Climate

The White House wants federal agencies to keep climate change in mind as they decide whether to approve major projects.

Internal documents revealed by committee show companies lobbied against climate laws they publicly claimed to support

Big oil has privately acknowledged its efforts to downplay the dangers of burning fossil fuels, US Democrats have found.

Major fossil-fuel firms have also pledged support for international climate efforts, but internally admit these efforts are incompatible with their own climate plans. And they have lobbied against climate laws and regulations they have publicly claimed to support, documents newly revealed by the committee show.

Continue reading...

Politicians fear perceived costs of green transition are driving poor and rural voters to parties such as AfD

Raising his voice above the pounding drums and honking tractors, Lutz Jankus, a city councillor from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), distanced himself from the furious protest unfurling before him.

“They’re rightwing extremists,” he said about Free Saxony, a loose political movement that includes neo-Nazis and skinheads, as his colleagues began to pack up their tent on the side of the square in the centre of Görlitz.

Continue reading...

The far right are on the march in Germany and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany has become the most popular party in several states. Immigration and a sense of being economically left behind have been driving factors in the rise in popularity but the Green party and the federal government’s climate policies have also borne the brunt of public anger. The Guardian travelled to Görlitz, on the German border with Poland, to find out to what extent Germany’s green policies are fuelling the far right

• How climate policies are becoming focus for far-right attacks in Germany

Continue reading...

Campaigners say last-minute compromise plays into the hands of petrostates and industry influences

Campaigners are blaming developed countries for capitulating at the last minute to pressure from fossil fuel and industry lobbyists, and slowing progress towards the first global treaty to cut plastic waste.

Delegates concluded talks in Ottawa, Canada, late on Monday, with no agreement on a proposal for global reductions in the $712bn (£610bn) plastic production industry by 2040 to address twin issues of plastic waste and huge carbon emissions.

Continue reading...

A subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp, Germany’s venerable steel producer, is landing major deals for a device that makes the clean-burning gas from water.

After the trauma of losing their spouse and breadwinner to the Sundarbans’ great predator, women are cast out by their superstitious communities. But they are coming together to rebuild their lives

Nobody saw exactly what happened in the minutes leading up to Aziz Murad’s death. But when his friends got back to the boat where they had left him, they found only his severed hand in the fishing net he was untying.

“We were only gone for about five minutes,” says Abu Sufyan, who was first to reach the boat. “When we got back, he was gone and there was blood everywhere.”

Continue reading...

So long as oil and gas companies remain wedded to self-interest, the push against them isn’t going away

• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Australia’s south-west is suffering through a historic dry stretch. Perth had the lowest rainfall on record in the six months to March, and trees in eucalyptus forests and scrubland across a 1,000 kilometre stretch are dying in shocking and spectacular fashion, with spillover effects through the ecosystems that rely on them.

The climate signal – the impact of rising atmospheric greenhouse gases, largely due to the burning of fossil fuels – in this part of the world has been clear for a while. Winter rainfall has fallen up to 20% since the 1970s in what scientists have for years described as one of the earliest examples of the climate crisis having a measurable influence.

Continue reading...

Around the world, grass-roots organizers and Indigenous communities are taking proposed coal, oil and gas projects to court — and winning.

I have spent the better part of the last 12 years writing about lies. My colleagues call it “disinformation,” and I generally do, too, but let’s call it for what it is: lying. During this stretch, I have written more than 200 articles and columns, and most of them were either about CEOs who lie, experts who lie, scientists who lie, attorneys general who lie, legislators who lie, or a president who lies. And I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill white lies. I’m talking about lies that have grave consequences for the future of the planet.

(I should add that I also wrote 65 columns featuring Q&As with scientists and experts who work for my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). They don’t lie. They follow the science. The series is called “Ask a Scientist,” and the last one I wrote will run in mid-May.)

