[✔️] September 2, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Exxon says, Bill Gates says, Why more children?, Texas prison deaths, Big Money Free markets

[Richard Pauli]

/*September 2*//*, 2023*/

[ Reuters report ]
*Exxon says world set to fail 2°C global warming cap by 2050*
By Sabrina Valle
August 28, 2023
Summary

    - - Exxon projects oil, gas to be 54% of world’s needs in 2050
    - - CO2 emissions in 2050 to double IPCC's desired scenario

HOUSTON, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Oil and natural gas are still projected to 
meet more than half of the world’s energy needs in 2050, or 54%, Exxon 
Mobil Corp (XOM.N) said on Monday, with the world failing to keep global 
temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius.

The largest U.S. oil producer projects the world will reach 25 billion 
metric tons of energy related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2050, 
according to its energy outlook published on Monday.

That is more than twice of the 11 billion metric tons the United Nations 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say would be needed on 
average in its Lower 2°C scenarios.

"An energy transition is underway, but it is not yet happening at the 
scale or on the timetable required to achieve society’s net-zero 
ambitions," the producer said.

Exxon produces less than 3% of the world's daily crude demand and in May 
its shareholders overwhelmingly rejected calls for stronger measures to 
mitigate climate change...
- -
Only two of the 55 technologies needed to reach net-zero emissions by 
2050 are “on track,” Exxon said citing the IEA. Emissions will decline 
only by 25% by 2050 as lower-emission options grow, the company said, 
below desired scenarios.

Overall, Exxon projects energy-related CO2 emissions will peak at more 
than 34 billion metric tons sometime this decade as economies and energy 
demand grow, and then decline to 25 billion metric tons in 2050.

Exxon is investing $17 billion over a six-year span through 2027 in 
lower carbon emissions technologies such as carbon capture and 
sequestration and hydrogen. The company says these two technologies, 
currently not commercial, are a significant promise for 
hard-to-decarbonize sectors in IPCC Lower 2°C scenarios.

Most of the capital is directed to reducing carbon emissions of its 
operations and of third parties. Unlike its European peers, Exxon has 
stayed away from consolidated renewable sources such as wind and solar 
power. It expects wind and solar to provide 11% of the world’s energy 
supply in 2050, five times today’s contribution.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-projects-oil-gas-be-54-worlds-energy-needs-2050-2023-08-28/



/[  Baby steps as Bill Gates discovers non-meat foods ] /
*Bill Gates: This is the major contributor to climate change that people 
are ‘probably least aware of’—It’s ‘a challenge’*
Updated Wed, Aug 30 2023
Tom Huddleston Jr.

Bill Gates has spent years, and billions of dollars, working to combat 
climate change.

The billionaire’s foundation has invested vast sums in various climate 
tech solutions while regularly raising the alarm about the leading 
contributors to climate change, like the greenhouse gas emissions 
stemming from major energy and manufacturing companies burning fossil 
fuels at prodigious rates.

But, according to Gates, most people are still unaware of the role 
played by one of the biggest contributors to climate change: 
agriculture, specifically methane emissions from livestock and fertilizers.

“Of all the climate areas, the one that people are probably least aware 
of is all the fertilizer and cows, and that’s a challenge,” Gates 
recently said on the latest episode of his podcast, “Unconfuse Me.”

The topic came up because Gates was in conversation with musician and 
director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who, like Gates, also happens to be 
an early investor in several plant-based food startups, such as 
Impossible and NotCo.

Thompson, who is from Philadelphia, even recently partnered with 
Impossible to create a plant-based cheesesteak that counts former 
president Barack Obama as a fan, he told Gates.

Thompson told Gates he was won over by plant-based foods’ ability to 
mimic the taste of real meat, among other products: “Something told me 
plant-based is going to be the future … and I want to be the person that 
plants the seed,” he said.

While plant-based foods have won support from those looking for 
alternatives to products made from animals, Gates said that he started 
backing plant-based food ventures because of their potential to combat 
climate change.

“I came to it more from that climate angle,” he said.

Gates has pointed out in the past that the agricultural industry 
contributes roughly 24% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, with 
much of that stemming from methane emissions from livestock and 
fertilizer used to cultivate crops, according to data from the U.S. 
Environmental Protection Agency.

In fact, if cattle “were a country,” Gates wrote in 2018, “they would be 
the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases [in the world].”

In his 2021 book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” Gates wrote that 
effectively combating climate change will take people being willing to 
commit to new ideas, like switching to electric cars and synthetic meats.

That same year, Gates argued that wealthy countries that have the 
resources to do so “should move to 100% synthetic beef” in order to 
meaningfully reduce global emissions from livestock, he told the MIT 
Technology Review.

“You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re 
going to make it taste even better over time,” he said at the time. 
“Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of 
change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the 
demand.”

Plant-based meat sales still represent just a small percentage of the 
total meat market, and even Gates admits it will be difficult to 
convince enough people to stop eating real meat to make a significant 
difference.

One issue is that the still relatively new products are currently more 
expensive than real meats. Still, Gates has a positive outlook that 
plant-based meat companies will continue to improve their products, and 
reduce their costs, helping them to eventually become more popular.

That’s why Gates and his foundation have financially backed plant-based 
and lab-grown meat startups such as Impossible, Beyond Meat and Upside 
Foods. He’s also backed Neutral, a carbon-neutral food startup. Speaking 
to Thompson about the plant-based meat startups, like Impossible, Gates 
said that “they’re doing well, but a lot of people want him to make [the 
product] even slightly better.”

“They have a good roadmap, so I’m optimistic,” he said.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/29/bill-gates-climate-change-cause-people-are-least-aware-of.html



/[ Childbirth should be carefully considered, while parenting is greatly 
encouraged //at any time//]/
*Having a Kid at the End of the World*
By Amil Niazi, columnist on intersection of work and motherhood.
AUG. 31, 2023
 From the moment I had a sense of the world, I had a sense that it was 
finite and we were destroying it. I learned about acid rain sometime 
during third grade. The idea of flesh-burning precipitation, coupled 
with a hole in the ozone layer that was going to destroy the planet and 
all of my favorite animals, used to make me itchy with stress. I 
remember begging my parents, who had very little disposable income, to 
become paying members of the World Wildlife Fund to save the whales. I 
talked about chlorofluorocarbons like I was a paid expert, afraid of 
stepping out into a storm for fear of melting. I was convinced the world 
was ending, and none of us, my friends and I, would live to see 
adulthood because of it.

Yet when I first started trying to have a kid eight years ago, I didn’t 
think about climate or the planet; I thought only about the desire for a 
baby, about what it would mean to me and my husband to bring that person 
into our world. But, in the years since and now expecting my third, it’s 
become harder not to look at my kids without being acutely aware of how 
smoky and scary and fucked everything is.
There are always intangibles in future family-planning that you can’t 
fully account for — Will I be mature enough? Will I make enough money? 
What about my career? — so instead require the kind of personal leaps of 
faith most of us are capable of imagining and making. But if you’re 40 
years old or younger, you’ve been told your whole life that the 
environment is collapsing and nobody who has the power to stop the 
collapse has done a damn thing about it. Most of us have no reason to 
believe the future we were promised has ever existed, so for anyone 
thinking about their first or another kid now, imagining a future for 
them at all makes that leap harder and harder to make.
And now as we close out a summer plagued by wildfires that have 
devastated huge swaths of Hawaii, Greece, and Canada’s north and Pacific 
Northwest, the future I’ve feared since I was a child is indisputably 
here and it’s terrifying. As I write this, I’m visiting my dad back home 
in Vancouver, and smoke from wildfires to the east has made even the air 
down by the coast where he lives difficult to breathe.

So, should I have a baby even though the world is burning? My knee-jerk 
response to the question has always been defensive. I know the 
perception is that it’s selfish to even think about it. But, like the 
whales and the ozone layer, how did something somebody else broke become 
my problem to fix?

When I put this question out to people on Twitter and Instagram, the 
response was overwhelming. I got long emails from over 50 strangers, men 
and women who are scared, anxious, hopeful, optimistic, who have kids 
and fear for their future, who won’t have kids so they don’t have to, 
and who don’t know how they can possibly make a decision like this at a 
time like this.
On days when Emily Cosbey, who lives in Buffalo and has a 1-year old 
son, thinks about the state of the world, she “shuts down.” “I cry, 
uncontrollably, thinking about the future that he belongs to,” she 
writes. “The future that I am setting him up for, but all I can see is 
the ugliness.” Meg Z., a 28-year-old living in New York City, knows that 
she wants kids one day and she has “a partner who is supportive and 
silly and kind and would love to see him be a father to our children,” 
but deciding whether or not to actually have one is paralyzing. “I am 
racked with such gnarly anxiety that I don’t know how I, personally, 
could bear bringing someone into this world,” she writes. Nadia Mike, an 
Inuk mother from Nunavut in the north of Canada, has three kids who have 
already confronted the destructive change that haunts their futures. “I 
have a 16-, 11-, and 5 year-old, and it’s so sad to see the world 
deteriorating right before our eyes and to try to explain that it’s 
fucked up, but also try to hold promise for them,” she says. Her own 
brother had to flee Yellowknife earlier this month after fires forced 
thousands from their homes.

Since the start of summer, the anxieties and concerns raised in the 
letters that Emily, Meg, Nadia, and so many others wrote to me have been 
in my mind, too. In May, I found out I was pregnant again. In June, the 
air in Toronto where I live was considered some of the worst in the 
world because of wildfires 336 miles away in Montreal. Maybe I could 
pretend even six years ago with my first that the climate in Toronto 
wasn’t so vulnerable, telling myself we were safe or that something 
would come along to fix it. Now, suddenly faced with Canada’s first 
104-degree summer day in history and air so thick with smoke I could 
barely breathe no matter where I went, well, I can’t exactly ignore the 
state of the world for this new one. My entire pregnancy has been 
punctuated and defined by whether or not it was safe enough for me to 
even be outside, let alone allow my kids to play out there. Where would 
I find my hope?

Reporter Gina Rushton has a book coming out on this subject, _The 
Parenthood Dilemma: Procreation in the Age of Uncertainty._ She started 
writing the book in the aftermath of Australia’s massive bushfires in 
late 2019–early 2020. Those fires burned through 60 million acres, 
decimating forests and animal populations. Months later, Rushton spoke 
to a doctor in a region razed by fires who described the placentas of 
her pregnant patients as “gray and grainy like a pack-a-day smoker.” She 
found hope speaking with climate scientists who had chosen to have kids. 
“Documenting the truth, showing up, making noise, taking on politicians 
— that consistent fight for their children’s futures seemed to make 
parenthood more not less tenable,” she told me over email.

I started thinking a lot about my own parents this summer — refugees who 
fled poverty, violence, and discrimination to dream of something bigger 
and better for themselves in Canada. They had no money, no tangible 
vision of a future when they had my two sisters and I, and yet they 
built their optimism around us. People like them have had children in 
the face of far greater hardships and shakier futures than I could ever 
imagine. Jade Sasser, the host of the podcast _Climate Anxiety and the 
Kid Question_ and author of an upcoming book with the same title, says 
“women of color are significantly more likely to feel traumatized by 
climate impacts and for those traumatized feelings to have a direct 
impact on the number of children they plan to have.”
So how do I square all this with the decision to bring another life into 
this world? Having kids has shown me that parenting itself is an act of 
optimism, a willingness to believe that the world, your kids, and you, 
will be better tomorrow than you are today. People have had kids in the 
midst of wars and plagues, doing it all on sheer hope.

