Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[Syt]

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-methane-hunters-climate-change/

Article about efforts to hunt/plug methane spills from fracking operations in Texas.

A few days later he had an answer. Beneath the splotch, Zhang discovered, 2.9 million metric tons of methane were pouring into the sky each year. By one measure, that cloud of gas is contributing as much to global warming as Florida—every power plant, motorboat, and minivan in the state.

Release a ton of methane today, and over the next two decades it will warm the planet as much as about 80 tons of carbon.

Lyon found his biggest spill last September. An airplane working for EDF picked up a large concentration of methane near a gas compression station south of Midland and circled back for a look. It found a huge cloud of gas jetting from a tank. EDF later calculated the size of the release at 12 tons of methane per hour. That's about the same climate impact you would create if you started up every car in the state of Maine and left them all idling.

[Tonitrus]

Oat milk

I think I converted someone here already

Indeed you have.  Oat milk with coffee is irreplaceable.

[Legbiter]

I mean it does - the vegan alternatives to meaty dishes are out there and they're really very good - chicken, beef, doner (the three genders).

Looking at the ingredients list they're tasty and have the right mouthfeel because they're this Frankensteinian sludge of plant protein, rancid industrial oils and applied food chemistry. The amino acid profile is like nothing we or our ancestors would have evolved with naturally and is severely lacking, neither is the o3/o6 ratio and the salt ratio between NA and K is not anything like it is found in nature. 

Just my personal observation on vegans, they do their lifestyle by imitation, they overwhelmingly run into insurmountable problems involving mental health, sexual function and general well-being and quit. Female hair loss, iodine deficiency and very irregular periods among the young are just some of the long-term symptoms among them.  The only long-term vegans I know turned themselves into walking-breathing nutritional encyclopedias with the exact same localized outlook as the paleo folks.

[garbon]

Sometimes I take drugs that are not like anything found in nature.

[grumbler]

Indeed you have.  Oat milk with coffee is irreplaceable.

Unless you replace it with more coffee.  Win-win! 

[Zanza]

The necessary GHG emissions reduction to keep 1.5 degree target when the first IPCC report was created versus now.

[Jacob]

Yeah that's not encouraging.

[Syt]

https://link.newyorker.com/view/5dfabd433f92a458a452c434esq1y.16ow/3d30478b

Slow-Walking the Climate Crisis

Travellers arriving in an unfamiliar city used to worry that they'd climb in a taxi and be driven to their destination by the most circuitous route possible, racking up an enormous bill. That's pretty much what Big Oil and its allies in government and the financial world are doing with the climate crisis—in fact, at this point, it's the heart of the problem.

Yes, there are a few bitter-enders who refuse to acknowledge that change must come. Earlier in the summer, the Saudi Minister of Energy, Abdulaziz bin Salman, reportedly told a Bank of America gathering that "every molecule of hydrocarbon" will be drained from his country's oil fields. But most fossil-fuel profiteers have learned to talk the talk. Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, for instance, has lent more money to the fossil-fuel industry than anyone else—but he was wise enough to say, in April, that "climate change and inequality are two of the critical issues of our time." The bank has pledged that, by 2030, it will invest a trillion dollars in "green initiatives that boost renewable energy and clean technologies." Does that mean one of America's largest financial institutions is moving away from fossil fuels? Of course not. Last year, Chase once again topped the charts as Big Oil's biggest financial lifeline. Indeed, earlier this month, DeSmogBlog released transcripts from an "energy capital conference" held earlier in the year. There, Chase's managing director, Greg Determann, was asked by one expert if the company was "still going to be lending to oil and gas companies." "For a long time," Determann said, without hesitation. "Mr. Dimon is quite focussed on the industry. It's a huge business for us and that's going to be the case for decades to come."

The same logic that governs companies often governs countries, too. As the veteran energy analyst Ketan Joshi pointed out, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has set the de-rigeur target of "net zero by 2050," but, in April, indicated that "the trajectory to any net-zero outcome is not linear, and anyone who thinks it is I think doesn't get it." Morrison traced a curve in the air with his hand after he spoke, Joshi noted, "suggesting emissions reductions occur very late in the 30 years between now and 2050." "What we are seeing here is a mumbled acknowledgement of the macro problem, but an aggressive refusal to consider the micro components that comprise it," Joshi wrote. "It is the core engine of climate inaction."

