Vorratsdatenspeicherung: Dobrindt kündigt Gesetzentwurf „in den nächsten Wochen“ an
netzpolitik.org/2025/vorratsda…
Leopoldina-Papier unter der Lupe: Die magische Anziehungskraft des Social-Media-Verbots
netzpolitik.org/2025/leopoldin…
Bundesrechnungshof: Bundesregierung verfehlt Ziele der IT-Konsolidierung
netzpolitik.org/2025/bundesrec…
Report highlights need for journalists to push back when stonewalled
Screenshot of a 2023 "roundtable" hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis where he and his guests aired their grievances with the press. DeSantis is one of many public officials who often disregards established norms regarding media access.
There has been a disturbing uptick in recent years of instances where journalists have been prevented from covering public business or having access to public officials, in ways that violate laws, long-standing norms, or both.
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Director of Advocacy Seth Stern was among a group of journalists, policy advocates, and others who joined a symposium last year — convened by the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at Poynter — to discuss the problem.
This week, Poynter issued its report summarizing the discussion, as well as a “Journalist’s Toolkit” summarizing its findings and recommendations.
Stern emphasized the need for journalists to use their platforms to report press freedom violations and explain how officials are depriving the public of news.
“Journalists are historically hesitant to make themselves the story and/or worried that admitting the government is stifling their ability to report the news is a confession of weakness. That needs to stop,” he said.
Stern added that editorials about press freedom, although helpful, are not enough, because readers of the stories impacted by officials’ stonewalling may not read the editorials. Journalists, he said, should “make clear in the story that you would’ve liked to attend the event yourself or speak to the official or their staff but you weren’t allowed to do so. If they believe the coverage is biased, they have themselves to blame, and perhaps they’ll reconsider for next time.”
Stern also emphasized the impact of abuses of public records laws, including agencies charging journalists exorbitant fees to fulfill records requests.
The toolkit incorporates several of his recommendations, advising journalists to “platform the problem: publish when sources won’t cooperate” and to “tell your audience details about records denials.”
You can read the full report here and review the toolkit here.
EEB: Commission’s 2023 Work Programme caves under chemical and farm industry pressures
The European Commission Work Programme (CWP) for 2023 scraps bold plans to protect Europeans from hazardous chemicals and transition to a nature-positive economy.
Read Here
The post EEB: Commission’s 2023 Work Programme caves under chemical and farm industry pressures appeared first on Brave New Europe.
Aleks Szczerbiak: Why has the Polish government raised the German war reparations issue?
As Poland nears its 2023 election, the governing party is stoking the embers of the German war reparations question
Cross-posted from The Polish Politics Blog
Poland’s right-wing ruling party is using the war reparations issue to undermine Germany’s moral narrative that it has come to terms with its Nazi past, and attack the liberal-centrist opposition for allegedly colluding with foreign powers to undermine the Polish government ahead of next year’s parliamentary election. The opposition appears to have defused the issue for now by offering the government critical support, but it could still provide an effective means of mobilising the ruling party’s core electorate.
Poland’s moral and legal case
On September 1st, the eighty-third anniversary of Nazi Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, the Polish government, led since 2015 by the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, officially launched a campaign to seek war reparations from Berlin for the devastation caused by the country’s 1939-45 occupation. The announcement was accompanied by the publication of a report completed in 2019 and prepared by experts for a Law and Justice parliamentary commission which presented detailed analysis supporting the Polish claim from a political and legal, as well as moral and historical, perspective. The report calculated that the war losses suffered by Poland as a result of the occupation amounted to a colossal 6.2 trillion złoties (as of 2021), three times Germany’s annual state budget. Poland as a state never received significant financial compensation for the destruction caused by Germany; only individuals, such as victims of forced slave labour and pseudo-medical experiments in concentration camps, were awarded small symbolic sums by Polish-German foundations.
However, despite Poland’s renewed efforts Germany responded by reiterating its long-standing position that the issue of reparations had been settled conclusively in 1953. The then-communist Polish government renounced its claim in exchange for East Germany accepting Warsaw’s takeover of former German territories. Germany argues that, until now, no Polish government has raised the issue, even after the collapse of communism in 1989. Law and Justice rejects this interpretation arguing that reparations are still due. Supporters of the Polish case argue that: the two countries never concluded any legally binding bilateral peace treaty or liquidation agreement on the effects of the Second World War; the 1953 renunciation was never officially ratified nor even published; and, as it was part of the Soviet bloc, communist Poland did not have international sovereignty at that time. At the beginning of October, Warsaw issued an official ‘diplomatic note’ to Berlin formally making its claim for compensation.
Undermining Germany’s moral narrative
However, while Law and Justice certainly hopes that Poland will receive reparations at some point there is broad agreement that Germany is extremely unlikely to agree to its demands, not least because of the precedent-setting consequences. Any campaign for financial compensation is only likely to bear fruit in the very long-term, if at all. So what is Law and Justice hoping to achieve by raising the issue at this time? In the foreign policy sphere, the party wants to undermine the German government’s moral narrative that it has fully come to terms with, and settled accounts for, its Nazi past. By ensuring that other countries understand the full scale of the tragedy wrought upon Poland during the Second World War, for which Germany has never undertaken a proper financial reckoning, the Polish government hopes to undermine Berlin’s claim to be an international ‘moral superpower’.