Is it not my responsibility to leave this world in a better place than I 
found it? For me, the best way to do that is to raise people who will 
shepherd it in a way that’s more thoughtful, empathetic, and careful 
than the ones who came before them. I teach my kids about the fragile 
nature of this planet, of how much responsibility we have living here, 
to protect it and nurture it, not just for them, but for all of us. That 
feels tangible and real and possible. As the climate scientists above 
told Gina Rushton, these kids make fighting for something better seem 
necessary and inevitable.

I don’t blame anyone for being scared; I’m scared too. There are a 
million ways for the world to end, but also just as many ways to save it.

If that’s all I believe in for now, that’s enough.
https://www.thecut.com/2023/08/having-a-baby-question-climate-change-crisis.html

/
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/[ And extreme heat at Texas Prisons makes it difficult to hire guards ]
/*As the death toll in stifling Texas prisons climbs, congressional 
Democrats ask for investigation*
Most Texas prisons lack air conditioning. At least 41 prisoners have 
died of heart-related or undetermined causes since the unrelenting heat 
wave began.
BY JOLIE MCCULLOUGH
AUG. 21, 2023/
/At least 41 people have died in stifling, uncooled prisons of either 
heart-related or unknown causes during Texas’ relentless and 
record-breaking heat wave this summer, according to a Texas Tribune 
analysis.

Relatives of those who died and prison rights advocates insist at least 
some of those deaths were caused by the heat. More than a dozen of the 
prisoners were in their 20s or 30s, with at least four people 35 and 
under reportedly dying of cardiac arrest or heart failure. The Texas 
Department of Criminal Justice says no prisoner has died from the brutal 
heat in its facilities since 2012, around the time the agency began 
being bombarded with wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits over the 
heat...
- -
More than two-thirds of Texas’ 100 prisons don’t have air conditioning 
in most living areas inside the concrete and steel buildings where 
officers and prisoners work and live. With little to no ventilation and 
temperatures routinely soaring into the triple digits outside, the 
thermometer reading often rises even higher inside the prisons.

Since June, at least a dozen prisoners have died from reported cardiac 
arrest or heart failure in uncooled prisons on days when the regions’ 
outdoor heat indices were above 100 degrees, according to a Texas 
Tribune analysis of prison death reports and weather data. At least 
another 29 have died of what are still unknown causes pending autopsy 
results.

The death count is likely higher, as prisons have 30 days to report a 
prisoner’s death to the state...
- -
TDCJ has been chronically understaffed for years, and officer unions 
often point to the debilitating heat as a major reason employees leave.

In the congressional letter, the Democrats noted that the Texas 
Legislature has rejected attempts to put money directly toward air 
conditioning its prisons, despite increasingly hot summers and a surplus 
in the state budget this year...
- -
“State legislators prevail with the mindset that allowing inmates to 
suffer from excessive heat is appropriately ‘tough on crime,’” the 
representatives said, concluding “the problem of prison conditions 
demands serious attention by Congress, and we hope that you will join us 
in this critical endeavor.”

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/21/texas-prison-heat-deaths/

/
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/[ Big money innovation and //Techno-Fides //( faith in technology) ]
/*The Big Myth About “Free” Markets That Justified History’s Greatest Heist*
A recent book details how the top 10 percent stole $47 trillion via 
intellectual warfare./
/ Jon Schwarz
August 4 2023,
THE BANK ROBBER John Dillinger is one of history’s most famous thieves, 
absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million. You’d think 
that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7 million separate 
crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right? But you would be wrong.

In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California, 
released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 
2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of America’s establishment. In 
the decades following its founding after World War II, it was largely 
funded by and served the needs of the military-industrial complex. 
Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, 
which he had access to because RAND possessed several copies.

Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be 
the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a 
simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 
level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom 90 percent of 
Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another way, how much 
additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during this time, thanks 
to increased income equality?

If you have a butt, you should hold onto it, because the answer is 47 
TRILLION DOLLARS.

This is a number so large that it surpasses human understanding. There 
are only a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way; $47 trillion is 
about twice the size of the annual U.S. gross domestic product.

This raises an obvious question. Traditionally, this kind of upward 
concentration of wealth has required mass slaughter. How did America’s 
elites pull this off without needing to mow thousands of us down in the 
streets?

The answer can be found in the new book_“The Big Myth: How American 
Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.”_ It 
was written by Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard, 
and Erik M. Conway, a historian at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 
who previously collaborated on “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of 
Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global 
Warming.”

As Oreskes and Conway explain, “The Big Myth” grew out of their previous 
book. While writing “_Merchants of Doubt_,” they discovered that the 
groundwork of global warming denialism had been laid in the 1980s by 
prominent scientists who understood the reality of the situation quite 
well. However, these scientists were convinced believers in what Oreskes 
and Conway call “market fundamentalism” (borrowing from George Soros, 
one of market fundamentalism’s loudest critics). This is a system of 
belief that holds that political and economic freedom are indivisible. 
They quote the physicist Fred Singer, who wrote that “if we do not 
carefully delineate the government’s role in regulating … dangers there 
is essentially no limit to how much government can ultimately control 
our lives.”

In other words, government interventions in the economy — such as laws 
removing lead from gas, carbon taxes, or mandated cooling-off breaks for 
people working in 100-degree heat — not only make us all poorer, but 
also put us on the road to Stalinist tyranny. Hence it’s crucial to head 
them all off at the pass, even if that requires a vast misrepresentation 
of observable fact.
This worldview is such incoherent drivel that it’s hard to believe 
anyone with a functioning brain stem can buy into it. Meanwhile, market 
fundamentalists are oddly unconcerned with government intervention 
that’s profitable for large corporations. If you’re an entrepreneur who 
boldly tries to manufacture and sell any of the pharmaceutical 
industry’s patented products in a free market, you will quickly 
encounter the suffocating hand of the administrative state. Yet there 
are no Wall Street Journal op-eds decrying this injustice. (This doesn’t 
mean there’s no justifiable rationale for patents, but that there are 
rationales for other government regulations too.)

There’s also the reality that markets are a human creation, not a 
phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever came 
along. And since markets are created by us, it is legitimate and within 
our power to alter them to better serve our needs.

Finally, there’s the historical fact that no country has ever gone 
communist gradually, starting with minimum wage laws and ending up with 
gulags. Rather, it happened in various fell swoops in places with 
glaring injustices and vicious capitalistic inequality, and even then 
generally has required contemporary wars. As the renowned Soviet expert 
George Kennan put it in 1946, “communism is like malignant parasite 
which feeds only on diseased tissue.” Therefore, Kennan believed, “every 
courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own 
society” was a victory over communism.
This equanimity about using democratic power for the common good was 
common among U.S. potentates in the decades following World War II. 
Averell Harriman, the son of a 19th-century robber baron who later 
became secretary of commerce and governor of New York, believed that 
“Our social and economic system is working perhaps toward Swedish 
socialist concepts but not toward Soviet Communism. The government in 
Sweden has overcome poverty, achieved decent housing and medical 
services for all, but Sweden has in no way compromised the principle of 
representative government and concern for civil liberties.”

The story of how we got from there to here is shocking even if you 
consider yourself a wised-up malcontent, and “The Big Myth” tells it in 
granular detail. It’s a sweeping tale of what must be one of the most 
successful propaganda campaigns ever, one that transformed the intuitive 
common sense — what everyone “knows” without thinking about it — of both 
American elites and regular people.

