Climate Change: a reality creating plastic seas. True or false?

Disclaimer: The contents and opinions of this blog post do not represent the views or values of Honours Review as a publication.

Climate change: a topic dominating everyday discussions worldwide. In fact, THE topic of the present day. But first things first: What is Climate Change? Is it real or “fake news”? How will it affect our daily lives? Too many questions, not enough time. As a natural science student, I feel that the perception of this topic is a bit different when compared with ‘normal people’. Here, I propose to lead you through the story of Climate change, through my perspective. We’ll look deep into what it is Climate Change, the real risks on our ecosystems, what has been done to fight it and, lastly, which alternatives to secure the future of our planet could be taken.

Introduction - Hello my name is...

Contrarily to what most think, Global warming and the so feared Greenhouse effect are natural processes occurring throughout the eras. Periods of extreme heat followed by ice ages happened multiple times. However, what makes the present warming period different from all the rest is that this one is aggravated by us, humans. Its inevitability is almost undeniable, but the rate at which it occurs could have been mediated, controlled. 

In essence, Climate Change is a broad concept, not definable per se, but explained by a set of alterations related to the climate. Among them, ozone depletion over Antarctica; increase of the sea level, of the CO2 or methane emissions, of the global mean temperature; mass extinction of several species all over the world and moreover, extreme climatic calamities (hurricanes, fires or floods). 

Naturally, humans in general tend to consider themselves as the most intelligent beings, the ones upper in the food chain, the most powerful ones. Therefore, all resources should always be available to be explored in any way. However, this is not how it works; the planet Earth is the home of countless species: animals, plants, fungi, and infinite bacteria. The coexistence of us all is fundamental for the equilibrium of the ecosystems and the ability to share the same environments for distinct resourced must be achieved.  

What have we done? And mostly, what can we still do?

Regarding the ozone depletion over Antarctica, several measures were taken in the last decade. For instance, efficient use of energy, the 3R’s strategy – reduce, reuse and recycle – and the decrease of aerosols use. Fortunately, the damage of the ozone layer in the stratosphere was partially reversed. On the other hand, all the other consequences are yet to be solved, and by each passing day, the severity of them tends to rise.      

The increase in sea level comes as a direct consequence of the increase in global temperature. The glaciers are melting and species such as polar bears, sea lions, seals are struggling to survive in a changing environment. Not only the lack of physical land to inhabit is a threat to their survival, but also the absence of prey limits their existence. Therefore, there is a need to explore other territories, compromising their own survival. An example is a polar bear found in Siberia in June 2019 [1] which was weak and undernourished. Another perspective of the same side of the coin is the disruption of the balance of salt/freshwater and the accumulation of carbon dioxide within seawater. As known, the sea is the major regulator of the air and its associated characteristics, molecules, temperature, humidity. Most of the toxic compounds released by human activities such as industry, cars, intensive farming, and livestock units are captured to the sea. This is an apparently irrelevant function of the sea, however with catastrophic consequences. Marine life is being highly damaged by this unbalance: part of the existing corals is irreversibly lost and, similarly to what happens inland, the species must adapt to new, more favourable environments, thus, there is a migration process linked with these changes (usually towards the North). When we associate the salt/freshwater disturbance, the accumulation of CO2, and the increase of water temperature with an intense fishing activity and not enough laws or plans to protect the wildlife, it is clear that these ecosystems are being over explored and disturbed in a way which the consequences are yet to be fully understood. 

On top of all, humans still choose to dispose of their waste in the wrong places. Unfortunately, sooner or later, everything ends up in the ocean, and not only fishes but also birds, turtles, and other invertebrates are affected. Activities from illegal washing of oil tanks on the open sea or discarding of untreated residues from factories into rivers to dropping of cigarette tips on the floor or the overuse of non-reusable plastic are avoidable. Currently, there is a plastic island laying on the Pacific Ocean and that is not even the worst problem. The microplastics ‘swimming’ around the ocean are undetectable by the human eye, however, very hazardous to marine life.  

