The IPCC’s “Final Warning”: Only Rapid, Deep and Immediate Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cuts Can “Secure a Liveable and Sustainable Future For All”
22.3.23
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On Monday, the frenetic gossipy world of nonsense and distraction that, rather sadly and shamefully, constitutes most of what passes for news and culture these days paused for a moment to reflect upon the publication of the most significant document that will be published this year — the latest climate change report prepared by the climate scientists of the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the United Nations body founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to provide “regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation.”
This latest report — rather functionally known as the ‘AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023’ — is the final outcome of the IPCC’s sixth reporting period, which began in 2017, and which synthesises the findings of three working group reports, published in 2021 and 2022, as well as three special reports, published in 2018 and 2019.
The IPCC’s latest report establishes, as its ‘Headline Statements’ summary states, that “Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health”, and that “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
The report also points out — even though it really shouldn’t still be necessary — that it is “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases”, that “have unequivocally caused global warming”, and that the global surface temperature, in the second decade of the 21st century, was 1.1°C above what it was in the second half of the 19th century.
As the report also explains, “Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase”, based on “unsustainable energy use, land use and land-use change”, and on “lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production across regions, between and within countries, and among individuals.”
As a result, keeping global warming to an acceptable limit will involve “rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade.”
These are stark words, even with the necessary caveats: that the scientists responsible for sounding a message of imminent doom managed to do so despite efforts by representatives of the most fossil fuel-loving countries out of the 195 countries involved in the IPCC to water down their message, as they have been doing since the IPCC issued its first report back in 1992.
As usual, an all too brief flurry of media interest
The responsible mainstream media (i.e. the main broadcasters and those few newspapers that aren’t owned by fossil fuel-loving billionaires) duly highlighted the report’s stark message. The Guardian’s headline was ‘Scientists deliver “final warning” on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late’, with the tagline “IPCC report says only swift and drastic action can avert irrevocable damage to world”, and it was featured in the newspaper’s first two pages. It was also the lead report on Channel 4 News.
But, given the severity of the crisis, what the Guardian should surely have done was to give over its entire issue to the IPCC report, as should Channel 4 News with their entire hour-long show, following up with the crisis as front-page news and the lead report on an ongoing basis — perhaps, I might suggest, as they did for many months solidly last year when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Instead, the news cycle rolled on, the corruption of the Metropolitan Police became the top headline, and the opportunity to change the narrative was, yet again, lost — and more damagingly now than at any time in recent years, because the IPCC’s sixth reporting period has come to an end, and its seventh won’t reach this same point again until 2030, when those rapid, deep and immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors (to 50% of current levels) are supposed to have happened. And yet right now, as the IPCC report notes, global emissions continue to rise.
The media need to “tell the truth” relentlessly
The media’s inability stay focused on the severity of the climate crisis is a situation that those of us who care about the unprecedented scale of the climate crisis — and the unprecedented notion of what “urgency” actually means — have seen repeated over and over again, and it is profoundly dispiriting because it means that absolutely no one in the mainstream media is prepared to recognise that an unprecedented crisis — and there really is no bigger crisis than the scientifically-established reality of an unliveable planet within the lifetimes of billions of people alive today, unless we cease our current way of living as swiftly as possible — calls for an unprecedented response.
The inertia is, shamefully, far worse now, ironically, than it was when the IPCC’s ‘Global Warming of 1.5ºC’ report was published in October 2018, which warned that we had just 12 years left to cut greenhouse gas emissions significantly in an effort to prevent a global temperature rise of 1.5ºC since the advent of mass industrialisation in the 19th century, beyond which the earth would start to become uninhabitable.
It was the Guardian’s headline based on that particular report — ‘We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN’ — that shocked me into a sudden awareness that our collective lifestyles globally, and particular in the West, of course, constituted a ticking environmental time-bomb, and I was not alone in my sudden apprehension of what climate scientists has been warning about for years. Coinciding with the report, Greta Thunberg began her hugely influential ’School Strikes for Climate’ in Sweden, and, in London, the protest group Extinction Rebellion began a campaign of civil disruption, to urge governments to ‘Tell the Truth.’
Within months, politicians were queuing up to declare ‘climate emergencies’, but that, it turned out, was just virtue signalling, and no politician anywhere on earth was prepared to actually follow up with concrete measures designed to, for example, cut all new oil, gas and coal exploitation, and to reduce emissions across every sector of society by a minimum of seven percent a year on an ongoing basis; in other words, seven percent cuts every year in all transport emissions, in construction emissions, in the emissions from animal farming, in the production of the vast range of consumer goods that use fossil fuels, and so on.