You know the drill. Lowering taxes on billionaires will unleash their 
wondrous creativity and make us all richer in the long run. Minimum wage 
laws make regular people worse off and must stop going up. (Incredibly 
enough, the federal minimum wage has not increased in real terms since 
1968 and, adjusted for inflation, is now worth less than in 1950.) 
Stultifying environmental regulations are the reason your boss can’t 
give you a raise. Social Security was a mistake and is destined for 
extinction.
The funniest part is that this indoctrination into the glories of the 
“free” market could never have happened via free markets. Rather, as 
Oreskes and Conway illustrate, it required enormous subsidies from 
corporate America, much of it going to tenured professors working at 
nonprofit universities.

The book is an incredible work of scholarship, and every page has at 
least one sparkling, fascinating fact. Adam Smith’s 1776 book “_The 
Wealth of Nation_” is now seen as the key text proving the virtues 
(economic and political) of unregulated capitalism. This is not true at 
all: Smith argues that bank regulation is crucial; that workers should 
unionize; that businesspeople have often “deceived and oppressed” the 
public; and that any political proposal they make should be viewed with 
the utmost suspicion. George Stigler, a prominent economist at the 
University of Chicago and colleague of Milton Friedman, produced an 
edition of “The Wealth of Nations” that dealt with Smith’s inconvenient 
views by quietly excising many of them.

Also striking: Corporate funders realized that another book central to 
their cause, _“The Road to Serfdom”_ by Friedrich von Hayek, was just 
too long and complicated for most people to get through it. So they paid 
for a simplified version that appeared in Reader’s Digest in the 1950s, 
where it found a devoted reader in Ronald Reagan.
And there is just so, so much more. It’s all enough to make you paranoid 
about what other thoughts were put in your head on purpose by people 
without your best interests at heart. The most important lesson of “The 
Big Myth” is a meta one. They write convincingly, “Ideas do not exist ex 
nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and 
institutions. [This] is the history of the construction of a myth.”

Speaking of, the RAND study was funded by the Fair Work Center in 
Seattle, which in turn is largely funded by the foundation of Nick 
Hanauer. Indeed, the question the paper answers was itself thought up 
partly by Hanauer, who’s a venture capitalist and early investor in 
Amazon — but one has with views much more in tune with the views of 
1950s U.S. elites. Preposterous myths can be successfully promulgated 
with huge gobs of cash, but even getting the truth out there takes a lot 
of money.
Update: August 7, 2023
https://theintercept.com/2023/08/04/big-myth-book-free-market-oreskes-conway/ 




[ reminding us that we live on a globe shaped planet ]
*Africa's Fragile States Are Greatest Climate Change Casualties *
International partners must support the continent’s most vulnerable 
countries to adapt to extreme weather—or spillovers could become more 
disruptive
Jihad Azour, Abebe Aemro Selassie
August 30, 2023
Climate change poses grave threats to countries across Africa—but 
especially fragile and conflict-affected states. As the continent’s 
leaders converge on Kenya for next week’s African Climate Action Summit, 
it is vital that they come up with solutions to support these vulnerable 
countries.

 From the Central African Republic to Somalia and Sudan, fragile states 
suffer more from floods, droughts, storms and other climate-related 
shocks than other countries, when they have contributed the least to 
climate change. Each year, three times more people are affected by 
natural disasters in fragile states than in other countries. Disasters 
in fragile states displace more than twice the share of the population 
in other countries.

And temperatures in fragile states are already higher than in other 
countries because of their geographical location. By 2040, fragile 
states could face 61 days a year of temperatures above 35 degrees 
Celsius on average—four times more than other countries. Extreme heat, 
along with the more frequent extreme weather events that come with it, 
will endanger human health and hurt productivity and jobs in key sectors 
such as agriculture and construction.
A new IMF paper finds evidence that climate change indeed inflicts more 
lasting macroeconomic costs in fragile countries. Cumulative losses in 
gross domestic product reach about 4 percent in fragile states three 
years after extreme weather events. That compares with around 1 percent 
in other countries. Droughts in fragile states are expected to cut about 
0.2 percentage points from their per-capita GDP growth every year. This 
means that incomes in fragile states will be falling further behind 
those in other countries.