After a dozen years unmasking lies and five years before that overseeing UCS’s media relations operation, I am leaving the organization. But before I walk out the door, I wanted to provide a retrospective of some of my columns on the biggest sponsors of climate disinformation in the country: ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, and Charles Koch, CEO of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

See no evil

I wrote more columns about ExxonMobil and its top executives than any other major source of climate lies. Most of these pieces were about the company’s support for a seemingly independent network of anti-regulation, “free-market” nonprofits that spread falsehoods about the reality and seriousness of climate change. ExxonMobil spent at least $39 million on some 70 of these organizations from 1998 through 2020, more than any funder besides Charles Koch and his brother David, co-owner of Koch Industries until his death in 2019.

I first wrote about ExxonMobil in March 2013 after I saw the company’s then-CEO, Rex Tillerson, on the Charlie Rose talk show, who provided me with fodder for perhaps my favorite of two dozen ExxonMobil-related columns.

Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil CEO from 2006 to 2016. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Rose asked Tillerson open-ended questions on a range of subjects, including climate change and national energy policy. And Rose did, at times, ask follow-up questions. But in nearly every instance, Rose listened politely, refrained from challenging Tillerson on the facts, and went on to his next question. So I decided to write a column in which I pretended to have been on the show alongside Tillerson, calling it “Rex & Me: The Charlie Rose Show You Should Have Seen Last Friday,” a nod to Michael Moore’s first film, Roger & Me.

The column featured excerpts from Rose and Tillerson’s hour-long conversation with comments I inserted as if I were sitting there in the studio rebutting Tillerson’s statements.

Rose first asked Tillerson about his take on global warming. Repeating his company’s long-standing talking point, Tillerson emphasized scientific uncertainty, despite the fact that Exxon’s own scientists had been warning management about “potentially catastrophic” human-caused global warming since at least 1977. “We have continued to study this issue for decades…,” he said. “The facts remain there are uncertainties around the climate, climate change, why it’s changing, what the principal drivers of climate change are.”

In my retelling of the show, I quickly pointed out that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had by then concluded that “most” of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950 was “very likely” due to the increase in human-made carbon emissions.

When Rose asked Tillerson if there is a link between extreme weather events and global warming, Tillerson told Rose that he had “seen no scientific studies to confirm [one].” In the original broadcast, Rose went on to another topic. But before he was able to do that in my imaginary scenario, I corrected the record. “There is, in fact, substantial scientific evidence that there’s a strong link between global warming and heat waves and coastal flooding from sea-level rise,” I said. “There’s also a strong link to heavy precipitation and drought, depending on the region and time of the year.”

Later in the hour, Tillerson told Rose that the federal government should end subsidies for renewable energy. “I mean, wind has received subsidies for more than 20 years now,” he said. “Maybe if we took the subsidy off and it was challenged and had to perform, people would take it to a new level.”

It was a bogus argument that fossil fuel proponents would repeat ad nauseum over the next 10 years, so when Rose failed to provide some needed context, I jumped in.

“Rex,” I interjected, “it’s bizarre that your top national energy priority is ending federal support for renewables. … [W]hat about the oil and gas industry’s subsidies and tax breaks?” I then explained that, at the time, the oil and gas industry had been receiving an average of $4.86 billion (in 2010 dollars) in federal tax breaks and subsidies for nearly 100 years. “Renewables,” I added, “have gotten peanuts in comparison.”

Four years later, when Tillerson testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after President Trump nominated him to be his secretary of state, a senator asked him if he would pursue the Group of 20 pledge to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. His reply? “I’m not aware of anything the fossil fuel industry gets that I would characterize as a subsidy.”

Still funding lies after all these years

Tillerson’s successor, Darren Woods, now 59, has carried on his company’s tradition of deceit. During an October 2021 hearing the House Oversight and Reform Committee held on the oil industry’s decades-long climate disinformation campaign, Woods—one of four oil company executives testifying that day—was asked if he would “commit right here to stop funding organizations that reject the science of climate change.”

“We do not support climate denial,” he replied. “We do not ask people to lobby for anything different than our publicly supported [climate] positions.”

Darren Woods, ExxonMobil CEO from 2017 to the present. (Photo: Pool/Getty Images)

The history of that lie bears retelling. For years, ExxonMobil executives have acknowledged climate change is happening—but not its cause—and insisted they want to be “part of the solution.” And since 2015, they have claimed that their company supports the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which was brokered that year. Why? ExxonMobil wants to be seen as a good corporate citizen. It wants to protect what academics call its “social license,” meaning that it wants to be seen as being legitimate, credible and trustworthy. At the same time, however, the company has continued to expand oil and gas development and fund climate science denier groups that undermine efforts to address climate change.

