The recent IPCC
report that came out in the month of March 2022 says that, by the end of the century, the temperature rise is likely to be 2 to 3.7 degrees if global emissions, as they stand today, are not curtailed. In fact, according to the report, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions need to come down by 45 percent globally (compared with 2005) by the end of 2030.
While the attention of mostly Western media and politicians is quasi exclusively hoarded up by the proxy war in Ukraine and its consequences on the energy sector, the world’s big oil business continues to burn Planet Earth with its underreported though highly polluting, wasteful practice of gas flaring.
In the northern Mexican state of Coahuila the current situation of coal, used mainly to generate electricity, is opaque.
After working on the family farm, Carlos Salama comes home and plugs his cell phone into a socket via a solar-powered electrical system, a rarity in this rural village in southern El Salvador.
I recently visited Abu Dhabi and my impressions became intermingled with worries about the war in Ukraine. I also happened to read Livy’s
The Early History of Rome, written around the beginning of CE, coming across these lines:
Despite an abundance of fisheries reserves along Kwale County’s lush coastline located on the south coast of Kenya, fishers can no longer cast a net just past the coral reef and expect an abundant crab or prawn harvest.
At home, Isabel Bracamontes uses gas only for cooking. "We try to prepare food that doesn't need cooking, like salads," she says in the southeastern Mexican city of Mérida.
The oil and gas supply crisis unleashed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine represents new business opportunities for the oil-producing countries of the developing South, both traditional and emerging, and also for accelerating the global transition to green forms of energy.
Climate change activist Mithika Mwenda, the Executive Director of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), is not reluctant to engage African governments to do what’s necessary to commit to post-COVID-19 green growth strategies.
How would the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu have reacted to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine? Differently than you might think.
The invasion of Ukraine is a mass human tragedy. It is killing Ukrainians, exposing families to violent atrocities, and has driven a refugee crisis of over 4 million people and counting. The war in Ukraine has also reawakened our fear of global war - even nuclear war - and the importance we place on global peace.
Oil palm, known as
dendezeiro in Brazil, can produce
up to ten times more vegetable oil per hectare than other crops, but it is regularly condemned as harmful to the biodiversity of tropical forests in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Now, its cultivation looks set to advance in the Brazilian Amazon.
Three giant concrete cylinders with inflated membrane roofs are a strange sight in the industrial park of Zárate, a world of factories 90 kilometers from Buenos Aires that heavy trucks drive in and out of all day long. They are the heart of a plant that is about to start producing energy from agro-industrial waste, for the first time in Argentina.
The Pacific Ocean could quench the thirst caused by 10 years of drought in Chile, but the operation of desalination plants of various sizes has a long way to go to become sustainable and to serve society as a whole rather than just corporations.
“If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. Still haunted by the clever preaching of monetarist guru Milton Friedman’s ghost, all too many monetary authorities address every inflationary threat or sign they see by raising interest rates.
Finger pointing in the blame game over Russia’s Ukraine incursion obscures the damage it is doing on many fronts. Meanwhile, billions struggle to cope with worsening living standards, exacerbated by the pandemic and more.
Losing sight in the fog of war
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken
insists, “the Russian people will suffer the consequences of their leaders’ choices”. Western leaders and media seem to believe their
unprecedented “
crushing sanctions” will have a “
chilling effect” on Russia.
Georg Hegel once stated: ”What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.” Nevertheless, self-taught historian Vladimir Putin has learned to interpret history in his own manner. During COVID he went down in Kremlin’s archives and after studying old maps and treaties he wrote a lengthy essay
On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, while declaring that ”the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state is an aggression directed against Russia.”
Electricity transmission lines run through Chiedza Murindo’s home in Murombedzi, a small town in Zvimba district in Mashonaland West province, but her house has no electricity. That is the harsh reality for much of Zimbabwe’s rural population, where only 13% of households live without power compared to 83% of urban households.
For decades women’s demands for political and economic inclusion have placed them centre-stage in mass struggles against dictatorships across the world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its indiscriminate attacks on civilians now put women’s movements firmly on the front line of war, autocrats and fossil fuels.
Cuba has readjusted its plans to achieve at least 37 percent of electricity from clean energy by 2030, a promising but risky challenge for a nation that is a heavy consumer of fossil fuels and has persistent financial problems.
Coal—considered to be one of the
most polluting fossil fuels and, therefore, one of the biggest contributors to climate change—took centre stage at COP 26. A last-minute intervention by India during the negotiations resulted in a crucial amendment to the coal pledge in the
Glasgow Climate Pact.
Inflation hawks are winning the day. The latest ‘beggar thyself’ race to raise interest rates has begun. This ostensibly responds to the spectre of runaway inflation, supposedly retarding economic growth and progress, and thus threatening central bank ‘credibility’.