Law and Justice also hopes that, by putting Germany under pressure on this question, it can create its own moral narrative that could be used to strengthen Poland’s bargaining position in the international diplomatic arena on various other issues, notably in its ongoing ‘rule-of-law’ dispute with the EU political establishment. The European Commission has blocked 35 billion Euros of payments due to Warsaw from the EU’s coronavirus recovery fund. Law and Justice argues the EU political establishment is, in effect, synonymous with Germany which, it says, sees a strong and assertive Poland as an obstacle to its project of turning the Union into a federal bloc under its dominance.
Law and Justice believes that this is an opportune moment to raise the reparations issue because Germany and the other main EU powers have lost a great deal of political and diplomatic authority through their perceived weak response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Law and Justice has long criticised Germany for disregarding the interests of the former communist states of central and Eastern Europe through its over-conciliatory approach to Moscow, over-reliance on Russian energy (exemplified by the controversial ‘Nord Stream’ gas pipeline, which runs directly from Russia to Germany across the bed of the Baltic Sea by-passing Poland and Ukraine), and, following the outbreak of the war, slowness in providing Ukraine with military aid. Poland, on the other hand, has, for a long time, warned about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expansionist designs on the region. Indeed, Warsaw has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies, at the forefront of efforts to persuade the Western international community to develop a common, robust response to the Russian invasion and ensure that sanctions are maintained and extended.
Is the opposition colluding with foreign powers?
In terms of domestic politics, raising the German war reparations issue was expected to help Law and Justice regain the political initiative by putting pressure on its political opponents – especially the liberal-centrist Civic Platform (PO), Poland’s ruling party between 2007-15 and currently the main opposition grouping, led by former prime minister Donald Tusk. Although Law and Justice is still ahead in most opinion polls its edge over Civic Platform has narrowed in recent months. According to the ‘Pooling the Poles’ micro-blog that aggregates voting intention surveys, Law and Justice is currently averaging 35% support compared with 29% for Civic Platform. Moving the war reparations issue up the political agenda puts the government’s opponents in a difficult position because it resonates strongly with the Polish public. The opposition either has to back a Law and Justice administration, that it despises and harshly criticises at every turn, on this issue, or distance itself from the government’s restitution claims and risk being accused of kowtowing to Berlin and failing to defend the Polish national interest. Indeed, Law and Justice argues that Mr Tusk personifies the opposition’s pro-Berlin orientation and has, on numerous occasions, drawn attention to his strong ties to the German political establishment. Polish state TV, which is strongly supportive of the ruling party, frequently shows clips of Mr Tusk saying ‘Für Deutschland’ (‘For Germany’).
These two elements come together in one of Law and Justice’s main attack lines against the opposition: that it is colluding with Berlin and Brussels who are undermining Poland’s sovereignty and independence by interfering in the country’s domestic politics. The withholding of coronavirus funds by an allegedly German-dominated EU political establishment is thereby portrayed as being part of a politically motivated effort to help its opposition allies oust Law and Justice in the upcoming parliamentary election, scheduled for autumn 2023, and ensure the installation of a more co-operative pro-Berlin government. Germany is an easier target for Law and Justice than the EU in general because it evokes less instinctive sympathy among Poles. While Poles support their country’s continued EU membership overwhelmingly, a September survey conducted by the Ipsos polling agency for the liberal-left OKO.press portal found that 47% of respondents agreed that Germany was using the Union to subordinate Poland (49% disagreed). According to a February survey for the Institute of Public Affairs (ISP) think tank, since 2020 the number of Poles who evaluated Polish-German relations positively had fallen from 72% to 48% while those who viewed them negatively increased from 14% to 35%.
Has Civic Platform defused the issue?
All of this explains why the opposition, especially Civic Platform, reacted so nervously to the government’s moves and found it difficult to develop a clear line on the issue. Initially, Civic Platform simply argued that the government’s demands were not really about war reparations at all but part of a concerted anti-German campaign to shore up support for Law and Justice ahead of next year’s election. The fact that Law and Justice had waited more than three years to publish the parliamentary commission report and raise the issue with Germany in a significant way, in spite of the fact that it had been talking about war reparations since it came to office in 2015, showed, they said, that the government was instrumentalising the memory of Polish war victims as a political manouvre. It was an effort to distract the public from its other problems, such as: the economic slowdown, high energy prices and potential winter fuel shortages, and mounting criticisms of the government’s handling of surging inflation (now more than 17%). The opposition also warned that raising the issue in this way threatened to further undermine Poland’s relationship with Germany in the midst of the worst international crisis since the fall of communism in 1989. Indeed, one Civic Platform politician, ex-party leader Grzegorz Schetyna, actually appeared to echo the German narrative when he said that the question of war reparations was ‘closed’.
