Coal industry dwindling? That myth is blown up by German environmentalist Heffa Schücking. Then: 17,800 years ago, methane shot up in decades. Rapid ice melt changed the rain and an age of wildfire broke out. Is it happening again? We ask Ben Riddell-Young from CIRES. French economist Timothée Parrique says “Slow down or perish.” The slow way out.
Welcome to Radio Ecoshock.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
“Struggling to survive in a Mad Max-like plus four-degree world of heat wave, dead soil and the recurrent pandemics, that’s the scary bit. Compared to this, the quantity of money an economy makes is relatively unimportant.“
– Timothée Parrique
==============
WE ARE NOT WINNING THE BATTLE TO RETIRE COAL
HEFFA SCHUCKING
Thanks to the renewable energy revolution and climate worries, dirty coal is on it’s way out. Except that is not true. Yes, coal burning for electricity is slowly falling in the U.S. and European Union. That is where most of us get our news. But the International Energy Agency reports globally more coal was shipped and burned in 2024 than ever before – and that will continue for years, wrecking Earth’s climate.
We can track it. There is a global coal industry database. The Global Coal Exit List is run by the German non-profit called Urgewald. That was founded in 1992 by Goldman Environment Prize winner Heffa Shucking. Despite lofty promises by corporations and politicians, Urgewald warns us there is too much coal and too little exit.
Listen to or download this 25 minute interview with Heffa Schucking in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
The name “Urgewald” is a combination of the words “Urgewalt”, which means “elemental force”, and “Urwald”, which is an old word for “rainforest”. Urgewald, working with other NGO’s, worked intensively on European banks to get out of coal. In 2015 they got the Norwegian Government Pension Fund out of major coal investments. The latest news on this side of the Atlantic is not so good. After the election of Donald Trump, the six largest American banks withdrew from the UN-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance . Five big Canadian banks did the same.
But here is the truth about coal, as reported by Jillian Ambrose in the Guardian Dec 18: “Coal use to reach new peak – and remain at near-record levels for years”.
The International Energy Agency’s new “Coal 2024” report finds coal prices are about 50% higher than the average around 2019. They point to the Ukraine war pushing gas prices higher as a factor.
We all see photos of vast arrays of solar panels covering hills and valleys in China. Yet according to the IEA, China consumes 30% more coal than the rest of the world combined. China is still heavily coal-dependent. The IEA even says weather in China could affect coal demand in the next few years.
Despite climate pledges, Australia approved three big coal mine expansions in 2024. There is more bad news from here in Canada. The Premier of Alberta loves the Tar Sands. But now Alberta has approved coal mining in a picturesque slope of the Rocky Mountains, putting Canada back into the black carbon business. Australian companies are involved.
The Urgewald October report said:
“Over the past year alone, global coal-fired capacity grew by 30 GigaWatts, a net increase that is larger than Poland’s entire coal plant fleet.”
Urgewald maintains the “Global Coal Exit List” (GCEL), a public database of 1,579 companies in the coal industry. They say: “…companies on the GCEL plan to develop new thermal coal mining projects with a total capacity of 2,636 million tons per year (Mtpa), an amount equal to almost 35% of the world’s current thermal coal production. On a country level, the largest thermal coal mine expansions are planned in India (947 Mtpa), China (873 Mtpa) and Australia (201 Mtpa).” [Press release October 30, 2024]
Energy research firm Wood Mackenzie forecast 2024 as the high peak for coal. Two years ago, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry told the COP28 climate summit we are transitioning away from coal. The opposite is happening. Maybe greens believed what we wanted to believe?
Frankly, hearing the world burned a record high of 8.7bn tonnes this year made me want to call the climate species suicide hot-line. Could coal be the accelerator that pushes climate into a catastrophe for humans and wildlife?
The general theory is humans will ditch coal once renewables become cheap enough. It’s just a stage, they tell us, maybe for another ten years. They said that ten years ago, and anyway we may flame out with ten more years of these amazing emissions from all fossil fuels. And governments are backing away.
It would sure help if the media, and social media, kept bringing up coal as much as politics or the lives of famous people. We need a reminder every day of the damage done. In North America, I know the continuing life of coal is partly media silence and abdication.
