This is a story I had sporadically wondered whether I’d ever have the chance to write. Over a decade ago, I covered a lawsuit filed by climate scientist Michael Mann, who finally had enough of being dragged through the mud online. When two authors accused him of fraud and compared his academic position to that of a convicted child molester, he sued for defamation.
Mann was considered a public figure, which makes winning defamation cases extremely challenging. But his case was based on the fact that multiple institutions on two different continents had scrutinized his work and found no hint of scientific malpractice—thus, he argued, that anyone who accused him of fraud was acting with reckless disregard for the truth.
Over the ensuing decade, the case was narrowed, decisions were appealed, and long periods went by without any apparent movement. But recently, amazingly, the case finally went to trial, and a jury rendered a verdict yesterday: Mann is entitled to damages from the writers. Even if you don’t care about the case, it’s worth reflecting on how much has changed since it was first filed.
The suit
The piece that started the whole mess was posted on the blog of a free market think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In it, Rand Simberg accused Mann of manipulating data and compared the investigations at Penn State (where he was faculty at the time) to the university’s lack of interest in pursuing investigations of one of its football coaches who was convicted of molesting children. A few days later, a second author, Mark Steyn, echoed those accusations at the publication National Review.
Mann’s case was based on the accusations of fraud in those pieces. He had been a target for years after he published work showing that the recent warming was unprecedented in the last few thousand years. This graph, known as the “hockey stick” due to its sudden swerve upwards, later graced the cover of an IPCC climate report. The pieces were also published just a few years after a large trove of emails from climate scientists were obtained illicitly from the servers of a research institution, leading to widespread accusations of misconduct against climate scientists.
Out of the public eye were a large number of investigations, both by the schools involved and the governments that funded the researchers, all of which cleared those involved, including Mann. But Simberg and Steyn were part of a large collection of writers and bloggers who were convinced that Mann (and by extension, all of modern climate science) had to be wrong. So they assumed—and in Simberg and Steyn’s case, wrote—that the investigations were simply whitewashes.
Mann’s suit alleged the exact opposite: that, by accusing him of fraud despite these investigations, the two authors showed a reckless disregard for truth. That would be enough to hold them responsible for defamation despite the fact that Mann was a public figure. The authors’ defense was largely focused on the fact that they genuinely believed their own opinions and so should be free to express them under the First Amendment.
In essence, the case came down to whether people who appear to be incapable of incorporating evidence into their opinions should still be able to voice those opinions without consequences, even if doing so has consequences for others.
Victory at last-ish
In the end, the jury decided they did not. And their damage awards suggest that they understood the present circumstances quite well. For starters, the compensatory damages awarded to Mann for the defamation itself were minimal: one dollar each from Simberg and Steyn. While Mann alleged he lost grants and suffered public scorn due to the columns, he’s since become a successful book author and received a tenured chair at the University of Pennsylvania, where he now heads its Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.
But the suit also sought punitive damages to discourage future behavior of the sort. Here, there was a dramatic split. Simberg, who now tends to write about politics rather than science and presents himself as a space policy expert, was placed on the hook for just $1,000. Steyn, who is still actively fighting the climate wars and hosts a continued attack on Mann on his website, was told to pay Mann $1 million.
That said, the suit’s not over yet. Steyn has suggested that there are grounds to appeal the monetary award, while Mann has indicated that he will appeal the decision that had terminated his case against the Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review. So, check back in another decade and we may have another decision.
Enlarge/ Aerial view of the Athabasca oil sands near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada.
Canada’s tar sands have gained infamy for being one of the world’s most polluting sources of oil, thanks to the large amounts of energy and water use required for their extraction. A new study says the operations are also emitting far higher levels of a range of air pollutants than previously known, with implications for communities living nearby and far downwind.
The research, published Thursday in Science, took direct measurements of organic carbon emissions from aircraft flying above the tar sands, also called oil sands, and found levels that were 20 to 64 times higher than what companies were reporting. Total organic carbon includes a wide range of compounds, some of which can contribute directly to hazardous air pollution locally and others that can react in the atmosphere to form small particulate matter, or PM 2.5, a dangerous pollutant that can travel long distances and lodge deep in the lungs.