The genesis of ExxonMobil’s brazen hypocrisy can be traced back to 2007. In January of that year, UCS released consultant (now UCS editorial director) Seth Shulman’s report, “Smoke, Mirrors and Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science,” revealing that the company had spent $16 million between 1998 and 2005 on more than 40 anti-regulation think tanks to launder its message. When asked by a Greenwire reporter a month later about the grantees identified in the UCS report, Kenneth Cohen, then ExxonMobil’s vice president of public affairs, said the company had stopped funding them. Hardly. In 2007 alone, the company gave $2 million to 37 denier groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, Heartland Institute and Manhattan Institute.

In July 2015, after UCS discovered that Exxon (before it merged with Mobil) was aware of the threat posed by climate change more than 30 years earlier and had been intentionally deceiving the public for decades, reporters contacted ExxonMobil spokesman Richard Keil for comment. One reporter asked him about ExxonMobil’s long history of funding climate change denier groups. “I’m here to talk to you about the present,” Keil said. “…We do not fund or support those who deny the reality of climate change.”

I wrote a column a week later dissecting Keil’s carefully crafted whopper. “Technically [Keil was correct], perhaps, because practically no one can say with a straight face that global warming isn’t happening anymore,” I wrote. “Most, if not all, of the people who used to deny the reality of climate change have morphed into climate science deniers. They now concede that climate change is real, but reject the scientific consensus that human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—is driving it. Likewise, they understate the potential consequences, contend that we can easily adapt to them, and fight government efforts to curb carbon emissions and promote renewable energy. ExxonMobil is still funding those folks, big time.”

By its own accounting, ExxonMobil has continued to fund those folks—albeit fewer of them—to this day. For at least a decade, the company has been listing its grantees in its annual World Giving Report, and beginning in 2015 I wrote a column every year citing how much it gave climate science denier groups the previous year through 2021, when it stopped listing grantees receiving less than $100,000. Previously, its reports included grants of $5,000 or more. That lack of transparency has made it impossible to discern exactly how much the company is still spending on climate disinformation, but nonetheless it amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

My 2021 column on the company’s grants from 2020, “Despite Cutbacks, ExxonMobil Continues to Fund Climate Science Denial,” ran two days before Woods and top executives from BP America, Chevron and Shell testified before the House Oversight Committee. Despite Woods’s insistence at the hearing that his company does not support “climate denial” and does not ask its grantees to support anything other than its official climate-related pronouncements, three ExxonMobil grantees that received at least $100,000 in 2020 contradicted the company’s professed positions. They included a climate science-denying economist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received more than $5 million from ExxonMobil since 1998; George Washington University’s anti-regulation Regulatory Studies Center, which opposed stronger efficiency standards for home appliances and vehicles that would significantly reduce carbon emissions; and the US Chamber of Commerce, which at the time dubiously called for “the increased use of natural gas” to “further progress” in addressing climate change.

Since I wrote that column, my last one on ExxonMobil’s annual grants, the company’s Worldwide Giving Report in 2022 indicated that in 2021, ExxonMobil contributed another $150,000 to AEI and $150,000 to the GWU Regulatory Studies Center. The company has yet to publish a report for its grantmaking in 2022, let alone 2023.

Things go worse with Koch

My other bête noire is the 88-year-old libertarian industrialist Charles Koch—the 22th-richest person in the world with a net worth of $67.6 billion—and his network of uber-rich friends and “free-market” think tanks and advocacy groups. From 1997 through 2020, Koch family-controlled foundations donated more than $160 million to at least 90 groups to manufacture doubt about climate science and delay efforts to address global warming—four times more than even what ExxonMobil reportedly spent over the same time period.

Koch is a lot more doctrinaire than his current counterpart at ExxonMobil. Woods downplays the central role human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—plays in triggering climate change, but he has grudgingly conceded that global warming poses an “existential threat.” Koch, by contrast, has never acknowledged that climate change is a serious problem and has questioned—with no evidence—the veracity of climate models, which studies have found to be quite accurate.