Instead, Covid came along, and, when we’d all experienced a glimpse of the peace and cleanliness of accidental ‘degrowth’ — an extraordinary by-product of the lockdowns — the giddy rush to return to ‘business as usual’ began in earnest, even though most of us had by now, however fleetingly, accepted how ruinous it was.
The skies are once more full of extraordinarily polluting planes, taking us on the holidays that none of us want to play a part in forswearing for our own survival, cruise ships pollute the seas once more, toxic building sites are everywhere, and our streets are once more choked with polluting vehicles. We also continue to eat too much meat, and to unquestioningly ‘treat’ ourselves by buying products whose environmental impact we wilfully ignore. Nowhere are seven percent cuts a year in evidence, and those with the power to do anything about it — the media and our politicians — have, fundamentally, abdicated all responsibility.
Seven percent emissions cuts across all sectors of the economy now
We need seven percent cuts a year across all sectors now, and it’s time for the mainstream media to start focusing on this obligation with the urgency it requires, and on politicians to start educating the public about how ‘peak everything’ is over, because it is killing us, and we will all have to adapt to less.
It’s not even as though most of this will be arduous. Fossil fuels are filthy, while renewable energy is not, and although so many of us have become sick with a gluttony for the spoils of the over-exploitation of our miraculous planet, most of us weren’t like this a generation ago, and can unlearn our ecocidal impulses.
But if we’re to do this, the responsible mainstream media needs to focus relentlessly on the climate crisis, shepherding the public towards an understanding of why we need ‘degrowth’ across all sectors of society that rely on fossil fuel extraction, and how that can be achieved.
Hammering home the message that emissions need to be cut by 7% a year would be a good start, I think, and, if broadcasters were also prepared to give a significant amount of time to those with solutions — regarding sustainable energy, for example, as opposed to new and continuing fossil fuel extraction — it’s just imaginable that, eventually, growing recognition of the scale of the problem, the urgent need to tackle it, and, crucially, the absolute non-viability of any more evasionary tactics whatsoever, might prompt the government to take it seriously, and to recognise that cutting emissions by 50% will require leadership, a massive programme of education, and, if that is not sufficiently successful, legislation.
Progress has already been achieved in the media, as their obsession with ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ — always interviewing people from both sides of any argument — seems to have been quietly done away with when it comes to climate change. This is as it should be, of course, because, when the scientific consensus regarding the man-made nature of the climate crisis, and its ever more alarming manifestations, is almost 100%, indulging in this so-called ‘balance’ would be fundamentally, even criminally irresponsible.
Tackling conspiracy theories
I also think that the mainstream media need to much more robustly tackle the growing tide of misinformation emanating from the opaquely-funded ‘think-tanks’ (lobbying groups) clustered in and around Tufton Street, and to stop allowing their representatives to be interviewed on mainstream news programmes as part of their commitment to ’balance’ and ‘objectivity’, and, perhaps more importantly, to delve as deeply as possible into the world of conspiracy theories, which has grown alarmingly since Covid, obsessed with notions of global state control, and clearly driven by shadowy right-wing sources tied to the fossil fuel industry.
In amongst all the paranoia about ‘The Great Reset’, these dark forces continue to push climate change denial messages, as can be seen in their troublingly successful efforts to portray ’15 Minute Cities’, LDNs and the expansion of Ulez as a kind of green fascism, aimed at curbing what is promoted as the ultimate human right — for people to continue driving as much as they want, whenever they want, and, more broadly, to do whatever they want, whenever they want, even though these notions of ‘liberty’ serve only to sustain the fossil fuel industry, and other corporations whose profits depend on consumer compliance.
I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t practical problems with LTNs and the Ulez expansion — but certainly not with the notion of ’15 Minute Cities’, an eminently sensible suggestion that has, nevertheless, been interpreted as the first post-Covid implementation of what we might call the notion of ‘prison cities.’ Overall, however, it is deeply troubling that a significant proportion of the population is being shepherded towards a fabricated form of insurrectionary outrage by the same dark forces that promoted the rise of Donald Trump, that promoted Brexit, and that began with astonishingly risible claims of a Democratic paedophile ring in the US.
The Big One: April 21 in London
While I’m very serious about the need for as public a discussion as possible about the urgent requirement for the mainstream media to prioritise the climate crisis above all other news, and to focus on it relentlessly, I also remain committed to public pressure, and I encourage everyone in the UK who cares about the extent of the crisis to come to Parliament Square from Friday April 21 to Monday April 24 for what Extinction Rebellion are calling ‘The Big One’, a proposed 100,000-strong gathering that could, if enough people believe in it, be the most powerful demonstration of collective people power in our lifetimes.
Just two days ago, I was delighted to see a tweet from XR announcing that nearly 50 organisations have already signed up to support the action, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, EarthDay.org, the PCS Union, War on Want, CND, Global Justice Now, the Quakers, CAFOD and the National Education Union’s Climate Change Network.
So please, come along on April 21, and bring as many people you know with you as well. With the government cynically legislating to make protest illegal, overwhelming the police with numbers seems like the most intelligent way forward. Who knows? It could even be a ‘velvet revolution’ movement, but, even if it isn’t, it’s a hugely important opportunity for those of us who grasp the unprecedented enormity of the challenges we face — and the need for urgent action to dismantle capitalism in its current form — to insist that profound and significant change needs to begin now, and cannot, on the grounds of “pragmatism” or denial, be endlessly deferred.
For the first time in our lives, we — humanity as a whole — face an existential threat that cannot be ducked, ignored, or walked away from. The longer we delay, the worse the outcomes will be — and not in some far distant future, but within years.
The time for action is now!
* * * * *
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.
To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.
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25 Responses
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
Here’s my latest article, examining the just-published report by the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which synthesises and updates the findings of previous reports (since 2018), establishing that a future livable planet depends on us collectively making rapid, deep and immediate cuts to greenhouse gas emissions before 2030.
I particularly look at the failure of the mainstream media to prioritise this unprecedented crisis, and to report on it relentlessly, as well as highlighting the need for there to be a practical focus on how greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by 7% a year from now on (50% by 2030).
I also urge anyone concerned to come to Parliament Square on April 21 for a protest initiated by Extinction Rebellion (and already supported by nearly 50 other organisations), which organisers are hoping will attract 100,000 people — too many, I hope, for it to be shut down.
...on March 22nd, 2023 at 7:42 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Caro Lina wrote:
Thanks Andy X
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:33 am
Andy Worthington says...
You’re welcome, Caro Lina. Good to hear from you!
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:33 am
Andy Worthington says...
Natalia Rivera Scott wrote:
Thank you, Andy. I appreciate you tagging me in climate change articles too.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:34 am
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks, Natalia. I’m glad you appreciate me tagging you. From what I understand, you’ve been feeling the effects of climate change much more acutely than we have here.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:34 am
Andy Worthington says...
Natalia Rivera Scott wrote:
Andy, I feel anguished all the time because of climate change. I try to live zero waste as much as I can. Part of the reason I won’t have children are both our causes: the injustices of the world and the climate change… all the damage and destruction …
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:35 am
Andy Worthington says...
It’s very sad to hear that you don’t want to bring children into this world, Natalia, but I can’t blame you. Even in 1999, when my son was born, I wondered what the future would be, and the last 24 years seem only to have confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions about how bad things could get. Perhaps we’ll find some way collectively to overthrow all these mainly evil old men who hate their lives so much that they want to take us all down with them, but I can’t see how right now – although I haven’t given up hope, and in the end that hope is what’s required.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:36 am
Andy Worthington says...
Natalia Rivera Scott wrote:
Andy, don’t be sad 🙃 I’m very happy with my decision. And I think we will achieve what you say, or your son’s generation or my niece’s…🥰
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:36 am
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks for that encouragement, Natalia, but I am sad tonight – because of focusing on this article, I think, and because I feel that I can no longer trust the weather, which, here in London, seems pretty relentlessly grey and windy and threatening right now, as if nature is at war with us.
I realise it’s an unusual situation in which to find myself. I’m more generally angry, and believe, as John Lydon sang, that “Anger is an energy.” This sadness is something else. It feels more like love, so maybe that’s how we’ll win. Our love – for the planet, for each other – will grow ever stronger, and those who hate, those who are killing us, will end up overwhelmed.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:45 am
Andy Worthington says...
Kevin Hester wrote:
The IPCC report is junk. Junk science and junk, so called solutions.
They lie about how much warming we’ve triggered and they lie about the efficacy of mitigation.
We’ve triggered over 6 dozen feedback loops, most of them irreversible.
The IPCC was set up by the corporations to protect the corporations, please don’t give them any credibility whatsoever.
https://kevinhester.live/2021/09/06/its-time-to-acknowledge-the-spectacular-success-of-the-ipcc/
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:46 am
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks, Kevin. I know you’ve posted that link before, but I have to say that my opinion of the IPCC isn’t so harsh. I think it’s troubling that the context of the IPCC means that scientists have to struggle constantly with the different agendas of politicians (and their corporate masters), which waters down the message, but I can’t imagine how, without the IPCC, we’d ever hear much about the science at all.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:46 am
Andy Worthington says...
Kevin Hester wrote:
“In the latest ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 5th Assessment Report’ (IPCC AR5), there have been published a selection of ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCP’s).
Dr Matt Watson, from the school of earth Sciences at the University of Bristol (UK), made this point strongly at a recent meeting at the Royal Society in London: “Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this research? This is why, this is the latest projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the alarming thing is that these two scenarios [RCP 2.6 and RCP 4.5] both include negative emissions technology. So, there is geoengineering, of the flavour of carbon dioxide removal, in the best case scenarios.”
“The very, very alarming thing for us is that we are on this path here, that is RCP 8.5. We are slap bang on this trajectory and this puts us in a very different place in our children’s lifetime.”
All hope of maintaining a liveable planet has been gambled on negative emissions technology that simply does not exist. In fact it is “Fantasy Technology” that they hope will be invented sometime in the future.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:47 am
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, that’s really quite disturbing, Kevin. I’ve been more focused on the efforts over all these years to alert people to the severity of the crisis, rather than problems with the alleged solutions, which you so helpfully expose here.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:48 am
Andy Worthington says...
Anita Tuesley wrote:
Kevin, the IPCC was set up with noble intentions in my view based on what I’ve read. They realised they’d get nowhere without a consensus to act around so invited all stakeholders to the table. That big oil and big ag along with oil states and other corporate interests were invited in good faith but have deliberately skewed the consensus towards extremely conservative findings is devastating. There’s also the fact that the science tends to build on previous science and funders tend to fund science that has known foundations, so there’s little chance of outside the box thinking, findings or funding. It’s within the capitalist, ecological modernisation paradigm/frame, so neglects low-tech or nature- based solutions. I think this is the true story, and an accurate critique, so close enough to your critique. I just don’t understand these representatives of corporate interests and oil states. Don’t they consider their children’s interests?
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:49 am
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks for your assessment, Anita. I too wonder about the criminals in the world of fossil fuels, who will end up responsible for the greatest genocide in human history, and how they justify their actions, especially as it has become clearer that they commissioned research in the ’80s that confirmed the deadly impact of man-made global heating via fossil fuel emissions, but then deliberately hid that information.
There is a darkness in the motives of certain individuals – mostly men – that I can’t fathom. They seem, quite fundamentally, not to care about life itself. Perhaps the lesson is that capitalism itself involves a hatred of life, as the making of vast fortunes is so often connected with waging war on nature, and, by extension, on ourselves.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:50 am
Andy Worthington says...
Valerie Jeans wrote:
Thank you, Andy
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:50 am
Andy Worthington says...
You’re welcome, Valerie. Good to hear from you.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:51 am
Andy Worthington says...
Ed Calipel wrote:
Watching the audience on “Top of the Pops”, dancing moronically to a song about their impending death (Strawbs, Lay Down) is both amusing and sobering; it illustrates something about humans.
I’d applaud destruction of the overwhelming percentage of the human race were it to leave those that had even a vestigial relationship with nature behind. So as to preserve for the precious time that remains all species rather than their demise be accelerated by human greed and stupidity.
Of course, it won’t happen; everything every individual does matters, despite the irresponsible percentage who believe it’s their right to take a jet at a whim – and the internet is awash with stories about women who’d rather starve than let their children “go without” designer clothes – but many of us now only persevere because we see the beauty in what we still have yet are losing in the blink of a metaphorical eye.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:51 am
Andy Worthington says...
That’s a very eloquent defence of nature against the mass of human stupidity, Ed, and I can see why you have found somewhere and have embarked on endeavours that, it seems to me, have allowed you to find your place in what may very well be a dying world.
I’m feeling rather saddened by it all right now, almost certainly because the weather is no longer right, no longer trustworthy, here in London — repetitively grey and overcast and oppressive, and with winds that appear quite menacing. Cycling around and seeing all the human poverty in such unnerving climactic conditions is quite challenging.