The study found that tar sands operations were releasing as much of these pollutants as all other human-made sources in Canada combined. For certain classes of heavy organic compounds, which are more likely to form particulates downwind, the concentrations were higher than what’s generally found in large metropolises like Los Angeles.
“The absolute magnitude of those emissions were a lot higher than what we expected,” said John Liggio, a research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, the nation’s environmental regulatory agency, and a co-author on the study. Researchers at Yale University also contributed.
Seth Shonkoff, executive director of PSE Healthy Energy, an independent scientific research institute in California, who was not involved in the study, said the findings suggest air pollution from tar sands operations is more damaging to people’s health than previously known.
“I actually could hardly believe what I was reading,” Shonkoff said of the new study.
Over the last decade, a growing body of research has examined emissions of different air pollutants from oil and gas operations across the United States and Canada, and much of that has shown that industry estimates tend to undercount what’s being released, he said. “But the scale of this discrepancy is very surprising.”
Mark Cameron, vice president of external relations at the Pathways Alliance, an oil sands industry group, said in an email that the findings warrant further review and that “the oil sands industry measures emissions using standards set by Environment and Climate Change Canada and we look forward to working together to explore opportunities to further enhance our measurement practices.”
Content creators have spent the past five years developing new tactics to evade YouTube’s policies blocking monetization of videos making false claims about climate change, a report from a nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), warned Tuesday.
What the CCDH found is that content creators who could no longer monetize videos spreading “old” forms of climate denial—including claims that “global warming is not happening” or “human-generated greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming”—have moved on.
Now they’re increasingly pushing other claims that contradict climate science, which YouTube has not yet banned and may not ever ban. These include harmful claims that “impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless,” “climate solutions won’t work,” and “climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.”
The CCDH uncovered these new climate-denial tactics by using artificial intelligence to scan transcripts of 12,058 videos posted on 96 YouTube channels that the CCDH found had previously posted climate-denial content. Verified by researchers, the AI model used was judged accurate in labeling climate-denial content approximately 78 percent of the time.
According to the CCDH’s analysis, the amount of content disputing climate solutions, climate science, and impacts of climate change today comprises 70 percent of climate-denial content—a percent that doubled from 2018 to 2023. At the same time, the amount of content pushing old climate-denial claims that are harder or impossible to monetize fell from 65 percent in 2018 to 30 percent in 2023.
These “new forms of climate denial,” the CCDH warned, are designed to delay climate action by spreading disinformation.
“A new front has opened up in this battle,” Imran Ahmed, the CCDH’s chief executive, said on a call with reporters, according to Reuters. “The people that we’ve been looking at, they’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying, ‘Hey, climate change is happening, but there is no hope. There are no solutions.'”
Since 2018—based on “estimates of typical ad pricing on YouTube” by social media analytics tool Social Blade—YouTube may have profited by as much as $13.4 million annually from videos flagged by the CCDH. And YouTube confirmed that some of these videos featured climate denialism that YouTube already explicitly bans.
In response to the CCDH’s report, YouTube de-monetized some videos found to be in violation of its climate change policy. But a spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the majority of videos that the CCDH found were considered compliant with YouTube’s ad policies.
The fact that most of these videos remain compliant is precisely why the CCDH is calling on YouTube to update its policies, though.
Currently, YouTube’s policy prohibits monetization of content “that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
“Our climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” YouTube’s spokesperson told Ars. “Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed. However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos. We also display information panels under relevant videos to provide additional information on climate change and context from third parties.”
The CCDH worries that YouTube standing by its current policy is too short-sighted. The group recommended tweaking the policy to instead specify that YouTube prohibits content “that contradicts the authoritative scientific consensus on the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change.”
If YouTube and other social media platforms don’t acknowledge new forms of climate denial and “urgently” update their disinformation policies in response, these new attacks on climate change science “will only increase,” the CCDH warned.
“It is vital that those advocating for action to avert climate disaster take note of this substantial shift from denial of anthropogenic climate change to undermining trust in both solutions and science itself, and shift our focus, our resources and our counternarratives accordingly,” the CCDH’s report said, adding that “demonetizing climate-denial” content “removes the economic incentives underpinning its creation and protects advertisers from bankrolling harmful content.”
Earlier this week, the European Union’s Earth science team came out with its analysis of 2023’s global temperatures, finding it was the warmest year on record to date. In an era of global warming, that’s not especially surprising. What was unusual was how 2023 set its record—every month from June on coming in far above any equivalent month in the past—and the size of the gap between 2023 and any previous year on record.
