Feed humans before livestock – World Wildlife Fund

July 10, 2022 / activist360

Transform UK farmland to boost food resilience and tackle nature crisis, says WWF.

By, Brendan Montague, The Ecologist (Creative Commons 4.0)

Half of the UK’s wheat harvest each year – equivalent to 11 billion loaves of bread – is being used to feed livestock in an “inherently inefficient” process that is fuelling climate change, a WWF report reveals.

The report shows the extent of farmland used to grow crops that are being used to feed animals instead of people. It explores the benefits for people, climate and nature of using more of the UK’s arable land to grow crops for human consumption instead, such as addressing the climate and nature crises and boosting the UK’s food resilience.

The latest report in WWF’s Future of Feed series highlights the fact that dairy and meat products provide only 32 percent of calories consumed in the UK and less than half of protein despite livestock and their feed making up 85 percent of the country’s agricultural land use.

Habitats

Growing crops like cereals to feed farm animals accounts for a significant proportion of this land-use footprint, according to the analysis in the report.

Wheat and barley grown to feed farmed animals in the UK using 2 million hectares of land – 40 percent of the UK’s arable land area.

Wheat grown in the UK each year to feed livestock – mostly chickens and pigs – makes up half of our annual wheat harvest and would be enough to produce nearly 11 billion loaves of bread.

Oats grown in the UK to feed livestock each year make up a third of our annual oat harvest and would be enough to produce nearly 6 billion bowls of porridge.

The UK imports large quantities of soy to feed pigs and poultry, fuelling the destruction of precious habitats overseas, like the Brazilian Cerrado.

Affordable

Replacing animal feeds like soy and cereal with alternatives like grass, by-products from the food supply chain, and innovative feed ingredients such as insect meal, would free up land to grow food for people, including high-value crops like fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and could be at the heart of a transition to nature-friendly regenerative agriculture.

The report recognises that this approach to feeding farm animals would necessitate a reduction in the overall numbers of livestock in the UK.

Kate Norgrove, executive director of advocacy and campaigns at WWF said: “We can’t afford to stay locked into a food system that’s not fit for purpose, with food prices soaring.

“Far too much of the food we eat is produced in ways that are fuelling the climate crisis and driving catastrophic nature loss, yet failing to deliver affordable, healthy food for all.

Biodiversity

“To make our food system truly shock-resistant we need to accelerate a shift to sustainable production, including rethinking the way we are using huge quantities of the UK’s most productive land to grow food for livestock instead of people.

She added: “UK governments can future-proof our food and bring huge benefits for nature and climate at the same time by ramping up support for farmers to transform our landscapes, making space for nature in farms and forests, fields and fens.”

Focusing purely on the carbon footprint of food production risks fuelling agricultural intensification and masking other negative environmental impacts, like pollution from the slurry or land conversion for feed production in chicken farming, which can have a low carbon footprint in comparison with pasture-fed beef, the report states.

It also highlights the importance of looking at a wider range of measures to evaluate the environmental impact of all aspects of food production, taking account of pressures on land, water, and biodiversity before drawing conclusions.

Does Supreme Court decision doom power plant rulemakings?

July 3, 2022 / activist360

*Greta Thunberg (weißes T-Shirt und Megaphon mitte-rechts) und Luisa Neubauer (daneben in Grün) im Demonstrationszug von Fridays For Future, Berlin, 24.09.21*

‘Seismic decision’ in landmark climate ruling, CNN says in reporting on decision written by Chief Justice Roberts

By Bud Ward, Yale Climate Connections (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5)

Devastating.” “Hamstrings …” “… a major blow …” “destructive …” a cataclysm …”

And more.

Those are a few of the early terms used by proponents of greenhouse gas emission regulation to describe the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in the most significant environmental case of its session … and perhaps since the Court’s ruling in 2007 finding carbon dioxide a public health pollutant subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.

In its final decision of this consequential term, the court’s now-familiar six-to-three conservative majority ruled EPA had gone beyond its legal authority by attempting to regulate greenhouse gases through the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. The decision was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, with the three progressive justices dissenting.

