France, German states use wiretaps, GPS to track activists
Bavaria tries to stop protests with preventative detention
Berlin police spend more than 400,000 hours on climate cases
France outlaws one group, German states consider ban
BERLIN, Aug 10 (Reuters) – Simon Lachner had plans to glue himself to a German city thoroughfare in June to call public attention to climate change. Instead, he ended up in police custody before he’d even left his home.
Lachner, 28, is one of thousands of activists caught up in a European crackdown on a wave of direct action protests that gathered pace last year demanding urgent government action against climate change.
Roadblocks on major motorways in Britain have caused traffic chaos, protests at oil installations in Germany have disrupted supplies, and in France, thousands of activists and police clashed over water usage, leaving dozens injured.
Determined to prevent such protests from strengthening further, states in Germany and national authorities in France are invoking legal powers often used against organised crime and extremist groups to wiretap and track activists, Reuters found, based on conversations with four prosecutors, police in both countries and more than a dozen protesters.
In Berlin alone, police have spent hundreds of thousands of hours working on more than 4,500 incidents registered against the “The Last Generation” and “Extinction Rebellion” groups, according to previously unreported data from police.
State authorities in Germany are widely using preventative detention to stop people from protesting, including holding at least one person for as long as 30 days without charge, which is permissible under Bavarian law, the prosecutors consulted by Reuters said.
Lawmakers passed new surveillance and detention laws in France in July and in Britain in May, with Britain making it illegal to lock, or glue, yourself to property.
A dried-up part of the Muga riverbed in northern Spain. Photograph: David Borrat/EPA
Water scarcity threatening agriculture faster than expected, warns Cop15 desertification president
The world is likely to face major disruption to food supplies well before temperatures rise by the 1.5C target, the president of the UN’s desertification conference has warned, as the impacts of the climate crisis combine with water scarcity and poor farming practices to threaten global agriculture.
Alain-Richard Donwahi, a former Ivory Coast defence minister who led last year’s UN Cop15 summit on desertification, said the effects of drought were taking hold more rapidly than expected.
“Climate change is a pandemic that we need to fight quickly. See how fast the degradation of the climate is going – I think it’s going even faster than we predicted,” he said. “Everyone is fixated on 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and it’s a very important target. But actually, some very bad things could happen, in terms of soil degradation, water scarcity and desertification, way before 1.5C.”
The problems of rising temperatures, heatwaves and more intense droughts and floods, were endangering food security in many regions, Donwahi said. “[Look at] the effects of droughts on food security, the effects of droughts on migration of population, the effect of droughts on inflation. We could have an acceleration of negative effects, other than temperature,” he said.
This is obvious. We’ve seen huge droughts, floods, heatwaves, heatdomes, etc already with temperature increases at 1.1/1.2. Agriculture is already precarious.
“Fossil fuel interests see a clear benefit in promoting direct air capture as a means to preserve the dominance of dirty fossil fuels,” said one advocate.
Campaigners demand far-reaching climate action at a rally. (Photo: michael_swan/flickr/cc)
Climate action groups on Friday said the U.S. Department of Energy’s newly announced $1.2 billion in grants for two carbon capture projects are far from the climate action that scientists and advocates have demanded for years—despite the Biden administration’s claim that the “next-generation technologies” must be used alongside renewable energy sources to draw down carbon emissions.
The department said it will invest $1.2 billion to build the nation’s first commercial plants that will conduct “direct air capture,” in which “giant vacuums… can suck decades of old carbon pollution straight out of the sky,” as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters on Thursday.
The unproven technology has been a key focus of oil and gas lobbyists, who argue that fossil fuel companies can continue their planet-heating extraction activities if plants are built to remove the pollution they cause.
Advocacy group Food & Water Watch noted that one oil company, Occidental, stands to benefit directly from the grants because its wholly owned subsidiary, 1Point5, was selected by the Energy Department as one of the recipients.
“Direct air capture is expensive, unproven, and will ultimately make almost no difference in reducing climate pollution… Capturing just a quarter of our annual carbon emissions would require all of the power currently generated in the country.”
“Fossil fuel interests see a clear benefit in promoting direct air capture as a means to preserve the dominance of dirty fossil fuels,” said Jim Walsh, the group’s policy director. “The federal government is handing them hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies, when it should be pursuing policies to end the era of fossil fuels.”
Occidental plans to build one of the plants in Kleberg County, Texas, while nonprofit research firm Battelle will build another in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana—one of the state’s air pollution hotspots, according to New Orleans Public Radio.
“Frontline communities that have borne the brunt of environmental racism and climate change for generations say, ‘Enough!’” said Marion Gee, co-executive director of the national grassroots coalition Climate Justice Alliance. “In an effort to move quickly and carelessly to balance a ‘carbon budget,’ the backyards that he’s talking about building in won’t be [White House Deputy Chief of Staff John] Podesta’s, President [Joe] Biden’s, or their neighbors. It’ll be Black folks, Indigenous communities, and poor BIPOC neighbors—sacrificed, yet again, in the name of protecting corporate interests.”
Critics note that carbon capture is expensive and requires a huge amount of energy to run the “capturing” mechanisms, increasing the very emissions companies aim to remove from the atmosphere.
Former Vice President Al Gore said in a TED Talk last month that turning to carbon capture—as the Biden administration did when it included $3.5 billion to fund a total of four direct air capture plants in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law—is a “moral hazard” that will give fossil fuel giants “an excuse for not ever stopping oil.”
