In 2009, the New Scientist interviewed James Lovelock, the originator, with Lynn Margulis, of the Gaia Hypothesis, that all Earth was a great living organism. At 90, Lovelock’s outlook for the human future was dim.

Do you think we will survive?

I’m an optimistic pessimist. I think it’s wrong to assume we’ll survive 2°C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4°C, we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population.

What about work to sequester carbon dioxide?

That is a waste of time. It’s a crazy idea — and dangerous. It would take so long and use so much energy that it will not be done.

Do you still advocate nuclear power as a solution to climate change?

It is a way for the UK to solve its energy problems, but it is not a global cure for climate change. It is too late for emissions reduction measures.

So are we doomed?

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste — which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering — into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.

Would it make enough of a difference?

Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine percent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes, and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then plows into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few percent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won’t do it. http://bit.ly/2Hd9kh0

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Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large

There is now unprecedented worldwide interest in the reform of fossil fuel pricing, reflecting several underlying factors. 1 First, reducing carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions from fossil fuels is central to greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation commitments submitted by 190 countries for the 2015 Paris Agreement. Second, many countries are concerned about dangerously high local air pollution concentrations that frequently exceed (often dramatically so) World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, and much of this pollution comes from fossil fuel combustion. Third, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, many countries face growing fiscal pressures from rising debt levels, which are likely to be reinforced over the medium to longer term by spending pressures from ageing populations (especially in advanced economies) and financing needs for the Sustainable Development Goals (especially in developing economies). Increasing fossil fuel prices is administratively straightforward and could play the central role in addressing all three concerns.

 Information on the gap between existing and efficient levels of fossil fuel prices is a key ingredient of an informed debate on the need for, and benefits of, fuel pricing reform. It provides a basis for understanding the environmental, fiscal, and economic welfare impacts of moving to more efficient pricing, the likely social and political challenges, and a benchmark against which alternative policies (e.g., less ambitious fuel pricing or the use of non-pricing instruments) can be evaluated. This helps policymakers understand trade-offs, prioritize reforms, understand differences across countries, and communicate the case for reform. Download IMF PDF

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And no amount of Israeli propaganda and Eurovision whitewashing can erase the legitimacy of its right to do so.

 We have spent sleepless nights under Israeli bombs before – in 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2018. On Saturday, apartheid Israel decided to launch yet another murderous campaign of bombardment against one of the most densely populated areas on earth. 

Again, the victims were children and women. Fourteen-month-old Palestinian toddler, Siba Abu Arrar, was killed along with her pregnant aunt, Falastine, who succumbed to her wounds shortly after American-made, Israeli warplanes targeted their home in Zeitoun neighbourhood.

On Friday, like all the previous 57 Fridays, I joined thousands of peaceful protesters at the eastern fence of the Gaza concentration camp, where Israeli snipers shot and killed four Palestinians and injured 51, including children. One of those killed was 19-year-old Raed Abu Teir, who was walking on crutches, having been injured during previous protests. http://bit.ly/2Y7iy3G

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Meet The Kenyan Engineer Who Created Gloves That Turn Sign Language In Speech

 Twenty-five-year-old Kenyan engineer and innovator, Roy Allela, has created a set of gloves that will ultimately allow better communication between those who are deaf and those who are hearing yet may not necessarily know sign language. The Sign-IO gloves in essence translate signed hand movements into audible speech.

Allela’s gloves feature sensors located on each finger that detect the positioning of each finger, including how much each finger will bend into a given position. The glove connects via Bluetooth to an Android phone which then will leverage use the text-to-speech function to provide translated speech to the hand gestures of a person signing.

http://bit.ly/2H4CC1g

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Our world is a finely tuned biological entity, an entity honed by by over a billion years of evolutionary adaptation.

Our world is a delicate mechanism, which, if our environment is not maintained in a healthy state, will cease to support life. 

Nicholas Robson, Cayman Islands 1st. May 2019

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An 800-CEO-READ “Editor’s Choice” March 2019 

How We Can Harness Carbon to Help Solve the Climate Crisis 

In order to rescue ourselves from climate catastrophe, we need to radically alter how humans live on Earth. We have to go from spending carbon to banking it. We have to put back the trees, wetlands, and corals. We have to regrow the soil and turn back the desert. We have to save whales, wombats, and wolves. We have to reverse the flow of greenhouse gases and send them in exactly the opposite direction: down, not up.We have to flip the carbon cycle and run it backwards. For such a revolutionary transformation we’ll need civilization 2.0. 

A secret unlocked by the ancients of the Amazon for its ability to transform impoverished tropical soils into terra preta—fertile black earths—points the way. The indigenous custom of converting organic materials into long lasting carbon has enjoyed a reawakening in recent decades as the quest for more sustainable farming methods has grown. Yet the benefits of this carbonized material, now called biochar, extend far beyond the soil. Pyrolyzing carbon has the power to restore a natural balance by unmining the coal and undrilling the oil and gas. Employed to its full potential, it can run the carbon cycle in reverse and remake Earth as a garden planet.

