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Green Or Gone

Green

Libya Flood, A "Natural" Disaster Made Of Climate Change And Colonialism

The devastating flood in Libya is the result of the climate crisis, worsened by the country's poor infrastructure, the legacy of European colonialism. These disasters will only become more frequent.

-Analysis-

If we still haven't come to terms with the climate crisis and the criminal irresponsibility of the Western world, we need look no further than the harrowing images coming from Libya, a nation devastated by the Mediterranean Storm Daniel.

The death toll is still unknown, with numbers rising everyday. It seems possible that the death toll will surpass 20,000, eclipsing Morocco's earthquake (which, somehow, has better captured the public's attention).

The damage is notable. In the eastern coastal city of Derna, witnesses describe water as much as three meters high. Yet these extreme weather conditions, stemming from an increasingly severe climate crisis, are only heightened by humanity's reckless disregard for the earth.

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Crossing Europe, Sans Gas? My Summer Vacation 'Stress Test' For Electric Cars

The author set off on a three-week vacation trip across Europe in an electric car. Would the charging infrastructure be enough to get all the way, or would they end up stranded without battery, far from home?

BERLIN — "Do we really want to do that?" my wife asked. "Nearly 3,000 kilometers across Europe, in an electric car? We've already failed over much shorter distances."

She was right about that. But it's 2023, and e-mobility has outgrown its niche. It is set to become the new reality — in fact, it already is. After all, we're driving through Europe, not the desert.

After a lot of persuasion, I finally managed to assuage her worries. But I also prepared myself for a fairly big adventure. After all, our three-week vacation tour this year took us not only through Germany, but also Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Italy.

On our last long electric trip just over a year ago, we got stuck in a charging station jam after only 160 kilometers. The charging park in Nempitz, Saxony-Anhalt, was overrun, and before we could get to the charging point we had to line up and wait for 45 minutes.

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Goodbye, Greek Beach? Tourism In The Era Of "Global Boiling"

UN chief António Guterres has warned us, ominously suggesting that we update the phrase “global warming” to "global boiling" as July is on track to be the hottest month on record. Summer holidays to the beach may no longer be on the cards as countries around the globe grapple with scorching heat. Will climate change push us to drastically change the way we holiday?

-Analysis-

Thousands of people on the beach. Children reportedly falling off evacuation boats. Panic. People fleeing with the clothes on their backs. It felt like “the end of the world”, according to one tourist.

The fires sweeping through the Greek islands of Rhodes and Corfu are showing us favorite holiday destinations are no longer safe as climate change intensifies.

For decades, tourists have flocked to the Mediterranean for the northern summer. Australians, Scandinavians, Brits, Russians all arrive seeking warmer weather. After COVID, many of us have been keen to travel once again.

But this year, the intense heatwaves have claimed hundreds of lives in Spain alone. Major tourist drawcards such as the Acropolis in Athens have been closed. Climate scientists are “stunned by the ferocity” of the heat.

This year is likely to force a rethink for tourists and for tourism operators. Expect to see more trips taken during shoulder seasons, avoiding the increasingly intense July to August summer. And expect temperate countries to become more popular tourist destinations. Warm-weather tourist destinations will have to radically change.

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Sicily, My Sicily — A Lament From Inside The Inferno

Segesta, Sicily is in flames, with fires spreading throughout the region. A local author describes scenes of apocalypse, which although not unusual on the wildfire-prone island, grow worse every year — and nothing is done about it.

SEGESTA — It's very early in the morning, 7 a.m., when I receive a frantic phone call from my sister in San Vito Lo Capo, in the northwestern part of Sicily, near Trapani. She tells me that a part of her house and all the surrounding land are on fire. She’s been there since four in the morning, she said, and has been helping the firefighters keep the fire under control.

I'm in my car and on the way to help her before she can finish speaking. On the way, the lady that helps me keep my house in Palermo calls me. She tells me that nobody can hang laundry on the balconies because they are covered in ash. Everything is covered with a thick black veil that dirties everything — cars, houses, people. What she describes is something that I imagine people must have experienced during major volcanic eruptions.

The whole of Sicily is burning. Segesta and the archeological park area are on fire. The woods around the ancient abbey of San Martino Delle Scale, Monreale and the Ficuzza forest nature reserve — they’re all burning.

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Green
Carlo Petrini

Droughts To Floods, Italy As Poster Child Of Our Climate Emergency

Floods have hit northern Italy after the longest drought in two centuries. Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini explains how these increasingly frequent events are being exacerbated by human activity.

-Analysis-

FAENZA By now it is undeniable: on the Italian peninsula, the climate crisis is evident in very opposing extreme events (think drought and floods), which occur close together and with increasing frequency. Until just a few days ago, almost the entire country was gripped by the longest drought in two centuries.

Now, however, extreme rainfall has hit the state of Emilia Romagna in the north of the country causing casualties and displacing over 10,000 people.

In 18 hours, the amount of rain that falls on average in a month has fallen. This has caused all rivers to overflow, flooding lowland towns and cutting off hillside towns due to landslides on many roads. Fields have become lakes and orchards that were at a crucial stage of ripening have been severely damaged.

It would be a blessing if this dreadful situation were a sporadic and isolated phenomenon, but unfortunately this is not the case.

What will happen tomorrow is unknown, yet we know it will happen.

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Green Or Gone
Luize Sampaio

“Who'll Stop The Rain?” Why Climate Anxiety Hits Harder In Brazil

Rain often brings deadly flooding and property damage to neighborhoods around Brazil, where people are organizing to address the worsening problem.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Cover the mirrors, turn off all the electrical appliances and call to find out where your child is. Listen to the sirens, the thunder, the roof swaying, and feel the fear of not knowing what to do.