Solutions are needed! In fact, various alternatives are already in place. They can be consumer-directed, such as the use of personal metal straws, the sale of toothpaste without an involving card box, bulk selling or the fee applied for plastics bags in supermarkets. Even changes in the daily diet, by decreasing the ingestion of meat and fish, replacing them by vegetables or other substitutes, already compromises livestock units, which are responsible for the release of methane, a ‘toxic’ molecule, to the atmosphere. But large-scale approaches are also being used worldwide. Recently, a team of students improved a bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis, reported in 2016, able to turn plastic into water by a two-step reaction [2;3]. Boyan Slat, a Dutch young inventor, who at the age of 18 started the company Ocean Cleanup, aiming to eliminate plastic pollution by 70% on the Pacific Ocean by 2025. Basically, it consists of a pipeline on the surface of the sea, seen from above, moving with the natural currents. Underneath there is a ‘skirt’ that traps the plastic [4]. In Copenhagen, there is a facility that, among several actions, burns out the waste from the city and converts it to electric energy, powering several households – Copenhill [5]. Furthermore, there are numerous brands trying to act sustainably and transforming waste into new products [6-10] or using more sustainable raw materials or biodegradable plastics, for instance, created in massive bioreactors.  

Conclusion - take your own responsibility

It is more and more essential for each of us to take responsibility into our own hands and change the little things in our day-to-day life. A small change by each of us means 7 billion small changes… If we don’t act fast, the ‘blue planet’ maybe a little less colourful. We are still on time to reverse the effects described above, either by valuing waste, i.e. convert waste materials into more useful products including chemicals or fuels, by using ‘greener’ energy sources, by changing our eating and shopping habits, or overall, by being more conscious about our ecological footprint. 

References

1. https://www.publico.pt/2019/06/19/p3/noticia/urso-polar-exausto-avistado-siberia-percorrer-centenas-quilometros-1876921 [Accessed at 06.11.2019]

2. https://www.popsci.com/plastic-eating-bacteria/ [Accessed at 06.11.2019]

3. https://www.ubergizmo.com/2019/06/scientists-bioengineer-bacteria-eat-plastic-turn-to-water/ [Accessed at 06.11.2019]

4. https://time.com/5389782/boyan-slat-plastic-ocean-cleanup/ [Accessed at 06.11.2019]

5. https://www.archdaily.com/925966/copenhill-the-story-of-bigs-iconic-waste-to-energy-plant [Accessed at 06.11.2019]

6. https://www.zouri-shoes.com/

7. https://delphiseco.com/

8. https://www.macrebur.com/

9. https://www.econyl.com/

10. https://www.rizboardshorts.com/

Acting Locally, Thinking Globally: What the Anti-Nuclear Movement Can Teach us about “New [Transnational] Modes of Observation of the World”

Disclaimer: The contents and opinions of this blog post do not represent the views or values of Honours Review as a publication.

The 24th UN Climate Change Conference (COP24) has just wrapped up in Katowice, Poland. The conference’s main objective was to reach a decision that will ensure full implementation of the Paris Agreement (the so-called Katowice Package) and further lower greenhouse gas emissions globally. Reaching a decision that will appeal to all the signing parties of the Paris Agreement, however, is not a piece of cake; different national actors are still tackling the issue of climate change at their own pace, while the discrepancy in terms of  technological possibilities of controlling climate change between developed and developing countries is still enormous.

Climate change and environmental disasters at large possess an inherently transnational dimension. According to Lorenzo Natali, this transnational dimension stems primarily from their “hybrid character”: “The environmental disasters of the contemporary scenario are phenomena with uncertain boundaries. In a sense, they are ‘hybrid objects’—halfway between nature and culture, science and politics, human and non-human, global and local” (5). It is precisely because of their “hybrid character” that they require us to acquire “new modes of observation of the world, starting from our own collocation in the world in terms of space (local/global) and time” (5). The anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s, as well as contemporary activist groups fighting for the elimination of nuclear energy on a global scale can teach us how to do so.

From Local Struggles to Trans-Local Solidarity

The development of the anti-nuclear movement began during the 1950s, when the international community was still coming to terms with the 1944 atomic bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With these bombings, the final stages of the Second World War left a bitter taste in the discourse on nuclear weapons and the use of nuclear energy which was circling within the scientific communities of some of the world’s most technologically advanced powers of that time.