However, realising the risks of appearing insensitive to the traumatic history of Polish-German relations – and concerned that, by rubbishing the call for reparations, it had fallen into Law and Justice’s trap – Civic Platform very quickly undertook something of a course correction, particularly as polling showed that most Poles supported the government’s approach. For example, a survey conducted by the IBRiS agency for the ‘Rzeczpospolita’ newspaper found that, by a margin of 51% to 42%, respondents agreed that Poland had the right to seek financial compensation from Germany. As a consequence – while still accusing Law and Justice of raising the issue primarily for electoral purposes, and criticising the ruling party for not having a schedule of diplomatic activities to take it forward – Civic Platform began to stress that it felt that the government’s call for reparations was justified. In the event, virtually all of the party’s deputies voted in favour of a parliamentary resolution supporting the government’s efforts. Indeed, Civic Platform even tried to outflank Law and Justice by saying that the government should also pursue financial compensation from Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union which invaded Poland along with Nazi Germany in 1939 (the ruling party responded that linking these two issues risked diluting the more clear-cut case for German reparations).
Mobilising Law and Justice’s core electorate
By announcing its intention to seek war reparations, Law and Justice looks set to make Polish-German relations central to its bid for re-election next year. One of its main lines of attack is that the opposition is colluding with Berlin and the EU political establishment to undermine the Polish government ahead of the forthcoming parliamentary poll. However, Civic Platform’s pivot on this issue has under-cut Law and Justice’s electoral strategy and defused German war reparations as a question of domestic political contestation sharply dividing the Polish political scene.
In fact, although the issue is likely to return to the political agenda with greater or lesser intensity between now and the election, it was never going to be a dominant one or a political game-changer. While most Poles may agree with Law and Justice’s stance on war reparations, they care more about, and their voting preferences are likely to be determined by, issues such as rising prices, falling living standards, and possible energy shortages. Nonetheless, some commentators argue that Law and Justice has lost ground in opinion polls mainly because its supporters are demoralised and, if an election were held today, rather than switching to other parties they would simply not turnout to vote. So the ruling party is likely to continue raising the reparations issue because, apart from continually setting a trap for the opposition to portray themselves up as the defenders of German interests, it is a highly emotive one and seen by Law and Justice primarily as an effective way of solidifying and mobilising its own, currently rather demotivated, electoral base.
Support us and become part of a media that takes responsibility for society
BRAVE NEW EUROPE is a not-for-profit educational platform for economics, politics, and climate change that brings authors at the cutting edge of progressive thought together with activists and others with articles like this. If you would like to support our work and want to see more writing free of state or corporate media bias and free of charge. To maintain the impetus and impartiality we need fresh funds every month. Three hundred donors, giving £5 or 5 euros a month would bring us close to £1,500 monthly, which is enough to keep us going.
The post Aleks Szczerbiak: Why has the Polish government raised the German war reparations issue? appeared first on Brave New Europe.
Ayesha Tandon – ‘Top 1%’ of emitters caused almost a quarter of global emissions since 1990
Just 1% of the world’s population was responsible for almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions over 1990-2019, new research finds
Ayesha Tandon holds an MSci in Natural Sciences, specialising in Climate Science, from The University of Exeter
Cross-posted from Carbon Brief
The study, published in Nature Sustainability, highlights the inequality in peoples’ greenhouse gas footprints – a cornerstone of the climate justice movement.
In 2019, people living in sub-Saharan Africa produced 1.6 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) each on average, the study finds. In North America, average per capita was more than 10 times higher, while the top 10% of the continent’s emitters produced almost 70tCO2e.
To have a “high” chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, average global per-capita emissions need to fall to 1.9 tCO2e by 2050, the study notes.
When assessing individual contributions to global warming, researchers often focus on emissions from goods and services that people consume. This study presents an update to this method by also including the emissions from a person’s investments in their greenhouse gas footprint. This allows the study to more accurately represent the emissions of the wealthy – which largely come from investments.
“Individuals can consume carbon, but they can also own [and invest in] firms that produce carbon,” the lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief, adding that his work “is proposing a method that is going to integrate these different bits of our carbon footprints together”.
Focusing on 1990-2019, the findings show that investment was the main source of emissions for the top 1% of emitters. And the per capita emissions of the top 1% grew by 26%, while the top 0.01% saw growth of 80%.
Wealth and emissions
Humans release billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. However, these emissions are disproportionately produced by wealthier people, who typically live more carbon-intensive lifestyles.
Recent research suggests the average person living in sub-Saharan Africa produces 0.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide (tCO2) every year, while the average US citizen produces 14.5tCO2. Carbon Brief analysis has also shown that the US alone is responsible for one-fifth of all CO2 emissions since 1850.
The new paper uses an income and wealth inequality dataset from the World Inequality Database to track inequality over 1990-2019. It combines economic data with information on per-capita carbon footprints – calculated using “input-output” methodologies combined with data from the “distributional national accounts” project.
