‘Mega-consumers’ of food and energy cost environment $5.7tn a year, study finds | Environment | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/18/mega-consumers-food-energy-damage-cost-environment

Environmental damages of the top ten percent consumers exceed global climate and biodiversity funding gaps | Communications Sustainability
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00079-x

The environmental damage bill racked up by the highest-consuming 10% of the world’s population has reached up to $5.7tn a year – larger than the economy of every country except the US and China, a study has found.

Mega-consumers in this group are concentrated in the global north, accounting for more than half the population of the US and 40-45% of people in the EU.

The damage tally, which one researcher described as “bonkers”, also exceeds global funding gaps for tackling the climate and biodiversity crises, highlighting how economic priorities remain skewed towards running down the Earth’s life-support systems.

The most destructive forms of consumption were linked to two main areas: food – particularly red meat, a primary driver of deforestation – and energy, including flights and heating and cooling homes, which typically rely on burning of fossil fuels, such as gas, oil and coal.

The $5.7tn figure, published in a paper by researchers at University of Oxford and University of Leiden, was calculated by using estimates of the monetary impacts of climate disruption, biodiversity loss, nutrient pollution and freshwater use.

Phytoplankton decline hints trouble for north Atlantic food webs - Oceanographic
https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/phytoplankton-decline-hints-trouble-for-north-atlantic-food-webs/

It has linked the declines primarily to rising sea surface temperatures and changes in mixed layer depth – physical properties that control how nutrients and light are distributed in the upper ocean. As surface waters warm, the ocean stratifies into more distinct layers that are less likely to mix vertically, cutting off the supply of nutrients from depth that phytoplankton depend on to grow.

“While the ocean may appear to be one giant body of water, it is often divided into layers based on temperature,” said Dr Tilstone. “As the ocean warms, these layers become stronger and less likely to vertically mix – a process known as thermal stratification. This matters because the mixing of ocean waters helps transport nutrients from the depths to the surface, where phytoplankton can use them to grow. When that supply is reduced, microalgae productivity can decline.”

TADEAS:

R Hallam
https://www.facebook.com/share/1Dv9ebRvP4/

Okay, let's be honest - let's guess how many supposedly upright anti racist Guardian readers read Prof Bill McGuire's description of UK life in the summer of 2052 - 40C heat, water and food shortages, economic depression - and think "Oh, doesn't sound so bad - at least we won't be starving to death like all those billions of brown and black people in the global south."

Okay, let's not be honest. I take it all back. Sorry.

And obviously it would be beyond impolite to talk about 2070.

In case you missed the biggest news that was lost to the circus that is our government, the USGS has released data showing that America's underground aquifer storing water is officially drying up.

Spanning approximately 174,000 square miles across eight states from South Dakota to Texas, the Ogallala Aquifer (High Plains Aquifer) is the lifeblood of American agriculture, providing roughly 30% of all groundwater used for U.S. irrigation.

However, the aquifer faces an existential crisis as massive agricultural extraction severely outpaces natural replenishment from rainfall. In some heavily farmed regions like the Texas High Plains, water levels have plunged by up to 80 meters (262 feet), leaving parts of the reservoir entirely depleted and threatening the long-term viability of the region's farming communities.

The consequences of this groundwater collapse extend far beyond localized dry wells.

The Ogallala sustains a massive $35+ billion agricultural economy, and as the water table drops, farmers are hit with skyrocketing extraction costs and dwindling crop yields.

This critical situation is not isolated; California’s Central Valley Aquifer, another vital agricultural engine, is suffering from similar severe, long-term depletion. Without aggressive water management and a shift toward sustainable farming practices, the depletion of these non-renewable resources risks destabilizing the nation's food supply and transforming once-fertile plains back into arid dust bowls.

source: USGS

Soil4Climate | Time to build soil
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Cw3RMV7Co/

The USDA’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center has been the go-to resource for American beekeepers for over a century. When 1.6 million bee colonies collapsed between June 2024 and March 2025, scientists there worked quickly to find out why. Six months later, they had an answer it was a viruses spread by pesticide-resistant mites.

The Trump administration announced it was closing the lab. Their reasoning is the facility is “underutilized and redundant.” Bees pollinate roughly 80% of U.S. crops fruits, nuts, vegetables, cotton. The research happening at Beltsville isn’t “underutilized and redundant.” It’s what stands between a bad season and a food supply crisis. And the administration just shut it down right after it proved exactly why it exists.

Members of Maryland’s congressional delegation say the closure may be illegal without congressional approval. Farm groups are pushing back. But the administration is moving forward anyway.

This isn’t about budget efficiency. It’s about dismantling the federal science infrastructure that protects American agriculture one “redundant” lab at a time just like the Trump administration claimed about the forest service!

The USDA’s Beltsville... - Alt National Park Service
https://www.facebook.com/share/14eUGSMNAkN/

France just completed the world's largest agrivoltaic trial — installing solar panel canopies above 2,400 hectares of Provence vineyards, cereal fields, and vegetable plots, generating 500 megawatts of clean electricity from the same land producing full agricultural output.

The Sun'Agri program installs tilting solar panels on 5-meter-tall structures above crops, with panel angles controlled by sensors responding to crop water stress and solar irradiance.

Panels tilt to provide shade on hot days, reducing crop water needs by 30 percent and heat stress damage by 64 percent during heatwaves while generating electricity from diffuse light above the canopy. Crop yields in pilot vineyards increased 27 percent in drought years.

France loses 18,000 hectares of agricultural land to conventional ground-mounted solar annually.

Agrivoltaics eliminate this conflict entirely — 2,400 dual-use hectares replace lost food production while generating clean power.