Burn looks beyond renewable biomass or carbon capture energy systems to offer a bigger and bolder vision for the next phase of human progress, moving carbon from wasted sources: 

into soils and agricultural systems to rebalance the carbon, nitrogen, and related cycles; 

enhance nutrient density in food; rebuild topsoil;  

and condition urban and agricultural lands to withstand flooding and drought to cleanse water by carbon filtration and trophic cascades within the world’s rivers, oceans, and wetlands to shift urban infrastructures such as buildings, roads, bridges, and ports, incorporating drawdown materials and components, replacing steel, concrete, polymers, and composites with biological carbon to drive economic reorganization by incentivizing carbon drawdown 

Fully developed, this approach costs nothing—to the contrary, it can save companies money or provide new revenue streams. It contains the seeds of a new, circular economy in which energy, natural resources, and human ingenuity enter a virtuous cycle of improvement. Burn offers bold new solutions to climate change that can begin right now.

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Rich elites and corporations have corrupted democracy, and pushed a blind faith in markets and money so far that over the last 30 years they have caused us to breach critical planetary limits. Climate breakdown is their doing.

It has been hard to ignore the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protesters who have taken over bridges, blocked major roads, planted trees, danced and even temporarily brought a halt to the DLR tube line. Leading on from their naked protest in parliament, they have certainly grabbed the headlines, generating countless column inches (including this one), garnering radio and TV interviews, and, to the chagrin of many of the big green NGOs, sparked more discussion about climate change than years of their campaigning had done.

There are rightly many criticisms and discussions about the XR protests, from the whiteness of its mobilisation, the long term viability of building a movement solely around the tactic of “non-violent civil disobedience and disruption”, to the lack of concrete political demands to build broader public support.

As well as to the very real concern that it effectively sidelines the very people who are already facing the devastating impacts of climate change – those who are dying today and not sometime in the future, the people of the global south, who are also the ones least responsible for the climate crisis. But whatever one thinks about Extinction Rebellion, the truth is that for good or worse the School Strike for Climate and the Extinction Rebellion protests have propelled the issue of climate change up the news agenda. Read More

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There are more important issues to be  discussing than President Cobblepot’s latest tweet, but I feel the need  to examine his wall fetish in a little more depth because lately, we are seeing Democrats, including all the 2020 candidates, buying into at  least part of the Republican scare narrative.  That bothers me. As a voter, even if my elections are rigged, I like to at least think there  might be a difference between my choices. But in the last couple of  presidential elections, I voted for Jill Stein to become the first female-identified POTUS. If she or whatever Green candidate were now to  talk about our “immigration crisis,” I would blow a fuse.

According to the World Bank, by 2050 some 140 million people may be displaced by sea-level rise and extreme weather, driving escalations in crime, political unrest, and resource  conflict. Even if the most conservative predictions about our climate  future prove overstated, a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in temperature during  the next century will almost certainly provoke chaos, in what experts  call climate change’s “threat multiplier”: Displacement begets  desperation begets disorder. — The New York Times, April 10, 2019

First, let’s be clear. Immigration is a problem. So  is emigration. Climate change will make both catastrophically worse.  Most reliable estimates of the carrying capacity of the planet by  mid-century fall in the range of 1 to 2 billion. By “reliable,” I mean  science-based and factoring in the effects of rapid climate change on agriculture, water supplies, sea level rise, vector-borne disease, and biodiversity destruction. Some, like the Limits to Growth sequelae, even take microplastics into account through a morbid pollution equation. 

Contrast that 1 billion with today’s 7.7 billion (April 2019) people, topping 8 billion by 2024, and projected, but by no means certain, to hit 9 billion in 2042. Like any exponential curve,  this hockey stick began tilting upward after the Second World War and  continues to incline more steeply by the year, abbreviating its doubling  time with each generation. And yet, on the human evolutionary time  scale, Homo colossus is a relatively recent phenomenon.

As we have seen from many competent studies of the  rise and fall of great civilizations, human population adheres to a  strict functional relationship with its food supply. It is in one-to-one equilibrium. As supply rises, so does fecundity. Conversely, when  supply falls, for whatever reason, deaths outnumber births until a new  equilibrium is established. One need only look to the droughts of Northeastern Africa in recent years for a current example of how that plays out. As the droughts worsened, hunger grew, civil society  disintegrated, insurrections and civil wars erupted, and neighboring states were suddenly coping with massive refugee flows, conflict  spillovers, and disease outbreaks. Fertility plummeted. Read More

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Both Sides Now: New Solar Panels Promise a Clean Energy Revolution 

 When the U.K.’s largest subsidy-free solar farm opens later this year, there will be something a bit different about its panels: Unlike traditional panels that absorb energy on only one side, these panels will be absorbing sunlight from both sides.

The new solar farm in York, developed by Gridserve, uses “bifacial” modules, a technology that has become one of the fastest-growing trends in solar because it helps solar panels generate more electricity.

The 35-megawatt plant will generate enough power for 10,000 homes. “Bifacial panels are a no-brainer,” says Toddington Harper, chief executive of Gridserve. “In our opinion, they will be the panel of choice for the utility-scale market.” He estimates the solar farm will generate 20 percent more energy due to its combination of bifacial solar panels and trackers that enable each panel to follow the sun, compared with traditional static photovoltaic panels. http://bit.ly/2UaONg2

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