Some may confuse a decline of coal burning in UK and U.S. with a global trend (a common mistake in mass media centered in New York and London). The public did not hear about Chinese burning, and China was in no rush to tell them. Major miners in Australia and Indonesia knew they were expanding production.
The reality of record coal burning in a time of city-burning wildfires and region-smashing hot hurricanes is our dirty little secret. The coal renaissance will not be broadcast on TV.
SEE ALSO: GLOBAL COAL PLANT TRACKER from Global Energy Monitor
I previously spoke with Heffa Schucking in January 2019 for the show “Halting Mass Suicide by Coal”.
==============
ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE PAST – AND FUTURE?
BEN RIDDELL-YOUNG
About 18,000 years ago, ice bergs flooded the North Atlantic and humans sheltered from the cold in caves. Scientists called it the H1 Heinrich Event. Until now, we did not know the great land forests also burned then, like an age of fire, increasing methane in the atmosphere. As melting Greenland pours freshwater into the sea, as record fires burn the landscape and methane is climbing, could it happen again? Is this the start of a “fire regime” as a sign of abrupt climate change, as seen in past records?
Cool new science reveals more about this abrupt climate change in Earth’s recent past – and you can’t guess how they did it. The paper published in Nature January 1st, 2025 is called “Abrupt changes in biomass burning during the last glacial period”. The lead author and innovator is Dr. Ben Riddell-Young. He is a postdoctoral scholar at CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. That is located at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is also associated with the Global Monitoring Laboratory at NOAA. Ben defended his Thesis at Oregon State University in 2023, and one of his chapters was immediately published in Nature Geoscience.
THE MOST RECENT ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE?
When scientists take samples from the bottom of the North Atlantic, they find patches of stony debris fields that could only have been dropped from icebergs as they melt. Using various ways of measuring time, they determined that some major ice event happened around 18,000 years ago – and it was fast, developing in a decade or two, and not lasting more than maybe two hundred to two thousand years (?). Such a massive burst of iceberg release is called a “Heinrich Event”. That is associated with abrupt climate change.
To get more detail on this abrupt climate change (happening not long before human agriculture and cities) Ben Riddell-Young led a team of scientists looking at a detailed record in the ice cores. Greenland ice cores do go back that far, but for various reasons, it is difficult to find changes in just a few years. However, in Antarctica, annual snow fall is heavy enough that each year’s layer can be separately measured using new technology and new approaches.
IMAGE CREDIT: by: Thomas Bauska/British Antarctic Survey (ice bubbles)
Listen to or download this 19 minute interview with Ben Riddell-Young in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
Check out this press release from CIRES January 6, 2025 “Wildfires accompanied past periods of abrupt climate change”.
First, you may ask: can Antarctic ice cores tell us much about what happened in the Northern Hemisphere, like the North Atlantic where that glacial debris marker was found? Ben has worked on that, including his co-authored 2023 paper “Bipolar impact and phasing of Heinrich-type climate variability”.
The CIRES led team located signs of an abrupt climate change around 17,800 years ago. Within those delicate layers of ice, they carefully extracted air bubbles for analysis – building on a lot of previous work analyzing these ice cores. This study chose to focus on methane. There was an important increase in methane.
Among the many miracles of nature, the methane molecule comes in various configurations, called “isotopes”. The configuration of the isotope reveals whether the methane originated from microbes, from fires, or from geologic sources. As Ben tells us in this interview, the increased methane in that abrupt event 17,800 years ago cam not from microbes but from fires. This indicates a decade or more of massive wildfires burning across the Northern Hemisphere, and perhaps in the Southern Hemisphere.
The authors suggest the rapid change during the Heinrich Event pushed rain belts further south toward the tropics, with a change in atmospheric circulation called the Hadley Cell. This would have dried the northern forests, priming them for almost unimaginable years of fire. That is what the ice core air bubbles report.
So now we have three developments during an abrupt climate change a few thousand years ago: release of fresh water from melting ice in the Northern Hemisphere, increasing methane in the atmosphere, and a lot of wildfires. All three of those are active today. We discuss present-day applications of this new science in our interview. Given mass fires in Canada last year, and Los Angeles just weeks ago, I thought you might want to know.