“That gives them a license to continue producing more and more oil and gas,” he said.
Basav Sen, climate justice policy director at the Institute of Policy Studies, accused the Biden administration of playing “cynical political game of squandering public funds on unproven, expensive, and potentially dangerous schemes such as direct air capture, purportedly to gain credibility for backing climate solutions, while doubling down on expanding fossil fuels.”
The grants were announced days after President Joe Biden angered campaigners by claiming that “practically speaking,” he has already declared a climate emergency, despite his approval earlier this year of a massive oil drilling project in Alaska and his recent proposal to update rules for—but not end—fossil fuel leasing on public lands.
As Common Dreams reported in May, Food & Water Watch recently unveiled an interactive online website titled Carbon Capture Scam to expose the “false narratives” being pushed by the fossil fuel industry and lawmakers to promote a “dangerous distraction from the pressing need to move off oil and gas.”
“Direct air capture is expensive, unproven, and will ultimately make almost no difference in reducing climate pollution,” said Walsh on Friday. “Capturing just a quarter of our annual carbon emissions would require all of the power currently generated in the country.”
“Even if the technology was effective, there are still serious questions about whether there is a safe and effective way to store the captured carbon dioxide,” he added. “A more practical and effective approach would be to invest money in wind and solar energy—which would be far more effective in actually reducing climate pollution.”
Greenpeace claimed Mr Sunak will “go down in history” as failing on climate change, amid fresh concern about the Tory leader’s frequent use of high-polluting travel and approach to net zero.
Rish! ‘Biggles’ Sunak: The most effective use of your time is to make a phone call or a video conference call instead of destroying the planet like the uncaring, planet-trashing cnut we all know that you are.
The wildfires offer the latest evidence that President Joe Biden must declare a climate emergency, said one progressive economist.
With weather experts pointing to unusually dry conditions on the Hawaiian island of Maui that primed the area for the wildfires that have killed at least 36 people so far, climate advocates on Thursday said the devastation offers the latest evidence that U.S. President Joe Biden must declare a national climate emergency.
Major General Kenneth Hara, the top defense official in Hawaii, said early Thursday that the wildfires had been contained, but authorities are still assessing widespread damage, displacement, and loss of life following a disaster that sent residents frantically running into the ocean for safety.
The historic town of Lahaina, once the capital of Hawaii, was decimated by the fires on Wednesday, with its oldest building apparently burned to the ground.
Theo Morrison, the executive director of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, told The New York Times that the town had “no preparation, no warning, nothing” as the flames—directly fueled by the 80 mile-per-hour winds of Hurricane Dora south of Hawaii and dry vegetation—spread to Lahaina and razed its historic town center in a matter of hours.
Kaniela Ing, a former Hawaii state representative and national director of the Green New Deal Network, expressed grief over the devastating fires and noted that while residents and local authorities were caught off-guard by the fast-moving blaze, U.S. officials have been warned for years that the continued extraction of fossil fuels is making parts of the country drier and hotter and creating conditions in which wildfires can become more damaging.
“My island is on fire. My heart is breaking at the utter devastation these wildfires are causing my friends, family, and community,” said Ing in a statement. “The extreme wildfires in Lahaina in this summer of climate disasters are yet more proof that we are in a climate emergency and this crisis is killing us. Our leaders in D.C. passed starting measures to tackle climate change—but we need legislation that is as bold and urgent as the scale of the wildfires choking Hawaii and Canada, the heatwaves suffocating Texas, and the extreme flooding drowning Europe.”
Ing suggested that Congress must pass legislation to expand investments in clean energy infrastructure and jobs, but also that Biden can and should act without Congress to significantly reduce the fossil fuel emissions which scientists have said are contributing to extreme heat and wildfires.
“How many more lives lost or families displaced in communities like mine is President Biden willing to tolerate before he declares a climate emergency and activates politicians to take further climate action?” said Ing.
The wildfires devastated Lahaina on the same day that Biden told a reporter on The Weather Channel that “practically speaking,” he has already declared a climate emergency by acting to protect some public land from certain types of mining and rejoining the Paris climate agreement.
The “apocalyptic scenes” in Hawaii, said economist Umair Haque, offer the latest proof that “practically” declaring a climate emergency is not enough.
It should go without saying seeing the apocalyptic scenes in Maui that Biden shouldn’t “practically declare” a climate emergency, he should actually declare a real one. It’s what we’re living in now.
Ing also condemned Republican politicians who continue to deny the existence of the climate crisis and that it’s being caused by the fossil fuel industry, including Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who dismissed the call for a climate emergency declaration in a Fox News interview.
“Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, oil companies, and anyone in power who denies climate change are the arsonists,” said Ing. “We are living the climate emergency.”
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than a third of Maui was experiencing at least a moderate drought as of August 1, and nearly 16% of the island was in a severe drought the day before the flames engulfed parts of the island.
Climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania said the fires are a “‘compound’ climate catastrophe”—made worse by the hurricane’s rapid winds, which interacted with the “background state” of extreme drought.
What we're seeing in #Maui is a "compound" climate catastrophe, where an immediate factor (in this case, unusually strong winds from the outer bands of a passing hurricane) interact w/ background state (extreme drought that has been in place for a month):https://t.co/YF7HXpB4TC
Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat, said an immediate issue the island is coping with is the displacement of several thousand people, and asked visitors to leave or cancel nonessential travel to Maui to ensure that hotel rooms and other accommodations are available for people in need of shelter.
