The Okavango has been described as one of the world's largest inland deltas. What would a visitor notice about it?
Flying into the Okavango Delta, [you can see] water materialize from the barren landscape of the Kalahari Desert sands. Immediately, you feel its vastness. It's surprising. It's so dry and then, suddenly, it's an oasis of green. The trillions of gallons of water that flow here start in Angola's highlands, cross Namibia's Caprivi strip, then fan out into a patchwork of islands, lagoons, and grassy floodplains in Botswana's northwest corner. In a world with rapidly diminishing biodiversity, it's an unparalleled gem -- filled with an array of elephants, lions, antelope, and more. There's a magical quality that draws tourists here and creates a lifeline of sustainable revenue for the region. But underneath are Permian shales. That's made it a target for the fossil-fuel industry.
What do the local people you talked to imagine about their future with drilling? Do they even know about it?
About two hundred thousand people live here, but only a fraction are aware of the drilling. However, like most rural communities facing the start of oil-and-gas development, those aware of the project probably don't understand what's coming. Even the people involved in permitting it may not understand what they signed on to. That's happened in a lot of American communities, like in western Colorado. People expect jobs, but they're short-term jobs for highly skilled people. They expect income from selling supplies, but the revenue stream doesn't last. A store takes out loans to fill orders, but, within a few years, orders dry up, and they can't repay the debt, so are forced to close. It's the nature of this boom-and-bust business -- drill, drill, drill, until one day you can't. In the meantime, you lose your clean air. You lose your clean water. All for some money. For some people, that might be a good enough trade-off. But, usually, for the people that live there, it's not.
There are also big plans for an East African Crude Oil Pipeline. Is Africa a kind of last-gasp oil play? What might be done to slow it down?
From pipelines planned for Kenya and Uganda, to a gas development in northern Mozambique being fought over with guns, to drilling in South Africa's environmentally sensitive offshore regions, the fossil-fuel industry appears to have placed Africa in its sights. It's creating a terrible Faustian bargain where, even if the leadership of a country changes, the contracts will still be valid and a new administration will have to accept those developments for decades to come, instead of developing "leapfrog" technologies like solar and wind. One way to stop it is public pressure. Another is for donor countries to put pressure on the region's governments to make better choices and add transparency to the process. Pressuring the U.S., Canadian, and German governments may also provide the impetus for this disastrous policy to change for the better.
Michael Benson, an Ottawa-based artist, wrote an essay for the Times about watching our planet through satellite feeds -- and especially about the way that smoke swirling from wildfires became a signature of 2020.
Kate Aronoff offers a sobering analysis of Joe Biden's climate promises in The New Republic. Bottom line: "Dealing with the climate crisis will mean breaking down the traditional firewall between the voluntary rules of global climate policymaking and the ironclad ones encasing the rights of capital and carbon to flow freely."
What happens when a movement that's in the streets every week meets a pandemic? Yale E360 provides a look at Fridays for Future, the movement that grew out of Greta Thunberg's climate strike. It quotes "Germany's Greta," Luisa Neubauer: "We're trying to figure things out now. Beating the coronavirus is the first thing we have to do, but the fight to save the climate can't stop. It will continue in other ways, and when this crisis is over the climate crisis will look different. We may even have a better chance. We know that political will, when it is there, can move mountains. We are experiencing this right now in the [coronavirus] crisis."
Here's an interesting thought experiment from the energy analyst Michael Barnard, who asks what if, in the nineteen-fifties, instead of concentrating on "Atoms for Peace" and building nuclear reactors, we'd focused on "Renewables for Peace"?
The much-loved novelist Louise Erdrich, who is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, provides a moving denunciation of the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline, which is currently under construction in Minnesota, and will cut across Indigenous treaty lands.
Climate Town's Rollie Williams deserves some kind of prize for this video explaining, in sprightly terms, why plastic recycling is pretty much a scam.
Arthur Waskow, the indefatigable Philadelphia rabbi who has been at the heart of social and ecological movements for decades, has published a useful essay outlining a localized green new deal that was designed, in part, to circumvent rural distaste for big government programs. He writes, "The point would be to emphasize neighborhood co-ops. That would be the crucial difference from almost all existing massive Green campaigns -- deliberately funneling money and attention into the heavily Republican rural areas, only for renewable energy rather than for tariff relief as the Trump Administration did."
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