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TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Just about everything comes through the Strait of Hormuz
“Nearly 80% of oil production in the US is now light weight shale oil, which can be refined into fuels like gasoline, and jet fuel, and naphtha which can be made into plastic. Originally, the oil flowing out of US rocks was heavy crude, and our oil processing facilities were built to work with heavy oil. The kicker is that refineries that process heavy oil can’t reliably process light oil.
“Most American light oil is simply shipped off to more recently built refineries elsewhere in the world — largely in the Middle East. Oil companies then imported heavy crude to feed into America’s aging refineries — again, mostly from the Middle East.
“Remember that naphtha thing? Shale oil that is largely shipped to the Middle East produces the feedstocks for plastic and fertilizer and thousands of other petrochemicals. And what is made from naphtha? The question is more what isn’t? Everything is plastic.
“Here is a short litany of the [petrochemical] things that affect you daily: clothing and shoes, dyes and paints, artificial scents and flavors, glycerin (the base of soap), surfactants (the base of many shampoos and liquid cleaners), paraffin, mineral oil (baby oil), vinyl, carpeting and most furniture, siding and roofing, acrylic, non-stick coatings, lubricants (from Vaseline to Valvoline), car bodies and most tires, pens and the inks that fill them, the keyboards we type on and the screens we read, umbrellas, soccer balls and most other sports equipment, tents and sun-shades, hot air balloons, mylar balloons and their associated curly ribbons, a rather scary amount of food preservatives, many feedstocks for drugs of all kinds, all the packaging that encases everything that must be shipped — and so on and on and on.
“For Trump to say that the US doesn’t need the Strait of Hormuz opened is so stupid it would be laughable — if it weren’t so dire. Quite literally everything for sale in most supermarkets has gone through that Strait.
“Much of the stuff that flows between Asia and America — which is everything — is now stuck in port. It is not moving on to the next stage in production. It is not heading out to restock American warehouses and retail shelves. It’s quite likely that we’re going to experience shortages that will make the COVID shutdown seem like a mild bump.” [click the link for the full article]
Food price increase will be turbocharged
“As he ran for a second presidency, Trump said repeatedly he would ‘defeat inflation’. Food prices were already expected to increase in 2026, and at a faster rate than their 20-year historical average.
“But the war with Iran will likely turbocharge grocery prices, particularly beef prices, that are expected to increase 10.1%. The USDA now predicts overall food prices would increase by 3.6% — faster than inflation.” [click the link for the full article]
Food sovereignty sidesteps petro-fertilizers of industrial ag
“The US and Israel’s attack on Iran has led to significant price increases on fuel. Oil and gas capture the headlines. But fertilizer prices could also skyrocket, especially in low-income countries. This is what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine.
“In African countries, dependency on imported fertilizers underlines the need for a new approach to food production and distribution. That new approach is often called food sovereignty. Food sovereignty focuses on who controls food production and distribution, and how it is organized.
“In practice, this means seeking alternatives to industrial agriculture techniques — often called the ‘green revolution’. These methods rely on consolidated landholdings, mechanization, increased chemical inputs, and a shift toward ultra-processed foods. Driven by foreign interests, such consolidation increases African communities’ dependence on external actors.
“Awareness of regenerative agriculture is growing among family farmers in Africa, including in Kenya’s Kisumu region. Farmers there refer to regenerative agriculture’s cover crops as green manure. Green manure has many benefits for producers, consumers, and the environment, and it returns control over key inputs to family farmers. A war in the Middle East does not affect the price of cover crops used to fertilize fields and build soil health.” [click the link for the full article]
GDP overlooks exploitation of “free” natural capital
“The late Paul R. Ehrlich goes so far as to describe On Natural Capital as ‘the best book in economics for the general reader since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations‘. The book was born out of a report on the economics of biodiversity, commissioned by the UK government in 2019.
“This is not a polemic reliant on reductionism and grandiosity. At every stage requiring nuance, Partha Dasgupta either delves into it or stresses that it is there. On Natural Capital reads like an academic paper: one devoid of jargon, dead set on clarity, with a refreshing faith in the reader’s ability to consider his thesis at the level Partha delivers it — objectively.
“And yet, despite his stressing complexity, the central thesis is, admissibly, simple: we cannot continue to take from the natural world at the rate we currently do. It’s immoral in the first instance and impossible in the second.
“In the past 50 years, wildlife populations have declined by 73%. The size of low-oxygen areas in the ocean (because of algal growth, because of nitrate fertilizer runoff) has increased by an area roughly the size of the European Union, and the number of zero-oxygen areas has quadrupled.
“The extinction rate is currently 100 to 1000 times the previous average. Owing to asteroids the size of cities or incomprehensibly severe volcanism, there have been five mass extinction events in Earth’s history — we are currently living through the sixth, according to Partha.” [click the link for the full article]
Protecting biodiversity is essential for ALL life — podcast
“Biodiversity is collapsing under the pressures of human overpopulation, overconsumption, and animal agriculture. In this podcast, Tierra Curry and Stephanie Feldstein of the Center for Biological Diversity explain how science, law, and advocacy can protect wildlife and wild places.
