There is nothing that cannot be corrupted, nothing good that cannot be transformed into something bad. And there is no clearer example than the great climate land grab. We now know that it’s not enough to leave fossil fuels in the ground and decarbonise our economies. We’ve left it too late. To prevent no more than 1.5C of heating, we also need to draw down some of the carbon already in the atmosphere.

By far the most effective means are “nature-based solutions”: using the restoration of living systems such as forests, salt marshes, peat bogs and the seafloor to extract carbon dioxide from the air and lock it up, mostly in trees or waterlogged soil and mud. Three years ago, a small group of us launched the Natural Climate Solutions campaign to draw attention to the vast potential for stalling climate breakdown and a sixth mass extinction through the mass revival of ecosystems.

While it is hard to see either climate or ecological catastrophe being prevented without such large-scale rewilding, we warned that it should not be used as a substitute for decarbonising economic life, or to allow corporations to offset greenhouse gases that shouldn’t be produced in the first place. We found ourselves having to shed a large number of partner organisations because of their deals with offset companies…

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/26/carbon-offsetting-environmental-collapse-carbon-land-grab

Oliver Milman: Joe Manchin attracts global anger over climate crisis

Within the brutal machinations of US politics, Joe Manchin has been elevated to a status of supreme decision-maker, the man who could make or break Joe Biden’s presidency.  Internationally, however, the Democratic senator’s new fame has been received with puzzlement and growing bitterness, as countries already ravaged by the climate crisis brace themselves for the US – history’s largest ever emitter of planet-heating gases – again failing to pass major climate legislation…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/26/joe-manchin-climate-crisis-global-villain

George Monbiot: Dead Line – Future corporate profits are officially more important than life on Earth

Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death. By George Monbiot

 

Climate crisis: economists ‘grossly undervalue young lives’

Hundreds of global civil society representatives walk out of Cop26 in protest

CODE RED for Humanity – The IPCC report is clear: nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe

JOHN BUELL: Living on a Newly Unrecognizable Planet

Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction

Our leaders look climate change in the eyes, and shrug / Siberian heatwave led to new methane emissions / Terrifying documentary on US wildfires

Earthly Anecdotes: an alternative to the doom-saying of our times

Reynard Loki – Here’s a major lesson from the pandemic: We can save the planet from climate change

Aseem Shrivastava: An Age gone blind // Mallika Bhanot – Char Dham Pariyojana: A High Risk Engineering Exercise

This obscure energy treaty is the greatest threat to the planet you’ve never heard of