The Copernicus dataset used for that analysis isn’t the only one of the sort, and on Friday, Berkeley Earth, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration all released equivalent reports. And all of them largely agree with the EU’s: 2023 was a record, and an unusual one at that. So unusual that NASA’s chief climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt, introduced his look at 2023 by saying, “We’re frankly astonished.”
Despite the overlaps with the earlier analysis, each of the three new ones adds some details that flesh out what made last year so unusual.
Each of the three analyses uses slightly different methods to do things like fill in areas of the globe where records are sparse, and uses a different baseline. Berkeley Earth was the only team to do a comparison with pre-industrial temperatures, using a baseline of the 1850–1900 temperatures. Its analysis suggests that this is the first year to finish over 1.5° C above preindustrial temperatures.
Most countries have committed to an attempt to keep temperatures from consistently coming in above that point. So, at one year, we’re far from consistently failing our goals. But there’s every reason to expect that we’re going to see several more years exceeding this point before the decade is out. And that clearly means we have a very short timeframe before we get carbon emissions to drop, or we’ll commit to facing a difficult struggle to get temperatures back under this threshold by the end of the century.
Berkeley Earth also noted that the warming was extremely widespread. It estimates that nearly a third of the Earth’s population lived in a region that set a local heat record. And 77 nations saw 2023 set a national record.
Enlarge/ Lots of factors converged on warming in 2023.
The Berkeley team also had a nice graph laying out the influences of different factors on recent warming. Greenhouse gases are obviously the strongest and most consistent factor, but there are weaker short-term influences as well, such as the El Niño/La Niña oscillation and the solar cycle. Berkeley Earth and EU’s Copernicus also noted that an international agreement caused sulfur emissions from shipping to drop by about 85 percent in 2020, which would reduce the amount of sunlight scattered back out into space. Finally, like the EU team, they note the Hunga Tonga eruption.
An El Niño unlike any other
A shift from La Niño to El Niño conditions in the late spring is highlighted by everyone looking at this year, as El Niños tend to drive global temperatures upward. While it has the potential to develop into a strong El Niño in 2024, at the moment, it’s pretty mild. So why are we seeing record temperatures?
We’re not entirely sure. “The El Niño we’ve seen is not an exceptional one,” said NASA’s Schmidt. So, he reasoned, “Either this El Niño is different from all of them… or there are other factors going on.” But he was at a bit of a loss to identify the factors. He said that typically, there are a limited number of stories that you keep choosing from in order to explain a given year’s behavior. But, for 2023, none of them really fit.
Enlarge/ Something very ominous happened to the North Atlantic last year.
Berkeley Earth had a great example of it in its graph of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, which have been rising slowly for decades, until 2023 saw record temperatures with a freakishly large gap compared to anything previously on record. There’s nothing especially obvious to explain that.
Lurking in the background of all of this is climate scientist James Hansen’s argument that we’re about to enter a new regime of global warming, where temperatures increase at a much faster pace than they have until now. Most climate scientists don’t see compelling evidence for that yet. And, with El Niño conditions likely to prevail for much of 2024, we can expect a very hot year again, regardless of changing trends. So, it may take several more years to determine if 2023 was a one-off freak or a sign of new trends.
Enlarge/ Month by month, 2023 stood far above the rest.
The confused wiggles on the graph above have a simple message: Most years, even years with record-high temperatures, have some months that aren’t especially unusual. Month to month, temperatures dip and rise, with the record years mostly being a matter of having fewer, shallower dips.
As the graph shows, last year was not at all like that. The first few months of the year were unusually warm. And then, starting in June, temperatures rose to record heights and simply stayed there. Every month after June set a new record for high temperatures for that month. So it’s not surprising that 2023 will enter the record books as far and away the warmest year on record.
The EU makes it official
Several different organizations maintain global temperature records; while they use slightly different methods, they tend to produce very similar numbers. So, over the next few weeks, you can expect each of these organizations to announce record temperatures (NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will do so on Friday). On Tuesday, it was the European Union’s turn, via its Copernicus Earth-observation program.
