India’s dramatic election results have confirmed a third term for Narendra Modi, but with a much-weakened mandate – is climate change to blame (or thank) for that?

India stands third in the world for the number of billionaires and the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and that perhaps sums up the paradoxical nature of the nation’s latest election.

As Narendra Modi was sworn in for a third term as prime minister, he did so much later and in much different circumstances than his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), expected. Before the election – where 642 million Indians, or 8% of the world’s population, voted – the narrative was one of a third-consecutive landslide victory for the right-wing party.

With a mandate built on Hindu nationalism, the slogan ‘Ab ki baar, 400 paar’ (This time, past 400) – a redux of the 2015 campaign slogan ‘Ab ki baar, Modi sarkar’ (This time, a Modi government) – was all over the BJP’s communications, referring to a parliamentary supermajority that would allow the party to amend the constitution.

Things, however, didn’t pan out the way Modi wanted. The BJP didn’t even obtain the simple majority of 272, let alone 400, instead having to rely on alliances to form a coalition government with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). It was a victory that felt like defeat, and vice-versa for the now-strong opposition INDIA coalition, led by Congress member and political dynast Rahul Gandhi.

The shock result of the world’s largest election was a rejection of the BJP’s religious persecution, and was ascribed – by Gandhi no less – to India’s poorest. In the last decade, the country has become the fifth-largest economy in the world, but the wealth gap has never been more stark.

The disparity can also be found when you look at who feels the worst effects of climate change. While Modi may have built an us-versus-them mentality using the historical emissions of the “hypocritical West”, the climate crisis was notably absent from his entire electoral campaign, despite India being amongst the 40 nations most vulnerable to global warming.

Climate change drove farmers away from the BJP

The sheer size of India’s elections makes for complex logistics – this year, the entire exercise ran six weeks. And while the length of the election isn’t anything new, it was a much larger focus because of the extreme heatwaves sweeping through the nation.

In the northern states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha, at least 33 people – including election officials on duty – died of suspected heatstroke in a single day in May. This followed reports that parts of New Delhi almost breached the 53°C barrier, the highest-ever temperature recorded in India, prompting the High Court to warn that the capital could soon turn into “a barren desert”.

But despite the Election Commission setting up a task force to monitor weather conditions (only after voting was underway) and sending a heat precaution list to poll workers, party campaigners were told not to do anything differently in the face of the heat.

This encapsulates the attitude towards the climate crisis by India’s lawmakers. While people suffer fatally from extreme weather, the BJP promised more temples and a better economy. But at what – and whose – cost? Unemployment and cost of living have been pinpointed as two key reasons that voters turned sour on the incumbent government.

In his second term, Modi faced one of the most powerful backlashes of his political career. While India and the world went in and out of lockdowns, hundreds of thousands of farmers poured into New Delhi to protest against his moves to open up more private investment in agriculture. The farmers believed this would make them vulnerable to low prices.

Agriculture is the biggest source of income in India, with 70% of rural households dependent on farming, and 82% being small or marginal farmers. But as climate change worsens, so does its impact on the sector. Extreme heat and droughts are decimating crops, while groundwater is already in short supply. Farmers are facing crippling debt – since Modi first took office in 2014, estimates suggest 100,000 farmers have taken their lives.

These are all climate issues. Ignoring them has swayed many former BJP voters, who are rightfully dismayed by the lack of jobs outside agriculture for India’s youth, many of whom grow up in farming families riddled with debt for their entire lives.

India’s inadequate climate goals need a revamp

Modi’s first speech after it became apparent that his coalition would gain the majority represented some marked shifts from his previous rhetoric. ‘Jai Shree Ram’ became ‘Jai Jagannath’ (after Ayodhya voted out the BJP despite the building of a divisive temple on the site of a destroyed mosque), the Modi government was now the NDA government, and climate change was suddenly an issue.

The prime minister took note of the election workers who toiled away in the sweltering heat for weeks, and, while there was no mention of the failure of reaching the 400-seat target, read between the lines and you could sense relief, and worry.

India’s emissions are off the charts, thanks in part to its agricultural practices, and in even larger part to its fossil fuel industry. Coal, specifically, is the biggest source of electricity across the country, and its use actually grew this year. And, despite being the third-largest solar power generator in the world, the overall share of clean energy has subsequently decreased, making up just around 22% of the total.

At COP26, Modi set out a pledge to reach net zero by 2070, but more than half of India’s electricity will still be sourced from coal by the end of the decade. And its climate target (or nationally determined contribution) has been deemed “highly insufficient” by the Climate Action Tracker, with current policies and action rated as “insufficient” as well.

This makes it all the more infuriating that climate change was just not on the ballot in India this year. It mirrors the larger political landscape: only 0.3% of the questions asked in the parliament are about climate change, and just one of the country’s 700-plus parties is focused on the environment.

But per capita emissions have risen by 93% since 2001, and heat-related deaths increased by 55% from 2000-2004 to 2017-2021. Climate change needs to be on the parliamentary agenda – especially since neither the BJP nor the INDIA coalition made any clear campaign commitments for the climate crisis, with just a handful of eco targets intertwined with promises to grow infrastructure.

For climate activists, the concern starts at the top, with Modi. This is a man who has infamously compared the changing climate to people’s heightened sensitivity to cold when they age. He has also proclaimed that the “climate has not changed”, but people and their habits have spoiled and destroyed the environment (identifying the very reason that the climate has, in fact, changed).

As a country, India proved that democracy is still important and alive, and secularism is part of its social fabric. In a climate election year, its voting surprised everybody – but now, its farmers, islanders, and climate-vulnerable citizens are hoping that the government springs a surprise too. It’s imperative that it does.

The post Was the World’s Largest Election Decided By the Climate Crisis? appeared first on Green Queen.

The 50 countries most vulnerable to climate change are paying back 15.5% of their government revenues as debt to external creditors, the highest rate since 1990.

Debt payments by the 50 countries facing the worst impacts of the climate crisis have doubled since the Covid-19 pandemic, reaching their highest levels in 34 years, according to research by UK charity Debt Justice.

Using data from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the report suggests that climate-vulnerable countries are now paying 15.5% of their revenue to external creditors, up from 7.7% pre-pandemic and 3.7% in 2010 (the lowest level in recent history).

“Record levels of debt are crushing the ability of the most vulnerable countries to tackle the climate emergency. We need a rapid and effective debt relief scheme to cancel debts down to a sustainable level,” said Heidi Chow, executive director of Debt Justice.

Zambia’s uneven debt restructuring deal

The charity found that Chad – the country most vulnerable to climate change – will pay 19.4% of its revenues to creditors this year. This is followed by four other African countries: Niger (10.4%), Guinea-Bissau (20.6%), Tonga (8.8%), and Sudan (16.6%).

But the climate-vulnerable nation that will see the highest share of its revenues end up as debt payments is Angola, which will give back a whopping 59.8% of its revenues to external creditors. But this isn’t a one-off, last year, this actually amounted to 60.2% of what the country made.

Sri Lanka and Zambia are joint second at 43.5%. The former actually had the highest percentage of debt payments last year (86.4%). Zambia, meanwhile, has declared a national emergency due to the ongoing drought, considered its worst in two decades. After three-and-a-half years of negotiations, its government has just sealed a debt restructuring deal with some (not all) of its private lenders.

This means that banks and asset managers will be repaid 13% more than governments, despite lending at higher interest rates. But while the deal allows for large increases in debt payments if the economy does better than expected, there’s no equivalent clause to decrease payments if a shock (like another drought) occurs.

Under the debt deal, Zambia will have to pay bondholders like BlackRock $450M this year. “It is outrageous that Zambia’s creditors have demanded a deal where they get huge increases in debt payments if things go well, but no losses if Zambia is hit by disasters such as droughts,” said Tim Jones, head of policy at Debt Justice. “The $450M going to bondholders this year is money which could have been used to respond to the national disaster.”

Rich countries must cancel debts to help climate-vulnerable nations

For 49 countries in the report, 38% of the external interest payments between 2023 and 2030 are earmarked for private lenders, totalling $50.9B. Debt Justice excluded India from this calculation because its large size skews the results, and its external debt payments are relatively low.

Of the remaining interest payments, 35% go to multilateral institutions, 14% goes to China, and 13% to other governments.

And, when you factor in principal payments – the amount originally borrowed – as well, multilaterals will receive 38% of the share ($208.8B), while private lenders will get 30% ($166.6M). This illustrates the high interest rates charged by the latter.

Debt Justice said its new report explains the urgent need for comprehensive debt relief, so low-income countries can invest in climate change adaptation measures. While two rounds of comprehensive debt relief in the late 90s and mid-00s led to a sharp decline in debt burdens, repayments rose in 2010 and have been soaring since 2020.

This is because the debt suspension scheme agreed by creditors at the start of Covid-19 has now ended, which means debts are now due to be repaid again. Countries borrowing the capital have also been hit by rising interest rates, compared to rock-bottom levels in the early 2010s. Plus, most debt payments are owed in US dollars, the value of which has increased the size of the debt.

World leaders are in the middle of a 10-day climate conference in Bonn, Switzerland, which focuses on countries’ ability to finance climate action. And, last month, an investigation by Reuters found that rich countries have been funnelling money back into their economies through climate finance programmes – primarily loans and grants with strings attached – putting the Global South in a “new wave of debt”.

With policymakers discussing climate finance and unsustainable debt levels in Bonn, Jones added: “As well as debt cancellation, rich countries urgently need to pay their climate debt by delivering grant-based, adequate climate finance.”

The post ‘Outrageous’: Debt Payments for Climate-Vulnerable Nations Reach 34-Year-High appeared first on Green Queen.

A Danish court has thrown out a case brought by a woman who claimed her rights were violated after a hospital did not offer adequate vegan options during her pregnancy.

Despite one district court recognising veganism as a protected belief earlier this year, another has gone the opposite way, ruling against a woman who claimed she was discriminated against by a hospital that failed to provide her with enough plant-based food options while she was pregnant.

Mette Rasmussen was twice hospitalised in Hvidovre (just north of Copenhagen) in 2020 – once for acute pain, and the second time in connection with her pregnancy – and was offered food categorised as “side dishes” on the hospital’s menu, since they were the only vegan options available. This meant she was given items like rice, root vegetables and apple juice as her meals, prompting concerns about her nutrition.

Worried that she may not be able to breastfeed properly, Rasmussen left the hospital early during the second hospitalisation. In fact, the hospital suggested she bring a packed lunch when she returned for childbirth.

The Danish Vegetarian Association (DVF) filed a suit against the administrative unit responsible for hospitals in Copenhagen and its surroundings on Rasmussen’s behalf, arguing that her dietary choice was protected by Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (which contends with the right to freedom of thought, belief, and religion).

In February 2020, the Danish Ministry of Justice acknowledged in a reply to the parliament that vegetarians and vegans were protected by the convention, and, in some situations, probably have the right to be served vegetarian and/or vegan meals in public institutions. But, on Thursday, a court acquitted the Capital Region, ruling that the patient wasn’t prevented from being vegan as she could eat the side dishes, and “had the opportunity to bring food herself or to have it delivered via relatives or others” to the hospital, or even buy food at 7-Eleven.

“It is very surprising that the court believes that what I was offered is considered adequate as vegan food, both in terms of nutrition and taste. Dry white rice, baked carrots, celery and boiled potatoes,” said Rasmussen. “And then I’m just happy that I didn’t have to be hospitalised longer than I actually was, because then I would have become decidedly underweight from malnutrition and a lack of calories.”

The experience led her to choose a home birth for her second child.

Hospital admits vegan food it offered is not nutritious enough

In 2015, the Danish national dietary recommendations included concrete proposals to satisfy hot vegan dishes, in which pulses play a key role. Hvidovre Hospital says it has adopted these guidelines in its policy, but, of the 20 lunch and dinner meals on its menu, none were vegan. And, while several vegetarian dishes on the menu follow these recommendations, employees told the court in Hillerød last month that these could not be made vegan.

The lawyer representing the defendants argued that it was too much to ask the hospital to offer vegan food or adapt vegetarian meals to be plant-based, suggesting that vegans don’t have the right to demand more than the items listed as side dishes. Two employees reiterated this, but when asked if they thought the vegan food on offer was sufficiently nutritious or met the dietary guidelines, they conceded it didn’t.

The court also heard that there was oatmeal and shortbread in the kitchenette for patients, but this would have required patients to be able to physically move. Meanwhile, soy milk and yoghurt were also present on the kitchenette’s range of available items, but hospital staff weren’t aware of this, and so never ordered them for the department.

“I honestly cannot understand that all hospital kitchens cannot prepare nutritious vegan dishes that can benefit all patients, now that they have an entire menu full of meat dishes. It goes against all recommendations to let sick people live on side dishes for all the others’ meals during their hospitalisations,” said Rasmussen.

“For me, it would be the obvious and easy choice to make a few delicious vegan dishes that everyone can eat. In this case, Hvidovre Hospital does not even follow its own meal policy or dietary guidelines set by the state. I think it’s crazy that they are allowed to do that.”

Hundreds of similar complaints against Danish hospitals

“The plaintiff has not been prevented from eating vegan food in accordance with her beliefs during her otherwise short-term admissions,” the court said after acquitting the Capital Region, basing the judgement on the fact that Rasmussen’s hospitalisations were only one and three days long. But would the outcome have been different if these were longer stays?

This is what the plaintiff is considering as the DVF and prosecutor assess whether the verdict should be appealed to the high court. “The court says that the hospital could offer Mette ‘vegan food’. But there were no full vegan meals to be had, only individual vegan food items. In addition, it states that hospitalised vegans have the option of paying themselves to have food delivered from outside or to buy in the hospital’s kiosk, but this is also clear discrimination, and moreover impossible for many if they do not have family nearby or are bedridden,” said DVF general secretary Rune-Christoffer Dragsdahl.

“Having to buy food from outside every day can add up to a large amount. Thus, it becomes a user fee for hospitalised vegans, which is not fair,” he added.

The DVF has received 450 complaints from people who have had problems with accessing vegan food in hospitals, with many having to ask family or friends to bring in food, get ready meals from 7-Eleven, or live on supplements during their hospitalisation. While several hospitals in Denmark offer vegan food, many others don’t, the association said.

“We are surprised that the country’s hospitals do not follow the excellent official recommendations for what vegan hospital food should consist of – and that some of the suggested dishes are not on the menu at all,” Dragsdahl said last month.

“It is paradoxical that by having 20 different meals on the menu, the hospital takes into account many different personal preferences based on taste and pickiness. But when it comes to a conviction protected by the Human Rights Court, no consideration is given. It simply does not make sense, and we hope that the district court comes to the conclusion that it is illegal discrimination,” he added.

In February, a district court in the city of Hjorring protected veganism as a belief under the European Convention, after a school denied a kindergarten student the right to plant-based meals, and refused to allow her to bring a packed lunch as well. The Danish government, meanwhile, became the first to adopt a national action plan to transition towards plant-based food last year.

The post Hospital Didn’t Violate Human Rights with Lack of Vegan Food for Pregnant Woman, Rules Court appeared first on Green Queen.

Food and climate journalist Thin Lei Win speaks to Ian Urbina, executive editor of The Outlaw Ocean Project, about the organisation’s investigation into India’s shrimp farming industry.

On March 20, The Outlaw Ocean Project, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit investigative outfit that focuses on wrongdoings in the oceans, published a bombshell investigation based on a treasure trove of internal company documents, emails, and WhatsApp messages, as well as footage from security cameras at a shrimp processing plant in India. 

The evidence, provided by a courageous whistleblower, showed multiple levels of wrongdoing, from the terrible living and working conditions the workers had to endure to falsifying documents to say they source shrimp for certified farms and knowingly shipping contaminated products.  

The plant was leased by Choice Canning, a company whose exports have “filled frozen food sections at stores such as Walmart, Price Chopper, ShopRite and Hannaford with a little over 19 million pounds of packaged shrimp”. 

The company’s “Tastee Choice” brand products are sold in commissaries at 29 U.S. Military bases spanning 23 states across the country and Washington, D.C., said the Outlaw Ocean Project, so this isn’t exactly a no-name company. 

On the same day, Associated Press published an article and video news story about the gruelling conditions in Indian shrimp industry, confirming the findings of a report – Hidden Harvest – from the Chicago-based Corporate Accountability Lab, a human rights legal group, that came out a day earlier. 

I reached out to Ian Urbina, executive editor of The Outlaw Ocean Project, and someone I’d interviewed before on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing for The Index podcast over a year ago, to find out about this latest investigation, titled, “India Shrimp: A Growing Goliath”. 

The conversation below has been edited lightly for length and clarity. 

Q: Can we perhaps start from the beginning? How did the story come about and what the findings are, for those who may not have read it? 

A: It emerged in a kind of funny way. An individual who was working at a large seafood company was in the room during several fairly tense meetings we had with that company about findings of forced labour in their plants in China. He left that company and took what looked like a dream job for him in India to run a new plant. 

Several months into that new job, he sent me a note on LinkedIn and said, “You don’t know me but I know you. I came to really respect the work you guys do. I am at a plant where I’m seeing things that are disturbing and probably illegal and I’m not sure what to do.” 

I was on a ship at that time in the Southern Ocean, so I got on the phone and talked with Josh Farinella, the whistleblower and I spent the next week or so vetting him. I really checked him out to make sure he wasn’t fake and was honest, and the more I talked to him by text and by satellite phone from the ship, the more I realised this was an unusually strong whistleblower because he had access to large amounts of very compelling documents. And those documents could make this a stronger revelation. 

That’s always the key thing with whistleblowers – how can you corroborate what they’re saying? He also just kind of checked out in the subtle ways in which reporters check on the credibility of sources. His stories didn’t wobble. Details didn’t shift. 

We were supposed to be at sea for a month and we cut that short and. My visa to India wasn’t approved but my videographer got his. So we sent him in to go meet the whistleblower at the plant, to film conditions, and to get the documents in person. Meanwhile, we were digitally receiving thousands of pages of emails and recordings and all sorts of evidence. 

The outcomes of the investigation is that a plant in India that was operated under a lease by an American company called Choice Canning, which is a large player in the shrimp export arena – over a third of all shrimp in the US is coming from India – had very serious problems with what seemed to be captive labour and also food safety concerns specifically tied to antibiotics in shrimp that seem to have ultimately been shipped to the US and Canada and elsewhere.

Q: There were so many levels of wrongdoing – the forced labour aspect, the hygiene and food safety issues, the antibiotics issues, just to name a few – that it was quite staggering. Is it something that you see quite regularly when it comes to problems with seafood supply chains? 

A: You summed it up well. If you imagine it as layers, you’ve got the layers of, generally speaking, the treatment of workers and you’ve got lots of parts in there, their wages, their living conditions, their work hours, their hygienic expectations. Even within wages, you have delay of wages, non-payment of wages, lots of layers in the labour-human rights category. There are captivity concerns – they are not allowed to leave without permission. 

Then you have the food concerns – the antibiotics, the unhygienic stuff. Is the stuff clean, does it have things in it that it shouldn’t have? 

But then you have the more boring and I think in some ways, more consequential and fundamental problems, which are auditing and tracking. Because there’s an industry that’s supposedly meant to police those other things, right and that whole industry does not work, and often is worse than ineffective. It’s actually complicit in the deception of the consumer and the companies. And that was the case here where there was evidence of wilful deception by the company and the auditing firms. 

And that to me is the the deepest layer because it’s one that traverses India, it takes you to China and takes you to other industries, like garment in Bangladesh, and the auditing and check mechanisms that are meant to reassure companies and consumers even when they’re trying to do well, is pretty ineffective and oftentimes, they’re more just trying to do PR. So I think that’s the deepest layer of problem that we unveiled.

Q: What’s the response been so far? Lots of media have picked it up but there’s also been a Senate committee or political players actually trying to find out what happened, right?

A: Yeah, so I put the “what happened next” in three categories. 

One is… to be fair and balanced, there’s the Indian pushback. Just to be a good reporter, let’s just deliver what they say, whether we believe it or not. That “This is a liberal Western competitively-motivated campaign to undercut a growing Indian industry, and it’s attempting to tarnish our reputation with false claims because the US shrimp industry, the domestic industry is not competitive, and it’s clawing its way back into the market”. 

The liberal cabal card has also been put forward by the company itself and by the industry association and by the government, which is to say, these human rights organisations and these liberal journalists are just out to have a good story and claim terrible things that aren’t there. That’s one form of pushback. It’s completely wrong, but it’s worth giving them their chance. 

The second category is a lot of other news outlets picked up the story and ran with it and amplified it. Great.

And then the third is various stakeholders. I would divide them into lawmakers and executive branch folks. The lawmakers… several congressional offices have asked for the documents. Maybe they just were riding the media wave but don’t have any real intention. But they asked me and they asked the whistleblower and his lawyer for all the documents and they’re going through them. Whether that will result in legislation, a hearing, a letter, who knows? 

The second category outside the congressional or lawmaker realm is the executive branch. A formal whistleblower complaint was submitted by the lawyer of the whistleblower to multiple agencies, the FDA, Customs and Border, Department of Labour, and Department of State. These whistleblower complaints emphasise different parts. So we’ll see. 

But those are the three big impacts. I will point out though, that strategically, the company on the chess board played a very smart move which was probably what they should have done at the outset rather than threatening us and trying to intimidate us with legal letters. They instead, in stage two, went for, “We’re closing this plant, and we’re opening a new one and everything’s going to be great there”. That’s the logical PR move. 

(Thin: you can see at least one letter threatening lawsuit here.)

Q: So the company’s move – that they’re shutting this plant down and opening a new one. It feels a little bit like “Whack-a-Mole”. Labour exploitation and problems within the seafood industry is is not new, right? Because it happened in Thailand years ago with the Burmese workers. It moved to India and now it’s shifting from one place in India to another place in India. Is that just the modus operandi?

A: I mean, I think it’s an even bigger story about how foreign capital operates, if you want to go meta. I think foreign capital just moves when things get hot, whether it’s environmental issues or killing people. In the Amazon logging, it’s the same story. Investors move. 

But yes, I think the hope here, though, journalistically, is that when you engage in the “Whack-a-Mole” journalism that we’re engaged in, if you can whack big – I don’t know how to keep the metaphor – but if you can do it the right way, you get deep enough that big brands start asking hard questions of those no-name players like the auditing firms. 

That you’re doing a follow up story is gold. This is where change happens when folks do stories a month and a half later because you extend its duration the news. And that’s how auditors and big brands started saying, “Hey, we’ve got to fix this for real”. It doesn’t solve it but it could well improve it because they’re more sceptical and asking better questions of their auditors or maybe switching to different kinds of auditors. Whatever.

Q: What about in terms of from consumers, the ordinary people who enjoy having shrimp at a cheap price? Do you think there’s a common misunderstanding around where seafood comes from or is it just easier not to look too closely? 

A: Look, I don’t think the story here is different for Nike shoes or iPhones or shrimp. I do think globalised supply chains are all rife with hidden deficiencies, buried costs, environmental degradation, and slavery. Those are efficiencies and they’re in all the products. 

I think seafood is distinct though. That’s why I left the Times and doubled down on the ocean space because what’s happening out there is different than a sweatshop in Port-au-Prince or Dhaka or the Amazon. 

There are sweatshops on the ships and those supply chains are longer, more tangled, more opaque, and therefore there’s a lot more craziness built into the supply chains and I think on the receiving end, the brands have, for a long time, enjoyed the plausible deniability that allows them to not get a lot of attention because (the oceans are) a hard place to report from. 

It’s hard to break these stories, it’s costly, it’s slow, it’s complicated with the trade data, etcetera. So I think all that has added up to seafood being a good decade behind garments or blood diamonds, like the fluency of average consumers who are like, “Before I get that fur or that diamond, I might want to check to make sure it’s not coming from DRC”. Whereas with secret, it’s only starting to occur like, “Oh, wait, did you see that story?”

Q: Yeah, like with the salmon farms. Now, was this a collaboration, meaning did you collaborate with a lot of media outlets to push the story out? Or was it mainly an Outlaw Ocean Project thing? 