The more harmful effect of climate events in fragile states is not only 
because of their geographical location in hotter parts of the planet, 
but also because of conflict, dependence on rainfed agriculture, and 
lower capacity to manage risks.

Conflict undermines the capacity of fragile states to manage climate 
risks. For example, in Somalia, the areas most severely affected by food 
insecurity and hunger due to the prolonged drought in 2021-22 were under 
the control of terrorist groups that thwarted delivery of humanitarian 
assistance.

*Conflict and hunger*
Climate shocks also worsen underlying fragilities, such as conflict and 
hunger, further exacerbating the effect they have on the economy and 
people’s wellbeing. Our estimates indicate that in a high emissions 
scenario, and all else equal, deaths from conflict as a share of the 
population could increase by close to 10 percent in fragile countries by 
2060. Climate change would also push an additional 50 million people in 
fragile states into hunger by 2060.

The higher losses from climate events also reflect the dependence of 
fragile states on rainfed agriculture. Agriculture represents close to 
one-quarter of economic output in fragile states, but only 3 percent of 
cultivated areas are irrigated with canals, reservoirs, and the like. 
Rainfed farms are especially vulnerable to droughts and floods. Where 
irrigation infrastructure does exist, it is often poorly designed, left 
to crumble, or damaged by conflict.

In central Mali, for example, floods along the Niger river are partly 
caused by farmers fleeing fighting and drainage ditches falling into 
disrepair. Sudan’s Gezira irrigation scheme once covered 8,000 square 
kilometers of fecund farmland but has shrunk to less than half that area 
owing to poor maintenance.

Finally, the higher losses from climate shocks are also because of the 
lack of financial means. With the financing needed for climate 
adaptation well beyond what fragile and conflict-affected countries can 
afford on their own, sizable and sustained support from international 
development partners—both concessional financing and capacity 
development—is urgent to avoid worsening hunger and conflict that can 
fuel forced displacement and migration.

*Policy considerations*
For policymakers in these countries, critical interventions include 
policies to facilitate immediate response to climate shocks, such as 
building buffers through more domestic revenues, lower public debt and 
deficits, and higher international reserves. The paper indeed finds that 
fragile countries with such buffers see a faster recovery from extreme 
weather events. Strengthening social safety nets and leveraging 
insurance schemes are also key to financing recovery in the case of 
catastrophic events. In addition, fragile countries need to implement 
policies to build climate resilience over time, including scaling up 
climate-resilient infrastructure investments.

The IMF is stepping up support to fragile states dealing with climate 
challenges through carefully designed policy advice, financial 
assistance, and capacity development. Our strategy promotes a deeper 
understanding of the drivers of fragility, tailoring of programs, 
scaling up capacity development, and synergies with other partners that 
work in these countries. We are also providing financial support through 
standard facilities, emergency financing and, more recently, our new 
Resilience and Sustainability Facility.

These efforts by the IMF and other ongoing initiatives by international 
partners are still a drop in the big effort needed across the entire 
international community to protect the most vulnerable. The Africa 
Climate Summit could be a step forward towards generating effective 
solutions for mitigating the devastating impact of natural disasters and 
droughts on the continent’s people and economies.
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/30/africas-fragile-states-are-greatest-climate-change-casualties


/[ The news archive - We knew about hurricanes from the late, great 
climate scientist Stephen Schneider - video is 5 mins and is timelessly 
entertaining ]/
/*September 2, 2005 */
September 2, 2005: Climate scientist Stephen Schneider appears on "Real 
Time with Bill Maher" to discuss climate change's role in Hurricane Katrina.

http://youtu.be/H9mWZZ2U6EQ


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*Mass media is lacking, many daily summariesdeliver global warming news 
- a few are email delivered*

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