Apart from more extreme temperatures (including for the second straight summer, the Pacific Northwest), forest fires, floods (northern Alaska to the Ohio valley in the US), the most prominent climate news this week is the deal for climate provisions in the US Congress' upcoming reconciliation bill. Spurred in part I'm sure by this summer's heat etc., it's being described as simultaneously the most extensive climate-related legislation ever, and not enough to bring the US in line with its UN climate pledges.
But at least as important, and quite possibly more significant, is a story not getting as much attention: the announcement by the Democratic Republic of the Congo that it is auctioning off vast tracts of forest peatlands to oil and gas companies for extraction. Keeping the country's forests intact is crucial to the effort to lessen the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. These forests are huge carbon sinks, and cutting down trees for fossil fuel extraction is a double defeat.
But it gets even worse. In addition to the blow to climate, the sites up for auction include habitat for the endangered mountain gorillas, as well as other threatened primate species. Indigenous tribes could also be displaced. So it is a blow to efforts to avoid a mass extinction event, and a blow to the cultural caretakers of the forests.
The Congo government is not the cynical equivalent of those despoiling the Amazon rainforests--it supports saving its forests to address climate distortion. But those same UN treaties include agreements for the rich nations like the US to pay poorer and less industrialized nations some of the money they need to preserve their forests and to prepare for the effects of the climate distortion that the more industrial nations, like the US, have caused. And those nations, including the US but also western Europe, have not paid what they promised. Not even close.
So the Congo is calling them out, and they are likely to be just the first. That the US isn't paying the relatively small amount they promised is simply outrageous. In addition to paying into the international fund (which they aren't doing), the US and Europe could be making specific deals with individual countries like the Congo, that asked for $5 billion a year. They didn't get it, so they've gone to the fossil fuel industry, selling off their future as well as everyone's. And it's our fault.
At the same time as this is happening, Netflix is beginning to show a new action series in which one scene cost $7 million. Not the whole series or the whole episode, not even big Marvel-sized effects, but one fight scene that will last a few minutes on the screen. This society at the moment can afford to keep its climate promises, and meet its commitments to the future. We can live without $7 million fight scenes and $300 million movies and a lot for which our governments spend billions. We can't live without the rain forests, or with a mass extinction.