But the decision did leave the door slightly ajar to Congress’s outright authorization of such regulations somewhere down the highly uncertain road ahead. Critics of the court’s ruling in West Virginia v. EPA found that option highly unlikely politically and, in any event, nothing to celebrate.

Private sector, market forces, big business left to take climate leadership roles? (to be determined)

“Devastating” is the term the Biden White House used in its initial take on the decision.

Carol Browner, EPA Administrator during the Clinton administration, not surprisingly, used the same term in an interview with CNN, which labeled the ruling a “big blow” to Biden administration climate change ambitions. The decision is expected by many to have implications extending far beyond EPA and climate, affecting rule making by diverse Executive branch agencies (the “administrative state”) on a wide swath of issues.

Upcoming posts coming soon at this site will provide detailed coverage on the court’s ruling; on reactions to the ruling from legal and policy experts; and on what options the federal government, and perhaps some states, might next consider in attempting to reduce greenhouse gas pollutant emissions and atmospheric concentrations.

Forecast ahead: Lots of uncertainty, lots more case-by-case litigation, further doubts over U.S. global role, let alone “leadership,” on climate change.

‘Unknown territory’: Antarctic glaciers melting at rate unprecedented in 5,500 years: study

June 12, 2022 / activist360

“These currently elevated rates of ice melting may signal that those vital arteries from the heart of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet have been ruptured,” said one researcher. “Is it too late to stop the bleeding?”

By Julia Conley, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

The human-caused climate crisis is pushing crucial glaciers in Antarctica to lose ice at a rate not seen in more than 5,000 years, according to a new study published Thursday.

Researchers at the University of Maine, the British Antarctic Survey, and Imperial College London found that the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could cause global sea level rise of up to 3.4 meters, or over 11 feet, in the next several centuries due to their accelerated rate of ice loss.

“That the present-day rate of glacier retreat that has doubled over the past 30 years is, indeed, unprecedented.”

The glaciers—one of which, the Thwaites, has been called the “doomsday glacier” by climate scientists because of its potential to raise sea levels—are positioned in a way that allows increasingly warm ocean water to flow beneath them and erode the ice sheet from the base, causing “runaway ice loss,” the University of Maine team said in a statement.

The researchers examined penguin bones and seashells on ancient Antarctic beaches in order to analyze changes in local sea levels since the mid-Holocene period, 5,500 years ago.

Sea levels were higher and glaciers were smaller during the mid-Holocene, as the climate of the planet was warmer than it is today.

Since then, according to the study published in Nature Geoscience, relative sea levels have fallen steadily and the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers have stayed relatively stable—until recent decades.

Ice loss was likely accelerated just prior to the mid-Holocene, and since then, the rate of relative decrease in sea levels over the past 5,500 years was almost five times smaller than it is in present day, due to “recent rapid ice mass loss,” according to the scientists.

“That the present-day rate of glacier retreat that has doubled over the past 30 years is, indeed, unprecedented,” wrote Caroline Brogan, a science reporter at Imperial College.

With the Thwaites spanning an area of more than 74,000 square miles and the Pine Island glacier spanning more than 62,600 square miles, the rapid ice loss of the two glaciers could cause major rises in sea levels around the globe.

Dylan Rood of Imperial College’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, a co-author of the study, likened the two glaciers to arteries that have burst.

“These currently elevated rates of ice melting may signal that those vital arteries from the heart of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet have been ruptured, leading to accelerating flow into the ocean that is potentially disastrous for future global sea level in a warming world,” said Rood. “Is it too late to stop the bleeding?”

The study follows increasingly urgent calls from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, and climate scientists around the world for an end to fossil fuel extraction, which is needed to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and limit the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.

Scientists have warned that the accelerated melting of the Thwaites glacier is likely irreversible.

“We’re going into unknown territory,” Scott Braddock, a researcher at University of Maine, told Science News. “We don’t have an analog to compare what’s going on today with what happened in the past.”