The paper assesses three components of a person’s greenhouse gas footprint. The first is private consumption – made up of emissions from the direct use of fuel and emissions embedded into goods and services. The second includes emissions from government spending in that person’s country – such as government administration, public roads or defence.
Glossary:CO2 equivalent: Greenhouse gases can be expressed in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2eq. For a given amount, different greenhouse gases trap different amounts of heat in the atmosphere, a quantity known as… Read More
The final component of a person’s carbon footprint is investment. Dr Lucas Chancel, from the Paris School of Economics, is the sole author of the new study. He tells Carbon Brief that when someone invests in a company, they are in part responsible for the emissions produced by the day-to-day activities of that firm.
Chancel highlights the global inequality between high and low emitters:
“I find that, in 2019, the bottom 50% of the world population emitted 12% of global emissions, whereas the top 10% emitted 48% of the total.”
Looking in more detail the 174 countries included in this study, he shows the inequality between high and low emitters in different regions. The plot below shows tonnes of CO2 equivalent emitted per person per year for the top 10% (red), middle 40% (dark blue) and bottom 50% (light blue) of emitters in different regions of the world.
Per-capita emissions (tCO2e) in 2019, for the top 10%, middle 40%, and bottom 50% of emitters, grouped by region. Data source: Chancel et al (2022). Chart by Tom Prater for Carbon Brief using Highcharts.
Sub-Saharan Africa has particularly low per-capita emissions. The bottom half of emitters are responsible for just 0.5tCO2e each year, while the top 10% emit around 7.5tCO2e.
In contrast, even the bottom 50% of emitters in North America have annual emissions above 10tCO2e. Meanwhile, the top 10% of the continent’s emitters are responsible for almost 70tCO2e every year.
Dr Anne Owen – a senior research fellow at the University of Leeds, who was not involved in the study – tells Carbon Brief that this is “an ambitious and impressive piece of work”, adding that the “robust” data and methods “allow for a consistent comparison between countries”.
Emissions inequality
The paper goes on to explore how per-capita emissions have changed over 1990-2019 for different emitting groups. It finds that, since 1990, average global per-capita emissions have grown by more than 2%, but that this growth was not uniform across emitting groups.
Chancel tells Carbon Brief that the broad trends in emissions inequality have not changed much over the study period, but notes that “at the very top of the distribution, you see quite a bit of action”.
He finds that per-capita emissions of the top 1% of emitters in the world grew by 26% over 1990-2019. The top 0.01% saw an even larger rise of 80%. Meanwhile, the bottom half of emitters saw a more modest 16% increase in per-capita emissions. And the “lower- and middle-income groups of the rich countries” saw a drop in per capita emissions of 5-15%.
This can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows the percentage change in per-capita emissions for different global emitter groups over 1990-2019 (blue line). In general, individuals in richer countries fall into the “higher emitting” groups, and are found on the right of the chart, while the lowest emitters are found on the left.
Percentage change in per capita emissions for different global emitter groups over 1990-2019 (left) and changes in emissions inequality between countries and within countries, based on an “index of inequality” (right). Source: Chancel et al (2022).
Dr Narasimha Rao – an associate professor of energy systems at the Yale School of Environment, who peer reviewed the study – tells Carbon Brief that it is “striking”, but “unsurprising” to see “the disproportionate growth in the emissions of the global elite around the world”.
Growing inequality within countries has also shaped global emissions over the past three decades, according to the paper.
It finds that, in 1990, while the average citizen of a rich country “polluted unequivocally more” than much of the rest of the world, the wealth gap between individuals within the same country was “on average lower across the globe than today”. However, “the situation has entirely reversed in 30 years”, the study says.
This is reflected in the right-hand chart above. It shows that, in 1990, the largest driver of global emission inequality was due to inequality between countries (red line). By 2019, this had shifted so that within-country emission inequality was the dominant driver (blue line).
In other words, while global emissions inequality in 1990 was primarily driven by the difference in emissions between residents of richer and poorer countries, it is now increasingly driven by the difference in emissions of people living within each country, rich or poor.
“Economic inequality within countries continues to drive a lot of the dynamics that we observe in terms of pollution,” Chancel tells Carbon Brief. He adds that understanding these inequalities is “key” to understanding “how to solve the climate crisis”.
The top 1%
In February 2022, a group of researchers published a study on the global inequality in carbon emissions. It found that the average carbon footprint in the top 1% of emitters was more than 75-times higher than in the bottom 50%.
Dr Wiliam Lamb – a researcher at the Mercator Research Institute, who was not involved in the study – praised the paper. However, he told Carbon Brief that by focusing solely on consumption, the paper did not accurately capture the emissions of the “super-rich”, as “their earnings may be derived from investments while their expenditures can be shrouded in secrecy”.
Chancel tells Carbon Brief that “people who think about carbon footprints just from the point of view of consumption don’t have the entire picture”. By using a “systematic combination of tax data, household surveys and input-output tables” the new study is able to more fully represent the emissions of the very wealthy, it says.