Copernicus rates 2023 as being nearly 1.5° C above pre-industrial temperatures and about 0.17° C above 2016, the previous holder of the warmest year on record. The difference between 2023 and 2022 was the largest single-year change in the record as well, confirming that the amount of warming this past year was exceptional.
The 1.5° C landmark is significant because many countries have committed to trying to limit global warming to that mark. This doesn’t mean we’ve failed; the average temperature for the last decade is still below that. But it does highlight how little time we have left to act before we potentially experience more radical consequences of climate change.
The Copernicus analysis notes a couple of additional daily landmarks within the yearly record. It defines pre-industrial temperatures as those experienced between 1850–1900. The records from this period are sparse enough that, rather than daily temperature data, it’s been handled as a monthly average. So, the best Copernicus could do is compare 2023’s daily temperatures to the equivalent month in the pre-industrial record.
Even given that limitation, some of the results of this comparison were striking. For the first time ever, individual days in 2023 were 2.0° C above the preindustrial monthly average. Nearly half the days in 2023 were 1.5° C warmer than preindustrial records, and it was the first time every day was at least 1.0° C warmer.
Why so extreme?
The simplest answer is El Niño. The past few years have been spent in a reasonably strong La Niña, the cooler phase of the Southern Oscillation. But that started fading throughout the spring, and by mid-year, a weak El Niño had arrived. Normally, a relatively feeble El Niño like this would have a limited effect on global temperatures, and in any case, it would normally take some time for its effect to be felt in global temperatures.
Red means hot: last year saw a strong La Niña come to a close, with conditions shifting to a slight El Niño.
But with temperatures poised near record levels to begin with, just a little push appeared to be all 2023 needed to soar to record heights.
Still, there are plenty of indications that the year wasn’t only the result of El Niño, which is a phenomenon that occurs in the tropical Pacific. For example, the North Atlantic, which is not directly connected to the Tropical Pacific, experienced exceptionally warm sea surface temperatures over the second half of the year.
Copernicus suggests that several additional, weak factors could have contributed to the year’s warmth. These include lower emissions of cooling aerosols from shipping, a peak in the solar cycle, and high levels of water vapor in the stratosphere due to the eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano. On its own, the impact of any of these would likely be minimal. In combination with the weak El Niño and the continued emission of greenhouse gasses, however, they might have enhanced what was already an exceptionally warm year.
The announcement of 2023’s warmth comes only months after a set of UN climate negotiations that many have derided as lacking the sort of urgency the record might have provided. Instead, Copernicus notes that carbon dioxide and methane emissions increased last year.
Enlarge/ Where beavers set up home, the dams they build profoundly change the landscape.
For the first time in four centuries, it’s good to be a beaver. Long persecuted for their pelts and reviled as pests, the dam-building rodents are today hailed by scientists as ecological saviors. Their ponds and wetlands store water in the face of drought, filter out pollutants, furnish habitat for endangered species, and fight wildfires. In California, Castor canadensis is so prized that the state recently committed millions to its restoration.
While beavers’ benefits are indisputable, however, our knowledge remains riddled with gaps. We don’t know how many are out there, or which direction their populations are trending, or which watersheds most desperately need a beaver infusion. Few states have systematically surveyed them; moreover, many beaver ponds are tucked into remote streams far from human settlements, where they’re near-impossible to count. “There’s so much we don’t understand about beavers, in part because we don’t have a baseline of where they are,” says Emily Fairfax, a beaver researcher at the University of Minnesota.
But that’s starting to change. Over the past several years, a team of beaver scientists and Google engineers have been teaching an algorithm to spot the rodents’ infrastructure on satellite images. Their creation has the potential to transform our understanding of these paddle-tailed engineers—and help climate-stressed states like California aid their comeback. And while the model hasn’t yet gone public, researchers are already salivating over its potential. “All of our efforts in the state should be taking advantage of this powerful mapping tool,” says Kristen Wilson, the lead forest scientist at the conservation organization the Nature Conservancy. “It’s really exciting.”
The beaver-mapping model is the brainchild of Eddie Corwin, a former member of Google’s real-estate sustainability group. Around 2018, Corwin began to contemplate how his company might become a better steward of water, particularly the many coastal creeks that run past its Bay Area offices. In the course of his research, Corwin read Water: A Natural History, by an author aptly named Alice Outwater. One chapter dealt with beavers, whose bountiful wetlands, Outwater wrote, “can hold millions of gallons of water” and “reduce flooding and erosion downstream.” Corwin, captivated, devoured other beaver books and articles, and soon started proselytizing to his friend Dan Ackerstein, a sustainability consultant who works with Google. “We both fell in love with beavers,” Corwin says.
