Climate Notes

It's Not My Problem, But We Could Criminalize Ecocide, Or We Could Green the Sinai.

Insouciant Americans Be Like La La La I Don’t Hear You

From Inside Climate News:
Roughly one in two Americans said they are not very or not at all exposed to environmental and climate change risks. Those perceptions contrast sharply with empirical evidence showing that climate change is having an impact in nearly every corner of the United States. A warming planet has intensified hurricanes battering coasts, droughts striking middle American farms and wildfires threatening homes and air quality across the country. And climate shocks are driving up prices of some food, like chocolate and olive oil, and consumer goods.

Americans also largely believe they do not bear responsibility for global environmental problems. Only about 15 percent of U.S. respondents said that high- and middle-income Americans share responsibility for climate change and natural destruction. Instead, they attribute the most blame to businesses and governments of wealthy countries.

Those survey responses suggest that at least half of Americans may not feel they have any skin in the game when it comes to addressing global environmental problems, according to Geoff Dabelko, a professor at Ohio University and expert in environmental policy and security.

Translating concern about the environment to actual change requires people to believe they have something at stake, Dabelko said. “It’s troubling that Americans aren’t making that connection.”

While fossil fuel companies have long campaigned to shape public perception in a way that absolves their industry of fault for ecosystem destruction and climate change, individual behavior does play a role. Americans have some of the highest per-capita consumption rates in the world.

The world’s wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for nearly half the world’s carbon emissions, along with ecosystem destruction and related social impacts. For instance, American consumption of gold, tropical hardwoods like mahogany and cedar and other commodities has been linked to destruction of the Amazon rainforest and attacks on Indigenous people defending their territories from extractive activities.

The United States is one of the world’s wealthiest countries, and home to 38 percent of the world’s millionaires (the largest share). But a person doesn’t need to be a millionaire to fit within the cohort of the world’s wealthiest. Americans without children earning more than $60,000 a year after tax, and families of three with an after-tax household income above $130,000, are in the richest 1 percent of the world’s population.

On The Other Hand We Could Criminalize Ecocide

There is at least one area where the Global Commons survey appears to track with political developments happening in a handful of countries and the European Union.

About three out of four people polled said they would like to see acts that cause serious environmental harm made a criminal offense.

Activists have long called for a crime of “ecocide” to be enshrined into international law alongside crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. But in recent years, the campaign to make ecocide a crime at the international and national levels has ramped up. In 2021, an independent group of legal experts proposed a definition for an ecocide crime covering “severe” and “widespread or long-term environmental damage.”

Over the past few years, the European Union, as well as governments in Chile, France and Belgium have passed ecocide-like laws. Lawmakers in Brazil, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru and Scotland have proposed such legislation.

Though criminalizing environmental offenses is not new, proponents of ecocide say the laws act as a catchall, as compared to rules that delineate certain pollution thresholds. They also argue that an international ecocide crime would have moral sway, affecting public opinion about mass harm to nature being morally wrong. That might change the behavior of corporations, governments and insurers, said Jojo Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of Stop Ecocide International.

“People clearly understand that the most severe forms of environmental destruction harm all of us, and that there is real deterrent potential in creating personal criminal liability for top decision-makers,” she said in a press release. “Damage prevention is always the best policy, which is precisely what ecocide law is about.”

Or We Could Turn the Sinai Green

CNN reports that a team of engineers and ecologists have a plan to turn Egypt's Sinai Peninsula green .

Ties van der Hoeven’s ambitions are nothing if not grand. The Dutch engineer wants to transform a huge stretch of inhospitable desert into green, fertile land teeming with wildlife.

His sights are set on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, an arid, triangle-shaped expanse that connects Africa with Asia. Thousands of years ago it was bursting with life, he said, but years of farming and other human activity have helped turn it into a barren desert.

Van der Hoeven is convinced he can bring it back to life.

He has spent years fine tuning an initiative aimed at restoring plant and animal life to roughly 13,500 square miles of the Sinai Peninsula, an area slightly bigger than the state of Maryland. The goal: to suck up planet-heating carbon dioxide, increase rainfall and bring food and jobs to local people.

He believes it is the answer to a slew of huge global problems. “We are destroying our planet in a way which is scary,” he told CNN. “The only holistic way out of this situation is with large-scale ecological regeneration”

So-called desert regreening projects are not new, and this is one of a number around the world seeking to transform arid landscapes. Many aim to halt desertification — the creeping degradation of dry lands — a phenomenon the United Nations calls a “silent, invisible crisis that is destabilizing communities on a global scale.”

But the concept is also controversial; critics say transforming deserts is unproven, enormously complex and could negatively affect water and weather in ways we cannot predict.

But the more he researched, the bigger he wanted to go.

Scanning the terrain in Google Earth, he saw the outline of a network of now dried-up rivers, criss-crossing the Sinai like blood vessels, suggesting this land was once green. He pored over weather models and ecological studies and started to see connections.

He could use the sediments dredged from Lake Bardawil to help regreen the surrounding area. “They are salty but they hold very many nutrients and minerals, which you need to start restoring the land,” he said.

He would start with the wetlands around the lake, expanding them to lure the birds and fish.

Then, he would go higher into the region’s mountains, pumping in the lake’s sediments and layering them to create soils where they could grow different varieties of salt-tolerant plants. These would help revitalize the soils, van der Hoeven said, reducing salt levels and making the land able to support a larger array of plants.

Van der Hoeven’s central idea is that adding vegetation to the landscape will mean more evaporation, more clouds forming and more rain falling. It could even change the winds, as greening the region can bring back moisture-laden flows of air, he said.

“This could completely change the weather patterns.”

There’s a thought.

More on this concept: