Humanity subsidizing ‘our own extinction,’ warns study

Extinction Rebellion blockade of the Oberbaumbrücke. Credit: Leonhard Lenz, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Extinction Rebellion blockade of the Oberbaumbrücke. Credit: Leonhard Lenz, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

World governments are spending $1.8 trillion annually to support fossil fuel emissions, deforestation, water pollution, and other harms to biodiversity and the planet.

By Julia Conley, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Releasing a new study showing that world governments spend at least $1.8 trillion annually to subsidize activities which worsen the climate crisis, global subsidies experts on Thursday said leaders must eliminate or redirect the financial supports as part of an ambitious Global Biodiversity Framework at an upcoming summit in China.

“Reforming the $1.8 trillion a year of subsidies that are harming the environment could make an important contribution towards unlocking the over $700 billion a year needed to reverse nature loss by 2030.

The B Team and Business for Nature, two organizations that push businesses around the globe to adopt sustainable practices, supported the study, titled Financing Our Survival: Building a Nature-Positive Economy Through Subsidy Reform.

According to the authors—Doug Koplow of subsidy research firm Earth Track and Ronald Steenblik of the International Institute for Sustainable Development—a lack of transparency regarding the use of subsidies means that the amount of government money being spent on the destruction of nature could be much higher than the research shows.

Photo by Evan Nitschke from Pexels
Photo by Evan Nitschke from Pexels

“Nature is declining at an alarming rate, and we have never lived on a planet with so little biodiversity,” said Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and a member of The B Team. “At least $1.8 trillion is funding the destruction of nature and changing our climate, while creating huge risks for the very businesses who are receiving the subsidies… Harmful subsidies must be redirected towards protecting the climate and nature, rather than financing our own extinction.”

The report identifies at least $640 billion in annual fossil fuel subsidies, $520 billion used by the agricultural sector, $350 billion in water management and wastewater infrastructure, and $155 billion subsidizing logging and unsustainable forest management, all of which account for the majority of annual subsidies.

The equivalent of at least 2% of the global GDP is being spent by governments to finance water pollution and air pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, biodiversity loss, planet-heating fossil fuel emissions, risks to ecosystems in oceans and waterways across the globe, and other harms to nature and humanity, the authors said.

To help finance climate crisis mitigation measures in the Global South—as wealthy nations pledged they would in 2009, promising $100 billion annually—and redirect government funds toward a transition to renewable energy and a reversal of nature loss, hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies must be eliminated or repurposed, according to the report.

A draft of the Global Biodiversity Framework calls for $500 billion per year in reformed subsidies—a target that “needs to be strengthened” in April at the U.N. Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) in Kunming, China.

“The case is clear: reforming the $1.8 trillion a year of subsidies that are harming the environment could make an important contribution towards unlocking the over $700 billion a year needed to reverse nature loss by 2030 as well as the cost of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050,” wrote the authors. “This needs to happen alongside aligning all private financial flows to nature-positive and increasing public and private finance to deliver innovative financial solutions that help protect, restore, and conserve nature.”

“With political determination and radical public-private sector collaboration,” they added, “we can reform these harmful subsidies and create opportunities for an equitable, nature-positive and net-zero economy. To do so, we must bring awareness, transparency, and disclosure on subsidies from both governments and business.”

Ahead of the biodiversity conference in April, said Business for Nature, negotiators must strengthen the Global Biodiversity Framework draft by including a commitment to reform “ALL harmful subsidies, including indirect and direct incentives.”

“Climate action is at a crossroads, in part because of the large scale of public money flowing to harmful industries and practices,” said Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and member of The B Team. “We need to see thorough subsidy reform from governments and businesses, with social and environmental considerations at the heart, to ensure a just and equitable transition for all.”

Living near fracking sites linked to higher risk of early death: Study

Fracking Site in Warren Center, PA, August 23 2013, Source: Fracking Lawyer, Ostroff Law
Fracking Site in Warren Center, PA, August 23, 2013, Source: Fracking Lawyer, Ostroff Law, (CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons).

Harvard researchers provide further evidence that, as one environmental advocate has said, “fracking is inherently hazardous to the health and safety of people and communities in proximity to it.”

By Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Elderly individuals who live near or downwind of fracking and other “unconventional” drilling operations are at higher risk of early death compared with seniors who don’t live in close proximity to such sites, according to a new study out Thursday from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Airborne contaminants from more than 2.5 million oil and gas wells across the U.S., researchers wrote in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Energy, are contributing to increased mortality among people 65 and older residing in neighborhoods close to or downwind from what is called unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD)—extraction methods that include directional (non-vertical) drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

“Although UOGD is a major industrial activity in the U.S., very little is known about its public health impacts,” Petros Koutrakis, professor of environmental sciences and one of the paper’s co-authors, said in a statement. “Our study is the first to link mortality to UOGD-related air pollutant exposures.”

Co-author Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics, population, and data science, added that “there is an urgent need to understand the causal link between living near or downwind of UOGD and adverse health effects.”

Earlier research, the Harvard Chan School acknowledged in its press release, has “found connections between UOGD activities and increased human exposure to harmful substances in both air and water, as well as connections between UOGD exposure and adverse prenatal, respiratory, cardiovascular, and carcinogenic health outcomes. But little was known about whether exposure to UOGD was associated with mortality risk in the elderly, or about exactly how exposure to UOGD-related activities may be contributing to such risk.”

To find out more, a team of 10 scholars analyzed a cohort of nearly 15.2 million Medicare beneficiaries living in all of the nation’s major UOGD exploration regions from 2001 to 2015. They also examined data collected from more than 2.5 million oil and gas wells.

For each Medicare recipient’s ZIP code and year in the cohort, researchers calculated what pollutant exposures would be if one lived close to UOGD operations, downwind of them, or both, while adjusting for socioeconomic, environmental, and demographic factors.

The closer people lived to fracked gas and other unconventional wells, the greater their risk of premature mortality, researchers found.

According to the Harvard Chan School’s summary of the study:

Those who lived closest to wells had a statistically significant elevated mortality risk (2.5% higher) compared with those who didn’t live close to wells. The study also found that people who lived near UOGD wells as well as downwind of them were at higher risk of premature death than those living upwind, when both groups were compared with people who were unexposed.

“Our findings suggest the importance of considering the potential health dangers of situating UOGD near or upwind of people’s homes,” said Longxiang Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental Health and lead author of the study.

The new study adds to a growing body of literature linking fossil fuels to negative health outcomes. In a recent report, the World Health Organization warned that burning coal, oil, and gas is “causing millions of premature deaths every year through air pollutants, costing the global economy billions of dollars annually, and fueling the climate crisis.”

Another recent study estimated that eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would save 74 million lives this century. Despite mounting evidence of the deadly toll of fossil fuels, President Joe Biden has yet to use his executive authority to cancel nearly two dozen fracked gas export projects that are set to unleash pollution equivalent to roughly 400 new coal-fired power plants.

So-called unconventional drilling practices have grown rapidly over the past decade, becoming the most common form of extraction in the U.S. As of 2015, the Harvard Chan School pointed out, “more than 100,000 UOGD land-based wells were drilled using directional drilling combined with fracking,” and “roughly 17.6 million U.S. residents currently live within one kilometer of at least one active well.”

Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly. It should be banned entirely.

—Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch
Oil rig, ~12219-12999 Macon Road, Saline Township, Michigan, June 22, 2012. Source: Dwight Burdette, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Oil rig, ~12219-12999 Macon Road, Saline Township, Michigan, June 22, 2012. Source: Dwight Burdette, (CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

In contrast to conventional oil and gas drilling, methods such as fracking require “larger volumes of water, proppants (sand or other materials used to keep hydraulic fractures open), and chemicals,” the Harvard Chan School noted.

Last summer, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) uncovered internal records revealing that since 2012, fossil fuel corporations have injected potentially carcinogenic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or chemicals that can degrade into PFAS, into the ground while fracking for oil and gas—after former President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency approved their use despite agency scientists’ concerns about toxicity.

At the time, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, called the PSR report “alarming,” and said it “confirms what hundreds of scientific studies and thousands of pages of data have already shown over the last decade: fracking is inherently hazardous to the health and safety of people and communities in proximity to it.”

“This says nothing of the dreadful impact fossil fuel extraction and burning is having on our runaway climate crisis. Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly,” said Hauter. “It should be banned entirely.”

It is 100 seconds to midnight!

It is 100 seconds to midnight
Suzet McKinney, member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists‘ Science and Security Board (SASB), and Daniel Holz, 2022 co-chair of the Bulletin’s SASB, reveal the 2022 time on the Doomsday Clock. Photo by Thomas Gaulkin/Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Lack of actionable climate policies, continuing and dangerous threats posed by nuclear weapons, disruptive technologies, insufficient global COVID-19 response, and disinformation lead to a “mixed threat environment.”

On Thursday, January 20, 2022, the 75th anniversary of its Doomsday Clock (“Clock”), the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (“Bulletin”) announced that the Clock is set at 100 seconds to midnight, closer to midnight than ever in its history. This marks our second consecutive year with the Clock at 100 seconds to midnight.

The Doomsday Clock is a metaphor for how dangerous this moment is in human history. Since 1947, the Clock has symbolized how close humanity is to destroying itself with nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies. The Clock’s time is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board with the support of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 11 Nobel Laureates. Designed by painter Martyl Langsdorf, the Clock has become an international symbol of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe. The Clock symbolizes danger, caution, hope, and our responsibility to one another.

[T]he Clock is not set by signs of good intentions but by evidence of action or, in this case, inaction. Signs of new arms races are clear.

—Scott D. Sagan, Ph.D., Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) at Stanford University, and member, Science and Security Board (SASB), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Stuck in a perilous moment

The Doomsday Clock statement explains that the Clock remains the closest it has ever been to the civilization-ending apocalypse because the world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment.”

One hundred seconds to midnight reflects the Board’s judgment that we are stuck in a perilous moment—one that brings neither stability nor security. Positive developments in 2021 failed to counteract negative, long-term trends.

—Sharon Squassoni, co-chair of the Science and Security Board (SASB), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a research professor at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University

We have an obligation and opportunity to fix these problems

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Eugene Rabinowitch, and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project. The scientists felt that they “could not remain aloof to the consequences of their work” and worked to inform the public and policymakers about manufactured threats to human existence. The Bulletin was founded on the belief that because humans created these problems, we have the obligation and opportunity to fix them.

The Doomsday Clock continues to hover dangerously, reminding us about how much work is needed to be done to ensure a safer and healthier planet. We must continue to push the hands of the Clock away from midnight.

—Rachel Bronson, PhD, president and CEO, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Key recommendations to reverse the hands of the Clock

The 2022 Doomsday Clock statement lists steps to address the current threats. Below are key recommendations to reverse the hands of the Clock:

Climate change

  • The United States and other countries should accelerate their decarbonization, matching policies to commitments. China should set an example by pursuing sustainable development pathways – not fossil fuel-intensive projects – in the One Belt One Road initiative.
  • Private and public investors need to redirect funds away from fossil fuel projects to climate-friendly investments.
  • The world’s wealthier countries need to provide more financial support and technology cooperation to developing countries to undertake strong climate action. COVID-recovery investments must favor climate mitigation and adaptation objectives across all economic sectors and address the full range of potential greenhouse gas emission reductions, including capital investments in urban development, agriculture, transport, heavy industry, buildings and appliances, and electric power.
  • At every reasonable opportunity, citizens of all countries must hold their local, regional, and national political officials and business and religious leaders accountable by asking “What are you doing to address climate change?”

Biological risks

  • US and other leaders should work through the WHO and other international institutions to reduce biological risks of all kinds through better monitoring of animal-human interactions, improvements in international disease surveillance and reporting, increased production and distribution of medical supplies, and expanded hospital capacity.
  • National leaders and international organizations must devise more effective regimes for monitoring biological research and development efforts.

Nuclear weapons

  • The Russian and US presidents should identify more ambitious and comprehensive limits on nuclear weapons and delivery systems by the end of 2022. They should both agree to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons by limiting their roles, missions, and platforms, and decrease budgets accordingly.
  • The United States should persuade allies and rivals that no-first-use of nuclear weapons is a step toward security and stability and then declare such a policy in concert with Russia (and China).
  • President Biden should eliminate the US presidents’ sole authority to launch nuclear weapons and work to persuade other countries with nuclear weapons to put in place similar barriers.
  • North Korea should codify its moratorium on nuclear tests and long-range missile tests and help other countries verify a moratorium on enriched uranium and plutonium production.

Disinformation

  • Governments, technology firms, academic experts, and media organizations need to cooperate to identify and implement practical and ethical ways to combat internet-enabled misinformation and disinformation.

Other global threats

  • Russia should rejoin the NATO-Russia Council and collaborate on risk-reduction and escalation-avoidance measures.
  • Iran and the United States must jointly return to full compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and initiate new, broader talks on Middle East security, and missile constraints.

No one changes the world alone. We’re not all going to agree, but we have to work together. And together, we will get it done.

—Hank Green, New York Times best-selling author and science communicator

#TurnBackTheClock

The Bulletin is asking people to take the #TurnBackTheClock Challenge. The challenge encourages people to share their ideas to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or TikTok using the hashtag #TurnBackTheClock. Share stories and ideas about:

  • Positive actions that inspire
  • People or groups who are making a difference
  • Ways to help make the world safer

The format for submissions can include art, writing, videos, or song.

“We can no longer afford to focus all of our efforts on other perils to the exclusion of the biological threat. If we do, diseases and the lives they take will push the second hand on the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight.”

—Asha M. George, DrPH, executive director, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, and member, Science and Security Board (SASB), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Since its inception, the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock has been set closer and farther away from midnight. In 2020, Bulletin set the Clock the closest it has ever been to midnight 100 seconds. The Clock has been set as far away as 17 minutes to midnight at the end of the Cold War.


In conjunction with the Doomsday Clock’s 75th anniversary, the Bulletin published a new book, The Doomsday Clock at 75, about the history of the Clock and its massive influence on science, politics, pop culture, entertainment, comics, and art.