These scientists found abrupt climate changes (changing in as little as tens of years) contemporaneous with an outflow of ice water during the period from 16,000 to 60,000 years ago. The source of those massive discharges of meltwater no longer exists: the Laurentide Ice Sheet that covered Canada and northern U.S. states for over 2 million years. In places it was several miles thick. The Laurentide Ice Sheet became extinct approximately 11,000 years ago – just before the development of agriculture and cities by humans. This marks the beginning of the Holocene epoch.
So the question becomes: could meltwater from Greenland and Antarctica force similar global changes (in rainfall, wildfires, and ocean currents) where large volumes of the more dangerous greenhouse gas methane are released? Have we reached the threshold for a big climate shift driven by rapid ice melt? By some recent estimates, current melting rates in Greenland are comparable to a mid-range Heinrich Event.
===============
SLOW DOWN OR PARISH
TIMOTHÉE PARRIQUE
Growth is the problem, never the answer says Dr. Timothée Parrique. He is with The Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and author of “Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth” and “Slow down or Perish” – the topic of this quick talk from The Conference 2023. You will find a transcript of the first 10 minutes of this presentation at the bottom of this blog.
Listen to or download this 15 minute talk by Timothée Parrique in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
Welcome to new listeners on WEFR AM in Fairmont West Virginia. Radio Ecoshock is now broadcast by 107 non-profit radio stations in four countries. Please tell others about this program, always available free (after broadcast) at ecoshock.org.
Bluesky people, please repost the show so others can find the voice of science.
@radioecoshock.bsky.social
I’m Alex. Thank you for listening and caring about our home planet.
===================
TIMOTHÉE PARRIQUE TRANSCRIPT:
[TP] Demolition is an essential part of construction. That which is true for the world of material infrastructures like pipeline and bridges is also valid for immaterial institutions like corporations, like financial markets. To construct a new alternative economy, we’ll first have to destroy the old one. This we’re not currently doing.
Instead, we’re thinking about the transition as a matter of additions. We try to green things with armies of eco-inventions like waste collecting, aquatic drones, underwater windmills, lab-grown meat, 5G-based smart grids, all this stuff we see every day. The problem is this approach has failed. For the last two decades, decades. The richest countries in the world have been trying to fall back within planetary boundaries. None of them has succeeded. Actually, 20 years later, most environmental indicator are worse today.
So This calls for a completely new strategy. Forget additions. Let’s think about the transition as a matter of subtractions. Let’s put innovation aside for a little bit and talk about exnovation, the process of terminating a practice of the use of a technology. This is what I want to talk about today. Removal, shutdown, blockade, divestment, sabotage, degrowth. I want to talk about how to diffuse a highly sophisticated climate bomb, an economic system that is destroying the biosphere and that needs to be completely be redesigned.
“HOW TO BLOW UP AN ECONOMY”
Hence, today, provocative title, “How to Blow up an Economy”. Of course, the problem is not the economy itself. It’s a specific economic system, capitalism, and it’s compulsion for endless growth. Just like a computer, every economy has an operating system, a social-cultural software made of many formal and informal rules.
Today, our economic system system is organized around a grow or die imperative. Governments must maximize their GDP. Cities look at their revenues. Businesses are focused on their profit. Associations look for funding, and individuals worry about income. At every level of that system, you have incentives in place to maximize financial growth. And guess what happens in a system where every part strives to grow? It gets bigger. An economy which grows at 3% per year doubles in size every generation. And that’s where it becomes to be tricky. Every economic activity uses energy and materials. You can use them more efficiently, but you cannot run an economy without them. The more you consume, the more you need to produce. The more you produce, the more you need to extract. The more you extract, the more you take the risk risk of overshooting the biophysical carrying capacity of your economy.
That’s where we are today, an ecological overshoot. GDP itself can grow forever because it’s immaterial. But ecosystems, on the other hand, they’re finite. They are limited quantities of soil, of species, of metals, of water. Central banks, they can create as many euros as they want, but they cannot create new fossil fuels. Nor can they create extra capacity for the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gasses. That’s our fundamental problem. We’re trying to sustain an infinite growth within a finite planet, which is a bit like expecting to grow up while keeping your baby shoes for your entire life.
