Once a haven for flamingos, sturgeon and thousands of seals, fast-receding waters are turning the northern coast of the Caspian Sea into barren stretches of dry sand. In some places, the sea has retreated more than 50km. Wetlands are becoming deserts, fishing ports are being left high and dry, and oil companies are dredging ever-longer channels to reach their offshore installations.

Climate change is driving this dramatic decline in the world’s largest landlocked sea. Found at the boundary between Europe and central Asia, the Caspian Sea is surrounded by Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan, and sustains around 15 million people.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/42722173

Archived

Countries around the globe condemned China’s hypocritical plans for a nature preserve on Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, where Beijing has wreaked environmental havoc with its artificial island-building as it seeks control over maritime territory to which it has no legal claim.

The Philippines faces constant coercion from China near the shoal and elsewhere inside its internationally recognized exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Beijing, which illegally claims most of the South China Sea, deploys coast guard, navy and maritime militia vessels to harass Philippine fishing, humanitarian missions, and routine military and law enforcement patrols. The aggression has continued even after an international tribunal’s 2016 ruling that invalidated China’s arbitrary claims to the South China Sea and found that Beijing violated Philippine rights to Scarborough Shoal.

Manila quickly denounced China’s declaration of an “island nature reserve” on the shoal. The move “is less about protecting the environment and more about justifying [China’s] control over a maritime feature that is part of the territory of the Philippines,” stated National Security Advisor Eduardo Año. “It is a clear pretext toward eventual occupation.”

[...]

Australia and Japan joined Indo-Pacific partners in calling for China to comply with the tribunal ruling, while the United Kingdom opposed “any unilateral activity that changes the facts on the ground and raises tensions in the South China Sea.”

Experts called China’s actions an example of lawfare — purposely misinterpreting the law to change the status quo — and pointed to Beijing’s history of causing environmental damage in the South China Sea.

“This isn’t environmental protection — it’s environmental lawfare,” Ray Powell, director of the SeaLight Project at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, told the U.S. Naval Institute News. He cited “highly destructive methods” used by Chinese fishing crews and reports that Beijing has destroyed more than 1,800 hectares of coral reef in the South China Sea with its artificial island-building. The international tribunal also found that China harmed coral reefs and inflicted “irreparable damage to the marine environment.”

[...]

Beijing has long used encroachment in an attempt to exert control over its neighbors’ territory. Analysts say such gray-zone tactics — sometimes called salami slicing — are small enough to avoid a military response but accumulate to China’s benefit. Examples include:

• China’s aggressive interference with Philippine resupply missions to its military outpost on Second Thomas Shoal, which Beijing wants Manila to abandon.
• Beijing’s artificial island-building in the contested Paracel and Spratly chains. By militarizing the features, China hopes to establish de facto authority over economically important stretches of sea.
• Regular China Coast Guard intrusions near the Japan-administered Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, an effort to challenge Tokyo’s control over the resource-rich territory.
• Fish farms and marine platforms that Beijing built without permission where its EEZ overlaps with the Republic of Korea’s in the Yellow Sea.
• Military harassment of self-governed Taiwan, which China claims as its territory and threatens to annex by force.
• Infrastructure projects Beijing has built along its de facto border with India and Chinese patrols into disputed territory, all aimed at asserting authority and upending the status quo.

A small town in rural Arizona sinks almost 3 inches each year — and the ground will likely only continue to collapse as locals and corporate mega-farms battle over access to clean water.

Residents of Wenden, an unincorporated community of less than 1,000 people about 75 miles southeast of the Colorado River, have been forced to dig deep underground just to access water, NBC News reported.

“It’s a train wreck waiting to happen,” Gary Saiter, who leads Wendon’s water district, told NBC.

“In the last 15 years, Wendon itself has sunk into a subsidence bowl. We sink at another 2.2 inches per year,” Saiter said.

Think Bill Gates is fixing the climate crisis? Not if you follow the money. While he funds green innovation and talks about cutting emissions, Gates also invests in dirty industries such as coal, oil and private jets. In this episode, Neelam Tailor exposes how one of the world’s most powerful climate voices is betting on both sides of the crisis – and making a lot of money in the process

Earth’s water cycle is becoming harder to predict as the climate changes, UN scientists have warned.

Last year was the sixth in a row to show an erratic cycle and the third where all glacier regions reported ice loss, according to the World Meteorological Organisation’s (WMO) state of global water resources report for 2024, released on Thursday.

They found that around 60% of rivers globally showed either too much or too little water compared to the average flow per year.

While the world has natural cycles of climate variability from year to year, long-term trends outlined in the report indicate the water cycle, at a global scale, is accelerating.

Stefan Uhlenbrook, WMO director of hydrology in the water and cryosphere division, said scientists feel it is “increasingly difficult to predict”.

“It’s more erratic – so either too much or too low on average flow per year,” he said.

As global warming drives higher global temperatures, the atmosphere can hold more water, leading either to longer dry periods or more intense rainfall.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Desk collaboration.

In the wake of the Trump administration’s announcement that it will overturn the rule which underpins virtually all US climate regulations, a Senate committee has launched an investigation into a suspected lobbying push that led to the move.

On Tuesday, the Senate environment and public works committee sent letters to two dozen corporations, including oil giants, think tanks, law firms, and trade associations. The missives request each company to turn over documents regarding the 2009 declaration, known as the endangerment finding, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said in July that it will unmake.

The finding enshrined that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases harm the health of Americans. “Rescinding the endangerment finding at the behest of industry is irresponsible, legally dubious, and deeply out of step with the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment, and the American public deserves to understand your role in advancing EPA’s dangerous decision,” wrote Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I,), the ranking member of the committee. “I am concerned about the role that fossil fuel companies, certain manufacturers, trade associations, polluter-backed groups, and others with much to benefit from the repeal of the endangerment finding—including your organization—played in drafting, preparing, promoting, and lobbying on the proposal.”

Fossil fuel companies and their allies are threatened by the endangerment finding because it confirms in law that carbon dioxide, which their products produce, are dangerous, Whitehouse told the Guardian. It also gives the EPA the authority to regulate those emissions under the Clean Air Act.

The letter, which asks for all relevant private communications between the day Trump was re-elected in November to the day the EPA announced plans to rescind the endangerment finding in July, was sent to oil giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP, as well as coal producers, a rail giant, and two auto manufacturers whose business plans rely on fossil fuels.

“The only interests that benefit from undoing the endangerment finding are polluter interests, and specifically fossil fuel polluter interests,” Whitehouse said.

“The fossil fuel industry owns and controls the Trump administration on all matters that relate to their industry.”

The letter was also sent to trade associations and law firms representing big oil and auto companies. And it was sent to far-right, pro-fossil fuel think tanks Competitive Enterprise Institute, New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Heartland Institute, America First Policy Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, each of which challenge the authority of federal agencies, and some of which have directly praised the proposed endangerment finding rollback.

The Guardian has contacted each recipient for comment.

Because Republicans control the Senate, Democrats on the environment and public works committee lack the power to subpoena the documents. But the Senate committee still expects the companies to comply with their request.

The letter could send a signal to polluting sectors and right-wing firms that they are being watched and could set the stage for continued investigation if Democrats win back a congressional chamber in next November’s midterm elections.

Fossil fuel interests pushed back on the endangerment finding when it was first written, yet little is known about more recent advocacy to overturn it. Immediately following the EPA’s announcement of the rollback, the New York Times reported that groups have not “been clamoring in recent years for its reversal.” But Whitehouse believes that has changed since Trump was re-elected in November.

When Joe Biden was president and Democrats controlled at least one chamber of Congress, Whitehouse said “a request to rescind the endangerment finding would have just looked like useless, pointless, madness.”