A: China was much more sprawling and more complicated in the collaboration. This was a bit more like Libya in that a collaboration was we did all the reporting, storytelling, video making, etc. And the collaboration that emerged was in the form of convincing editors to run it and that was not an easy sell because of those threatening letters. We had a lot of folks pull out when they saw the letters.

So the collaboration was in distribution more than in reporting although after we reported, we reached out and said, “This whistleblower did something very brave. He probably tanked this career. He’s a working class guy who doesn’t have a whole lot of options. And we as journalists really need to like rally around him. He’s the real deal. The documents in there. Vet it yourself, but I need other journalists to step up.”

So I tried to put the word out to folks and I said, “I need everyone to interview this guy because we need to flash mob around him.” But yeah, folks stepped up and said, “I get it, we’ll interview him and we’ll like put our own thing out.”

Q: Speaking of which, where is Joshua Farinella now? Is he ok?

A: Yeah, he’s great. It’s good. You never know how that’s gonna play out. He gave up a job and took a new job, for, I think a third of what he was making. He moved his family, his wife, his stepdaughter. He’s employed. He signed his contract the day before the story dropped. His lawyer and I were sweating. 

He’s in good shape. He’s happy and very proud of what he did, which is great.

Q: Can anything be done realistically to tackle these issues in a more system systematic way? Or will it always be a reactive thing where we respond to bad behaviour? 

A: I will answer this as a journalist to another journalist, two people who view the world through the lens of journalists can change the world kind of thinking. I do believe that. 

I think that journalism has a huge role to play here in the sense that if we as a group stay on this and keep pressing the core issues of unannounced spot checks versus announced spot checks, big difference. Audits in this form by these kinds of firms that are paid by the very people they’re policing, that’s a worrisome thing, etc, etc. 

If we keep pushing that type of story in this industry or others, I’m pretty sure… and we are smarter than historically journalists have been about working with NGOs who can push other levers.

It doesn’t mean we crossed that advocacy line, but it does mean we say, “You guys should sue. You guys should do as a shareholder resolution. You guys should run follow up coverage. You guys should write consumer letters. You Mr. Lawmaker should have a hearing.” 

If everyone does those things, trust me, this won’t happen.

This is an edited and web-adapted version of the May 10, 2023 edition of the Thin Ink newsletter, a weekly publication on food, climate, and where they meet by journalist Thin Lei Win – subscribe here.

The post Uncovering the Ugly Truth Behind India’s Shrimp Farming Industry appeared first on Green Queen.

South Korea’s constitutional court today held its final hearing on four landmark cases brought by the public against the government’s inaction on climate change. Experts say this could set a precedent.

The South Korean government is facing four citizen petitions accusing it of a failure to protect over 200 people – including over 60 children under five and an unborn child (at the time) – by not tackling climate change.

Today, the country’s constitutional court held its second and final hearing of the case (which is merging the four petitions), following the first hearing last month. While a decision is expected later this year, as the first case in East Asia to challenge climate change policies, it could set a major human rights precedent.

The plaintiffs argue that the government’s climate targets are too weak and threaten their right to live in a healthy environment. The hope is for a ruling that would force South Korea to be more ambitious in its next decade-long climate plan (known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs), which all countries are set to update next year.

“The climate crisis is already upon us but the effects will be felt even more intensely by future generations. Cases like this are vital to safeguarding citizen’s rights,” said Jiyoun Yoo, climate justice campaigner at Amnesty International Korea.

Why South Koreans are suing their country over climate change

One of the cases is widely referred to as Woodpecker vs South Korea, a reference to the name given to the unborn child of would-be parents who filed the suit in June 2022. It’s partially based on the Enforcement Decree of the Carbon Neutrality Act, which mandates the country to set its NDC to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 (from a 2018 baseline).

The other cases were from 2020. One argues against South Korea’s Framework Act on Low Carbon, Green Growth, another claims that the aforementioned Carbon Neutrality Act violates the constitution, and the other accuses the government of failing to respect fundamental rights.

These include the right to life, right to pursue happiness, right to general freedom, right to property, and right to a healthy environment. The 200-plus plaintiffs also feel the state is failing to fulfil its obligation to protect them from disasters.

The four cases were merged into one earlier this year, with the first hearing taking place in April. “Carbon emission reduction keeps getting pushed back as if it is homework that can be done later,” Woodpecker’s mother, Lee Donghyun, said at the time. “But that burden will be what our children have to bear eventually.”

Lee Jongseok, the president of the court, said: “The court recognises the importance and public interest of this case and will make efforts to ensure that deliberations are conducted thoroughly.”

What the case could mean for climate litigation

Next year, governments are expected to revise their NDCs, a key tenet of the 2015 Paris Agreement that sought to limit global temperature rises to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, with an upper limit of 2°C. At present, the policies in place are on track to result in an increase of about 2.7°C. Even the NDCs at present will only limit warming to 2.5°C.

According to the Climate Action Tracker, South Korea’s NDC (with a net zero target for 2050) is “highly inefficient”. In fact, its current climate policies are currently only compatible with up to 4°C of temperature rises, compared to modelled domestic pathways. And if all countries held its level of ambition, the global heating would hike up to 3°C by 2100 – it’s a figure many climate scientists fear we’ll reach.

Sejong Youn, a legal counsel for the case, told the Nature journal: “If we have a constitutional ruling on the insufficiency of the current NDC [this year], we will be able to enhance the government’s climate ambitions while they’re working on the 2035 target.”

In East Asia, litigation is usually seen as a last resort, but that’s what makes this such an important case. “Taking legal action against a state is often a long and arduous process which requires patience and perseverance and the courage of these pioneering plaintiffs is to be admired and applauded,” said Amnesty’s Jiyoun.

If the plaintiffs lose, the constitutional court may be less likely to agree to hear climate cases again. But Mingzhe Zhu, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, said: “Even if you lose this time, you can lose beautifully in the sense that you provoked social awareness. The very fact that this case went to the constitutional court – that is already a certain sense of success.”

But a win could have ripple effects, setting a precedent for future climate cases in the region. “If we have a favourable precedent in South Korea, I think that will really be a trigger in spreading this trend,” said Youn. “It will send a message: all countries need to take action in order to tackle this global crisis, and there are no exceptions.”

Globally, legal cases over climate change have spread like wildfire (pun unintended),  spanning countries like the Netherlands, Pakistan, the UK, Italy, Turkey, Australia, Brazil, Peru, South Korea, New Zealand and India. Last month, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a landmark ruling in favour of a group of Swiss women who accused their government of human rights violations due to climate inaction. Switzerland now has a legal duty to take greater action, failing which, it could face further litigation and financial penalties.

And in another case involving the youth, climate activists in Montana, US registered a legal victory after a judge ruled that the state’s fossil fuel policy was violating their right to a clean and healthful environment

The post South Korea: Climate Inaction Hearing Could Set Precedent in Case Brought by Children – and An Unborn Baby appeared first on Green Queen.

Industrial cotton farming in Brazil that’s sold to Asian suppliers of Zara and H&M is destroying the Cerrado savanna and violating the rights of local communities, a new investigation has revealed.

Zara & H&M – two of the world’s largest fashion companies – source cotton from industrial farms in Brazil that are accused of illegal deforestation, land grabbing, violent conflicts and corruption. These practices are violating the human rights of local communities and tearing down the Cerrado, the world’s largest savanna, according to a new report by climate NGO Earthsight.

Lying south of the Amazon, the Cerrado is home to 5% of the world’s animals and plants, encompassing 161 species and millions of humans depending on its forests for their livelihoods. But half of the biome’s native vegetation has already been lost to industrial farming by agribusinesses turning their attention to the Cerrado to spare the Amazon. And just last year, deforestation rates in the region increased by 43% – almost all of which is illegal.

“While we all know what soy and beef have done to Brazil’s forests, cotton’s impact has gone largely unnoticed. Yet the crop has boomed in recent decades and become an environmental disaster,” said Earthsight director Sam Lawson. “If you have cotton clothes, towels or bed sheets from H&M or Zara, they may well be stained by the plundering of the Cerrado.”