CAN WE JUST REGREEN THAT GROWTH?
Can’t we just green that growth? Just decouple GDP from its ecological impact? Economists and politicians just love this idea of green growth. I mean, it’s an easy story. It’s the ’don’t worry, everything is going to be okay’ thing to say. But the reality is more complicated. What we currently call green growth is growth that is slightly decoupled from greenhouse gasses. I say slightly because the amount of reductions of emissions is so very tiny, it looks ridiculous in comparison to what needs to be done. With current decarbonization rates, high income countries would take an average 220 years to reach carbon neutrality.
And in the process, they would emit a bit, almost 30 times their national carbon budget. Calling that growth green is a bit like me saying, ’Well, I’ve done a diet. I’ve lost 200 grams in 10 years’. Keep in mind that here we’re only talking about carbon. We’re doing way worse for other environmental pressures which are still heavily coupled with economic activity.
Take material footprint, for example. It has increased by 9. 4% in Europe since the 1990s. I don’t care how efficient your economy is if it still overshoots planetary boundaries. Same story for water footprint, land use, biodiversity loss, air and water quality, waste generation. As of today, no economy in the world has has managed to reduce this total ecological footprint while growing its economy. The only progress we’ve seen on the environmental front were during a period of economic crisis. See where this is going?
WHAT ABOUT A PERMANENT RECESSION?
So should we put our economies in a permanent recession? Let me put it this way. You’re obese and you want to lose 20 kilos. Do you stop eating everything and forever? No. You do a diet, a temporary, selective diet to be back in health. For economies, this is exactly what we need to do – a planned, selective, temporary downscaling of production and consumption enrich communities to lower total ecological footprint.
Is that going to be painful? Well, it depends. If you want to lose 20 kilos, you can either do a diet or you can chop one of your legs off. I mean, in terms of kilograms, both courses of action are exactly It’s the same. In terms of well-being, though, one is clearly better than the other. That’s the choice we have today. Planned degrowth, the diet today, or chaotic collapse tomorrow, the amputation. Either we take the time to organize a just and democratic transition to a smaller, more sustainable economy. Or we wait for resources to go scarce and let disaster set the agenda.
I understand that some people are afraid of GDP going down, but that’s not really what should scare us. Struggling to survive in a Mad Max-like plus four-degree world of heat wave, dead soil and the recurrent pandemics, that’s the scary bit. Compared to this, the quantity of money an economy makes is relatively unimportant.
END FIRST 10 MINUTES.
Get the rest or our chat in my interview.
On the Parreque talk…The diet concept to reduce growth is trying to make a good feeling to describe the predicament. The diet would have to be starvation to death of humanity to make the impact of necessity. Human wellbeing has no part of true relations to the changes that have to occur. The day of our growth will be followed by a lasting nightmare for all the beings on the planet. Nice try though.
Always depressing when climate experts/scientists go on about 1.5C when clearly it’s going to be VERY likely ~3C (re pretty much certainty)
Civilization is collapsing & our future is catastrophically dystopian . This message shld be clear from climate experts. But clearly life’s a journey & sleep sld always try to do the right thing & live wholesomely
This is an extremely important albeit a largely ignored issue in Canada and the US that requires every literate person who is concerned about human survival to critically examine. You might be surprised, as I was, to discover that there is a really robust body of degrowth inquiry (mainly out of Europe) including:
– The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, Erin Vansintoran (excellent survey of the degrowth literature)
– Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Sato (a best seller in Japan under the (translated) title Capital in the Anthropocene
– The Social Ecology of Capital, by Éric Pineault (see previous interview with Pineault on Radio Echo Shock)
– Capitalism in the Anthropocene by John Bellamy Foster (among his many other writings on this topic)
– Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation by Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams
– Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, by Jason Hickel
Perhaps the best argued case for the Green New Deal is Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin. Chomsky, while adding his name to a book that was obviously mainly the work of the neo-Keynesian economist Robert Pollin, seems in places to be unconvinced by the text’s central thesis. So I am.