“But now that they can actually do it in their desperation and with the mask of moderation pulled off, I think it’s very clear that they were directing this happen,” he said.

Under Trump, former lobbyists and lawyers for polluting industries such as oil, gas and petrochemicals have entered leadership positions at the EPA. “The fossil fuel industry owns and controls the Trump administration on all matters that relate to their industry, and they have subservient Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate,” said Whitehouse. “The change in power has allowed a change in tactics and attitude.”

Two environmental nonprofits have sued the Trump administration for “secretly” convening a group of climate contrarians to bolster its effort to topple the endangerment finding.

The EPA’s proposed undoing of the crucial legal conclusion comes as part of a larger war on the environment by the Trump administration, which has killed dozens of climate rules since re-entering the White House in January.

“The motive is to help fossil fuels survive,” said Whitehouse.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/42471244

Farmers in Zambia have filed an $80bn (£58.5bn) lawsuit against two Chinese-linked firms, blaming them for an "ecological catastrophe" caused by the collapse of a dam that stored waste from copper mining.

Million of litres of highly acidic material spilled into waterways in February, leading to "mass fatalities" among fish, making water undrinkable and destroying crops, the farmers said in court papers.

This is one of the biggest environmental lawsuits in Zambia's history, with the farmers saying the spillage affects about 300,000 households in the copper-mining region.

[...]

But Mackay Mayor Greg Williamson said while it's worth fighting the rising sea for now, it's a battle the community will eventually lose.

"At some stage in the future, when all of the seabed walls, rock walls and bag walls don't work, retreat is going to be the only answer," he said

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27623809

Human-made global heating caused two in every three heat deaths in Europe during this year’s scorching summer, an early analysis of mortality in 854 big cities has found.

In times of crisis, food is more than sustenance. It is a pillar of national stability. Finland has long understood this, not just because of policy, but because of who we are and where we live. Geography, a mild continental climate and our history have shaped a mindset where preparedness is essential. In a country with vast territory, a sparse population and long distances between communities, resilience must be built into everything we do.

This understanding is deeply rooted in our society, in individual households as much as government institutions. Today, Finland’s approach to preparedness is rightly seen as a model for Europe. But it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. What works for Finland, such as our high levels of food self-sufficiency, strong institutions and a culture of cooperation, may not work elsewhere. Still, our experience offers valuable lessons. Preparedness must be proactive, inclusive and deeply integrated into national strategy.

Archived

Chinese miners are illegally extracting Congolese gold on a vast scale, according to a new report from the nonprofit PAX, which also accuses the Democratic Republic of the Congo of weak and ineffective governance.

The report, published Wednesday by the Netherlands-based peace advocacy group, said that semi-industrial gold mining operations have devastated at least 155 miles of rivers and streams in Haut-Uélé, a province where poverty is widespread and where armed conflict and violence have roiled the population for decades.

[...]

Asked about whether Chinese nationals are engaged in illegal, semi-industrial gold mining in northeastern DRC, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said in a written statement: “I’m not aware of the specifics you mentioned. Please refer to the competent authorities for further comments.”

He added: “As a principle, the Chinese government consistently requires Chinese nationals abroad to abide by local laws and regulations and to refrain from any illegal activities.”

China’s Foreign Ministry said virtually the same thing in January when asked about similar illegal gold mining operations in a different DRC region, Kivu.

A surge in illegal gold mining in Haut-Uélé began in 2020, with Congolese mining enterprises presented as small-scale, artisanal “cooperatives” using Chinese financial and technical backing, the report said. Congolese law allows artisanal mining cooperatives of Congolese nationals to operate in certain areas if licensed.

The violent weather that battered Europe this summer caused short-term economic losses of at least €43bn, according to an EU-wide estimate, with costs expected to rise to €126bn by 2029.

The immediate hit to the economy from a single brutal summer of heat, drought and flooding amounted to 0.26% of the EU’s economic output in 2024, according to the rapid analysis, which has not been submitted for peer review but is based on relationships between weather and economic data that were published in an academic study this month.