Charles Koch, Koch Industries CEO from 1967 to the present. (Photo: Fortune Conferences)

For more than two decades, the Koch network has been diligently spreading disinformation to sabotage efforts to transition to a clean energy economy, more often than not by attacking proposed climate policies on economic grounds. Over the last 12 years, I wrote eight columns on the Koch network’s escapades, including:

• Its attempt in 2012 to scare consumers about the cost of state renewable energy standards, which require utilities to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels by increasing their use of wind and solar power. In fact, such standards have had a negligible effect on electricity prices and often save ratepayers money.

• Its effort in 2013 to kill the federal production tax credit for wind, when the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity and 100 other Koch network groups made the same disingenuous argument that Rex Tillerson made on the Charlie Rose show. “Americans deserve energy solutions that can make it on their own in the marketplace,” they wrote in a letter to Congress, “not ones that need to be propped up by government indefinitely.”

• Its 2018 campaign to kill a federal income tax credit for electric vehicle buyers, trotting out the same phony argument it made against wind tax breaks. The 18 Koch-funded groups that collaborated in the campaign, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute, and the Koch-founded American Energy Alliance and Americans for Prosperity, argued that the government shouldn’t subsidize any energy technologies, but confined their objections to tax breaks for clean energy alternatives, again falsely claiming—like Tillerson—that the oil and gas industry receives no subsidies.

But my favorite Koch column is my most recent one, “It’s Time for Charles Koch to Testify About His Climate Change Disinformation Campaign,” which ran in March 2022. I urged the House Oversight Committee to pull Koch in for questioning before it ended its investigation given the fact that he “is as consequential a disinformer as the four oil company executives who testified last fall … combined.”

Unfortunately, the committee did not take my advice, but the column did give me the opportunity to report on the considerable amount Koch Industries’ political action committees (PACs) and employees spend on campaign contributions, how much the company spends on lobbying, and the fact at least 50 Koch network alumni landed key positions in the Trump administration. They included Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, and … Vice President Mike Pence, who led Trump’s transition team. Egged on by Koch devotees both inside and outside the government—as well as by more than 60 executive branch staff from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation—the Trump administration rolled back at least 260 regulations, including more than 100 environmental safeguards.

Is the day of reckoning coming?

As I said at the beginning of this essay, the lies uttered and underwritten by the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil executives—as well as their employees and PACs’ generous campaign contributions to climate science deniers in Congress—have had serious consequences.

Last year, the United States suffered an unprecedented number of climate change-related billion-dollar disasters, including record heat waves, drought, wildfires and floods, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The 28 extreme weather events collectively caused nearly $93 billion in damage. Last year also was hottest in at least 173 years, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The annual temperature was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average.

While the world is burning up, oil industry profits last year—while lower than in 2022—were still quite robust. The two US oil giants, ExxonMobil and Chevron, netted $36 billion and $21.3 billion respectively. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, one of the oil company executives who testified before the House Oversight Committee in October 2021, boasted that Chevron “returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas [in 2023] than any year in the company’s history.” Meanwhile, Koch Industries’ annual revenue was $115 billion last year, down slightly from $125 billion in 2022. (Because the company is privately held, it is not required to divulge profit data.)

Cities, counties, states and US territories are now taking steps to hold these and other fossil fuel companies, as well as their trade associations, accountable. So far, some 40 of them have filed 28 lawsuits in state and territory courts for fraud and damages. Chicago and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 30 miles north of Philadelphia, are the most recent municipalities to file a climate lawsuit. In both cases, the defendants include BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Philips 66 and Shell, as well as the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil industry’s biggest trade association.

ExxonMobil has been named as a defendant in all of the cases. To date, Koch Industries has been named in only one, filed by the state of Minnesota in June 2020. That lawsuit alleges that API, ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, which owns an oil refinery in the state, violated state consumer protection laws by misleading Minnesotans about the role fossil fuels play in causing the climate crisis.