Corwin’s beaver obsession met a receptive corporate culture. Google’s employees are famously encouraged to devote time to passion projects, the policy that produced Gmail; Corwin decided his passion was beavers. But how best to assist the buck-toothed architects? Corwin knew that beaver infrastructure—their sinuous dams, sprawling ponds, and spidery canals—is often so epic it can be seen from space. In 2010, a Canadian researcher discovered the world’s longest beaver dam, a stick-and-mud bulwark that stretches more than a half-mile across an Alberta park, by perusing Google Earth. Corwin and Ackerstein began to wonder whether they could contribute to beaver research by training a machine-learning algorithm to automatically detect beaver dams and ponds on satellite imagery—not one by one, but thousands at a time, across the surface of an entire state.
After discussing the concept with Google’s engineers and programmers, Corwin and Ackerstein decided it was technically feasible. They reached out next to Fairfax, who’d gained renown for a landmark 2020 study showing that beaver ponds provide damp, fire-proof refuges in which other species can shelter during wildfires. In some cases, Fairfax found, beaver wetlands even stopped blazes in their tracks. The critters were such talented firefighters that she’d half-jokingly proposed that the US Forest Service change its mammal mascot—farewell, Smoky Bear, and hello, Smoky Beaver.
Fairfax was enthusiastic about the pond-mapping idea. She and her students already used Google Earth to find beaver dams to study within burned areas. But it was a laborious process, one that demanded endless hours of tracing alpine streams across screens in search of the bulbous signature of a beaver pond. An automated beaver-finding tool, she says, could “increase the number of fires I can analyze by an order of magnitude.”
With Fairfax’s blessing, Corwin, Ackerstein, and a team of programmers set about creating their model. The task, they decided, was best suited to a convolutional neural network, a type of algorithm that essentially tries to figure out whether a given chunk of geospatial data includes a particular object—whether a stretch of mountain stream contains a beaver dam, say. Fairfax and some obliging beaverologists from Utah State University submitted thousands of coordinates for confirmed dams, ponds, and canals, which the Googlers matched up with their own high-resolution images to teach the model to recognize the distinctive appearance of beaverworks. The team also fed the algorithm negative data—images of beaverless streams and wetlands—so that it would know what it wasn’t looking for. They dubbed their model the Earth Engine Automated Geospatial Elements Recognition, or EEAGER—yes, as in “eager beaver.”
Training EEAGER to pick out beaver ponds wasn’t easy. The American West was rife with human-built features that seemed practically designed to fool a beaver-seeking model. Curving roads reminded EEAGER of winding dams; the edges of man-made reservoirs registered as beaver-built ponds. Most confounding, weirdly, were neighborhood cul-de-sacs, whose asphalt circles, surrounded by gray strips of sidewalk, bore an uncanny resemblance to a beaver pond fringed by a dam. “I don’t think anybody anticipated that suburban America was full of what a computer would think were beaver dams,” Ackerstein says.
As the researchers pumped more data into EEAGER, it got better at distinguishing beaver ponds from impostors. In May 2023, the Google team, along with beaver researchers Fairfax, Joe Wheaton, and Wally Macfarlane, published a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciencesdemonstrating the model’s efficacy. The group fed EEAGER more than 13,000 landscape images with beaver dams from seven western states, along with some 56,000 dam-less locations. The model categorized the landscape accurately—beaver dammed or not—98.5 percent of the time.
That statistic, granted, oversells EEAGER’s perfection. The Google team opted to make the model fairly liberal, meaning that, when it predicts whether or not a pixel of satellite imagery contains a beaver dam, it’s more likely to err on the side of spitting out a false positive. EEAGER still requires a human to check its answers, in other words—but it can dramatically expedite the work of scientists like Fairfax by pointing them to thousands of probable beaver sites.
“We’re not going to replace the expertise of biologists,” Ackerstein says. “But the model’s success is making human identification much more efficient.”