This is absolutely correct. We call it "greenwashing," but that's too technical a term. We should call it what it is: people with a vested interest are learning how to slow-walk this crisis. They've done it with a thousand other crises, too, of course—one thinks of how, following the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, segregationists managed to delay action for a decade or more, focussing on a single phrase in the decision: "with all deliberate speed." But here they're doing it in the face of an absolute deadline imposed by science. As the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear, we must cut emissions in half by 2030 or our chances of meeting the targets that we set in Paris just six years ago fall by the wayside. Slow-walking is sabotage—smiling, and deadly.

And, in the course of that slow-walking, Big Oil is figuring out how to game the system in every way possible: as Inside Climate News recently reported, energy companies and their lobbyists are filling the infrastructure bill with billions of dollars for carbon-sequestration projects—essentially, getting taxpayers to fund equipment to capture the climate-destroying gases that Big Oil's products emit. That's absurd: it would be much cheaper to simply shut down those power plants and build out solar and wind power instead. But, for the fossil-fuel industry, preservation of the business model is paramount—they want to burn the stuff they own, no matter the consequences. The Biden Administration is caught in a very hard place: the White House is sincerely trying to accelerate climate action, but to do so it has to get past industry allies in the Democratic Party (Joe Manchin, for instance, who fears that we're "going to the EV" too fast), not to mention a business-friendly judiciary, which has, for instance, blocked Biden's plans to stop new drilling leases on federal lands. That's why, one guesses, you get leaders who know better, like the domestic-climate czar, Gina McCarthy, repeating old bromides about "all of the above" energy supply, or ignoring the increasingly bitter protests over follies like the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline, which runs through Minnesota.

The eventual outcome is not in doubt: eventually, the planet will run on renewable energy. But how long that transition takes will determine what kind of shape we leave the planet in. At the moment, the bankers and politicians in the driver's seat are taking us for a very long, very dangerous, and very expensive ride. We didn't ask for Hell when we climbed in the cab, but that may well be where we end up, unless we figure out how to grab the wheel.

[Sheilbh]

Wasn't sure whether to post this here or the covid thread - but went with here because I think it's a more future-looking piece than just a retrospective of covid (though this is from his new book out on the politics/economics of that, which sounds interesting). This piece is very interesting and I love that Keynes' line which I think should apply to climate as much as anything else. The fact it originated in WW2 is what I mean by we need to mobilise the state for this challenge as we would only otherwise for a war. I've mentioned before but that's also why I like the rhetoric of the "Green New Deal" because I think we have exhausted war as legitimising rhetoric/analogy (war on poverty/cancer/crime/drugs/terror) but need some way of understanding what we mean which is: "if we can actually do it, we can afford it":

What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run?
Sept. 1, 2021

Credit...Matt Chase

By Adam Tooze

Mr. Tooze is an economic historian and the author of the forthcoming "Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy," from which this essay is adapted.

Almost two years since the novel coronavirus began to circulate through the human population, what lessons have we learned? And what do those lessons portend for future crises?

The most obvious is the hardest to digest: The world's decision makers have given us a staggering demonstration of their collective inability to grasp what it would actually mean to govern the deeply globalized and interconnected world they have created. There is only one limited realm in which something like a concerted response has been managed: money and finance. But governments' and central banks' success in holding the world's financial system together is contributing in the long run to inequality and social polarization. If 2020 was a trial run, we should be worried.

How did we get here? In a way, the failure was predictable. As instruments of coordination and cooperation, global institutions like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization had proved fragile and toothless long before the pandemic. The explanation for this failure used to be geopolitical antagonism: Power blocs couldn't come together when they had competing priorities and agendas. It was thus tempting to imagine that some common threat — perhaps an alien invasion — might make a reality of the United Nations.

The coronavirus, one might think, was precisely such an invasion. And yet faced with this common threat, cooperation failed. Rather than a concerted shutdown of global aviation, frontiers were closed on the fly; supplies of personal protective equipment were grabbed at airports; haphazard travel bans continue to this day.

With America in the lead, the world was more divided than ever. America's failure to coordinate a response was no mere sideshow. Like it or not, this continental nation-state, with the world's largest economy, facing Europe, South America and the Pacific, is constitutive of globalism as we know it. It was a horrible irony that Donald Trump, the first American president to repudiate this, was in the White House when a truly global crisis hit. That encouraged talk of Covid as the first "post-American" crisis. But America will have to diminish a lot more before we can count it out. What 2020 showed, in fact, was that America's dysfunctions are the world's problem.

