As Our Planet Burns

While nations rally to reduce their carbon emissions, and try to adapt at-risk places to hotter conditions, there is an elephant in the room: for large portions of the world, local conditions are becoming too extreme and there is no way to adapt. People will have to move to survive.

Over the next fifty years, hotter temperatures combined with more intense humidity are set to make large swathes of the globe lethal to live in. Fleeing the tropics, the coasts, and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes; you will be among them, or you will be receiving them. 

This migration has already begun—we have all seen the streams of people fleeing drought-hit areas in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where farming and other rural livelihoods have become impossible.

The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent as the planet heats.

We can—and we must—prepare. Developing a radical plan for humanity to survive a far hotter world includes building vast new cities in the more tolerable far north while abandoning huge areas of the unendurable tropics. 

It involves adapting our food, energy, and infrastructure to a changed environment and demography as billions of people are displaced and seek new homes.  READ MORE...

Femicide

Gulsum Kav, founder of We Will Stop Femicide

Femicide - the killing of women and girls because of their gender - is the most extreme form of gender-based violence, but in many countries no record is kept of the number of cases. BBC 100 Women spoke to three women who carry out detective work to identify femicides, and obtain justice for victims.


Gulsum Kav began a campaign to stop femicide in 2010, the year after the dead body of a teenager, Munevver Karabulut, was found in a bin in Istanbul. It took police more than six months to track down the suspect, leading to protests on the streets of Istanbul.


One of Gulsum's goals was to understand how many murders take place Turkey, in which the killer's motive is gender-related.


Another was to provide support to Munevver's family as the case came to trial. "We have a slogan today, 'You will never walk alone,' which came from this," she says.


But soon Gulsum and her fellow activists in We Will Stop Femicide found themselves taking on the role of investigators.


"It started when a letter arrived from a family who believed their daughter had died in suspicious circumstances," she says.


This was the case of Esin Gunes, a young teacher whose body was found at the bottom of a cliff in Siirt province, south-eastern Turkey, in August 2010.

What is femicide?

• Femicide is defined as "the murder of women because they are women" or "the gender-related killing of women and girls"
• Eighteen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have adopted specific laws making femicide a criminal offence
• In many other countries the word is not widely used, but is increasingly being adopted by campaigners against gender-based violence

Esin's husband said they had gone to the area for a walk and a picnic, and she had slipped to her death. While the authorities initially accepted this story, the family didn't, as Esin had only recently returned to her husband after walking out and saying she wanted a divorce.


Gulsum's team commissioned a report which proved it was not physically possible to fall in the way she did and that she must have been thrown. This led to her husband's conviction for murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Since that first case, the team has worked on over 30 suspected femicides.  READ MORE...

Fossil Fuels

24 November 2021
Fossil Fuels: Stranded Assets and Fire Sales
By Gwynne Dyer


An article with the innocuous title ‘Reframing Incentives for Climate Policy Action’ slipped out in the scientific journal ‘Nature Energy’ three weeks ago and got very little attention, presumably because of the hopeless title. But it’s not innocuous at all. It’s explosive.


It explains why about half of the world’s oil and gas industry will die in the next 15 years, while the other half enjoys one last frenzied round of growth. Listen carefully, and you can already hear the smart money starting to move.


As the lead author of the article, Jean-François Mercure of Exeter University, told The Guardian: “People will keep investing in fossil fuels until suddenly the demand they expected does not materialise and they realise what they own is worthless.” Stranded assets, in other words. But that won’t happen everywhere in fifteen years’ time; just in some places.


The authors of the article took the national pledges of ‘Net Zero by 2050’ that have proliferated across the planet recently, worked out what that implies in terms of declining demand for oil and gas, and identified which oil- and gas-exporting countries will still be in the game by the mid-2030s.


Not all the Net Zero pledges will be kept in full, of course, but there will be still enough cuts in fossil fuel use, soon enough, to create a nightmare of falling global demand for all the fossil-fuel producers of the world. Anybody can see that. It takes a little more work to calculate who goes under and who doesn’t – or at least not right away.


What they foresee is that the lowest-cost producers, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, will go for broke. Nobody can compete with them on price (they can make a profit even when oil costs only $20 a barrel), so they will flood the world market with cheap oil.


They haven’t done that in the past because they could make much more per barrel if the supply stayed tight. But that’s a long-term perspective, and there is no long term for fossil fuels any more.


If it is clear that a lot of oil and gas assets are going to stay in the ground forever, then it is your patriotic duty to make sure that the stranded assets belong to other countries, not to yours.


So drop your price to $20 a barrel, drive all the higher cost competitors out of the market, and sell as much you can before demand collapses entirely.


The authors of the paper calculate that Saudi Arabia, for example, could earn $1.7 trillion before demand completely dries up if it goes the ‘fire sale’ route, compared to only $1.3 trillion if it cooperates with all the non-Arab members of OPEC and tries to hold oil and gas prices up. $400 billion is a big difference, so which way do you think they’ll jump?


Who goes to the wall first in this scenario? High-cost producers working in tar sands, oil shales, deep water and Arctic areas, so Canada, the United States, Latin America (mostly Mexico and Brazil), and Russia. But even the lowest-cost producers go broke by 2050, if all those ‘Net Zero by 2050' pledges come true.


Maybe all these changes can happen without grave impacts on other parts of the global economy, but history suggests otherwise. If too many players realise their assets are stranded at the same time, we could get the mother of all market crashes out of this.


Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘The Shortest History of War’.