Dilip Simeon's blog

The past week has seen record-breaking heat waves across Europe. Wildfires have ripped through Spain, Portugal and France. London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II. The U.K. saw its hottest day on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit. In China, more than a dozen cities issued the “highest possible heat warning” this weekend with over 900 million people in China enduring a scorching heat wave along with severe flooding and landslides across large swathes of southern China. Dozens of people have died. Millions of Chinese have been displaced. Economic losses run into the billions of yuan. Droughts, which have destroyed crops, killed livestock and forced many to flee their homes, are creating a potential famine in the Horn of Africa. More than 100 million people in the United States are under heat alerts in more than two dozen states from temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s and low 100s. Wildfires have destroyed thousands of acres in California . More than 73 p...

In case you hadn’t been paying attention, it’s hot on this planet. I mean, really hot. And I’m not just thinking about Europe’s worst heat wave in at least 200 years . There, fires in Spain, Portugal, and France rage , barely checked. Nor do I have in mind the devastating repeated spring heat waves in South Asia or the disastrous drought in the Horn of Africa . It’s burning right here! Scarcely noticed in the rest of the country (or in national news coverage), the American Southwest and parts of the West are in a megadrought of historic proportions. And parts of New Mexico, as naturalist and TomDispatch regular William deBuys describes so vividly today, have been burning in jaw-dropping fashion. (As a poor state, its fires don’t get the attention that those in wealthier southern California might.) And yet, right now in what Noam Chomsky recently suggested could be “the last stage in human history,” the question is: When it comes to climate change, who’s really paying att...

The last time there was open war between major European powers was in 1945. The last time the Northern Hemisphere was this hot was probably 125,000 years ago. Yet the FTSE 100 is worth more than ever, corporate profits are higher than ever, there are more British billionaires than ever. And oil companies are richer than ever. If we took climate change seriously, the petroleum industry would be bankrupt. These firms borrow billions against the future value of reserves they are yet to drill, but atmospheric physics demands we can’t burn that carbon if we wish civilisation to survive. If our modern societies are to continue to exist in recognisable form, oil companies’ assets are worthless. And if we aren’t, they are still worthless... https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/heatwave-climate-crisis-nhs-fossil-fuel-capitalism-hunger/ Banks are incentivised to fund climate chaos. Here’s how to change that The world’s largest banks are investing billions into heavily polluting industries, ...

Only breaking at midday to refuel on peanuts and palm wine, the village works methodically as a unit to grow fonio – a precious grain crucial to their diets that only takes days to germinate and can be harvested in as little as six weeks. Though laborious, growing fonio, one of Africa’s oldest cultivated grains, is simple and reliable, say Kamara’s Bedik people. It grows naturally, they insist, where mainstream crops such as wheat and rice are harder to cultivate. It is also well adapted to the climate, nutritious, tastes good and can be stored far longer than other grains. “If you put in front of me some fonio and also something made of maize, I’ll push aside the other because the fonio is much healthier. There are no chemicals used; it just grows naturally and then we harvest it. We don’t add anything,” says Kamara... https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jul/07/fonio-indigenous-crops-africa-food-security NORMAN MILLER: The forgotten foods that could excite our...

When I began work as an environmental journalist in 1985, I knew I would struggle against people with a financial interest in destructive practices. But I never imagined that we would one day confront what appears to be an ideological commitment to destroying life on Earth. The UK government and the US supreme court look as if they are willing the destruction of our life support systems. It feels like the end game. In the US last week, the third perverse and highly partisan supreme court decision in a few days made American efforts to prevent climate breakdown almost impossible. Ruling in favour of the state of West Virginia , the court decided that the Environmental Protection Agency is not entitled to restrict carbon dioxide emissions from power stations. The day before, in the UK, the government’s climate change committee reported a “shocking” failure by Boris Johnson’s administration to meet its climate targets. So stupid and perverse are its policies on issues such as energy sav...