Video footage from the year-long investigation shows a community member being shot, lands being burned, and large swathes of green fields being cleared, tracing over 800,000 tonnes of cotton back to firms in Asia that make clothes for Zara and Inditex (the parent company of Zara, Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka and Stradivarius), which together have over 10,000 locations and made $41B in combined revenue in 2022.

SLC Agrícola and Grup Horita’s land-grabbing and violent history

Brazilian cotton has become much more prominent in the fashion industry over the last decade, with the country now the world’s second-largest exporter of the crop, and set to overtake the US by 2030. In the last decade, Brazil’s cotton exports have more than doubled, and almost all of this is grown in the Cerrado.

The investigation found that H&M and Zara’s suppliers source cotton grown in the Brazilian state of Bahia by two of its largest producers: SLC Agrícola (which is the top producer) and Grupo Horita (the sixth-largest). Both owned by some of Brazil’s wealthiest families, their cotton production in western Bahia is linked to a number of illegalities.

The region has been heavily impacted by industrial agriculture, with locals telling Earthsight it’s hard to find a single large-scale cotton or soy farm in all of western Bahia that isn’t the result of land grabbing. Agribusinesses extract nearly two billion litres of water daily from the area, but dump 600 million litres of pesticides on the Cerrado every year. The heavy use of pesticides gives cotton an “extremely high” climate footprint – clearing Cerrado vegetation for agriculture emits as much carbon as 50 million cars in a year.

Horita grows cotton, soy and other crops on a third of a mega estate called Estrondo in a Bahia municipality. It has been linked to violent land disputes that pit Estrondo against Indigenous communities called geraizeiros, who have inhabited the area since the 19th century and have their right to traditional lands protected by law. Bahai’s attorney general ruled in 2018 that Estrondo was one of the largest land-grabbed areas in Brazilian history, but these public lands belong to the state and should be environmentally protected and set aside for the local population.

Over half of the area illegally appropriated by Estrondo’s owners in the 1970s and 1980s has been deforested, and in the last 10 years, the traditional communities have faced intimidation and harassment by armed men working for the agribusinesses. In 2019, two community members were shot by Estrondo’s security guards.

One of Grupo Horita’s owners, Walter Horita, has been caught in a corruption scandal for the sale of court rulings related to land disputes in Bahia, with attempts to influence judicial and political stakeholders in the region, and reports of him transferring $1.2M to a court official.

Another land-grabbing case has afflicted the Capão do Modesto community, with large agribusinesses accused of misappropriating public lands to convert them into “legal reserves”, which landowners must set aside for environmental prevention. But instead of keeping part of their productive properties as legal reserves, some agribusinesses have acquired land elsewhere to do so. Bahia’s attorney general has referred to Capão do Modesto as “one of the most serious land grabbing cases” in the region, with the local community facing harassment, surveillance, intimidation and attacks carried out by gunmen.

Better Cotton certification masks illegal deforestation

Both Grupo Horita and SLC Agrícola also have a history of illegal deforestation. The former’s farms were found to have illegally felled over 25,000 hectares, while there were no permits found for 11,700 hectares of deforestation by the company between 2010 and 2018. In fact, it has been fined over 20 times for environmental violations, totalling $4.5M.

And despite adopting a zero-deforestation policy in 2021, SLC Agrícola was accused of clearing over 1,350 hectares of native vegetation at one of its farms in 2022. That’s before you consider the 40,000 hectares its farms lost over the last 12 years. The business has also been fined over $250,000 since 2008 for its violations.

Earthsight notes how H&M and Zara rely on the Better Cotton (BC) certification system. All the cotton investigated by the organisation was BC-certified, and the two fashion giants are the world’s biggest users of such cotton. Brazil, meanwhile, produces the largest amount of BC-licensed fibre (42% of the global total).

But this system is “fundamentally flawed”, with BC having repeatedly been accused of greenwashing, not allowing for full supply chain traceability, and failing to protect human rights. The certification has “excessively vague” requirements to comply with local laws and no mention of land ownership or disputes. A 2019 ban on ecosystem conversion doesn’t address illegal deforestation, while an upcoming traceability system is inadequate as it traces cotton back to countries, not farms.

H&M and Inditex don’t have the policies and tools in place to make up for BC’s shortcomings. The former’s human rights and sustainability policies fail to address community rights or deforestation, while the latter’s climate commitments don’t extend to its cotton suppliers. BC has now launched an investigation into the allegations.

In a statement, H&M said it took the findings “extremely seriously”. “Even despite the standard owners’ best efforts, violations can of course occur. Therefore, it is essential that the standards and certifications we select have credible grievance mechanisms and incident management processes in place that enable remedy,” it said.

“We have commercial relationships with all these companies. Inditex’s purchases from these organisations represents a fraction of their total production,” said Inditex. “Accordingly to suppliers’ information, these companies do not directly purchase cotton to any Brazilian producer. They purchase cotton with different origins throughout specialised traders depending on the raw material characteristics, certification and price.”

What governments and companies need to do

The report notes that government reforms are needed to transform the cotton and fashion industries, given their weak supply chain oversight and ineffective certification systems. The EU, for its part, is close to finalising its Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive – but this will be a watered-down version of the original proposal, thanks to Germany’s withdrawal of support for the law. This was driven by the FDP (part of the governing coalition in the country), which has received funding from businesses that would be affected by the law.

Last year, the EU’s Deforestation Regulation came into force to require the production of certain goods to be legal and free from deforestation, but it does not cover cotton or goods made from cotton. This is also the case with the UK’s illegal deforestation ban and the US’s Forest Act. In Brazil, the federal government is promoting the PPCerado plan to reduce deforestation in the savanna, but this also only targets illegal deforestation and fails to address land clearing authorised by the local government.

Successive Bahia governments have also adopted regulations that undermine the state’s constitutional provisions on environmental and community protection. Earthsight suggests that the approval of deforestation permits has skyrocketed, with over 750,000 hectares authorised between 2012 and 2021. “The federal government should put in place a plan to halt all large-scale deforestation in the Cerrado, not only the illegal kind,” the report states. “Bahia’s government should map all public lands to ensure they are preserved and that traditional communities fully enjoy their land rights.”

Earthsight says Better Cotton must require certified farms to seek the consent of Indigenous communities for any activities that affect them, while rules on deforestation need to ban certified cotton from growing on land that was deforested illegally before December 2019. Conflict of interest issues also need to be resolved by putting impartial parties in charge of certification and audits.

Better Cotton is also being asked to implement and enforce a meaningful traceability system, with H&M, Zara and other big retailers called upon to pressure the accreditation programme to do so. Until that happens, these businesses need to go beyond using certifications and ensure their goods are sourced ethically by introducing more rigorous policies and checks.

“These firms talk about good practice, social responsibility and certification schemes, they claim to invest in traceability and sustainability, but all this now looks about as fake as their high-street window arrangements,” said Lawson. “It has become very clear that crimes related to the commodities we consume have to be addressed through regulation, not consumer choices. That means lawmakers in consumer countries should put in place strong laws with tough enforcement. In the meantime, shoppers should think twice before buying their next piece of cotton clothing.”

The post Zara, H&M Linked to Illegal Deforestation & Human Rights Abuses with Brazilian Cotton Supply Chain appeared first on Green Queen.

In a landmark ruling, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favour of a group of Swiss women, who said their government violated human rights by taking inadequate action on climate change. However, the court also threw out two other similar cases.

On what was a milestone day for global climate lawsuits in Strasbourg, France, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that the Swiss government’s inaction on climate change violates human rights, while rejecting similar claims made by French and Portuguese citizens in separate cases.

This was the first such ruling by an international court, with the ECHR acknowledging that weak climate policies can be in breach of the human rights set out in the European Convention. Despite the defeat of the other two cases, the verdict sets a legal precedent for future litigation on how the climate crisis affects people’s right to a safe planet, and amps up pressure on governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“It is clear that future generations are likely to bear an increasingly severe burden of the consequences of present failures and omissions to combat climate change,” said ECHR president Síofra O’Leary.

Why the ECHR ruled in favour of Swiss climate activists

The French suit was brought by MEP Damien Carême, who argued that France’s inadequate efforts to mitigate climate change violated his rights to life and privacy and family life. The case was filed when he was the mayor of Grand-Synthe, a coastal French town vulnerable to flooding. But the court rejected the case because he no longer lives there.