Chancel adds:
“Individuals can consume carbon, but they can also own [and invest in] firms that produce carbon. So here the exercise is proposing a method that is going to integrate these different bits of our carbon footprints together in a consistent framework where I’m not counting the same tonne of carbon twice.”
The plot below shows the percentage of emissions from different emitter groups that come from investments – rather than consumption of goods and services or government spending.
For the top 1% of emitters, the majority of emissions can be traced back to investments, the study finds. It adds that while the share of emissions linked to investment has risen for the top 10% of emitters over the past decade, it has dropped for the bottom 50%.
Chancel explains that this change in investing patterns is driven by the rising wealth gaps within countries.
Dr Klaus Hubacek – a professor of science, technology and society at the University of Groningen, and author of the study published earlier this year – tells Carbon Brief that he is “excited” about the inclusion of investments in this study and that “more effort needs to go into that direction”.
Warming targets
To put these results into context, Chancel compares present-day emissions to those needed to limit warming to 1.5C or 2C above pre-industrial levels.
The plot below shows average carbon footprints in different regions of the world in 2019 and the average global emissions needed to limit warming to 1.5C or 2C – assuming that emissions are split evenly across the global population.
The plot shows that to limit warming to 1.5C, average per-capita emissions need to drop by more than two-thirds from their 2019 value of 6tCO2e. This would require all regions except sub-Saharan Africa to reduce emissions, the paper says, and citizens of North America would need to slash its emissions more than 10-fold to meet the target.
In addition, a “large part of the population in rich countries already appears to be near 2030 national climate targets when these are expressed in per-capita terms”, the paper notes.
For example, it says, “nationally determined contributions (NDCs) established under the rubric of the Paris Agreement imply a per-capita target of around 10t of CO2e in the US”. The chart below shows 2019 per-capita emissions by income group (left) and how much these would need to change to meet the 10tCO2e target (right) for the US (top) and China (bottom) for 2030.
In the US, the richest 10% of the population would have to reduce its emissions by nearly 90% to reach the 2030 target. However, the bottom 50% of emitters would need to make little change.
In China, the difference between emitter groups is even more noticeable. All but the top 10% of the population could stay below their personal greenhouse gas allowances, even if their emissions rise considerably between today and 2030, the study finds. However, the top 10% of the country’s emitters would need to slash emissions by around three-quarters.
“Much is written about the emissions-intensive growth of people buying new appliances and cars as they rise out of poverty”, Rao tells Carbon Brief. However, he says this study “starkly reveals the need to focus on luxury emissions”.
Chancel tells Carbon Brief that he would like to see governments keeping track of how emissions are distributed across their countries, as they do with wealth and GDP data. “There is a lot of work ahead,” he says.
Support us and become part of a media that takes responsibility for society
BRAVE NEW EUROPE is a not-for-profit educational platform for economics, politics, and climate change that brings authors at the cutting edge of progressive thought together with activists and others with articles like this. If you would like to support our work and want to see more writing free of state or corporate media bias and free of charge. To maintain the impetus and impartiality we need fresh funds every month. Three hundred donors, giving £5 or 5 euros a month would bring us close to £1,500 monthly, which is enough to keep us going.
The post Ayesha Tandon – ‘Top 1%’ of emitters caused almost a quarter of global emissions since 1990 appeared first on Brave New Europe.
Steve Keen, Phil Dobbie – Energy, a free market failure
It’s clear, when energy becomes short in supply, free market forces can’t look after all of society. Just the wealthy. That’s why governments are having to step in, propping up an industry that is raking in massive profits. But could free market forces drive a more efficient delivery of energy, by making lower cost renewable energy able to compete on a more level playing field. Whilst there’s no doubt pricing is distorted in favour of fossil fuel provides, Steve tells Phil there’s still no option but to nationalise the provision of energy, something we know will never happen.
Listen Here
The post Steve Keen, Phil Dobbie – Energy, a free market failure appeared first on Brave New Europe.
The Energy Mix: 10 of 13 ‘Flagship’ CCS Projects Failed to Deliver, IEEFA Analysis Concludes
After a half-century of research and development, carbon capture and storage projects are far more likely to fail than to succeed, and nearly three-quarters of the carbon dioxide they manage to capture each year is sold off to fossil companies and used to extract more oil, according to a sweeping industry assessment released today by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
Read Here
Photo: Climate Group/flickr
The post The Energy Mix: 10 of 13 ‘Flagship’ CCS Projects Failed to Deliver, IEEFA Analysis Concludes appeared first on Brave New Europe.
Stefano Liberti: The Climate Won’t Wait for Italian Politics
Italy is extremely exposed to climate breakdown, and it is already being badly affected, but with elections upcoming on 25 September it is not part of the debate
Cross-posted from the Green European Journal
The Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi resigned on 21 July 2022, prompting the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella to dissolve Parliament and call an early election to be held on 25 September.
It is the first time since 1919 that there has been a summer election campaign in Italy. In the brief time available, the parties are busy creating alliances and defining programmes. However, the one subject entirely absent from the electoral campaign is the climate crisis. Its absence is even more surprising considering the profound effects of global warming that Italy is already going through.