After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 1950s were characterized by an atmosphere of an increased awareness of the potential dangers of nuclear energy and proliferation of nuclear weapons. It is during this period that the first nuclear disarmament groups of a more political and/or institutional nature were formed. These included the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Peace Action, Greenpeace, Global Zero, Soka Gakkai International, and many more.

However, it is only during the 1960s that the anti-nuclear sentiment began taking a more activist and grassroots turn, developing in tandem with the counter-cultural movements that were thriving across the western world. The counter-culture of the 1960s, together with the increased investments in nuclear energy, “exerted a profound formative impact” on the early environmental and anti-nuclear movement (3). It is also during this period that anti-nuclear sentiments took up a transnational dimension; “The expense and the scale of the reactor projects proposed during the late 1960s made almost every nuclear plant an international undertaking” (4).

Cross-Border Collaboration between Germany, France, and Beyond

During the 1970s, opposition to nuclear energy became a mass movement and “grassroots activists developed a new, politicized sort of environmentalism […]: one capable of probing the boundaries of high politics” (4). Due to the fact that environmental disasters and pollution at large do not stop at the borders of individual nation-states, activists in Germany and France, who were equally affected by plans of building nuclear energy power plants on both sides of the Franco-German border, started developing a trans-local sentiment which successfully linked  “geographically dispersed protest sites” (7). Activists from both sides of the border started participating in protests in German and French cities alike and, instead of conceptualizing the pollution affecting individual cities in France and Germany as a local problem, jointly demonstrated against further development of nuclear energy globally.

Thinking Globally; From Diablo Canyon to Tokyo

By the mid-1970s the anti-nuclear sentiment expanded across the borders of France and Germany: “communities close to prospective nuclear power stations in Austria, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and West Germany almost simultaneously found themselves asking very similar questions about the potential impact of nuclear energy on their health, environment, and way of life” (6). During the 1970s, environmentalists in Japan started developing a growing trans-local sentiment for activists in neighboring East-Asian countries affected by pollution caused by several factories in Tokyo which were dumping their waste into East-Asian waters (2). Similarly, in 1979 activists rallied against the construction of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California, United States.  Activists all over the world were rapidly collecting information from various transnational spaces, appropriating protest strategies, and traveling to protest sites across the globe. Due to its global presence, the 1970s opposition to nuclear energy gradually grew into a full-fledged transnational movement against nuclear proliferation and use of nuclear technology.

The transnational mode of thinking is still present in anti-nuclear activist groups across the globe. The Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes (MCAN), one of Japan’s largest networks of anti-nuclear activists and groups, regularly protests against further development of nuclear energy not only in Japan but also the world. The group’s transnational character comes to the fore most vividly in their emphasis on supporting the elimination of nuclear energy globally and calling for support from activists outside of Japan (1).

Going Global, Going Green

With the ongoing debates about climate change and how to best mitigate its effects, the international political community will have to reconfigure its way of thinking about environmental degradation and acquire a ‘global mode’ of thinking about climate change. Due to the hybrid character of environmental disasters as well as their tendency to spread across political and natural borders, anti-nuclear activists–from German and French activists protesting together against developments of nuclear power plants on both sides of the Franco-German border to protesters in Tokyo fighting against the use of nuclear energy both in Japan and the world–can teach us how to think in a transnational manner so as to jointly tackle pressing environmental issues which are affecting us all.

References

1. “About us.” Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes. http://coalitionagainstnukes.jp/en/. Accessed 21 December, 2018.

2. Avenell, Simon. “Transnational Activism and Japan’s Second Modernity.” New Worlds from Below: Informal Life Politics and Grassroots Action in Twenty-First-Century Northeast Asia. Ed. Tessa Morris-Suzuki and EunJeong Soh. ANU Press, 2017. 77-98.

3. Bess, Michael. The Light Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France 1960-2000. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

4. Milder, Stephen. Greening Democracy: The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968-1983. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

5. Natali, Lorenzo. A Visual Approach for Green Criminology: Exploring the Social Perception of Environmental Harm. London: Macmillan Publishers, 2016.

6. Tompkins, Andrew. Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2016

7. Tompkins, Andrew. “Grassroots Transnationalism(s): Franco-German Opposition to Nuclear Energy in the 1970s.” Contemporary European History 25. 1 (2016): 117-142.