Vaccines are a case in point. The development of Covid vaccines was a collective triumph of researchers, governments and businesses around the world. Mr. Trump's Operation Warp Speed was the most successful of all. But that program was defined by the needs of the United States — not the world. Scandalously, the United States under Mr. Trump did not even join the United Nations' Covax initiative. Even after vaccine rollout began in earnest in 2021, the United States continued to hoard doses.

The failure to develop a global vaccination program is not just dismaying. It ought also to be profoundly puzzling: It defies the self-interests of the richest countries in the world. Booster shots aside, the greater the volume of infection, the greater the risk of variants even more dangerous than Delta.

And the greater the economic damage, too. In July, the I.M.F. estimated that an investment of $50 billion in a comprehensive campaign for vaccination and other virus control efforts would generate some $9 trillion in additional global output by 2025 — a ratio of 180 to 1. What investment could hope to yield a higher rate of return? And yet none of the members of the Group of 20 have stepped up, not Europe, not the United States, not even China. Billions of people will be forced to wait until 2023 to receive even their first shot.

This failure is all the more glaring for another lesson that the pandemic revealed: Budget constraints don't seem to exist; money is a mere technicality. The hard limits of financial sustainability, policed, we used to think, by ferocious bond markets, were blurred by the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, they were erased.

Governments around the world issued debt as not seen since World War II, and yet interest rates plunged. As the private sector shut down, the public sector expanded. As government deficits grew, the monetary system responded elastically. Government spending made up for the loss of private incomes and spending.

This balancing of public and private spending works best if all countries are doing it simultaneously. This was one area where there was an alignment of national policies. In Europe, there was even a dramatic new phase of cooperation, with the launching of a 750 billion-euro recovery program funded, for the first time, by borrowing by Brussels rather than the European Union's member states. Providing a supportive frame for this global expansion was Mr. Trump's United States with its own gigantic fiscal and monetary expansion.

This was a surprise. Before 2020 there were conversations in the halls of the I.M.F. about whether a nationalist president and the flat-earthers in Congress would permit the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to play a leading role in a global financial crisis. Hank Paulson, George W. Bush's Treasury secretary in 2008, refused to endorse Mr. Trump for just this reason. But when it came to it, Mr. Trump's instincts all pushed in the right direction, at least on economic policy. If ever there was a president who took naturally to the idea of "fiat money," it was Donald Trump. So long as his name was on the checks, more was better.

It helped that the response was led by professional central bankers. Global finance is a world with a clear hierarchy, with the Fed at the top, followed by the European Central Bank, the People's Bank of China, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England. But it is also a close-knit community with a shared mental map. Central bankers trade in electronic money that can be created at the tap of a keyboard. Creating it does not "cost" anything and does not require approval from elected legislatures. After 2008, tools like quantitative easing — the large-scale purchase of assets — were well oiled.

The world discovered that John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared during World War II that "anything we can actually do, we can afford." The sheer scale of the action was intoxicating. Among the left wing of the Democratic Party, it generated excitement: If money was a mere technicality, what else could be done? Action on social justice, climate change, the Green New Deal, all seemed within reach.

But there were three interrelated problems.

First, the sense that government action had been liberated from the tyranny of finance was illusory. The interventions triggered in March 2020 were not free acts of creative political will. The central bankers were not buying government debt to help finance lockdown life-support checks. They were acting to rescue financial markets from melting down. "Too big to fail" has become a systemic imperative.

That meant, second, that the interventions were double-edged. Propping up the Treasury market enabled government spending on furlough schemes and paycheck protection plans to be funded in the normal way, by borrowing. But government IOUs are fuel for private speculation. When liquidity is flushed indiscriminately into the financial system, it inflates bubbles, generating new risks and outsize gains for those with substantial portfolios. Nowhere was this polarizing effect more pronounced than in the United States. While tens of millions of struggled through the crisis, trillions of dollars piled up in the balance sheets of the wealthy.

Finally, the digital money creation was the easy bit. Keynes's bon mot has a sting in its tail: We can afford anything we can actually do. The problem is agreeing on what to do and how to do it. In giving us a glimpse of financial freedom, 2020 also robbed us of pretenses and excuses. If we are not doing a global vaccine plan, it is not for lack of funds. It is because indifference, or selfish calculation — vaccinate America first — or real technical obstacles prevent us from "actually" doing it.

