportunities elsewhere.

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      Unless, of course, all mineral-rich countries form a new cartel. Let’s call this cartel OMEC, the Organization of Mineral-Exporting Countries. This mineral-version of OPEC could impose its own carbon-reducing restrictions on the extraction industry. “No one country has the wherewithal, the power, the influence, to demand that Russia, China and the United States follow carbon-neutral rules,” Rose concluded. “So, let’s gather a third of the world to create a union.”

      Remember, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) wasn’t just a mechanism to extract more money from the petroleum-desperate. It was originally designed to restrict oil production. As Lester Brown recounts in “Building a Sustainable Society,” the founder of OPEC, Venezuelan Minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, believed that “his mission in life was to stop the waste of valuable energy resources. When describing his early vision of OPEC, he said, ‘Most people see OPEC as a way to raise oil prices, but I see it as a way to lower the use of energy.’ Shortly before he died in late 1979, he referred to OPEC as the ‘leading ecology group in the world.’”

      OMEC could similarly perform a valuable ecological function by regulating the extraction of minerals to keep the price high, reduce waste and help turn countries like Afghanistan into the mineral equivalent of a Gulf state. Of course, to avoid the “resource curse,” OMEC members would have to submit to serious anti-corruption programs, devote profits to communal advancement rather than individual wealth and set aside a portion of proceeds to future contingencies (like Norway’s oil fund).

      But most of all, OMEC members must leverage their relatively small carbon footprints into economic advantage. I’ve written elsewhere about how a country like North Korea, which lags far behind South Korea on virtually every economic and social indicator, could parlay its single advantage of a smaller carbon footprint into a clean energy future that would lead the Korean peninsula and the region. Like Afghanistan, North Korea has significant mineral resources that could finance such a transformation.

      For decades, countries like North Korea and Afghanistan were promised material advancement — leading perhaps someday to membership in the club of richest nations called the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — if they just followed the conventional path of industrialization. The poorest of the poor haven’t made much progress in the last couple decades, and that industrial model has proved disastrous on a number of levels. Perhaps it’s finally time for them to band together according to an entirely different model of economic cooperation and development.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden’s big climate pledge: can it succeed, and what noticeable changes could it bring?

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      Joe Biden has closed out a two-day climate summit of more than 40 world leaders by warning that the planet risks reaching the “point of no return” if more isn’t done to escalate efforts to constrain the climate crisis.Biden, along with several other national leaders, made a number of new promises in the summit. Here’s what it all means.What has Joe Biden promised at the summit?As its centerpiece announcement, the Biden administration has said planet-heating emissions will be cut by 50%-52% by 2030. The target was officially submitted to the United Nations as part of an overarching global system where countries submit voluntary emissions reduction goals in order to collectively avoid dangerous global heating.On top of this, the summit saw an American promise to double financial aid for developing countries struggling with the escalating droughts, floods, heatwaves and other impacts of the climate crisis, as well as a new US push to work with other countries on clean energy innovation.The White House hopes the new commitments will spur other countries to do more, as well as signal the return of the US to the top table to climate leadership after a ruinous self-imposed exile under Donald Trump.Is that enough to deal with the threat of climate change?No. But then very little at this stage is sufficient. Despite decades of warnings from scientists, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to soar, only dipping last year due to pandemic-related shutdowns. The cuts required to stave off truly disastrous global heating are now precipitously steep – reduce by around half this decade and then to zero by 2050.Some activists feel the US could be doing more, with a group of protesters dumping wheelbarrows of manure outside the White House on Thursday. The climate aid pledge has also been criticized as “very low” by ActionAid USA.Conversely, the US goal is one of the most ambitious for a developed country, will make a significant dent in overall emissions and has generally been received as striking the right balance between ambitious and feasible by governments desperate to see the world’s largest economy rejoin the climate battle.“Is it enough? No,” said John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy. “But it’s the best we can do today and prove we can begin to move.”How will big reductions in emissions change Americans’ lives?Emissions have been gradually declining in the US for several years, largely due to the collapse of the ailing coal industry. Cutting emissions in half within a decade will require far more aggressive, and noticeable, changes – an explosion in solar and wind jobs, a rapid shift to electric cars, the refitting of energy inefficient buildings, the demise of coal country, a revamp of farming practices.Biden has framed this unprecedented transition as a glorious economic opportunity – “when I think of climate change, I think of jobs” has become a presidential slogan – and while experts agree that millions of new jobs can flow from a shift to clean energy the change will be jarring to some, particularly those working in fossil fuels.Regulations to force oil, coal and gas out of the energy system, along with mandates for electric cars, will have to materialize. But the climate problem is manifest – if the US is to get to net zero emissions by 2050 the focus at some point will shift to everything from airline and shipping emissions to gas stovetops in homes to whether a switch away from meat eating could help lower the sizable methane pollution from cattle.Biden’s task is to help accelerate a shift already under way to renewables while cushioning the blow to those left by the wayside, all while avoiding a backlash from an American public wary of personal sacrifice.How likely is it Biden will be able to deliver this?There are record levels of alarm among the American public over the climate crisis, with majorities of Democratic and Republican voters supporting action to bring down emissions. Big business, unions and city leaders have also swung strongly behind the push for a federal response.Imposing barriers remain in Congress, however, where Republicans have clung on to Trump-era rhetoric that acting on the climate crisis will harm the economy. The Biden climate target will put “good-paying American jobs into the shredder,” warned Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader.Biden will be able to unilaterally shut off new oil and gas drilling on public lands and set new pollution standards for cars and power plants, but further legislation will be required. Given the paper-thin Democratic control of Congress, the fate of even broadly popular measures such as Biden’s $2tn infrastructure plan – which would greatly expand electric vehicle charging stations, boost public transit and push forward renewable energy deployment – appear uncertain.At some point Biden will have to bring in “sticks” as well as “carrots”, such as a tax on carbon emissions and a directive to utilities to phase out fossil fuels. Again, such measures face huge hurdles in Congress.If he does get all of that done, is it problem solved?As the administration is keen to point out, the rest of the world is responsible for about 85% of all emissions and only through a coordinated, determined international effort will humanity avoid the punishing ravages of the climate crisis.Canada and Japan announced upgraded emissions reduction targets at the climate summit but China, the world’s leading carbon polluter, didn’t bring anything new and some countries, such as Brazil and Australia, have deeply recalcitrant leaders. Ahead of key UN climate talks in Scotland later this year, Biden will not only have to corral an unusually divided domestic polity to achieve his goals but also prod other countries to do more. It’s an unenviable task. More