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The Giant $7tn/year FU to 'Just Stop Oil' and the carbon credit fiasco [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-25

Fossil fuels are being subsidized at a rate of $13m a minute, says IMF

The IMF analysis found the total subsidies for oil, gas and coal in 2022 were $7tn (£5.5tn). That is equivalent to 7% of global GDP and almost double what the world spends on education. Countries have pledged to phase out subsidies for years to ensure the price of fossil fuels reflects their true environmental costs, but have achieved little to date. Explicit subsidies, which cut the price of fuels for consumers, doubled in 2022 as countries responded to the higher energy prices resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine. Rich households benefited far more from these than poor ones, the IMF said. Implicit subsidies, which represent the “enormous” costs of the damage caused by fossil fuels through climate change and air pollution, made up 80% of the total.

Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’

But repeated scandals about their true impact and a crackdown from regulators on claims of “carbon neutrality” have meant that demand and prices for offsetting have slumped, with signs that some carbon credit traders are writing off investments that would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars as recently as last year. In the US, the derivatives market regulator has issued a whistleblower alert relating to fraud and misconduct in carbon markets and has created a new environmental fraud taskforce.

Is anyone still surprised that climate change is occurring faster than experts even predicted?

Climate Collapse Could Happen Fast

For a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. They certainly are today. The Southwest is sweltering under a heat dome. Vermont saw a deluge of rain, its second 100-year storm in roughly a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began—a milestone surpassed again the following day. “For a long time, we were within the range of normal. And now we’re really not,” Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at Columbia University, told me. “And it has happened fast enough that people have a memory of it happening.”

It’s not as if it is killing anyone, right?

The World's largest study of global climate-related mortality links 5 million deaths a year to abnormal temperatures

Professor Guo said previous studies had looked at temperature-related mortality within a single country or region. “This is the first study to get a global overview of mortality due to non-optimal temperature conditions between 2000 and 2019, the hottest period since the Pre-Industrial era,” he said. “Importantly, we used 43 countries’ baseline data across five continents with different climates, socioeconomic and demographic conditions and differing levels of infrastructure and public health services – so the study had a large and varied sample size, unlike previous studies.

Not even to mention being burnt alive [e.g. Hawaii].

Great Britain came up with a new strategy to combat climate change awareness

‘Not What You’d Expect in a Democracy.’ How Britain Is Waging War Against Climate Protesters

But their democratic right to protest is now at risk as the British government declares war on tactics that it regards as disruptive and, ideally, illegal. Draft legislation that the House of Commons approved in October would pose unprecedented restrictions on the right to protest in England and Wales (Westminster does not have jurisdiction over policing in Scotland and Northern Ireland). If the House of Lords, the consultative upper chamber of Britain’s parliament, green-lights the Public Order Bill in its current form, there will be new criminal offenses for engaging in popular protest tactics. (The final wording of the legislation is currently being debated by both Houses of Parliament, a process known as “parliamentary ping pong.”) The bill also enhances police powers to stop and search suspected protesters, and allows for certain individuals to be banned from protesting altogether.

Protesting is now only legal if the demonstration occurs within your own home, for the time being anyway.

Some say, Oh please don’t scare people, we should just let the “adults” pocket the money in peace.

OK

Next time a disaster happens just say:

I’m so happy someone is profiting greatly from all this.

-/s

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/25/2189552/-The-Giant-7tn-year-FU-to-Just-Stop-Oil-and-the-carbon-credit-fiasco

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