It turns out that budget constraints, in all their artificiality, had spared us from facing the all-too-limited willingness and capacity for collective action. Now if you hear someone arguing that we cannot afford to bring billions of people out of poverty or we cannot afford to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, we know how to respond: Either you are invoking technological obstacles, in which case we need a suitably scaled, Warp Speed-style program to overcome them, or it is simply a matter of priorities. There are other things you would rather do.

The challenges won't go away, and they won't get smaller. The coronavirus was a shock, but a pandemic was long predicted. There is every reason to think that this one will not be a one-off. Whether the disease originated in zoonotic mutation or in a lab, there is more and worse where it came from. And it is not just viruses that we have to worry about, but also the mounting destabilization of the climate, collapsing biodiversity, large-scale desertification and pollution across the globe.

Looking back before 2020, it seemed that 2008 was the beginning of a new era of successive and interconnected disruptions, such as the global financial crisis, Mr. Trump's election, and the trade and tech war with China. It all had a familiar ring to it. Great-power competition, nationalism and banking crises all harked back to the 19th and 20th centuries. Then came 2020. It has given us a glimpse of something radically new: the old tensions of politics, finance and geopolitics intersecting with a natural shock on a global scale.

The Biden administration declares that "America is back." But to what is it returning? As recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, President Biden is determined to clear the decks, brutally if necessary. As far as the Pentagon is concerned, at the top of the agenda is great-power competition with China — a 19th century writ large. But what of the interconnected global crises of the 21st century that cannot be attributed to a national antagonist? For those, the one model that we have is central bank financial market intervention — a form of crisis-fighting based on technical networks, rooted in existing hierarchies of power and backed by powerful self-interest. It is conservative, ad hoc and lacking in explicit political legitimacy. It tends to reinforce existing hierarchy and privilege.

The challenge for a progressive globalism fit for the next decades is both to multiply those crisis-fighting networks — into the fields of medical research and vaccine development, renewable energy and so on — and to make them more democratic, transparent and egalitarian.

Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) is an economic historian at Columbia and the author of the forthcoming "Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy," from which this essay is adapted. He writes the Chartbook newsletter.

Incidentally I love the line that if there's ever a President who took to fiat money it's Trump

[mongers]

There can't now be any doubt about reality of climate change, can there?


I wonder what happened to those wankers like 'Lord' Lawson who pedalled the anti-scientific propaganda?
Perhaps they're still enjoying the adulation from their vocal supporters on social media or maybe one or two of them might one day come forward to admit they were wrong?

[Syt]

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/europe-miss-2030-climate-goal-by-21-years-current-pace-study-2021-09-04/

Europe to miss 2030 climate goal by 21 years at current pace - study

CERNOBBIO, Italy, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Europe will miss a key climate target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by more than 20 years unless it picks up the pace on energy transition measures and improves governance, a study involving Europe's biggest utility Enel (ENEI.MI) said.

At the current pace, Europe will only reach its 2030 target for a 55% reduction in greenhouse gases in 2051, a study by Enel Foundation and the European House-Ambrosetti said.

In July, Brussels unveiled a raft of ambitious measures in its 'Fit for 55' package aimed at putting the European Union on track to meet the 2030 goal of reducing emissions by 55% from 1990 levels.

The study, presented on Saturday, said investments of around 3.6 trillion euros ($4.3 trillion) were needed across the bloc to reach 2030 goals, with a potential cumulative impact on the EU's economic growth of more than 8 trillion euros.

But it warned the EU needed to step up its efforts if this potential was to be realised.

"It is necessary to accelerate and equip ourselves with a governance system which is adequate to the extent of the challenge and capable of translating intentions into concrete action," Enel Chief Executive Francesco Starace said.

He said at the current pace Europe would only reach its 2030 target of raising the share of renewable energy to 40% of final consumption in 2043. "(That) would be too late".

To speed up the process, the study called for closer cooperation between member states on energy transition, adopting a regional approach to help boost market integration.

[The Brain]

CERNOBBIO, Italy

Mamma mia! You-a didn't see-a the graphite-a! It's not there-a!

[Josquius]

There can't now be any doubt about reality of climate change, can there?