“Podcast topics include — human-driven extinctions are mutilating the tree of life; why biodiversity is essential for wellbeing and thriving of all species; why industrial agriculture’s promotion of pasture grazing is based on myths; meat reduction is the most effective strategy to preserve habitats and wild animals.” [click the link to hear the podcast]
Rights of nature: isolated cases must expand into a legal system
“Preindustrial humans venerated, respected, relied on, and also feared the raw force of nature. To better understand natural phenomena, people personalized many of the elements they encountered. This may not count as legal ‘personhood’ as understood in the 21st century, but rivers, mountains, forests, waters, harvests, and hunts all had deities or spirits.
“Indigenous peoples have long suffered discrimination and worse, but their ability to live in harmony with nature is increasingly understood and appreciated. Although they make up less than 5% of the global population, Indigenous people protect 80% of Earth’s remaining biodiversity.
“Rights of nature advocates view the relationship between humans and nature as interdependent and have called for a corresponding legal framework. Only the legal personhood of natural entities can be the shield protecting them from continuing harm.
“However, so far, most of the world’s traditional legal systems have tended to regard nature as property that can be used, abused, consumed, constricted, depleted, degraded, poisoned, and sold. The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature brings together a network of organizations and people from about 100 countries dedicated to achieving the ‘universal adoption and implementation of legal systems that recognize, respect, and enforce Rights of Nature’.” [click the link for the full article]
AI data centers — they’re not your common search engine
“The AI revolution has the potential to dwarf the nineteenth-century industrial revolution in both impact and pace, and perhaps even to dominate human society. But its spoils are not poised to be shared with anyone but tech capitalists and other members of the economic ultra-elite.
“A bill from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposes a moratorium on new AI data centers until oversight mechanisms and legal safeguards are in place, and on the export of AI chips to countries that do not sufficiently regulate the technology.
“Research compiled by Sanders’s staff projects that AI-driven automation will severely hollow out the American workforce, potentially destroying nearly one hundred million jobs within a decade. Among the planned data centers is a Meta facility that Mark Zuckerberg boasted would rival Manhattan in size.
“If passed and signed into law, the bill would provide federal cover for the more than one hundred local communities that have already enacted their own restrictions on data centers, in addition to the twelve states currently pushing forward with statewide proposals.
“Unregulated AI is becoming a tool for extracting profit from everyday life. Workers are deprived of work. People grow addicted to AI as a source of illusory companionship amid a mounting loneliness crisis. AI-generated misinformation undermines civic functioning. And the privacy and safety of Americans are under constant threat from companies that are collecting unprecedented amounts of personal data.” [click the link for the full article]
Wellbeing for all — not more wealth for a few billionaires
“Why, despite all our innovative capabilities, do problems like poverty, hunger, and environmental destruction keep plaguing humanity? And why, despite astonishing technological achievements has wellbeing in the rich countries been stagnant? The answer is simple. Solving poverty, caring for the environment, or fostering wellbeing is not the ultimate goal of our current economic system. Its goal is growth.
“The Limits to Growth: a 1972 bestseller published by a team of MIT scientists, was their answer to this question: ‘Why do we keep being plagued by these social and environmental woes despite all our progress?’ The MIT scientists created a first of its kind world model, and ran scenarios with it.
“There was no scenario in which wellbeing levels were able to keep rising indefinitely. But there was one in which current wellbeing levels were maintained — in which humanity consciously chooses its own limits, redirecting resources away from industrial growth towards human health, education, and combating pollution.
“With the model’s business-as-usual scenario, growth grinds to a halt around 2040 or so, followed by steep decline. I think the only realistic plan to avoid breakdown, and maintain global wellbeing, lies in the mindset shift from ‘never enough’ to ‘enough for each’ — a wellbeing economy.” [click the link for the full article]
No Virginia, there is no net-positive solar tech
“Like any technological product manufactured by industrial processes from raw materials extracted from the earth, solar panels have an ecological footprint that negatively impacts the more-than-human world. While I agree that we must reduce fossil fuel use for the good of the planet, I must point out that solar panels are not benign.
“I have long advocated for cutting overall energy use and consumption rather than trying to sustain current levels with alternate means. I’ll also add that I personally appreciate solar power in my own life. It is amazing technology that has allowed me to document some locales that are under threat from expanding development.
“My main concern is with the utility-scale photovoltaic plants. Rooftop, brownfield or parking lot installations are preferable in this way, though there is still the impact of manufacturing and disposing of the panels themselves, which is not trivial, and which I aim to highlight here.
“The three main types of solar panels used in utility-scale plants are monocrystalline, polycrystalline, and thin-film. Monocrystalline panels are the most efficient, last the longest and have the highest cost. Polycrystalline are no longer the standard in utility-scale operations. Thin-film comprise only ~5% of those in use.
“Silicon is the key material needed for crystalline panels, made from quartzite sand, which is in turn from quartzite ore. Quartzite ore is extracted from open-pit quarries or underground mines. As far as habitat degradation goes, mining is a nightmare. To get to pure silicon, the sand is mixed with a carbon source (like coal) and put in an arc furnace. As the oxide burns away, silicon is left.
“By 2050, the world will have to deal with ~78 million metric tons of solar panel waste. There’s no coordinated plan or regulations to deal with this. Technically speaking, the silicon wafers can be melted down and re-purified, though dealing with the encapsulation layer is not straightforward. Also, as with any industrial processes, recycling will itself require machines and energy and will generate waste.” [click the link for the full article]
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