Stop Digging

A report from Oil Change International called The Sky's Limit: Why the Paris Climate Goals Require a Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production reaches a bleak conclusion.

We find that the oil, gas, and coal in already-developed fields and mines (that is, where the infrastructure has been built) exceeds the amount that can be burned while likely staying below 2°C, and significantly exceeds the amount that can be burned while staying below 1.5°C.

They recommend that

No new fossil fuel extraction or transportation infrastructure should be built worldwide.

Instead, we should allow for the gradual decline of existing operations, over the coming decades, and invest strongly in clean energy to make up the difference. We have seen that there is no economic or technical barrier to making this transition over this time frame: the only requirement is political will.

Humans have, maybe, 17 years to get our act together.

Income Up, Poverty Down

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that "[i]n 2015, household income grew at the fastest rate on record, [and] the poverty rate fell faster than at any point since 1968."

Justin Wolfers selects additional details from Income and Poverty in the United States: 2015.

Update (September 18):  Edwin Rios also presents highlights from the Census report.

Lowest Average Sea Ice Extent

This year's Arctic sea ice minimum looks to be the second lowest on record, just edging out third place 2007. But a chart from blogger Tamino shows that the sea ice extent averaged from September 2015 to August 2016 did reach a record low.

Largest General Strike

As many as 180 million workers in India went on strike September 2 to protest greater privatization of the economy and the breakdown of minimum wage negotiations. I'm just now noticing any mention of the strike since U.S. media generally doesn't cover historic labor actions. Vijay Prashad reports:

680 million Indians live in deprivation. These people – half the Indian population – are deprived of the basics of life such as food, energy, housing, drinking water, sanitation, health care, education and social security. Most of India's workers and peasants count amongst the deprived. Ninety per cent of India’s workers are in the informal sector, where protections at the workplace are minimal and their rights to form unions virtually non-existent.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi ... did not pay heed to these workers. His goal is to increase India’s growth rate, which ... can be accomplished by a cannibal like attitude towards workers’ rights and the livelihood of the poor. Selling off state assets, giving hugely lucrative deals to private business and opening the doors of India’s economy to Foreign Direct Investment are the mechanisms to increase the growth rate. None of these strategies, as even the International Monetary Fund acknowledges, will lead to social equality. This growth trajectory leads to greater inequality, to less power for workers and more deprivation.

Update (December 15, 2020):  Alex Henderson reports on strikes in India involving as many as 250 million farmers and workers.

Update (December 22, 2020):  Sonali Kolhatkar explains the issues behind the Indian farmers' strike.

About half of India’s workers depend on the agricultural industry, and the government has long had in place regulations to protect farmworkers, acting as a middleman between farmers and buyers of their produce. Now those protections have been upended. In September 2020, [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pushed three deregulatory bills through Parliament amid chaos and even some opposition from within his own party.

Lost Wilderness

An article in Current Biology finds that 30.1 million square kilometers of wilderness remain (23.2 percent of total land area) which represents a 9.6 percent loss since the early 1990s. Unsustainable practices for agriculture are largely responsible for the losses.

Update (September 13):  Dahr Jamail points out additional details from the wilderness study.

[A]t least 27 entire "ecoregions" -- environmentally and ecologically distinct geographic units at the global scale -- have lost all of their "remaining globally significant wilderness areas" since the early 1990s. The Amazon basin, in particular, has been reduced from an area of 1.8 million km to 1.3 million km (a loss of over 30 percent) in the same time frame.