I wonder what happened to those wankers like 'Lord' Lawson who pedalled the anti-scientific propaganda?
Perhaps they're still enjoying the adulation from their vocal supporters on social media or maybe one or two of them might one day come forward to admit they were wrong?

I still see plenty of denial about.
Usually takes the tone of "they've been talking about this from 30 years and the beach is still there!".
There's one quote from a UN guy in 1990 saying action needs to be taken by 2000 or we will be doomed that they particularly seem to love... Not getting that action wasn't taken and so....

Saw a video the other day from a YouTube guy I follow.. Replying to a prager u video called "the war on cars"
They continue to go from stupid to stupider.

[Syt]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/07/license-to-krill-the-destructive-demand-for-a-better-fish-oil

Licence to krill: the destructive demand for a 'better' fish oil

It's a costly expedition, through some of the roughest seas in the world, to reach the Antarctic peninsula. A journey through Drake Passage to Subarea 48.1 faces treacherous weather, where waves can reach 12 metres (40ft) high.

And yet it is a risk that 14 vessels considered worth taking last year alone, as countries increasingly venture into the Antarctic to catch a species with great value to the billion-dollar health supplement industry: krill.

Each roughly the size of a paperclip, Antarctic krill is the most abundant species on Earth. There are an estimated 400m tonnes of krill in the Antarctic alone. It is a key link in the food chain: krill contributes iron and other nutrients that fertilise the ocean, and is a vital food source for wildlife including whales, penguins and seals.

It also plays an integral part in the carbon cycle. The Southern Ocean is one of the largest carbon sinks in the world, and krill are so numerous they can influence atmospheric carbon levels. One study found that krill can remove up to 12bn tonnes of carbon from the Earth's atmosphere.

While krill have long been used in aquaculture to fatten farmed fish, krill oil has become a gold rush for the dietary supplements industry in the past decade. Marketed as a superior and sustainable alternative to fish oil pills, Antarctic krill products are touted as more effective in delivering omega-3 fatty acids to the bloodstream than fish oil, which has been linked to improved heart and brain health – among many other benefits. And there is no fishy aftertaste.

With growing concerns about overfishing and the quality of fish oil, producers also promote krill products as a premium and more environmentally friendly substitute. One bottle sold on Amazon promises krill "sustainably harvested from pristine waters ... to ensure maximum nutrient quality".

But for all the claims of sustainability, the rise in demand has seen quotas reached with alarming speed. A recent cross-border investigation into the global fishing industry by the Environmental Reporting Collective found that in the past year, catch limits for Antarctic krill in Subarea 48.1 were reached in 69 days, as opposed to an average of 130 days over the previous five years.

"It's pretty worrisome when you've got fisheries exploring these 'unexploited' areas or discovering large stocks of fish," says Teale Phelps Bondaroff, director of research at OceansAsia. "This really should raise eyebrows because what's really driving that expansion? Krill oil is obviously one factor."

The international organisation that manages the Antarctic krill fishery, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), insists their practices do not disrupt the marine ecosystem.

Krill vessels monitor their own locations, it says, and diligently report their catch to CCAMLR, which sets strict catch limits around the Antarctic.

But it is clear that in some areas – the most vulnerable ones, according to conservationists including Bondaroff – those limits are being disrupted as countries rush to join the race.

China is building the world's largest Antarctic krill trawler, scheduled to be completed in 2023, and the country more than doubled its catch of Antarctic krill from 50,423 tonnes in 2019 to 118,353 tonnes in 2020. Russia, too, is investing $640m (£460m) in krill fishing, and South Korea is also registering more ships.

The retail krill oil industry is projected to grow by more than 13% by 2023, though most of the krill catch still goes to feeding fish, pets and livestock. Aquaculture is the fastest-growing animal food industry, and Antarctic krill offer more nutrients and fewer pollutants, making it particularly attractive for farmed salmon.

"It's growing, and I think it's a question of 'can the fishery be effectively managed before it expands further?'" says Nicole Bransome, of Pew's Protecting Antarctica's Southern Ocean project.

Last year, more than half of the krill was caught by one company: Aker BioMarine. The largest industry player since the 1990s, it is part of the Aker empire controlled by the Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke. The company, which spans oil and gas, construction, marine biotechnology and energy, acknowledges that the catch has been going up in recent years, but insists: "We want to harvest, of course, but we want to secure our harvesting potential for 10 or a hundred years ... we need to be in a place where our activity is accepted by a wide range of stakeholders."