The Portuguese case, meanwhile, was filed by six youngsters who sued 32 European countries for failing to avert the climate crisis and its effects, which they said threatened their right to life and discriminated against them based on their age. The ECHR refused to admit it on the grounds that applicants can’t bring cases against countries other than Portugal, and added that they hadn’t pursued legal options within Portugal.

As for the Swiss suit, it was filed by the KlimaSeniorinnen, a group of 2,400 elderly women whose average age is 74. The eight-year legal battle saw the organisation accuse the Swiss government of not doing enough to combat climate change. They argued that their rights are especially infringed on as they’re most affected by increasingly frequent extreme heat events, citing a UN IPCC report revealing that women and older adults are among the demographics facing the highest risks of temperature-related deaths during heatwaves.

Unlike the other two cases, the ECHR agreed with the KlimaSeniorinnen, who said Switzerland violated their right to life by failing to cut emissions that can limit global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures. The court ruled that the Swiss government had failed to comply with its duties under the European Convention concerning climate change.

O’Leary noted that there were critical gaps in the process of putting in place the relevant domestic regulatory framework. “This included a failure to quantify, through a carbon budget or otherwise, national greenhouse gas emissions limitations,” she said. “The respondent state had previously failed to meet its past greenhouse gas emission reduction targets by failing to act in good time and in an appropriate and consistent manner.”

The ECHR further noted that Swiss courts hadn’t provided convincing reasons as to why they considered it unnecessary to examine the KilmaSeniorinnen’s complaints, adding that they had failed to take into consideration the compelling scientific evidence concerning climate change and hadn’t taken the complaints seriously.

Swiss president Viola Amherd wasn’t impressed with the verdict, saying: “I would like to know what the grounds for it are. Sustainability is very important to Switzerland, biodiversity is very important to Switzerland, the net-zero target is very important to Switzerland. We are working on those and will continue to work on them with all our strength. This ruling does nothing to change that.”

But the country now has a legal duty to take greater action against climate change – its current commitments outline a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030, from a 1990 baseline. And if it doesn’t update its climate policies, further litigation and financial penalties could follow.

ECHR ruling sets legal precedent for climate change lawsuits

The ECHR rejects about 90% of all applications it receives, but fast-tracked the three climate cases due to their urgent nature. In fact, it delayed hearings on six other climate cases pending the three rulings on Tuesday. These include a lawsuit in Norway that accuses the government of violating human rights by issuing new oil and gas exploration licenses beyond 2035.

The ECHR’s unprecedented decision will have a ripple effect on future climate cases, establishing a binding legal precedent for all 46 member states of the Council of Europe, which could face similar lawsuits that they’re likely to lose.

“We expect this ruling to influence climate action and climate litigation across Europe and far beyond. The ruling reinforces the vital role of courts – both international and domestic – in holding governments to their legal obligations to protect human rights from environmental harm,” said Joie Chowdhury, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law. “While today we did not see ideal outcomes in all the three cases, overall today is a watershed legal moment for climate justice and human rights.”

“I really hoped that we would win against all the countries so obviously I’m disappointed that this didn’t happen,” said Sofia Oliveira, a 19-year-old applicant in the Portugal case. “But the most important thing is that the Court has said in the Swiss women’s case that governments must cut their emissions more to protect human rights. So, their win is a win for us too and a win for everyone.”

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the EU Commission (which Switzerland is not a part of), said: “The Commission takes note of these rulings and will of course be studying them very carefully. But regardless of the legal arguments, what these cases do is they remind us of the high importance and urgency which our citizens attach to climate action.”

Climate change litigation has been on the up for a few years now, spanning countries like the Netherlands, Pakistan, the UK, Italy, Turkey, Australia, Brazil, Peru, South Korea and New Zealand. Last month, an Indian court ruled that citizens have the right to be free from the adverse impact of climate change, while in August, youth climate activists in Montana, US registered a legal victory after a judge ruled that the state’s fossil fuel policy was violating their right to a clean and healthful environment.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was part of a gathering outside the court called the Swiss government’s inaction “a betrayal beyond words”. “This is only the beginning of climate litigation,” she said. “The results of this can mean in no way that we lean back. This means that we have to fight even more, since this is only the beginning. Because in a climate emergency, everything is at stake.”

The post Swiss Government’s Climate Inaction Violates Human Rights, Rules Top European Court appeared first on Green Queen.

Lawmakers in Kentucky are hoping to amend a law that would effectively criminalise whistleblowing and protect industrial livestock farming companies – but a new investigation into Pilgrim’s Pride chicken farms shows exactly why the ‘ag-gag’ legislation needs to be aborted.

The livestock lobby in the US seems to be in full swing. As several states look to ban cultivated meat, academics are tapped to discredit alternative proteins, and industry groups fund education schemes to influence school teachers and students, there’s a lot riding in a year that has been dubbed the climate election year.

In Kentucky, policymakers are taking a different approach, going on the offensive to be defensive of the industrialised meat sector. In what is called an ag-gag law, both houses have approved a measure that would criminalise unauthorised recording or photography at concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) – essentially dealing a blow to whistleblowers who expose health and safety hazards in the food industry.

But a new investigation from animal rights charity Mercy For Animals shows just how important it is to curtail the legislation. It has released footage displaying the cruelty that goes on behind the scenes at the poultry farms of Pilgrim’s Pride, which supply popular fast-food chains, from KFC (famously also from Kentucky) to Popeyes.

What is Kentucky’s ag-gag bill?

Sponsored by Republican senator John Schickel, SB 16 looks to amend a trespassing law from 2018, which aimed to protect “key infrastructure assets” like energy and drinking water facilities from surveillance by unauthorised drones.

This bill, however, seeks to extend these rules to CAFOs – numbering 150 in the state as of 2022 – and commercial food manufacturing and processing facilities (like meatpacking plants). And this time, it’s not just drones – SB 16 aims to restrict any photography or filming of these sites, making it a Class B misdemeanour sustainable by up to 90 days in jail and/or a $250 fine for a first offence.

“Ag-gag legislation, like Kentucky’s SB 16, draws support from industry giants, like Tyson, who do not want the public to see what goes on in their facilities,” Alex Cerussi, senior state policy manager at Mercy For Animals, tells Green Queen. Schicker has explicitly said that the bill was introduced to protect companies like Tyson Foods – you know, the same company that refused to shut down its meatpacking plants during Covid-19 and led to over 1,000 workers contracting the virus, which spread across the local community.

“The problem is that there’s unauthorized drone access over our facilities,” said Tyson Foods government affairs manager Graham Hall, who testified in favour of the bill. “A narrative can be created that’s problematic for us.” It’s almost incredible how transparent this effort is about safeguarding the business of meat producers. Tyson Foods is concerned about problematic narratives and has spent over $42,000 since January 2023 in lobbying government officials to bat for the company against any scrutiny of its operations.

The bill will now need to be voted on the House and Senate floors before it reaches governor Andy Beshear’s desk for consideration, but critics note that this violates free speech and removes a crucial tool for the press and animal advocates to hold corporations accountable. “Ag-gag laws seek to keep the public in the dark about where their food comes from,” says Cerussi. “The industry does not want the public knowing how animals and farmworkers are often treated.”

Michael Abate, an attorney for the Kentucky Press Association, told the Courier Journal: “We’re very concerned about this bill, which would purport to make it a crime to engage in basic newsgathering activities if there are stories related to food processing companies and their facilities.

Ag-gag laws have been deemed unconstitutional in at least five states – North Carolina, Kansas, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. “It just doesn’t seem like smart policy to pass something that’s been found unconstitutional more often than not,” Todd Blevins, Kentucky state director of the Humane Society of the United States, told the Kentucky Lantern.

Mercy For Animals’ investigation into Pilgrim’s Pride

An investigator for Mercy For Animals visited 23 contract farms belonging to Pilgrim’s Pride, the second-largest poultry company in the US, whose resulting footage shows why Kentucky’s pro-livestock bill needs to be voted against.

The farms had between three to eight broiler houses, each of which held between 25,000 and 38,000 birds – research has shown that most (if not all) chickens in the US are factory-farmed in such CAFOs. The chickens at Pilgrim’s Pride farms have been described as ‘Frankenchickens’ – they’re selectively bred to grow unnaturally large, and fast. The company raises about a billion of these birds each year.

