What can we say about the role indigenous communities play in protecting the environment?
Indigenous people across the world mobilize against damaging environmental activities to protect their sacred lands, water, and traditional way of life, and they are involved in 41 percent of documented environmental conflicts, according to a new study analyzing nearly 3,000 community movements. Across the board, environmental defenders face high rates of criminalization, physical violence, and assassination, but the risk is significantly higher when indigenous people are involved. In my experience reporting from across Mexico and Central America, environmentally destructive projects -- such as mining, dams, logging, and tourism resorts -- are imposed on indigenous communities without any consultation or compensation, and when they resist investors and politicians try to discredit them as anti-development and anti-green energy. This simply isn't true. Imposing these environmentally destructive projects, including clean-energy projects, will destroy indigenous communities who could teach us so much about sustainability.
Climate SchoolOrganized labor is often lumped in with progressive groups as a champion of environmental progress, and, indeed, many unions are engaged in the fight for a Green New Deal. But, as the climate journalist Steve Horn reminds us, in an incisive piece of reporting, other unions have continued to fight for pipelines and other big fossil-fuel initiatives. Some of them are joining with the former Obama Administration Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in a coalition to back "clean coal," natural gas, and other fossil-fuel projects. It will be fateful to see which vision carries the day, as the Democrats choose an energy future: the other pole is represented here, by Varshini Prakash, whom Senator Bernie Sanders has named to the joint task force on climate that he formed with Joe Biden. (The chairs are Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the former Secretary of State John Kerry.)
A new study finds that four more years of Donald Trump could delay global-emissions cuts by a decade, since it will not just depress action here but give other leaders around the world a good excuse for inaction.
Another new study -- this one headed by the senators Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, Debbie Stabenow, of Michigan, and Chuck Schumer, of New York -- details the decades-long effort to stage a right-wing "capture" of the American judiciary, helping to insure a rising number of court decisions protecting polluters.
ScoreboardThe number of birds in North America has fallen by a third since 1970, and climate change now seems to be making long-distance migration -- always something of a miracle -- much more difficult.
A lot of oil companies are making promises to go "net zero" in emissions by 2050, and this trend has come in for questions and critiques from environmental groups. That's not a problem for ExxonMobil, though -- always the hold-my-beer champion of corporate irresponsibility. At last week's shareholder meeting, Darren Woods, the chairman and chief executive, said that there would be no such targets for the company. He also told shareholders that there are no plans to invest in renewable energy, because the company has no "unique advantage" in the field. If nothing else, ExxonMobil's intransigence makes embarrassingly clear the failure of engagement strategies pursued by those who have chosen to work with the company rather than to divest their shares, a group that includes New York State (under the comptroller, Tom DiNapoli) and the Church of England.
On the world's short list of truly bad ideas: flying cars, which are apparently now under development at 20 different companies, and which, as Kevin DeGood, of the Center for American Progress, says, would "represent the technological apotheosis of sprawl and an attempt to eradicate distance as a fact of life for elites who are wealthy enough to routinely let slip the bonds of gravity."
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against several big oil companies, sending lawsuits seeking to hold them responsible for the effects of climate change back to California state courts. The companies had argued that damage from global warming was "speculative," and that, in any event, Congress had urged them to produce more hydrocarbons.
The United States consumed more energy from renewables than from coal last year -- the first time this has happened since the 19th century. Meanwhile, those who invested in fossil-fuel stocks have seen their value crater by more than 40 percent in the first four months of this year, while investments in renewable energy grew more than two percent.
Warming UpThe former Times science reporter Andrew Revkin has been hosting what he calls "Sustain What?" Webcasts, with Columbia University's Earth Institute, to foster "online conversations and communities shaping solution-oriented policy and personal paths amid wickedly intertwined challenges," such as COVID-19 and climate change. Late last month, he invited the University of Alabama biologist Gui Becker, whom you can hear singing his own composition, "Cataclysmic Chaos," at 1:17:45 of this YouTube video.
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