According to Fairfax, EEAGER’s use cases are many. The model could be used to estimate beaver numbers, monitor population trends, and calculate beaver-provided ecosystem services like water storage and fire prevention. It could help states figure out where to reintroduce beavers, where to target stream and wetland restoration, and where to create conservation areas. It could allow researchers to track beavers’ spread in the Arctic as the rodents move north with climate change; or their movements in South America, where beavers were introduced in the 1940s and have since proliferated. “We literally cannot handle all the requests we’re getting,” says Fairfax, who serves as EEAGER’s scientific adviser.
The algorithm’s most promising application might be in California. The Golden State has a tortured relationship with beavers: For decades, the state generally denied that the species was native, the byproduct of an industrial-scale fur trade that wiped beavers from the West Coast before biologists could properly survey them. Although recent historical research proved that beavers belong virtually everywhere in California, many water managers and farmers still perceive them as nuisances, and frequently have them killed for plugging up road culverts and meddling with irrigation infrastructure.
Yet those deeply entrenched attitudes are changing. After all, no state is in more dire need of beavers’ water-storage services than flammable, drought-stricken, flood-prone California. In recent years, thanks to tireless lobbying by a campaign called Bring Back the Beaver, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has begun to overhaul its outdated beaver policies. In 2022, the state budgeted more than $1.5 million for beaver restoration, and announced it would hire five scientists to study and support the rodents. It also revised its official approach to beaver conflict to prioritize coexistence over lethal trapping. And, this fall, the wildlife department relocated a family of seven beavers onto the ancestral lands of the Mountain Maidu people—the state’s first beaver release in almost 75 years.
It’s only appropriate, then, that California is where EEAGER is going to get its first major test. The Nature Conservancy and Google plan to run the model across the state sometime in 2024, a comprehensive search for every last beaver dam and pond. That should give the state’s wildlife department a good sense of where its beavers are living, roughly how many it has, and where it could use more. The model will also provide California with solid baseline data against which it can compare future populations, to see whether its new policies are helping beavers recover. “When you have imagery that’s repeated frequently, that gives you the opportunity to understand change through time,” says the Conservancy’s Kristen Wilson.
What’s next for EEAGER after its California trial? The main thing, Ackerstein says, is to train it to identify beaverworks in new places. (Although beaver dams and ponds present as fairly similar in every state, the model also relies on context clues from the surrounding landscape, and a sagebrush plateau in Wyoming looks very different from a deciduous forest in Massachusetts.) The team also has to figure out EEAGER’s long-term fate: Will it remain a tool hosted by Google? Spin off into a stand-alone product? Become a service operated by a university or nonprofit?
“That’s the challenge for the future—how do we make this more universally accessible and usable?” Corwin says. The beaver revolution may not be televised, but it will definitely be documented by satellite.
Enlarge/ African penguins on a beach near Simon’s Town in South Africa.
CAPE TOWN, South Africa—A weathered, green building stands at the edge of the cozy suburban Table View neighborhood in Cape Town, just a few blocks down from a Burger King and a community library. Upon stepping inside, visitors’ feet squelch on a mat submerged in antibacterial liquid—one of the first signs this isn’t just another shop on the street.
A few steps further down the main hallway, a cacophony of discordant brays and honks fill the air. A couple more strides reveal the source of these guttarall calls: African penguins.
Welcome to the nonprofit Southern African Foundation for the Conservation Of Coastal Birds’ hatchery and nursery, where hundreds of these birds are hand-reared after being injured or abandoned in the wild.
While this conservation center is a flourishing refuge for African penguins, the species as a whole is in dire straits. Over the past century, African penguin populations have plummeted, dropping from around one million breeding pairs in the early 1900s to less than 10,000 in 2023 as environmental conditions have worsened due to increased fishing pressure and climate change, which have both decreased fish populations on which penguins rely.
The climate crisis has also fueled more frequent and severe weather events in South Africa such as floods and heat waves, resulting in an increased number of penguin parents abandoning their eggs to seek refuge.
The staff at the Foundation is working to hand-rear penguins with the goal to release most of them back into one of the threatened Cape colonies they came from. But some of these penguins are destined for a different destination: a rocky outcropping along the Eastern Cape of South Africa within the De Hoop Nature Reserve.
There, scientists and conservationists are working to establish a new penguin colony, which they hope will become a stronghold for the entire African penguin species.