Hidden camera footage shows the chickens being kicked, stomped on, and thrown against the metal walls of the barns. Many are picked up by their legs, necks or wings and thrown several feet through the air into transport cages while already injured or in pain. Tens of thousands of these chickens are crammed into sheds and forced to live for weeks in their own waste, while severely sick and injured birds are bred to grow so large and so fast, they can’t support their own weight.

The investigation found that workers often carried seven chickens at a time and swung them all into transport cages together, while in many instances, transport cage doors were slammed shut, trapping chickens’ heads, wings and legs in the gaps. These cages have 15 compartments and employees – who are likely incentivised to catch chickens fast as they’re paid per chicken, not hour – were supposed to put 21 chickens into each, but the footage shows that they intentionally exceeded that limit often.

Even more alarmingly, chickens were mishandled for non-work-related purposes too. Some birds were carried outside the barn and placed on the driver’s seat of a forklift, for example. And in one instance, a worker held two chickens by their necks – one in each hand – slammed them against the wall, and moved their heads as though they were pecking each other.

“Pilgrim’s is falling behind on addressing enormous suffering in its chicken supply chain,” says Cerussi. “The company could significantly reduce the suffering for 1.5 billion birds a year by adopting the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), a set of industry-leading standards that hundreds of companies have promised to meet.”

The BCC calls for an end to the use of these Frankenchickens, whose rapid growth can lead to organ failure, heart attacks, lack of mobility, as well as muscular abnormalities, like white striping. “The BCC also requires improved living conditions, more space for birds, and a less cruel slaughter method,” says Cerussi. “As the second-largest poultry company in the United States, Pilgrim’s has a responsibility to the birds bred to suffer in its supply chain.”

Can such investigations have public and legislative impact?

This is far from the only investigation into animal cruelty in CAFOs. These have been going on for a long time, and it’s why Kentucky is attempting its ag-gag law. But it does feel that they don’t connect with the masses as much as they intend to – the US still overconsumes meat, and had fewer vegans in 2023 than in the previous decade.

“There is an overwhelming lack of awareness about the extent of animal cruelty in factory farming, and most consumers are unaware of the conditions in which animals are raised and slaughtered in industrial operations,” explains Cerussi.

She says there are a majority of reasons why consumers continue to purchase factory-farmed animal products. First, a lack of transparency into the “horrific conditions” shields the truth and makes it easier to ignore. Then, many prioritise convenience and lower prices over ethical considerations when making food decisions – factory-farmed products are often less expensive and more accessible than ethically sourced alternatives. And finally, most consumers are “disconnected from the source of their food” and “feel less responsible” for things happening to animals that they don’t see.

Mercy For Animals has not been in touch with KFC or Popeyes about the investigation into its supplier yet, but it intends to do so. “We have had numerous meetings with Yum! Brands (the parent company of KFC) and Restaurant Brands International (the parent company of Popeyes), and we remain deeply concerned about their lack of seriousness toward reducing suffering for the millions of chickens in their supply chains,” says Cerussi.

Despite adopting the BCC in the UK and Ireland, KFC hasn’t replicated that in the US or Canada. “Implementing the BCC would address some of the most egregious suffering in the company’s chicken supply chain,” she says. Restaurant Brands International, meanwhile, has embraced the commitment but not reported any progress or shared an implementation path. “As two of the world’s largest restaurant chains, these companies must take responsibility for the cruelty the chickens they source and serve to their customers endure.”

Speaking of large companies, Cerussi argues it’s exactly these corporations – not small family farms – that are being protected from accountability by the Kentucky bill, which she labels “particularly egregious”. “If passed, [it] could set a dangerous precedent for other states,” she notes. “This ag-gag legislation threatens the First Amendment rights of Kentucky residents and would allow cruel and unsanitary practices to run rampant with little oversight.”

She adds: “Undercover investigators go in as the eyes and ears of the public, who are kept largely in the dark about how the animal agriculture system really works, particularly how animals suffer before they reach their plates. If Kentucky’s SB 16 is signed into law, anyone seeking to inform the public about the conditions in factory farms and slaughterhouses – not just Mercy For Animals, but journalists, workers, and concerned citizens – would be in danger of having criminal charges against them.”

The post As Kentucky Mulls Over Ag-Gag Bill, Footage Shows Animal Cruelty at KFC Supplier Pilgrim’s Poultry Farm appeared first on Green Queen.

Emissions from burning the oil and gas produced by some of the largest fossil fuel companies could cause millions of deaths by the end of the century, according to new research.

Air pollution from fossil fuel use kills five million people worldwide every year, but the effect of oil and gas doesn’t just stop there. The emissions from burning these fuels cause excess heat, and that could be the cause of death for 11.5 million premature deaths before 2100.

That’s according to new research by global non-profit Global Witness, which analysed the impact of the emissions from fossil fuel burning until 2050 by Shell, BP, TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil and Chevron. The analysis marks the first attempt to quantify heat-related deaths as a result of planned fossil fuel production, amplifying calls for a phaseout of these fuels.

“Every 0.1°C of warming will be lethal. Unless the supermajors change course quickly, the death toll will be comparable to some of history’s most brutal wars. We cannot leave it up to them,” Sarah Biermann Becker, senior investigator at Global Witness, told the Guardian. “Governments need to step in, mitigate the impact of extreme heat and urgently ramp up the transition away from fossil fuels.”

Millions will die even if we reach net zero in 2050

In 2022, at least 61,000 Europeans died from extreme heat. Such lethal heatwaves have hit nearly every continent in the last few years – and in the US alone, the number of heat-related deaths rose by 95% between 2010 and 2022. Fossil fuels are the leading contributor to planet-heating emissions globally, and between 1991 and 2018, over a third of the nearly 30 million heat-related deaths worldwide were linked to climate change.

To measure the impact of fossil fuels on heat deaths, Global Witness used two datasets. The first was a Columbia University model assessing the mortality cost of carbon – the link between carbon emissions and heat-related deaths. In a high-emissions scenario – essentially, a business-as-usual situation where we only pursue the climate policies currently in place – this model estimates that every one million metric tonnes of carbon emitted in 2020 will cause an additional 226 excess temperature-related deaths over the next 80 years.

The second metric used was data from analysis firm Rystad Energy to calculate the fossil fuel production and emissions of these five companies, finding that together, they would add 51 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere by 2050 – that’s twice the current emissions of China, the US and India altogether. Combining this with the high-emissions scenario from the Columbia University model, the researchers ended up with the 11.5 million figure.

But even in a low-emissions situation, where the world dramatically cuts emissions to reach net zero by 2050, this number would still stand at 5.5 million. And as outlined by multiple other studies, this will hit lower-income countries and individuals the hardest –  the Global North is responsible for 92% of our excess emissions, but 91% of all temperature-related deaths occur in developing countries mostly in the Global South. This is why Global Witness calls it a climate justice issue.

“We’re already seeing the impacts of heat stress on workers around the world, particularly on people in outdoor or heavy-duty industries such as agriculture and construction,” Shouro Dasgupta, an environmental economist at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, told the Guardian. “This will likely get much worse as the planet continues to heat up. We need labour protection policies that are tailored to local needs rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. This isn’t just a moral question – it’s also in the economic interests of employers to provide adequate protection for their workers.”

Fossil fuel companies akin to drug or arms dealers

Global Witness’s analysis comes a few months after fossil fuels were the most talked about topic at the annual UN climate conference in Dubai, which was helmed – ironically – by the chairman of the UAE national oil company, who said during the summit that there’s no science that a fossil fuel phaseout would help achieve the 1.5°C goal, a statement that was met with fierce criticism from climate scientists as well as UN officials.

COP28 failed to include a fossil fuel phaseout in its final resolution, instead promising a “transition away” from oil and gas. This was thanks to intense lobbying from industry groups, which Global Witness believes has slowed down the transition to renewable energy. The non-profit grappled with the question of who is ultimately responsible for these deaths.