As I pointed out in a column about Minnesota’s lawsuit, the state has a storied history when it comes to such litigation. It was one of the first states to sue the tobacco industry, and its lawsuit in the 1990s—the only one that made it to trial—resulted in a groundbreaking settlement of $6 billion over the first 25 years and $200 million annually thereafter. The case also pried 35 million pages of documents from tobacco company files revealing details of the industry’s campaign to sow doubt about the links between smoking and disease. As UCS pointed out in its 2007 exposé of ExxonMobil’s climate disinformation campaign, the tobacco and fossil fuel industries used many of the same strategies and tactics.

US climate litigation is only expected to grow this year, following the US Supreme Court’s rejection of the oil industry’s attempts to transfer climate lawsuits from state courts to federal courts, where industry lawyers believe they are more likely to prevail. If the lawsuits are ultimately successful, courts could order oil companies and their trade associations to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars to impacted communities.

That eventuality, much like the deserved comeuppance the tobacco industry received, would be a just outcome. But even a huge payout wouldn’t begin to compensate for the damage already done by Koch and ExxonMobil lies.

Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) made headlines across the country when we published a report demonstrating how worsening wildfires in the West are linked to the unrelenting, shameless emissions of the fossil fuel companies. While we hope that our science will bolster efforts to hold these companies accountable, the truth is that such accountability is necessary but insufficient.

Climate-change fueled disasters will continue to have impacts on human health. We must measure these impacts and mitigate them. Wildfires have the most obvious and devastating effects on the lives of the people living in the neighborhoods that they destroy, but the impact they have on our air and water can spread far beyond the burn scar.

Two bills being considered by the California legislature can help mitigate the public health impacts of wildfires. UCS supports the passage of both.

Wildfires and water quality

Most of California’s water comes from rain and snow that falls in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and flows down to the population centers throughout the state. Usually, vegetation and soil will help soak up the rain and slow the flow of rainwater, nutrients, and soil over the land.

When a wildfire burns away vegetation and scorches soil, the soil becomes less absorbent and precipitation flows more quickly into the rivers, eroding away soil and picking up nutrients in higher quantities than usual, along with ash and debris. Worse, if a wildfire burns through an area populated by humans, when the rain falls, toxic chemicals from burning cars, plastics, and all sorts of synthetic products can flow into waterways and drinking water systems.

For more on the impacts that wildfires have on water quantity and quality, read our 2022 factsheet, Fire and Water in the Western United States.

Wildfire and air quality

Anyone who has lived in California for the past few years knows that our summers are plagued with unhealthy air quality days. And as is too often the case, the Central Valley bears the brunt of this impact.

There is an enormous amount of data on the adverse health impacts associated with poor air quality: respiratory issues, cognitive issues, impacts on pregnant people and their babies, and more. Many California communities already have some of the highest rates of heart and lung disease in the country, and these problems are only made worse by wildfire smoke.

What can we do?

California must continue to aggressively and equitably phase out fossil fuels across all sectors to minimize growth in the size and severity of future wildfires. The state should also plan for and fund projects that make our forests and communities more resilient to wildfire.

However, even with these actions, wildfires are a part of our lives in the western United States, as they have been for generations given our climate and our ecosystems. We must understand and mitigate their impact on human health.

There are two bills currently moving through the California Legislature that the Union of Concerned Scientists supports as key steps towards this end:

• Senate Bill 945 (Alvarado-Gil)would require state agencies to create, operate, and maintain a statewide-integrated wildfire smoke and health data platform to facilitate action from state authorities and the medical community to confront this critical, public health issue. We can’t improve what we can’t measure, and the current status quo makes it difficult to get a comprehensive picture of how smoke is affecting the health of Californians throughout the state.
• Senate Bill 1176 (Niello) would require state agencies and research entities to form a work group to establish best practices and recommendations for wildfire-impacted communities and first responders to avoid exposure to heavy metals after a wildfire.

California should pass these bills, continue to look for opportunities to make data on wildfire impacts accessible, and make data-informed decisions on protecting people from wildfire-associated human health impacts.