These are familiar feelings for many in Brazil, who still remember rainy-day survival advice shared by parents and grandparents. In Rio de Janeiro, which has seen more than two-thirds of the deaths caused by environmental disasters in Brazil over the past decade, climate anxiety is very real.

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Green Or Gone
Ruchi Kumar

Confronting Climate Change And The Taliban In Afghanistan

Amid a severe drought, Afghan scientists are asking the international community to engage with the brutal regime.

This past December, a fleet of colorful swan-shaped boats lined the muddy banks of Qargha Lake, a reservoir on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan. The boats’ owner, 50-year-old Shah Maqsoud Habibi, said his business has vanished, along with much of the lake, a once popular weekend destination for war weary Afghans.

Over the past few years, a series of droughts have gripped the country, causing reservoirs and other water bodies to dry up. “If there is no water, there is no business for me, and without work, I cannot feed my family,” said Habibi.

Local residents share similar concerns. “I have lived here for 16 years, and this is the first time I am seeing the lake empty,” said 21-year-old Rashid Samim. For two years, he hasn’t been able to properly water his apple and cherry orchards or his modest potato farm, leading to smaller yields.

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Green Or Gone
Claudio Andrade

Tracking The Asian Fishing "Armada" That Sucks Up Tons Of Seafood Off Argentina's Coast

A brightly-lit flotilla of fishing ships has reappeared in international waters off the southern coast of Argentina as it has annually in recent years for an "industrial harvest" of thousands of tons of fish and shellfish.

BUENOS AIRES — The 'floating city' of industrial fishing boats has returned, lighting up a long stretch of the South Atlantic.

Recently visible off the coast of southern Argentina, aerial photographs showed the well-lit armada of some 500 vessels, parked 201 miles offshore from Comodoro Rivadavia in the province of Chubut. The fleet had arrived for its vast seasonal haul of sea 'products,' confirming its annual return to harvest squid, cod and shellfish on a scale that activists have called an environmental blitzkrieg.

In principle the ships are fishing just outside Argentina's exclusive Economic Zone, though it's widely known that this kind of apparent "industrial harvest" does not respect the territorial line, entering Argentine waters for one reason or another.

For some years now, activists and organizations like Greenpeace have repeatedly denounced industrial-style fishing as exhausting marine resources worldwide and badly affecting regional fauna, even if the fishing outfits technically manage to evade any crackdown by staying in or near international waters.

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Green Or Gone
Maya Piedra

Deep Inside The Ecological Devastation Of Mexico’s Avocado Production

As avocado production stifles biodiversity, depletes water reserves and takes over once-forested land, farmers and environmentalists in Jalisco warn that Mexico’s “green gold” may not be so green after all.

ZAPOTLÁN EL GRANDE — Ten minutes away from downtown Ciudad Guzmán, the municipal capital of Zapotlán el Grande, is a small century-old ranch, where fruits and vegetables sprout from the ground and fall from the trees. It’s a picture of biodiversity fast fading from Mexico's western state of Jalisco.

Ranch owners Rogelio Trejo and Yaskara Silva, who inherited the land from Trejo’s parents, have seen the change take place. Once upon a time, sage would turn surrounding mountains into a sea of blue-green. Now, there are avocado farms as far as the eye can see.

“They’ve destroyed our natural forests,” Trejo says.

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eyes on the U.S.
Alex Hurst

Eyes On U.S. — How White House Climate Action Could Spark A Global Trade War

-Analysis-

When the U.S. Congress passed the Biden administration’s landmark "green" spending bill in August, environmentalists around the world saw it as a very strong — and long overdue — step in the right direction on climate change.

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Green Or Gone
Rachael Lyle*

Deny Evidence, Downplay Science: Big Oil Is Following Big Pharma's Legal Playbook

Opioid and oil companies alike have a history of obfuscating science as a litigation tactic. How does this harm victims?

Opioids and fossil fuels might seem like vastly different products. But both were marketed as panaceas for a more comfortable existence. Both have some legitimate uses, though we now know that safer alternatives exist for treating chronic pain and powering our economy. And in both instances, we could have known about the harms caused by these products decades sooner, had they not been deliberately concealed from the public for corporate profits.

As those harms have come to light, litigation has become the primary mechanism for attempting to protect the public. Here, too, the parallels continue.

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Habiba Fouad

Clean Hydrogen Production In Egypt: A Big Green Step Or More Hot Air?

As the Mediterranean region awakens to the potential of green hydrogen as a clean alternative, Egypt is still hesitant to invest heavily in the sector. For good reason?

CAIRO — When it opened in Aswan in 1963, the KIMA fertilizer plant was a clean energy producer ahead of its time. Running entirely off the surge of cheap, hydroelectric power spilling over from the Aswan Dam, it produced green hydrogen, used to make green ammonia and ultimately fertilizers, all part of a national politics of the time that was oriented toward self-sufficiency.

That the KIMA plant boasted state-of-the-art green credentials was almost a “coincidence” of the project, says Osama Fawzy, hydrogen consultant and manager of Hydrogen Intelligence platform, who attributes the decision to use renewable power at the fertilizer factory to its proximity to the dam and the relatively low cost of hydroelectric power for Egypt at the time. Yet as the natural gas and oil sectors boomed in the 1970s, KIMA’s specialized hydroelectric equipment deteriorated and was never replaced, and the plant was converted to run on cheaper natural gas in 2019.

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