A student adjusts a sign at an encampment on the grounds of Newcastle University, protesting against the war in Gaza, May 2, 2024
Wave of campus occupations launched at six unis
THOUSANDS of pro-Palestine students across Britain are mobilising at their universities to demand an end to “complicity in Israel’s genocide” following violent demonstrations across US campuses.
Students in Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield and Bristol have joined peers in Warwick by pitching tents outside university buildings in protest against the war in Gaza.
Bristol students said they were golding the action “in protest of the university’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians,” while Apartheid Off Campus Newcastle said its own action was to “highlight the institution’s investment strategy and its complicity in the Israeli military’s war crimes.”
Student activists elsewhere have also held marches and protests.
Marine biologist Anne Hoggett records bleached and dead coral around Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia on April 5. Credit: David Gray/AFP via Getty Images
Heat waves recently extended across nearly 30 percent of the world’s oceans, an expanse equivalent to the surface area of North America, Asia, Europe and Africa.
Over the past several years, the temperature of the Earth’s oceans have been spiking high enough to trigger numerous die-offs of marine species, killing millions of corals, fish, mammals, birds and plants. Those mass die-offs also have sent a wave of emotional trauma washing over some researchers watching their life’s work vanish before their eyes.
“We talk a lot about eco grief, that sense of being overwhelmed and feeling loss,” said Jennifer Lavers, who has been tracking how thousands of seabirds have starved to death during recent ocean heat waves off the coast of western Australia as coordinator of the nonprofit marine research Adrift Lab.
Right now the extreme ocean heat in her region is waning, but globally, marine heat wave conditions extend across nearly 30 percent of the planet’s oceans, a surface area equivalent to all of North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The harms of long-term gradual ocean warming are well documented, but Lavers said the most recent studies show that increasingly frequent pulses of extreme heat are doing the most damage to marine ecosystems.
With even more mass die-offs of ocean species projected, “scientists are leaving in droves from the field,” she said. “Incredibly skilled, talented, qualified, very passionate people are leaving because no matter what they say, what they do, how many papers they publish … It doesn’t matter.”
The creatures many scientists hoped to help with their research are still in decline and often they are worse off than they were when they started their work, including the flesh-footed shearwaters that she studies, she said.
“That’s the case for me,” she said. “I have to literally say to people that my job is to describe the extinction of a species.”
Exxon’s Richard Werthamer (right) and Edward Garvey (left) are aboard the company’s Esso Atlantic tanker working on a project to measure the carbon dioxide levels in the ocean and atmosphere. The project ran from 1979 to 1982. Credit: Courtesy of Richard Werthamer
Top executives were warned of possible catastrophe from greenhouse effect, then led efforts to block solutions.
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At a meeting in Exxon Corporation’s headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world’s use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.
“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.
It was July 1977 when Exxon’s leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.
A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon’s Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles. Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.
Exxon Mobil Chairman and CEO Darren Woods speaks during the CERAWeek oil summit in Houston, Texas, on March 18. Credit: Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images
Congressional Democrats say newly released documents trace oil industry’s pivot from denial to deception.
In the wake of Inside Climate News’ 2015 stories on ExxonMobil’s research confirming fossil fuels’ role in global warming, the oil giant hit back with a #GetTheFacts social media campaign calling the reporting “misleading,” “baseless,” and “politically motivated.”
But in internal discussions, Exxon’s communications team grappled with how to respond when “we actually don’t dispute much of what these stories report,” according to one of 4,500 documents newly released by Congressional Democrats after a two-and-a-half-year investigation of industry disinformation on climate change.
At a hearing on Wednesday, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said that the new documents show the evolution of the oil industry’s response to climate change. Instead of an outright denial of the science, Whitehouse said the oil companies engaged in what he called “Climate Denial Lite.”
Big Oil, Whitehouse said, is now “pretending it is taking climate change seriously—while secretly undermining its own publicly stated goals.”
Upwards of $100trn of global spending on the green transition is typically estimated as being required by 2050. Credit: Thaiview/Shutterstock.
The Climate Damages Tax proposes a fee per tonne of CO2 embedded within the domestic extraction of coal, oil and gas.
A new report has claimed that a tax on the extraction of fossil fuels could raise $720bn by the end of the decade for to support the green transition in the world’s poorest countries.
Led by Stamp Out Poverty and backed by the likes of Greenpeace, Climate Action Network and Christian Aid, the Climate Damages Tax report, published earlier this week, examines the proposal that OECD countries, in particular members of the G7, should “lead in introducing a fee per tonne of CO2 embedded (CO2e) within the domestic extraction of coal, oil and gas.”
The report outlines that, if introduced in OECD countries in 2024 at a low initial rate of $5 per tonne of CO2e increasing by $5 per tonne each year, the tax would raise a total of $900bn by 2030. This, it says could be split so that 80% ($720bn) went to the newly established Loss and Damage Fund for helping developing countries with in responses to climate losses and damages and 20% ($180bn) was retained by countries for use domestically.
Certainly, ways to ensure money finds its way to transition efforts are necessary, with upwards of $100trn of global spending typically estimated as being required by 2050 – and some estimates being closer to $300trn.
David Hillman, director of Stamp Out Poverty and co-author of the Climate Damages Tax report said of the proposed tax: “This is surely the fairest way to boost revenues for the Loss and Damage Fund to ensure that it is sufficiently financed as to be fit for purpose.”
