Week 31: Heat wave, refugees, palm oil, cocaine, and murder

Posted on by Benno Hansen

It’s Earth Overshoot Day, an unprecedented global heatwave has baked us for two months, and I’m rebooting Ecowar with the first of what I intend to be a weekly roundup of atrocities. Buckle up.

First of all, this heat wave is due to climate change says the World Weather Attribution. No, any single weather event doesn’t automatically prove a given trend. But this symphony of events does.

The link from climate change to migration is well established. The World Bank fears 140 million climate refugees globally by year 2050, and a study in Science predicts about 660,000 more refugees arriving in Europe by the end of the century if climate change continues unabated. Yet, while writing a lot about refugees and even about climate change sometimes, media rarely makes the connection between the two complains Jennifer Good.

Climate change has everything to do with the decision to flee one’s home — and those of us in more materially affluent parts of the world have everything to do with climate change.

A Guatemalan protesting pollution from palm oil production was shot and killed. Such killings happen on “a terrifyingly regular basis”, says Amnesty International. Three years later, the river is still polluted.

In the summer of 2015, a massive spill of toxic palm oil effluent overflowed into Río La Pasión, or the Passion River, a long, meandering river that runs through the tropical lowlands of the Petén region in northern Guatemala. For over a week, the surface of the river was carpeted with dead fish for 100 miles, devastating the health and food security of the Q’eq’chi Mayan communities living alongside it.

Jeff Conant of Friends of the Earth has talked to some locals.

As polar regions warm, tourism there expands. This week, a group of tourists got too close to a polar bear, and a guide shot the bear. Ricky said it like it is…

Meanwhile in Peru, a national park is being illegally logged, illegally mined and cleared for cocaine production.

I hope you see something that pisses you off? And perhaps feel like giving a tweet?