New book exposes the power of oil – from colonialism, to post-Soviet Russia, to the current climate crisis
Nearly four decades ago, a large team of scientists from around the world launched a major global research programme called the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP). Their goal was to study the connection between human activities and changes to the earth’s biological, chemical, and physical systems, and in 2004 they synthesised the results of their initial research phase in a 336-page report entitled Global Change and the Earth System. The report revealed that humanity was causing a series of unprecedented changes that were pushing ‘the Earth System well outside of its normal operating range’.
Never before had the world’s atmosphere, land, coastal zones, and oceans experienced change at the rate that was now occurring. This was ‘a no-analogue situation’ according to the IGBP authors, and raised the very real threat of catastrophic, non-linear, events that could destroy the natural systems on which the survival of humanity depends.
Twenty years have elapsed since this report was issued, and the casual reader might be forgiven for dismissing it simply as an interesting historical artefact – one more example of an urgent warning ignored in a long road of climate inaction. But the IGBP synthesis made one distinctive and path-breaking observation that remains highly relevant today: something happened around the middle of the twentieth century….
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oil-crude-capitalism-corporate-climate-justice/
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