One and a half million Australians are at risk from sea levels rising by 2050 unless climate change can be limited, Australia’s first national climate risk assessment has warned.

It found under 1.5C of warming, sea levels would rise by 0.14m, but they would rise by 0.54m under a 3C scenario — with Queensland home to 18 of the 20 most-exposed regions.

The assessment, which is the single most-significant body of climate work by the Australian government, also warns that 597,000 people are living in areas that will become exposed to sea level rise by 2030.

The grim document has been released days ahead of the federal government committing to its emissions target for 2035, and a meeting at the United Nations where countries will update their commitments.

Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said the assessment was an honest warning of the cost of failing to act.

The Trump administration has already added nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies for oil, gas, and coal in 2025, a report released Tuesday finds, sending an additional $4 billion out the door each year for fossil fuels over the next decade. That new amount, created with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer, adds to $30.8 billion a year in preexisting subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. The report finds that the amount of public money the U.S. will now spend on domestic fossil fuels stands at at least $34.8 billion a year.

The increase amounts to “the largest single-year increase in subsidies we’ve seen in many years — at least since 2017,” says Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager for Oil Change International, an anti-fossil fuels advocacy organization and author of the report.

The U.S. has been subsidizing fossil fuel production for more than a century. Many of the tax subsidies logged in the report — including a tax break passed in 1913 that allows companies to write off large amounts of expenses related to drilling new oil wells — have been on the books for decades.

Fossil fuel subsidies have proven notoriously difficult to undo, even with a determined administration. After campaigning on ending tax breaks for Big Oil, President Joe Biden’s 2021 budget pledged to raise $35 billion over 19 years by eliminating certain fossil fuel subsidies; one of his first executive orders tasked agencies with getting rid of those subsidies. (“I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to Big Oil,” he said at a press conference announcing the order.)

But the phaseouts of these subsidies were nixed during climate legislation negotiations with then-senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who was the key swing vote in the Senate at the time and a recipient of fossil fuel money with lengthy ties to the coal industry. Meanwhile, the Inflation Reduction Act — the resulting compromise between Manchin and Democratic leadership, which was passed in August of 2022 — gave additional boosts to the fossil fuel industry in the form of subsidies for oil-and-gas-friendly technologies, like carbon capture and storage and certain types of hydrogen made with natural gas.

“What happens is you have these policies in place, and then you have a constituency that strongly advocates and lobbies for them, it becomes harder and harder to unwind them, which I think is the situation that we’re in today,” says Matthew Kotchen, a professor of economics at Yale University, who was not involved in the new analysis.

That cycle is continuing in the new administration. Fossil fuel companies spent millions of dollars getting Trump elected last year; one report from the advocacy group Climate Power puts the total number at $445 million. Those companies are seeing benefits as the administration pursues an aggressive deregulatory agenda, hobbles renewable energy projects, and downplays the importance of climate change. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the president has taken to calling oil CEOs following their appearances on TV.

“It’s no secret that Trump and the Republicans are on the side of the fossil fuel industry and very much vice versa,” says Rees. “The fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting Republicans and Trump elected. They then presented their wish lists. Nearly everything on those wish lists was fulfilled, and in fact, they got a bunch of additional goodies that weren’t even in those wish lists.”

The new research builds on past work from Oil Change International, which last did the math on national fossil fuel subsidies in 2017, finding then that $20 billion was going out the door to the industry each year. To compile the new report, Rees and his colleagues combed through a variety of federal governmental sources on the amount of money going to the oil, gas, and coal industries each year.

The question of what, exactly, constitutes a federal subsidy is the topic of some debate. Environmental groups tend to have a broader scope in tallying up public money spent on fossil fuels, including federal money not distributed directly to oil companies. Conservative groups, meanwhile, take a much narrower approach. (For its report, Oil Change International used the definitions of subsidies set by the World Trade Organization in calculating domestic funding to fossil fuels.)