“When a company spills lethal chemicals into a river, and harms people, we hold it legally responsible,” it noted, adding that DuPont has paid out hundreds of millions for polluting drinking water with chemicals, and whether this extends to carbon emissions that lead to millions dying is an argument fossil fuel companies will be concerned about. But they could argue that they don’t burn much of the fuel they produce, and that societies, individuals and governments are responsible. “It’s certainly true that the line of responsibility between carbon emissions and deaths from extreme heat is not as simple and direct as that of a chemical spill into a river,” the organisation said.

However, it is these companies solely responsible for digging up these fossil fuels – in the past few months, ExxonMobil and Chevron have poured in over $100B into new oil and gas reserves, while TotalEnergies plans to increase production too. BP and Shell, meanwhile, have weakened their climate pledges.

In response, TotalEnergies said it didn’t agree with the analysis, specifically the emissions caused by its oil and gas burning, claiming that there’s “fundamental bias” when the blame for these emissions is dished out. It did not acknowledge the mortality cost of carbon either, and said it is investing in new oil projects to offset the “natural decline” in current production to meet expanding global demand.

TotalEnergies said it was investing in renewable and low-carbon energy too, a stance BP and Shell also took. BP stated that it has not set oil and gas production plans beyond 2030, so it did “not know how Rystad Energy has generated its predictions out to 2050” and rejected the validity of these calculations.

Shell, meanwhile, told the Guardian: “The pace of transition depends on action in many areas, including government policy, changing customer demand and investment in low-carbon energy. Our aim is to play our part in a balanced energy transition, where the world achieves net zero emissions without compromising on delivery of secure and affordable energy, which has improved so many lives, and which people will continue to need today and for many years to come.”

But the current situation was best summed via an analogy by Global Witness, which said companies are digging up fossil fuels “eyes wide open in the face of a mountain of evidence documenting the suffering and death” that oil and gas cause. “Drug dealers will claim that they aren’t to blame for drug addictions, and arms dealers will claim that they don’t kill people – that they’re simply supplying people with products they want,” it said. “Fossil fuel firms saying they’re not responsible for the emissions from their products is a similar line of argument.”

And in a similar vein, researchers from advocacy group Public Citizen are now promoting a legal theory that claims fossil fuel companies in the US could be put on trial for homicide for climate-related deaths.

The post Death by Fossil: Oil & Gas Emissions Could Kill 11.5 Million People by 2100 appeared first on Green Queen.

A quarter of Americans now live in cities and states taking companies to court over lying to the public.

By Kate Yoder

It’s been six years since cities in California started the trend of taking Big Oil to court for deceiving the public about the consequences of burning fossil fuels. The move followed investigations showing that Exxon and other companies had known about the dangers of skyrocketing carbon emissions for decades, but publicly downplayed the threat. Today, around 30 lawsuits have been filed around the country as cities, states, and Indigenous tribes seek to make the industry pay for the costs of climate change.

Until recently, most of these cases had been stuck in limbo. Oil companies were trying to move them from the state courts in which they were filed to federal courts, a more business-friendly setting. But just in the past year, the Supreme Court declined to hear their arguments to relocate these cases on three separate occasions, most recently clearing the way for Minnesota’s case to proceed in state court. That means executives from Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil giants may soon have to defend their actions in front of a jury.

“Last year was a really pivotal year in terms of getting past the industry’s big push and their delay tactics,” said Alyssa Johl, vice president for the legal program at the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy organization that provides support for these cases. “That issue and that effort has been put to rest, and now they have to face the music.”

The long delays might have strengthened the legal arguments against fossil fuel companies. Researchers have uncovered more details about what oil companies knew about climate change and when, and the science connecting fossil fuel emissions to climate disasters has matured, arming cities and states with more evidence. All the while, the effects of climate change — the heat waves, the blazes, the wildfire smoke — have only grown more obvious, and more costly. Last year, the U.S. recorded a billion-dollar disaster every two weeks.

Climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies have proliferated

“With each month and with each year that these cases are stalled, the impacts for communities just grow,” said Delta Merner, the lead scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ litigation hub. “I think that’s important context for understanding these cases, and for understanding the additional cases that have been filed over the last six years.”

That might explain the spread of lawsuits from coastal cities and states to inland areas like Minnesota, Colorado, and most recently, Chicago. With the third-largest city in the country suing BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and other oil titans for lying about climate change, a quarter of Americans now live in cities and states that are taking fossil fuel companies to court, according to the Center for Climate Integrity.

One of the cases that’s furthest along, filed by Massachusetts against Exxon Mobil in 2019, is already in the process of “discovery,” the last major step before a trial. In this stage, both sides try to uncover evidence that could help their case in court. The discovery process could unearth further details of oil companies’ deception, such as what individual CEOs or other company executives did with the information they learned about climate change, Johl said.

Another case that’s at the front of the pack is Honolulu’s suit seeking damages from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Sunoco, among others. In October, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court dismissed the companies’ appeal to throw out the suit, clearing the way for a trial. Last week, the companies asked the Supreme Court to toss that ruling.

The industry’s current line of argument in the Honolulu case (and others) is that these lawsuits are about the broader issue of emissions and pollution, and that the federal Clean Air Act preempts any claim brought by cities and states. So far, this approach has seen some modest success. In January, Delaware’s Superior Court denied oil companies’ motion to dismiss the state’s case against them while granting a few concessions, including that out-of-state emissions were the territory of the Clean Air Act, beyond the limits of state law. Emissions that originated in Delaware, however, were fair game.

As these climate cases have slowly begun to proceed, recent months have brought lawsuits from California, cities, and tribes. Last September, the state of California demanded that oil companies fund efforts to recover from extreme weather. In December, the Makah and Shoalwater Bay tribes along the coast of Washington state became the first Native American tribes to take oil companies to court over the costs of responding to climate-related risks from rising seas, flooding, and ocean acidification. Meanwhile, Hoboken, New Jersey, and a collection of cities in Puerto Rico have added racketeering lawsuits to the mix, alleging that oil companies engaged in a conspiracy of deception.

Science is quashing Big Oil’s rhetoric

New research has made it harder for oil giants to say they couldn’t have known the outcome of burning so much fossil fuel. A study published in the journal Science last year found that Exxon’s scientists predicted the effects of climate change with startling accuracy in the 1980s. Exxon’s models nearly matched actual temperature changes over the past several decades.

Then there’s the blooming area of scientific inquiry that connects climate change to extreme weather events. Researchers are now able to quantify how corporate emissions have fueled climate disasters, a critical development for these cases, Merner said. “This is the cutting edge where the science is moving towards — to be able to look not just at these global averages, but to see what is happening regionally.”

A study Merner coauthored last year found that 37 percent of the forests burned in the Western United States since 1986 can be linked to carbon pollution from a group of 88 of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. Last June, Multnomah County — home to Portland — cited the research in its lawsuit against oil companies over their contributions to a deadly heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021. In newer cases, like Multnomah’s and the ones filed by Indigenous tribes, the oil industry is sticking to its strategy of trying to move the case to federal courts, according to Margaret Barry, who maintains a climate litigation database at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center.

The new and improved science linking climate change to weather disasters has been a game changer for all of these cases, Merner said. “We can’t sit back and argue whether or not climate change played a role in extreme weather or public health problems that we’re facing today, because attribution science shows that it does and can calculate what that role was.” 

“It’s really what the industry fears the most,” Johl said. “They don’t want anyone digging through their archives and divulging their innermost thoughts and secrets.” Much of what the public learned about the tobacco industry’s effort to cover up the link between lung cancer and smoking, for example, came out of the discovery process, made public as part of a major settlement in 1998, when Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and other tobacco giants agreed to pay states $206 billion over the next 25 years. 

The discovery phase of the Massachusetts case is expected to wrap up later this year, and it could head to trial as early as 2025, Johl said.

Oil companies have plans to fight back, though. In response to the new lawsuit from Chicago, industry representatives characterized the lawsuits as a “waste of taxpayer resources” and contended that climate change should be addressed by Congress, not the courts. “They’re going to raise issues every step of the way and raise defenses every step of the way,” Johl said.

This article by Kate Yoder was originally published on Grist. It is republished here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

The post Big Oil, Big Lawsuits: The Fossil Fuel Industry is Bracing Itself for Climate Trials appeared first on Green Queen.