For several months, the Po Basin has been gripped in an unprecedented drought. The complete absence of snow in the Alps last winter and no rain for the last six months has transformed the largest Italian river into a small stream. In some areas, you can walk on large sandy beaches that have emerged from the riverbeds.
The lack of water could have catastrophic effects. The Po Basin is home to a third of the Italian population lives, generates 40 per cent of Italian gross domestic product, 35 per cent of agricultural production, and 55 per cent of its hydroelectricity. More than one hundred communes in Piedmont and Lombardy have begun to ration water for civilian use. Its use for irrigation is limited in several areas and hydroelectricity energy production has been interrupted. According to estimates by Coldiretti, the main Italian agricultural confederation, a third of the national production in maize, soya, wheat, rice, and fruit has already been lost. In the Po Delta, where the Po flows out into the sea, the minimal flow of the river has resulted in a sharp increase in the so-called “salt wedge”, that is to say, sea water at the mouth of the river. The increase compromises the availability of fresh water for irrigation and puts supplies of drinking water at risk in the area.
The drought in the Po Basin is not the only palpable manifestation of the effects of the climate crisis in Italy. On 3 July, an enormous serac broke off the Marmolada glacier killing 11 hikers. The clearly higher average seasonal temperatures are causing glaciers throughout the Alps to melt and hiking has been banned from several areas.
Downstream, the Mediterranean Sea has recorded extremely high temperatures. According to ENEA, the Italian Agency for New Technologies, Energy, and Sustainable Economic Development, the water is between 4 to 5 degrees above the seasonal average. This spike substantially changes marine ecosystems. Invasive alien species appear and find habitats well suited to their survival, while native species disappear.
An inept political class
These facts are not subject to public debate, nor are they analysed in the programmes of the political parties standing for elections. The climate impacts recorded this year are still generally considered to be an anomaly. As the Minister of Ecological Transition in Draghi’s cabinet, Roberto Cingolani, said, “We hope that the drought is a one-off occurrence”. The statement by the minister who should have been guiding the ecological transition is a clear example of the Italian political class inability to confront a crisis even as it hits the country so significantly.
This year is not an anomaly but a confirmation of a trend. Italy is the hub of what the scientists call a “climate hot spot”, an area of the planet where the effects of global heating are more obvious than elsewhere. The geographic position of the country, in the centre of the Mediterranean, particularly exposes Italy to rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather events.
There were 2061 of these last year in Italy according to the European Severe Weather Database that monitors Europe every day. This means that on average, in five or six areas of the country, winds with a speed of over 80 kilometres an hour, flooding, or hailstorms with hail over two centimetres in diameter were recorded every day. These increasingly common extreme events cause material damage and victims, exposing the fragility of a country whose territory underwent intense urbanisation and overdevelopment during the last 60 years.
Land consumption in Italy is clearly above the European average. According to data recently published by Ispra, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, in 2021 more than 2 metres squared were lost per second, the highest rate in the last 10 years. When land is consumed, ecosystem services are lost and territories become less able to absorb specific climatic shocks such as extreme events and heatwaves. According to Ispra, the damage caused by land consumption in the last 10 years is between 81 and 99 billion euros.
It is precisely this inability to understand the extent of the climate crisis that makes it difficult to put prevention policies in place. While Italy is one of the European countries most affected by global heating, it is one of the few that has failed to develop a serious adaptation policy.
The national climate change adaptation plan (PNACC), a document written by a group of experts in 2017, has been gathering dust in the ministerial archives for five years. The government has yet to produce an environmental evaluation. Evidently, the government does not consider it as a priority.
Draghi’s failures
Upon taking office, now-departed Prime Minister Draghi had announced incisive action to combat the climate crisis. “The warming of the planet has direct effects on our lives and on our health due to pollution, hydrogeological fragility, and rising sea levels which could make many areas of some coastal cities uninhabitable” said Mario Draghi in his inaugural speech on 17 February 2021. Immediately afterwards he announced policies to help companies become more sustainable. He then created, for the first time in Italy, the Ministry of Ecological Transition to guide the green conversion of the production, transport, and energy supply systems.
One and a half years later, the government’s performance in this aspect is disappointing. Not only has the adaptation plan not been approved, but all the policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions have been weakened. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia exposed Italy’s dependence on Moscow for 40 per cent of its gas imports. This dependence should have stimulated a change in the country’s energy model. Instead of accelerating the transition to renewable, the Draghi government frenetically searched for new gas suppliers such as Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The contracts concluded, as well as investments in gas transport and regasification infrastructure, demonstrate the will to remain anchored to a system built on the combustion of fossil fuels.
As for the enormous amount of resources allocated to Italy by Next Generation EU, the EU post-pandemic recovery fund, the money will only partially go to combatting the climate crisis. Only 13 per cent of the 234.8 billion euros earmarked for Italy are allocated for specifically “green” actions according to an analysis by Green Recovery Tracker, well below the 37 per cent threshold established by Europe.
