Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have hit a record high in 2024, with still no sign that they've peaked, according to a "carbon budget" assessment by the UK-based Global Carbon Project. The researchers found that burning of oil, gas and coal emitted 41.2 billion tons (37.4 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2024, a 0.8% increase over 2023. When added to emissions generated by land-use changes such as deforestation, a total of 45.8 billion tons (41.6 billion metric tons) of CO2 was emitted in 2024. At this rate, the researchers estimate there's a 50% chance that global warming will exceed the 1.5 Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming target set by the Paris Agreement within six years. The findings were published Nov. 13 in the journal Earth Systems Science Data. (LiveScience, DW)

Tech companies now acknowledge that they are failing to meet their carbon emission reduction goals because of the mega-computing necessary for artificial intelligence—as if AI were something good and inevitable rather than ultra-dystopian. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry exploits carbon concerns to lubricate its comeback—with even countries like Kenya now planning reactors, amid oppressive and iniquitous social conditions. Even apart from the risk of devastating accidents, the normal functioning of nuclear power constitutes an ongoing disaster due to the dilemmas of waste disposal and the despoliation of indigenous lands by uranium mining. Climate disaster versus nuclear disaster is a false choice posed by omnicidal techno-capitalism. The only way to salvage a dignified human future lies in the abolition of fossil fuels, nuclear power and artificial intelligence alike. So argues Bill Weinberg in  Episode 234 of the CounterVortex podcast. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

The inaugural biennial Africa Climate Summit, which was attended by some 30,000 delegates including 17 heads of state, wrapped up in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, Sept. 6 following three days of discussions largely centred on the opportunities for "green" economic growth on the continent. The summit issued the Nairobi Declaration, containing a slew of pledges and demands, including calls to accurately value the continent's natural carbon sequestration assets (such as its forests), and for $600 billion in investment in renewable energy (a more than 435% increase) to produce at least 300 gigawatts by 2030. The declaration also called on wealthy countries to live up to their existing commitments to cut emissions and to deliver funds for adaptation—by properly launching, for example, the Loss & Damage Fund agreed to at last year's COP27 in Egypt. However, the summit was also dogged by controversy and protests, with more than 500 civil society organizations signing an open letter claiming its agenda had been hijacked to market "false solutions" such as carbon markets.

Protesters demonstrated in Belém, Brazil, on Aug. 6 during the international Amazon Dialogues summit, against the state oil company Petrobras' proposal to begin offshore drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River.

The proposed project is located in deep waters off the Brazillian state of Amapá. The company's application for a license was rejected by the Brazilian Institute of Environment & Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) on May 17 due to "technical inconsistencies." According to Ibama, "The basin at the mouth of the Amazon is considered a region of extreme socio-environmental sensitivity because it houses Conservation Units, Indigenous Lands, mangroves, biogenic formations of organisms such as corals and sponges, in addition to great marine biodiversity with endangered species."

In Episode 151 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes a tellingly ironic juxtaposition of simultaneous news stories: the COP27 global climate summit in Egypt and the World Cup games in Qatar—where mega-scale stadium air-conditioning betrays the fundamental unseriousness of our civilization in addressing the impending climate apocalypse. The COP27 agreement for a "loss and damage" fund stops short of demands for climate reparations—a critical question for island nations that stand to disappear beneath the waves, flood-devastated Pakistan, and indigenous peoples of the fire-ravaged Bolivian Amazon. Petro powers like Russia and Saudi Arabia formed a bloc to bar any progress on limiting further expansion of oil and gas exploitation, while the Ukrainian delegation called for a boycott of Moscow's hydrocarbons, and pointed to the massive ecological toll of Russia's war of aggression. Meanwhile, the world population reached 8 billion, providing an excuse for groups like PopulationMatters to proffer the Malthusian fallacy even as the rate of population growth is actually slowing. Worldwide indigenous and peasant resistance to hydrocarbon exploitation points to a revolutionary response to the crisis.

In Episode 147 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the recent statement from the UN Environment Program that "only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster." Studies from similarly prestigious global bodies have raised the prospect of imminent human extinction. An International Energy Agency report released last year warned that new fossil fuel exploration needed to halt by 2022 in order to keep warming within the limits set by the 2015 Paris Agreement. Adoption of new technologies and emissions standards does mean that CO2 emissions from energy generation (at least) are likely to peak by 2025. But the IEA finds that this would still lead to global temperatures rising by 2.5 C above pre-industrial levels by century's end—exceeding the Paris Agreement limits, with catastrophic climate impacts. And the catastrophic impacts, already felt in places like (just for example) Chad and Cameroon, win but scarce media coverage. Climate-related conflict has already escalated to genocide in Darfur, and possibly in Syria. The oil companies, meanwhile, are constitutionally incapable of writing off the "stranded assets" of vast hydrocarbon investments. Climate protests in Europe—at oil terminals and car shows (as well as, less appropriately, museums)—do win some attention. But the ongoing resistance to still-expanding oil mega-projects in places like Uganda and Tanzania are comparatively invisible to the outside world. The dire warnings from the UN and IEA raise the imperative for a globalized resistance with an explicitly anti-capitalist politics. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

There is "no credible pathway to 1.5C in place" today, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) states in its new Emissions Gap Report 2022, despite legally binding promises made at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference to prevent average temperatures rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. "This report tells us in cold scientific terms what nature has been telling us all year, through deadly floods, storms and raging fires: we have to stop filling our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and stop doing it fast," said Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP. "We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster."

In Episode 121 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the grim irony that on the week of International Chernobyl Disaster Remembrance Day, Russian regime and state media figures issued blatant threats to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war. This follows criminal recklessness by Russian forces at the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhya nuclear plants, which itself constituted an escalation on the ladder of nuclear terror. These events clearly illustrate how nuclear power and weapons constitute a single unified threat. Weinberg continues his deconstruction of the industry propaganda about how the "no safe dose" dictum is now obsolete (no, it isn't, actually), and sophistries such as the "Banana Equivalent Dose."  Amid the relentless efforts to revive the nuclear industry in the US, China is undertaking a major thrust of nuclear development, with similar plans afoot in France. And this as economies are increasingly based on energy-intensive and socially oppressive activities like "crypto-mining." Nonetheless, respected environmentalists such as acclaimed climate scientist James Hansen and Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Center now advocate a continuance of reliance on nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels. This false choice is predicated on the continuance of dystopian "normality"—exactly what needs to be challenged. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.