Unearthed today: Beyond climate change?

I’m reading about… Fossil fuels being written off

It isn’t just BP that’s noticed fossil fuels are worth less than they used to be (Forbes). 

Exxon warned yesterday that low energy prices may wipe as much as one-fifth of its oil and natural gas reserves off the books. The company – which is not spinning this as anything green – has cut it’s drilling budget by a huge $10bn  and already removed 1bn barrels of oil from it’s reserves. It now warns another 4.5bn could follow. Separately, Chevron Corp. said in a filing Wednesday that it expects to revise its reserves downward by about 10%, mainly in the Permian Basin and Australia, Bloomberg reports. 

And it’s not just oil. Peabody Energy has written $1.4bn off the value of the world’s largest coal mine, an acknowledgment of electricity generators’ permanent shift towards natural gas and wind, the FT notes. “The longer the pandemic plays out, the more early retirements [of coal-fired plants] and permanent demand destruction from coal we’ll see,” said Benjamin Nelson, a coal industry analyst at Moody’s. 

And the role of natural destruction in causing pandemics

Earlier this year we reported on the role of natural destruction and deforestation in fuelling pandemics. “In a forest, you have natural reservoirs, you have hosts for viruses, for these kinds of pathogens. When we disrupt that, you can see the emergence of new infectious diseases,” said Prof Alessandra Nava, who lives in Manaus, a city at the heart of the Amazon rainforest and is involved in an ongoing project to create a bio-bank of deadly diseases.

Yesterday a new study added even more evidence to this relatively new field finding that the human destruction of natural ecosystems increases the numbers of rats, bats and other animals that harbour diseases that can lead to pandemics such as Covid-19 (Guardian). The assessment found that the populations of animals hosting what are known as zoonotic diseases were up to 2.5 times bigger in degraded places, and that the proportion of species that carry these pathogens increased by up to 70% compared with in undamaged ecosystems.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has awakened the world to the threat that zoonotic diseases pose to humans,” said Richard Ostfeld, at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, US, and Felicia Keesing at Bard College, US, in a commentary in Nature.

“With this recognition has come a widespread misperception that wild nature is the greatest source of zoonotic disease,” they said. “[This research] offers an important correction: the greatest zoonotic threats arise where natural areas have been converted to croplands, pastures and urban areas. The patterns the researchers detected were striking.”

“Our results suggest that global changes in the mode and the intensity of land use are creating expanding hazardous interfaces between people, livestock and wildlife reservoirs of zoonotic disease,” the authors note.

The study begs the question, should we continue to talk about deforestation and the destruction of natural ecosystems mainly in terms of climate change and biodiversity or is the risk of new pandemics emerging, and spreading rapidly throughout the world, now so great that this should be a core focus as well? 

It can seem as if the story is both more complex and more powerful than the one the media has focused on until now. It’s not just about melting icebergs and rising seas. It’s about a series of social and ecological fault-lines coming together to amplify the impacts of each one. Natural destruction is fuelling climate change, biodiversity loss, food shortages and pandemics – these in turn exacerbate societal weaknesses based around inequality and an associated collapse of trust in institutions and collective action. 

How on earth do you talk about that using short, simple words? I can’t say right now but it does kinda put all those fossil fuel write-off/oil company going a bit green stories in perspective doesn’t it?