The election campaign that has just begun does not seem likely to break with this trend of minimising the problem. How best to combat the climate crisis through both mitigation and adaptation policies is absent from the political debate. This is not surprising for parties of the centre-right coalition, the favourites in the polls. They have always tended to ignore the severity of the emergency, at times openly denying climate change. However, even the centre-left currently limits itself to vague proclamations about the need to address the environmental crisis without offering any more detail.
While politics ignores the problem, there are many voices in civil society who want swift action now. Significant from this point of view is the open letter that a group of scientists and climatologists have recently written to the political class.
“Climate science has shown us for some time that Italy, inserted in the context of a climate change hot spot like the Mediterranean, is more affected than other areas of the world by the recent anthropic climate change and its effects,” starts the letter, published on 3 August and also signed by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics Giorgio Parisi. “So we hope for the development of political programmes on these subjects and prompt action by the next government to combat the climate crisis and its impacts.”
If scientists have felt it necessary to go against their usual reluctance and make this public appeal, it means that they consider continued political inaction to be a serious problem. For the moment, the call to action has not had much effect but it is also true that the electoral campaign has just begun.
Support us and become part of a media that takes responsibility for society
BRAVE NEW EUROPE is a not-for-profit educational platform for economics, politics, and climate change that brings authors at the cutting edge of progressive thought together with activists and others with articles like this. If you would like to support our work and want to see more writing free of state or corporate media bias and free of charge. To maintain the impetus and impartiality we need fresh funds every month. Three hundred donors, giving £5 or 5 euros a month would bring us close to £1,500 monthly, which is enough to keep us ticking over.
The post Stefano Liberti: The Climate Won’t Wait for Italian Politics appeared first on Brave New Europe.
Ben Burgis: We should have listened to Bernie Sanders about Ukraine
Bernie got it right again.
Read the article here.
The post Ben Burgis: We should have listened to Bernie Sanders about Ukraine appeared first on Brave New Europe.
Prabir Purkayastha: The WTO Opts for Greed and Profits Over Providing Vaccinations for All People Worldwide
Vaccine apartheid is not in the news anymore but it is still live and well.
This article was produced by Globetrotter
The UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima had appealed before the 12th WTO Ministerial Conference in Geneva that the world would face a grim future if patent waivers did not take place. At a press conference, Byanyima had said, “In a pandemic, sharing technology is life or death, and we are choosing death.” During the 12th Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which took place from June 12 to 17, the rich countries did precisely that. They blocked almost all possibilities of providing cheap vaccines, antiviral drugs and diagnostics to the world. After two years of the WTO “postponing”—or blocking—the India-South Africa proposal for a waiver on patents for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines, the club of the rich countries—the European Union, the United States and the UK—ensured that no worthwhile patent waiver measure was passed. The profits of Big Pharma once again trumped the lives and health of the people. This is also what happened during the AIDS epidemic.
The so-called “concessions” accepted at the 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) do simplify some of the cumbersome procedures that were agreed to under the Doha Declaration for issuing compulsory licenses for medicines. But it makes it much more difficult for countries like India and China, which have considerable manufacturing capacity, to supply vaccines under such compulsory licenses. So yes, countries wanting vaccines can issue compulsory licenses more easily—but to whom, if not the countries with manufacturing capacity?
In vaccine manufacture, it is not the formula of the vaccine that matters. Unlike many medicines, which are small molecule drugs and therefore easy to patent, vaccines are large molecules and belong to the group of medicines that are called biologics. The key to manufacturing biologics is not the formula of the compound but rather manufacturing it at an industrial scale and ensuring the production process of replicating the complex large molecules accurately. This know-how is guarded not under patents but under trade secrets. It is possible to duplicate these trade secrets or secure them by giving somebody who knows the process the job. But this opens companies that try to do this to costly legal action, including by the WTO. And there is also the threat of unilateral sanctions by the United States, the EU and the UK.
The upshot is that Pfizer and other Big Pharma companies will continue to make huge profits at the expense of people’s lives, even if this leads to new SARS-CoV-2 variants emerging and causes the continuation of the pandemic. Less than 20 percent of people in Africa, which has a population of about 700 million, have been fully vaccinated, while millions of vaccine doses are going unused and are going to waste in the United States. We have the vaccine production capacity to immunize the entire global population, thus saving countless lives and reducing the possibility of new, dangerous variants emerging. But doing so is not in the interest of Big Pharma, for whom profits matter far more than human lives.
Just to put it in perspective, Pfizer’s profits roughly doubled in 2021 from 2020, with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine contributing to a significant part of those profits. If Pfizer were a country, its earnings of $81 billion last year would have placed it ahead of the GDP of countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya, according to an analysis of World Bank data by the organization Global Justice Now. Apart from vaccines, the monopoly over diagnostics and antiviral drugs also pushes up the costs for the people constantly battling the virus, while generating windfall profits for Big Pharma.
