InternationalRelations

In this context of accelerating ecological breakdown and economic crises, the degrowth movement has steadily been gaining ground. Based on a robust body of scientific literature, degrowth proponents suggest that capitalism’s demand for unlimited growth is destroying the planet. Only degrowth policies can repair this by rapidly scaling back our material and energy use, slowing down production and transitioning to an economy focused around needs, care and the sharing of wealth.

In the 1990s, it was reintroduced as a “missile word” against the then-dominant ideology of sustainable development and green growth: an ideology that was being used by governments and international organisations to greenwash ineffective climate politics, attacks on public services and predatory lending.

Capitalism in the Anthropocene by Kohei Saito, a Japanese Marxist scholar, sold more than half a million copies and became a bestseller in Japan.

“We’re not kidding ourselves that the registry will overnight result in sort of a massive governance regime on fossil fuels,” she said. “But it sheds a light on where fossil fuel production is happening to investors and other actors to hold their governments to account.”

the worst flare-up between the two Central Asian countries in years.

Both former Soviet Union countries are now part of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) but they regularly have escalating tensions.

Around half their 970-kilometre (600-mile) border is still to be demarcated.

Vulnerable countries, despite their limited contribution to climate change and ambitious climate commitments, are and will continue to shoulder the bulk of this burden

Developed by organizations from the Global South, ACT2025’s new Call for Enhanced Implementation lays out where concrete action is needed in the lead-up to and at the conference.

When looking at countries’ commitments to reach net-zero emissions by around mid-century, temperature rise could be kept to around 1.9 degrees C. However, some major emitters’ 2030 targets are so weak that they don’t offer credible pathways to achieve their net-zero targets, indicating a major “credibility gap.”

nergy majors are exaggerating their green credentials in public messaging while continuing to allocate the majority of new investment to oil and gas projects, according to an industry analysis released Thursday.Campaigners say this "significant misalignment" between communication strategies and business plans could allow five of the biggest privately-owned energy firms to continue to delay the decarbonisation needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

public communications were found to contrast with the five's planned capital expenditure for 2022, with just 12 percent of new investments earmarked for low-carbon activities

the five corporations had spent $750 million on climate-related messaging last year alone

“It is plausible that the good work carried out under the Montreal Protocol … could be undone by the impact of global warming on intense fires,”

under global warming, the frequency and intensity of wildfires is expected to increase, which would lead to more” fire-induced stratospheric warming and ozone depletion in the future

The ozone hole that formed over Antarctica following the fires in 2020 was the longest-lasting and among the largest and deepest in decades

Although it is true that Senator Joe Manchin (and, for all we know some other Dem senators) slipped some goodies into the bill for Big Carbon, those are small potatoes compared to the massive sums devoted to climate change amelioration. And, those funds come on top of billions that were in last fall’s Infrastructure Act for setting up charging stations around the country for electric vehicles, supplying schools with electric buses, and emissions reductions at ports and airports.

American energy is no longer a level playing field. It is starkly tilted against fossil fuels, both because of price structures and because of state government policy in big important states like California and New York.

Despite a slight uptick this year because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent high methane gas prices, coal is doomed and will decline to almost zero in this decade. Methane gas is also doomed but may last a little longer.

The circular economy offers a value-chain approach to tackling this problem. Rather than the current linear flow of materials through the global economy, in which they are extracted, processed, manufactured, used, and finally disposed of as waste, a circular economy uses a systemic approach to decouple economic prosperity from material use by maintaining a circular flow of resources through regenerating, retaining or adding to their value, while contributing to sustainable development. The circular economy not only encourages sustainable production and consumption, but could also contribute to tackling the 45 per cent of global emissions that cannot easily be mitigated through the shift to renewable energy and energy-efficiency measures,2 and help halt and reverse land degradation and biodiversity loss.

Circular trade has grown strongly in value over the past two decades. For example, the value of trade in second-hand goods, secondary raw materials and waste for recovery rose by more than 230 per cent (from $94 billion to $313 billion) between 2000 and 2019, with the global export value of trade in goods rising by around 195 per cent over the same period.4 The value of trade in maintenance and repair services increased from $74 billion to $108 billion between 2015 and 2019.5

Although circular trade is a key enabler of a global circular economy, a range of regulatory and technical challenges are inhibiting its advancement. These include a lack of mutually recognized definitions, classifications, interoperable standards, regulations and conformity procedures concerning circular economic activities or goods. Furthermore, as an emerging area of activity, the circular economy has itself only been embedded to a limited degree in bilateral, regional and plurilateral trade and economic cooperation agreements. This restricts the scope and potential for collaboration around transboundary issues such as illegal waste, supply-chain transparency and traceability, investment or the issues pertaining to mutual recognition, technical barriers to trade, and trade facilitation.