The ecological trap
It’s difficult to pin a single threat to the demise of African penguins; oil spills, avian flu and extreme weather events have wreaked havoc on colonies across South Africa. These chronic issues combine with freak incidents: In 2021, a swarm of bees killed more than 60 African penguins on the popular Boulders Beach in Cape Town and, a year later, two huskies killed 19 penguins in the same area.
However, scientists say that one of the main causes of the seabirds’ decline is the intense fishing pressure on sardines and anchovies, the penguin’s main diet.
Fighting unemployment, low-income people fish around coastal beaches to support themselves, said Shanet Rutgers, an animal health technician at the Two Oceans Aquarium in South Africa, and there is a large commercial industry for purse-seine fishing, in which a wall of netting is cast around a school of fish.
“When they pull out too much fish in the ocean, they leave the colonies with almost little to nothing to feed on,” she said.
When you drop money in the bank, it looks like it’s just sitting there, ready for you to withdraw. In reality, your institution makes money on your money by lending it elsewhere, including to the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, as well as emissions-heavy industries like manufacturing.
So just by leaving money in a bank account, you’re unwittingly contributing to worsening catastrophes around the world. According to a new analysis, for every $1,000 dollars the average American keeps in savings, each year they indirectly create emissions equivalent to flying from New York to Seattle. “We don’t really take a look at how the banks are using the money we keep in our checking account on a daily basis, where that money is really circulating,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which published the analysis. “But when we look under the hood, we see that there’s a lot of fossil fuels.”
By switching to a climate-conscious bank, you could reduce those emissions by about 75 percent, the study found. In fact, if you moved $8,000 dollars—the median balance for US customers—the reduction in your indirect emissions would be twice that of the direct emissions you’d avoid if you switched to a vegetarian diet.
Put another way: You as an individual have a carbon footprint—by driving a car, eating meat, running a gas furnace instead of a heat pump—but your money also has a carbon footprint. Banking, then, is an underappreciated yet powerful avenue for climate action on a mass scale. “Not just voting every four years, or not just skipping the hamburger, but also where my money sits, that’s really important,” says Foley.
Just as you can borrow money from a bank, so too do fossil fuel companies and the companies that support that industry—think of building pipelines and other infrastructure. “Even if it’s not building new pipelines, for a fossil fuel company to be doing just its regular operations—whether that’s maintaining the network of gas stations that it owns, or maintaining existing pipelines, or paying its employees—it’s going to need funding for that,” says Paddy McCully, senior analyst at Reclaim Finance, an NGO focused on climate action.
A fossil fuel company’s need for those loans varies from year to year, given the fluctuating prices of those fuels. That’s where you, the consumer, comes in. “The money that an individual puts into their bank account makes it possible for the bank to then lend money to fossil fuel companies,” says Richard Brooks, climate finance director at Stand.earth, an environmental and climate justice advocacy group. “If you look at the top 10 banks in North America, each of them lends out between $20 billion and $40 billion to fossil fuel companies every year.”
The new report finds that on average, 11 of the largest US banks lend 19.4 percent of their portfolios to carbon-intensive industries. (The American Bankers Association did not immediately respond to a request to comment for this story.) To be very clear: Oil, gas, and coal companies wouldn’t be able to keep producing these fuels—when humanity needs to be reducing carbon emissions dramatically and rapidly—without these loans. New fossil fuel projects aren’t simply fleeting endeavors, but will operate for years, locking in a certain amount of emissions going forward.
At the same time, Brooks says, big banks are under-financing the green economy. As a civilization, we’re investing in the wrong kind of energy if we want to avoid the ever-worsening effects of climate change. Yes, 2022 was the first year that climate finance surpassed the trillion-dollar mark. “However, the alarming aspect is that climate finance must increase by at least fivefold annually, as swiftly as possible, to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change,” says Valerio Micale, senior manager of the Climate Policy Initiative. “An even more critical consideration is that this cost, which would accumulate to $266 trillion until 2050, pales in comparison to the costs of inaction, estimated at over $2,000 trillion over the same period.”
Smaller banks, at least, are less likely to be providing money for the fossil fuel industry. A credit union operates more locally, so it’s much less likely to be fronting money for, say, a new oil pipeline. “Big fossil fuel companies go to the big banks for their financing,” says Brooks. “They’re looking for loans in the realm of hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes multibillion-dollar loans, and a credit union wouldn’t be able to provide that.”