Young victims of the climate crisis will on Tuesday launch legal action at Europe’s top human rights court against an energy treaty that protects fossil fuel investors. Five people, aged between 17 and 31, who have experienced devastating floods, forest fires and hurricanes are bringing a case to the European court of human rights, where they will argue that their governments’ membership of the little-known energy charter treaty (ECT) is a dangerous obstacle to action on the climate crisis. It is the first time that the Strasbourg court will be asked to consider the treaty, a secretive investor court system that enables fossil fuel companies to sue governments for lost profits. “It just can’t be that the fossil fuel industry is still more protected than our human rights,” said Julia, a 17-year-old high school student from Germany, who said she was joining the legal challenge after catastrophic lethal floods came to her home region, the Ahr valley , last July. https://www.theguardi...

Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira  have been killed  in an undeclared global war against nature and the people who defend it. Their work mattered because our planet, the threats to it and the activities of those who threaten it matter. That work must be continued. The frontlines of this war are the Earth’s remaining biodiverse regions – the forests, wetlands and oceans that are essential for the stability of our climate and planetary life-support system. The integrity of these systems is under attack from organised crime and criminal governments who want to exploit timber, water and minerals for short-term, often illegal profits. In many regions, the only thing standing in their way is  Indigenous communities  and other traditional forest dwellers, supported by civil society organisations, conservation groups and academics. My friend Dom knew how important this story was. It is why he took a year off to  research a book , How to Save the Amazon, and it is why h...

Plastic has long had the planet in its grip. All too often it is found piled up on beaches and floating as "plastic islands" in the ocean . But it also clogs the stomachs of birds and other animals, and has even made it into the human bloodstream. To date, just 9% of the world's plastic has been recycled . Some 12% has been burned, and the rest has ended up on landfills or in nature. But as dire as the situation sounds, there is light at the end of the plastic tunnel, writes intergovernmental economic organization, the OECD, in its new Global Plastic Outlook report. If countries around the world make a concerted effort.... https://www.dw.com/en/solutions-to-the-plastic-crisis-microplastics-oceans/a-62017738 Tobacco industry severely damages environment: WHO Smoking not only kills people, but also severely impacts the environment , the World Health Organization said in a report released Tuesday. The report, Tobacco: poisoning our planet, published to coincide with World No...

Apocalypse is an alarming idea, commonly taken to denote catastrophic destruction foreshadowing the end of the world. But in the original Greek, apokálypsis means a revelation or an uncovering. One vernacular definition is “to take the lid off something”.  That latter feat is exactly what Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, achieved last week, possibly inadvertently, when he suggested Britain was facing “apocalyptic” levels of food price inflation. Tory ministers fumed over what they saw as implied criticism of the government’s masterly economic management. In fact, Bailey was talking as much about the drastic impact of Ukraine-war-related rises in food costs and food shortages on people in poorer countries. “There’s a major worry for the developing world as well ... Sorry for being apocalyptic for a moment, but that is a major concern,” he said ....   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/21/apocalypse-now-the-alarming-effects-of-the-global-food-crisis ...

The African continent is responsible for only 2–3% of the world’s  carbon dioxide emissions  from energy and industrial sources. But it’s alarmingly suffering from the effects of the climate crisis, as  reports  from the UN and  others  show. On the positive side, Africa has a huge potential for climate mitigation, especially thanks to its tropical rainforests. The  Congo Basin’s  rainforests in central Africa are sometimes called Earth’s  second lungs  (after the Amazon) because of its ability to store carbon. In addition to the forest trees, the basin has  the world’s largest tropical peatlands , discovered in 2017. Scientists estimate that these peatlands store carbon worth  about 20 years  of the fossil fuel emissions of the US. The Congo Basin is also rich in biodiversity and in minerals. As long as this strategically important and rich region is not destroyed, Africa can help  fight global climate change . T...

This is a song at the end of the film Dark Waters (2019), about the lawyer  who became Duponts worst nightmare .  Dark Waters, tells of the toxic spills scandal that led to US chemicals giant DuPont  paying US$671 million (£516 million)   to settle more than 3,500 lawsuits in 2017.  The company’s plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia had been contaminating the water supply with perfluorooctanoic acid ( PFOA ), also known as C-8, which is used to make products such as Teflon. The contamination had a “probable link with six illnesses” among the local population, including kidney and testicular cancer.  DuPont had used C-8 since the 1950s. It had known since the early 1980s that the chemical was toxic to humans, but only   agreed in 2006   to phase out its use. Though the company continued to deny wrongdoing, it has become one of the classic cases in which business leaders pursued a strategy that could cause human harm long after the risks had come to ...