Due to a lack of transparency across the federal government, the calculations in this report are “likely to be an undercount,” Rees says. “There’s probably some things that we missed — some corners of the budget that are funding fossil fuels in different ways.”

The $4 billion in new yearly subsidies comes largely in the form of allocations contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed this summer. One of the biggest new subsidies — an expansion of the tax credit for carbon capture and storage — is, ironically, related to provisions from the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Trump campaigned on reversing. (The One Big Beautiful Bill Act did, however, crack down harshly on tax credits for wind and solar, carrying out part of Trump’s campaign promise.)

Carbon capture and storage is the process of capturing CO2 emissions and injecting them deep underground. The oil and gas industry has for decades injected CO2 underground to help recover difficult reserves that don’t respond well to traditional drilling methods. Environmentalists have long argued that the logic of replicating an oil and gas technique as a climate solution is seriously flawed — especially considering that a company could reap a climate tax credit from injecting CO2 that will then be used to create more fossil fuels.

In the original Inflation Reduction Act, which significantly expanded the existing carbon capture tax credit, there was a price differential baked into the tax credits: Producers got more money per ton of CO2 they sequestered underground without any oil production involved, and less for CO2 used specifically to produce more oil and gas. But the One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated this differential, allowing producers to collect on the full credit even if they are using CO2 to produce more fossil fuels. The total expansion of tax credits for carbon capture in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the analysis found, could send out more than $1.4 billion of public money to oil and gas companies each year.

The types of federal subsidies addressed in this report are just one kind of boost the government gives dirty industries. The analysis does not address state and local tax breaks for fossil fuel companies, nor does it add up international financing from publicly funded U.S. entities to overseas fossil fuel companies and projects. (Just before he left office, President Biden backed a limit on funding for dirty investments made by the U.S. Export-Import Bank, a part of the executive branch that facilitates the export of U.S. goods and services. President Trump promptly encouraged the Bank in April to resume funding for coal projects abroad.)

The fossil fuel industry also benefits financially from not having to address the negative side effects of their products: Coal companies don’t have to deal with the health impacts from people breathing polluted air, for example, while oil and gas companies don’t need to think about damages from extreme weather juiced up by climate change caused by their product. Kotchen, the Yale economist, calculated in a 2021 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a small handful of U.S. oil, gas, coal, and diesel giants, by not having to pay for the damage they cause, get $62 billion in what he calls “implicit subsidies” per year.

I asked him if, given the major environmental rollbacks overseen by the Trump administration, he’d expect that figure to increase if he redid his analysis in 2025. “The environmental externalities are higher, and production has gone up,” he says. “I think [the number] would be a lot higher.”

This article is about the coming collapse of a particular economic bubble but I also think it is emblematic of a broader process of collapse too. It is very telling about our future how FAR from reality our thinking has gotten about AI.

In the study, published in July, the think tank Model Evaluation & Threat Research randomly assigned a group of experienced software developers to perform coding tasks with or without AI tools. It was the most rigorous test to date of how AI would perform in the real world. Because coding is one of the skills that existing models have largely mastered, just about everyone involved expected AI to generate huge productivity gains. In a pre-experiment survey of experts, the mean prediction was that AI would speed developers’ work by nearly 40 percent. Afterward, the study participants estimated that AI had made them 20 percent faster.

But when the METR team looked at the employees’ actual work output, they found that the developers had completed tasks 20 percent slower when using AI than when working without it. The researchers were stunned. “No one expected that outcome,” Nate Rush, one of the authors of the study, told me. “We didn’t even really consider a slowdown as a possibility.”

