Firefighters in California are battling huge wildfires and every child can do the math. To little surprise, July turned out to be the hottest month on record in the state. But the wildfires a not linked to global warming. No, they are caused by legal actions of “environmental terrorist groups” says US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
“Scientific research has shown that the enormous increases in fire activity experienced recently in the West are driven to a large extent by climate change […] Simply put, climate warming results in longer fire seasons and larger and more intense fires.”
Dr. Philip B. Duffy
Where most people see cause and effect, the current US government see loopholes for business? Meanwhile, other Trump official attended a climate denier conference.
This week’s story about illegal logging is about Chinese imports from Papua New Guinea. Where those profits are going, we don’t know. But according to a report in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, most profits from illegal logging, overfishing et cetera are stoved away in tax havens.
“Nature is facing unprecedented threats as we continue to take more resources from the world’s richest natural areas. Tax havens make it very difficult to track international flows of capital and that means there is no accountability […]If we are to secure a future for areas like the Amazon, we need to see greater corporate transparency and traceability of flows of capital around the world that fund the destruction of nature.”
Andrea Marandino, WWF
An injustice of climate change is how it’s primarily caused by rich countries while primarily suffered by poor countries. But the 2018 summer heat waves across the Northern hemisphere revealed how the burdens and dangers are also distributed unequally within rich countries, as coloured, homeless and immigrant workers were much more likely to drop dead in the heat.
Worried about what will happen with the energy resources in Syria after the war? OilPrice.com has an analysis for you. In Libya, yet another conflict could break out over the oil there.
That was just me skimming through last week’s news about conflicts over natural resources and related scandals. What did you read?