Some crops completely wiped out and dramatic falls in yields being predicted in county which reflects crisis in rest of UK

With his farm almost entirely surrounded by the banks of the River Severn in north Shropshire, Ed Tate is used to flooding on his land – but this year, the sheer level of rainfall is the worst he has ever seen.

He points to a field where about 20% of wheat crops have failed as they have been covered with rainwater that has pooled in muddy puddles, in areas that would usually be a sea of green by now.

Continue reading...

The UN global plastic treaty could be as important as the 2015 Paris accords, if negotiators can stand up to industry lobbyists

Last week, in an enormous convention centre in downtown Ottawa, I joined delegates who have been negotiating over the most important environmental deal since the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change.

The global plastic treaty has a mandate to agree on a legally binding, international agreement to tackle plastic pollution across the entire plastics life cycle, from the initial extraction of fossil fuels for plastics production to the end-of-life disposal of plastic waste. The current meeting is the fourth of five scheduled negotiations and is critically important – without agreement on the objectives, structure and key measures, the prospect of agreeing on the final treaty text by the end of 2024 seems ambitious.

Continue reading...

Murrawah Johnson recognised for role in landmark legal case to block coalmine backed by Clive Palmer

• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

For Murrawah Johnson, the impacts of the climate crisis and the destruction of land to mine the fossil fuels that drive it are more than simple questions of atmospheric physics or environmental harm.

“What colonisation hasn’t already done, climate change will do in terms of finalising the assimilation process for First Nations people,” the 29-year-old Wirdi woman from Queensland says.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Continue reading...

Large parts of islands could be uninhabitable by 2050, federal court told in first climate class action taken by Australian First Nations people

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Torres Strait Islanders could be forced to leave their homes within the next 30 years if urgent action is not taken on the climate crisis.

This would mean a loss of country, sacred sites and culture, the federal court has been told.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Continue reading...

All the trees are dying. Yet we go about our lives

• Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published
• Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints

Continue reading...

Analysts say impact on wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape harvests means price rises on beer, bread and biscuits and more food imported

UK harvests of important crops could be down by nearly a fifth this year due to the unprecedented wet weather farmers have faced, increasing the likelihood that the prices of bread, beer and biscuits will rise.

Analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has estimated that the amount of wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape could drop by 4m tonnes this year, a reduction of 17.5% compared with 2023.

Continue reading...

Levy on oil and gas majors in richest countries would help worst-affected nations tackle climate crisis, says report

A new tax on fossil fuel companies based in the world’s richest countries could raise hundreds of billions of dollars to help the most vulnerable nations cope with the escalating climate crisis, according to a report.

The Climate Damages Tax report, published on Monday, calculates that an additional tax on fossil fuel majors based in the wealthiest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries could raise $720bn (£580bn) by the end of the decade.

Continue reading...

Farmers, even more than consumers, need a stable and predictable global food system

The small indulgence of chocolate is becoming a more costly one. Soaring prices for cocoa beans recently hit a record $12,000 a tonne: roughly four times last year’s price. Many think they will go higher. That means smaller or more expensive bars and reformulated recipes for many consumers, and may put out of business small specialist producers. Yet it is bringing little reward to struggling growers.

The immediate culprit is a bad harvest in west Africa – which produces 70% of the world’s beans – reflecting El Niño-linked weather patterns and disease. Major processing plants in Ghana and Ivory Coast, the main growers, have halted or reduced operations because they cannot afford the beans. But underlying the crisis are longer-term issues including the climate crisis and the inability of farmers to invest in production due to their low incomes. Big companies have long claimed that it simply wasn’t viable to pay more for beans. Now they are suddenly finding that they can, in fact, manage to do so when the market demands it. Cocoa amounts for only around a tenth of the costs of producing a bar.

Continue reading...

It’s almost a century since the 1924 expedition ended in tragedy, yet the question of whether the climbers conquered the summit remains unanswered

On the morning of 6 June, 1924, George Mallory – one of the world’s greatest mountaineers – set off with his companion, Sandy Irvine, from a camp on the slopes of Mount Everest and headed for its summit.

A veteran of three British Everest expeditions, Mallory knew the world’s highest mountain better than any other climber at the time. He had come close to death there on three occasions.

Continue reading...