This makes banking a uniquely powerful lever to pull when it comes to climate action, Foley says. Compared to switching to vegetarianism or veganism to avoid the extensive carbon emissions associated with animal agriculture, money is easy to move. “If large numbers of people start to tell their financial institutions that they don’t really want to participate in investing in fossil fuels, that slowly kind of drains capital away from what’s available for fossil fuels,” says Foley.
While the new report didn’t go so far as to exhaustively analyze the lending habits of the thousands of banks in the US, Foley says there’s a growing number that deliberately don’t invest in fossil fuels. If you’re not sure about what your bank is investing in, you can always ask. “I think when people hear we need to move capital out of fossil fuels into climate solutions, they probably think only Warren Buffett can do that,” says Foley. “That’s not entirely true. We can all do a little bit of that.”
Enlarge/ Saudi Arabia’s presence at COP28 has reportedly been used to limit progress on fossil fuel cutbacks.
Oil-producing countries are apparently succeeding in their attempts to eliminate language from an international climate agreement that calls for countries to phase out the use of fossil fuels. Draft forms of the agreement had included text that called upon the countries that are part of the Paris Agreement to work toward “an orderly and just phase out of fossil fuels.” Reports now indicate that this text has gone missing from the latest versions of the draft.
The agreement is being negotiated at the United Nations’ COP28 climate change conference, taking place in the United Arab Emirates. The COP, or Conference of the Parties, meetings are annual events that attempt to bring together UN members to discuss ways to deal with climate change. They were central to the negotiations that brought about the Paris Agreement, which calls for participants to develop plans that should bring the world to net-zero emissions by the middle of the century.
Initial plans submitted by countries would lower the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but not by nearly enough to reach net zero. However, the agreement included mechanisms by which countries would continue to evaluate their progress and submit more stringent goals. So, additional COP meetings have included what’s termed a “stocktake” to evaluate where countries stand, and statements are issued to encourage and direct future actions.
The language of that statement needs to be agreed upon by every party and is invariably contentious. This year’s statement has been especially difficult, as early drafts (such as this one) included the potential to call for parties to stop using fossil fuels, along with a separate, vague alternative:
Option 1: An orderly and just phase out of fossil fuels; Option 2: Accelerating efforts toward phasing out unabated fossil fuels and to rapidly reducing their use so as to achieve net zero CO2 in energy systems by or around mid-century; Option 3: No text.
The “unabated” language in the alternative is widely interpreted as referring to abatement via the use of large-scale carbon capture to offset the emissions from continued fossil fuel use.
While we know that carbon capture can work, it has not been tried at large scales, much less on anything close to the scales needed to offset continued fossil fuel use. Critical details like the capacity and stability of different storage options haven’t been worked out, nor has the very tricky question of who will be paying to operate all the infrastructure that would be required for it to work.
As a result, carbon capture is not generally considered a viable option for offsetting anything more than a few difficult-to-decarbonize use cases, such as international shipping. Which why most countries and NGOs are supporting the UN’s secretary-general, who promoted the alternate language calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels.
Most, but not all. One notable NGO, OPEC, directly called on its members to reject any language that targeted fossil fuels. And a prominent OPEC member, Saudia Arabia, appears to have been trying to block any deals that would include that language, in part by bogging down all negotiations at COP28. Matters weren’t helped when a video surfaced that showed the conference’s host, Sultan Al Jaber, saying that there was “no science” behind calls to phase out fossil fuels, although he quickly disavowed that position.
The loss of Option 1 from the latest drafts is a sign that oil-producing nations have succeeded. Which in turn indicates that they have no intention of slowing production even as indications of continued warming and its consequences have grown ever more dramatic. It will also provide cover for many other countries that may be looking for excuses to act.
That said, the same draft includes several actions that do not have any alternative language and call for countries to take significant actions:
Triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.
Double the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements.
Immediately stop issuing permits for coal plants that do not include carbon capture and rapidly phase out any existing plants of this sort.
Rapidly phase in zero-emissions vehicles.
Eliminate fossil fuel subsidies.
Negotiations are ongoing, and that draft is nearly a week old, but it may indicate that some positive things could be accomplished while everyone is distracted by arguments over the phase-out of fossil fuels.