No individual experiment should be treated as the final word. But the METR study is, according to many AI experts, the best we have—and it helps make sense of an otherwise paradoxical moment for AI. On the one hand, the United States is undergoing an extraordinary, AI-fueled economic boom: The stock market is soaring thanks to the frothy valuations of AI-associated tech giants, and the real economy is being propelled by hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on data centers and other AI infrastructure. Undergirding all of the investment is the belief that AI will make workers dramatically more productive, which will in turn boost corporate profits to unimaginable levels.

On the other hand, evidence is piling up that AI is failing to deliver in the real world. The tech giants pouring the most money into AI are nowhere close to recouping their investments. Research suggests that the companies trying to incorporate AI have seen virtually no impact on their bottom line. And economists looking for evidence of AI-replaced job displacement have mostly come up empty.

...

The capability-reliability gap might explain why generative AI has so far failed to deliver tangible results for businesses that use it. When researchers at MIT recently tracked the results of 300 publicly disclosed AI initiatives, they found that 95 percent of projects failed to deliver any boost to profits. A March report from McKinsey & Company found that 71 percent of companies reported using generative AI, and more than 80 percent of them reported that the technology had no “tangible impact” on earnings.

...

What makes the current situation distinctive is that AI appears to be propping up something like the entire U.S. economy. More than half of the growth of the S&P 500 since 2023 has come from just seven companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. These firms, collectively known as the Magnificent Seven, are seen as especially well positioned to prosper from the AI revolution.

That prosperity has largely yet to materialize anywhere other than their share prices.

...

The dot-com crash was bad, but it did not trigger a crisis. An AI-bubble crash could be different. AI-related investments have already surpassed the level that telecom hit at the peak of the dot-com boom as a share of the economy. In the first half of this year, business spending on AI added more to GDP growth than all consumer spending combined. Many experts believe that a major reason the U.S. economy has been able to weather tariffs and mass deportations without a recession is because all of this AI spending is acting, in the words of one economist, as a “massive private sector stimulus program.” An AI crash could lead broadly to less spending, fewer jobs, and slower growth, potentially dragging the economy into a recession. The economist Noah Smith argues that it could even lead to a financial crisis if the unregulated “private credit” loans funding much of the industry’s expansion all go bust at once.

For the third year running toxic blue-green algae blooms that look like pea soup and smell like rotten eggs have covered much of Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the UK and Ireland.

But this summer, the thick green veneer -- so widespread it is visible from space -- has been worse than ever, according to locals living near the Northern Ireland landmark.

The algae growth -- fuelled by industrial, agricultural and sewage pollution, as well as climate change, according to experts -- has ravaged fishing and watersports, and prompted concerns about drinking water safety.

Though it was more than 25 years ago, I still feel the chill that ran through my body in a conference room in the wetlands of Northern California. I was a graduate student on a multi-university, interdisciplinary wetland restoration project team. We, a group of scientists from the south and west, had convened near one of our research sites, and a prominent plant biologist from Louisiana who spent her career researching the wetlands of New Orleans was presenting her work. It was four years prior to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, when we were naïve to the harsh reality that the government, at all levels, could and would devastatingly fail the most vulnerable Americans during an unprecedented natural disaster, leaving human tragedy in its wake.

Recall that in New Orleans, in the face of the catastrophic hurricane assigned the name Katrina, it was the levee system that did not hold, that burst sending water gushing back into the Lower Ninth Ward and other impoverished areas. Our project team was exploring what happens to wetland ecosystems when levee systems like the one that broke (i.e., an elevated humanmade barrier or embankment constructed to stop the natural flow of water often to create dry developable land) breach naturally over time. During her presentation, four years before Katrina, the plant biologist said she knew with certainty that if a massive storm hit, the levee systems in New Orleans would not hold. Four years prior to Katrina, she urgently shared this information with government officials, warning them of the imminent threat particularly to poor, elderly, and Black residents if the levee system broke. But instead of taking action to bolster the failing system, she was told: “We have the body bags ready.”

I know this is US focused but I think Hurricane Katrina is one of the clearest visions of the future of collapse "from within the empire" and is worth contemplating in a broader context.