I’m reminded of when I was interviewed by Chris Hedges about Guantanamo a few years ago, and arrived at the studio to find Dahr Jamail also preparing for an interview with Chris. I had got to know Dahr when he was reporting on Iraq, when I was in the early years of my Guantanamo work, but when we met he had just spent years travelling and studying climate collapse first-hand for his book ‘The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption’, and I was very affected by his interview with Chris, which, at its heart, involved two middle-aged men discussing how they were making their peace with the ongoing collapse of a liveable world.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 12:52 am
Andy Worthington says...
Natalia Rivera Scott wrote:
Don’t be sad, Andy. Plan a vacation here in Mexico (I read in one of your articles while translating that you don’t want to take those flights anymore because of the environmental impact; it only made me admire you more) but maybe Greece or somewhere closer with nice weather 🙃
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 10:08 am
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, I didn’t feel that I could justify a long-haul flight to the US this January, Natalia. I’ve not banned myself from flying entirely. Dot and I are flying to Turkey, where we have friends, on a cheap holiday in July, but one international flight a year rather than two, for example, noticeably cuts my contribution to emissions.
In my article, I discuss how we need emissions cuts across all sectors by seven percent a year from now on, and it’s that that I really want to see implemented by governments, and supported by what remains of a responsible mainstream media.
Imagine if it was official government policy, along with concrete steps to directly reduce emissions in sectors over which the government had control, and people were encouraged to drive less, to fly less, to consume less.
1 in 13 car journeys not taken, 1 in 13 environmentally toxic sweat shop clothes not bought, 1 in 13 Amazon-destroying steaks not consumed …
No doubt many people wouldn’t cooperate, and the ‘libertarians’ would be up in arms, but how can it be that our governments, and our responsible media aren’t even trying to get people to engage directly in ‘degrowth’?
Instead, however, we have targets that we’ve been told are necessary since that 1.5C report in October 2018 that was so influential, and yet no government has been prepared to embark on policies that actually seek to make a 7% reduction a year in emissions across all sectors into reality, and so each year that nothing happens the time we have left to effect change on the scale that is needed gets shorter.
Over the last few years, it’s been obvious that catastrophic changes to the climate are already happening, and that notions that we have until the 2030s to see the effects of our inaction are unravelling faster than even many experts predicted, and yet still there’s no genuine declaration of an emergency by any government except those most powerless in the Global South who are already suffering the devastation.
What is it going to take for people with power and influence to act? The ICC charges Putin, while the oil company executives who knew what was happening decades ago, but hid the truth still remain unindicted and largely anonymous, even though they will one day be remembered as those who bear the largest responsibility for the coming genocide, which will dwarf anything we’ve seen in the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 10:09 am
Andy Worthington says...
Natalia Rivera Scott wrote:
Andy, I saw a reel about an artist that said that she’s grateful to her anger. I am, with mine. I’m very angry lately and sad and hurt but anger also gives strength.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 10:10 am
Andy Worthington says...
Mature individuals trying to be responsible are such a mix of emotions, Natalia. My anger drives me, and although the self-help industry has tried for decades to suggest that it means there’s something wrong with me, I know that’s not true. My anger is a manifestation of my intelligence and my love. We’re not just one thing. I can also be silly, I have a cynical wit, and sometimes I’m sad, although I try generally to avoid that, as it can tip into brief depressions that paralyse me. That said, there’s something in the sadness that I’m beginning to see can connect me more strongly to people than perhaps anything else – a sympathy, perhaps for their suffering, in the face of the enormity of the suffering we’re all having to deal with as our miraculous life-sustaining atmosphere begins to turn against us.
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 10:10 am
Andy Worthington says...
Here’s an interesting development: the Harvard Environmental Law Review has accepted a paper arguing that fossil fuel companies “have not simply been lying to the public, they have been killing members of the public at an accelerating rate, and prosecutors should bring that crime to the public’s attention.” One of the authors, David Arkush, who is also the director of the climate program at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, says, very aptly, “What’s on their ledger in terms of harm, there’s nothing like it in human history.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/22/big-oil-companies-homicide-harvard-environmental-law-review
...on March 23rd, 2023 at 4:26 pm
The IPCC’s Final Warning, by Andy Worthington – Dandelion Salad says...
[…] Andy Worthington Writer, Dandelion Salad Andy Worthington website, Mar. 22, 2023 March 25, […]
...on March 25th, 2023 at 5:04 pm