Although there are only about a dozen krill fishing vessels in the Antarctic, their number belies their impact. The ships are floating factories, some the size of football pitches, capable of vacuuming up more than 1,000 tonnes of krill a day.

"It's not like you could just take a small boat and go and start to harvest krill," says Ekaterina Uryupova, visiting fellow at Washington's Arctic Institute.

"You have to prepare yourself and be ready for all kinds of weather, for all kinds of situations. Then you have to find the best location to catch krill, and then once your fridges are full, you have to cover the same distance back."

Conservationists fear fishing is concentrated in areas crucial to species that depend on krill as a food source.

Rodolfo Werner, of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, says: "The fishery was fishing over and over in certain areas close to the coast where on one side are colonies of penguins and on the other side are areas popular for foraging whales."

Most vessels operate in Area 48, an immensely biodiverse region that is home to more than 62m tonnes of krill.

In 2010, CCAMLR set a catch limit of 620,000 tonnes across four areas to prevent concentrated fishing. In theory, once the limit is reached, all krill fishing must stop until the next year.

Krill fishing is within the limit but last year's catch in Area 48 was almost 450,000 tonnes, up by 15% from the year before.

Subarea 48.1 has the smallest limit, 155,000 tonnes, due to its significant ecological importance. Colonies of penguins and seals live close to the shore, and in the summer whales feed on krill. Conservationists are concerned that the catch limit has been reached eight times in the past decade.

"If you're really pushing up to the last number of krill that you can pull out of the water, that doesn't give any buffer for challenges like climate change," says Bondaroff.

Even within Subarea 48.1, fishing is concentrated in a tiny pocket. Between 2010 and 2018, 74% of the total catch there came around the Bransfield strait, which represents only 8% of the area. In another region, Subarea 48.3, it was even more concentrated: 95% of the catch came from just 5.6% of the area.

"So they're not overfishing in the entire Antarctic, but if you look at these very small areas, they are. And that's what actually matters to the wildlife there," says Bransome, who fears the quotas are so low and cover such a wide area that they fail to prevent such concentrated fishing.

In October, in a pivotal moment for krill, CCAMLR's 26 members, 25 countries and the EU, will decide at its annual meeting whether to revise catch limits for Area 48, or eliminate them altogether – which would happen if no agreement is reached.

"And that would allow the fishery to really concentrate their catch. If that happens, that could be quite destructive to the ecosystem," says Phil Trathan, a conservation biologist at the British Antarctic Survey.

CCAMLR argues that catches of krill in the Southern Ocean are at precautionary levels. It notes that less than 1% of krill in the Antarctic is fished annually.

"This is one of the few resources that is still underexploited in a very big way in the global oceans," says David Agnew, of the CCAMLR.

But with a higher interest in krill, scientists are concerned about the effect on the food chain.

"You cannot have an infinitely contracting and concentrating fishery with an increasing number of actors being involved and no change in that structure. Something has to change," says Andy Lowther, a quantitative ecologist at the Norwegian Polar Institute. "Either the quota needs to go up or the area needs to expand or fewer actors need to be involved in the fishery."

Research from last year suggests that concentrated krill fishing is reducing locally available amounts of krill, which has badly affected penguins, including population declines for certain species.

"When you're fishing for krill, what you're doing will affect the whole ecosystem, because every species in Antarctica feeds on krill or on another species that feeds on krill," says Werner.

Changes to krill populations are proving to be critical, too. A study published in June said krill populations are projected to fall by 30% by 2100, due to the climate crisis. The Antarctic peninsula is among the fastest-changing regions, warming almost 3C over the last 50 years.

In particular, krill are shifting south towards the pole as the ocean warms. If krill continue moving south, less food would be available for predators in sub-Antarctic islands, such as seals and penguins.

"We're not dealing with a static system. It's changing because of the warming planet," says Trathan. "I would say we're heading towards one of the most challenging years."

A 2019 study revealed that krill are already facing increasing difficulty in replenishing their population at Southern Ocean's northern edge, close to Area 48.

Says Bransome: "It really speaks to what we're doing to our oceans in general: that we fished so much that we now have to go down to this place that's at the bottom of the world."

[Sheilbh]

Found this kind of cool - UK only I'm afraid - the carbon emissions of your town/city:
https://www.centreforcities.org/data/net-zero-what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-my-city/