The only waiver in the MC12 was on compulsory licenses for vaccines. It did not address patents on diagnostics and antiviral drugs. It also did not address the other issue that had been raised that the WTO includes in its waiver other intellectual property rights such as trade secrets, which are essential to the mass production of vaccines.
The MC12 kicked the ball six months down the line on making a decision about doing away with patents for diagnostics and antiviral drugs, with very little chance that the rich countries would have a sudden change of heart on these issues, considering their continued stance on these matters over the course of the pandemic that has already killed millions.
Why is immunizing the global population important? Simply put, the more people that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) infects, the more the chance of new variants emerging. There is a misguided belief among some people that the more the virus mutates, the more benign it is likely to become. This used to be a common opinion among a section of the medical community. However, today evolutionary biologists hold that there is no evidence that viruses mutate to become more benign. And even if it is held to be true in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes, the economist, put it, “In the long run, we are all dead.”
The longer we live with a pandemic that continues to infect around half a million to a million people every day, the more we are dicing with the possibility of a new variant emerging that can be as transmissible as omicron and can also lead to larger case fatalities than we have seen before. The transmissibility of the virus is maximum when the infected patient has only mild symptoms, is physically and socially mobile, and can therefore infect others. This is the window in which the virus spreads. Whether the patient subsequently recovers or dies has little impact on the replication of the disease in other people the patient might have infected. It may have an impact on our social behavior, but that has little to do with the virus becoming more benign with time.
Over time, people do tend to generate more immunity to the virus, but that is what then drives the future evolutionary path of the virus. If delta showed higher transmissibility, then omicron has a much higher immune escape. This means that omicron can bypass our immunity derived from earlier infections or vaccines. Of course, if the evolution of the virus leads to the patient being so sick right from the beginning that the person cannot move around at all, that will halt or lower the transmission of the virus. But that is not how the SARS-CoV-2 virus behaves.
How is SARS-CoV-2 likely to evolve over the next few years? As immunologists tell us, the evolutionary trajectory of the virus depends on the complex interplay of a number of factors that shape the response of our immune system to the evolution of the virus.
Waiting for the virus to turn more benign or a mythical herd immunity cannot be an answer to the current pandemic. The vaccines are crucial to any public health response to the pandemic as countries across the world fight to cut down the number of new infections and, therefore, the roots of new transmissions. And yes, for the foreseeable future, we will have to live with repeating our vaccine booster doses as we fine-tune the vaccines to newer variants.
While the patents on antiviral drugs as a cure for COVID-19 are important, and they will certainly help to cut down the deaths and complications of long COVID, again, patents come in the way of their use. The antiviral drugs are effective only within a small window of the first few days of the disease, which means that they have to be made available cheaply for the people so that they can buy them from a pharmacy. The high cost and the control over the patents of these drugs do not provide a large enough market. A small market and high prices lead to a Catch-22 situation: the prices are high because the market is small; the market is small since the prices are high.
Again, open licensing of the antiviral drugs might make it possible to create a large market for them. But this is what the WTO does not allow. The route of compulsory licensing under the WTO is cumbersome, and its relaxation in the MC12 means that countries like India, which were crucial in fighting the AIDS epidemic, are supposed to opt out as suppliers. They then cannot become antiviral suppliers for COVID-19 as they had been for AIDS antiviral drugs.
Why don’t countries that have the capacity to manufacture advanced vaccines—India, China, Russia and South Africa—come together to offer technology and supplies to the rest of the world? Why don’t countries collaborate with Cuba, a biologic powerhouse, to produce vaccines locally? Cuba has developed five such vaccines, two of which are already under large-scale production.
The answer lies in the “rules-based international order” propagated by the club of the rich. The rules include sanctions on many countries, including Russia, Cuba and China. For those not yet under sanctions, there is the threat of future sanctions by the United States, the EU and the UK—the gang of three that teamed up in the WTO to defeat the India-South Africa patent waiver initiative. The United States also has its domestic law, the U.S. Trade Act, Section 301, for “protecting” its intellectual property under which it threatens countries with U.S. sanctions. India and China figure prominently every year in the list of countries whose laws and actions do not conform to U.S. domestic laws. If the United States and its allies do not win in the WTO, they then use their “rules-based order” where they get to make the rules.
Welcome to our brave new world, where, to paraphrase Winnie Byanyima, death triumphs over life.
Support us and become part of a media that takes responsibility for society
BRAVE NEW EUROPE is a not-for-profit educational platform for economics, politics, and climate change that brings authors at the cutting edge of progressive thought together with activists and others with articles like this. If you would like to support our work and want to see more writing free of state or corporate media bias and free of charge. To maintain the impetus and impartiality we need fresh funds every month. Three hundred donors, giving £5 or 5 euros a month would bring us close to £1,500 monthly, which is enough to keep us ticking over.
The post Prabir Purkayastha: The WTO Opts for Greed and Profits Over Providing Vaccinations for All People Worldwide appeared first on Brave New Europe.
We can establish a market with more privacy friendly services to choose from
It’s just a matter of decision. A decision that Europe has to make.
And the opportunity is now.
peertube.european-pirates.eu/w…