Source: French National Institute for Agriculture INRAE, Sun'Agri France, French Ministry of Agriculture, 2025.

MURDOCH OWNS OUR GOVERNMENTS | Bad news for the solar sceptics-
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BYTtJi4FB/

TADEAS:

R Hallam
https://www.facebook.com/share/1Au28JyCiB/

Four points on the "landmark" UK report on the elite's mass death project.

1. If it is a "landmark" report which points to the destruction of the British economy, its way of life, and the very existence of the country at 4C, why does it get two small lines in the middle of the news section of the world's main "liberal" newspaper that sells the idea that facts are "sacred"? The point being the liberal elites exist to smooth the journey to mass death being prepared for us by the business elites.

2. It's not the mean, stupid. What kills is the outlier. What we want to know is not that food production will go down by x% on average - we want to know that every 20 years an outlier probability is there will be destroyed crops two years running, leading to mass starvation of British people, from which they will not recover by the time the next outlier hits.

3. The unit of analysis of the "UK" is also beyond stupid. What will happen in the UK does not depend upon what happens in the UK but in the whole world. When outliers happen in other areas - war, famine, social breakdown, the world economy will collapse and UK living standards will collapse. Meaning poor people will starve and revolutions will happen.

4. The "climate" is not an event. So stopping pretending it is. It is not a matter of "if we get to 4C". It is a matter of if we get to 2C, feedbacks will send our kids to 3C and their kids to extinction at 4/5 and 6C. It's a ball rolling ever faster down the hill, not a bus stop.

Rainforests pushed to breaking point by new demands for resources, report says | Deforestation | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/20/rainforests-pushed-to-breaking-point-by-new-demands-for-resources-report-says

Fresh demands for critical minerals, biofuels and pulp – used in fast fashion, processed food and packaging – are compounding existing pressures from cattle ranching, monocrops, oil and logging, the analysis finds.

Mining, in particular, has a far greater environmental footprint than previously thought owing to secondary impacts, such as water pollution and the construction of roads, settlements and other infrastructure development. Between 10% and one-third of the world’s forests are already affected and this proportion is expected to increase.

The authors say this highlights an urgent need to replace and reduce the use of products from forest regions, rather than simply adding new forms of consumption, as is currently the case.

The report tracks the commodity trends that are threatening forests in the Amazon, the Congo basin and south-east Asia, and weakening their capacity to regulate temperature, store carbon, recycle water and provide a home for nature.

Cattle ranching, agriculture and gold mining remain by far the biggest threats, finds the study, which was produced by the Dutch research organisation Profundo and commissioned by Rainforest Foundation Norway. All three are forecast to continue expanding.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/05/09/iran-farms-thailand-food/

A Thai rice farmer has decided that the rational response to the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is to leave 19 hectares of land empty. The Washington Post reports that Saithong Jamjai, 53, spent weeks calculating whether to plant again in central Thailand and reached the same answer each time: fuel, fertiliser, plastics and other inputs would cost at least $33,000, while the rice she expects to sell in August would bring in only $22,000. Her conclusion was blunt: “A confirmed loss”. So she is letting the land bake under the husks from last season.

The mechanism carrying the war into Asian rice fields is urea, the nitrogen fertiliser that modern high-yield farming depends on. Iran’s destruction of gas infrastructure in the Gulf, combined with U.S. and Iranian efforts to choke the Strait of Hormuz, has blocked supplies of fuel and gas-linked fertiliser products from leaving the Middle East. According to Pranshi Goyal, senior analyst at CRU Group, 30 per cent of global urea supply has effectively been “wiped out”. Urea spot prices are up 40 per cent since February; weekly production in Iran has fallen from 182,000 to 63,000 metric tons, while Qatar and Bahrain have dropped to zero in the figures cited. China has restricted fertiliser exports to protect its own farmers, and Russia is seeing demand rise in a way that could strengthen its economy and aid its war in Ukraine.

The Food and Agriculture Organization is warning that the shock is spreading through the global food system by calendar, not by geography alone. Speaking in Rome, FAO director general Dongyu Qu called the war “a disruption at the core of the global agrifood system”. FAO chief economist Maximo Torero said the worst effects are currently in Asia, where Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Australia are entering key sowing periods, but the crisis is “moving east to west and south to north”. Farmers are already skipping planting, reducing acreage, or cutting fertiliser use, which means lower yields later this year.

The next pressure point is June, when India and Brazil, two of the world’s biggest agricultural producers, are expected to ramp up urea orders. If ships carrying urea are still not moving by then, Torero warns of “significant yield loss” across many countries, higher commodity prices, renewed inflation, and a hit to economic growth “very close to what happened in covid-19”. A likely super El Niño this year could add extreme heat and drought to the fertiliser shock, making the same planting decisions even riskier.

Thailand’s official assurances are already colliding with shortages on the ground. The Commerce Ministry said in April that the country had 343,000 tons of urea, enough for the upcoming planting season. But the Post found fertiliser shops across Ayutthaya and Suphan Buri provinces out of urea for weeks. One wholesaler sent a truck to a marketplace used by large dealers and got nothing after four days. Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow says Thailand still has sufficient farming supplies, while also acknowledging that the country is competing against richer nations and has “not faced such a crisis before”. A Russian supply attempt is likely to fail because shipping disruptions mean the urea would take at least two months to arrive, too late for the current planting window.

Thai farmers are being squeezed from both sides. Their costs are rising because fertiliser and fuel are scarce, while their expected income is falling because the Middle East, one of their major export markets, has effectively shut. The region accounted for 17 per cent of Thailand’s rice exports in 2025, with Iraq the largest single destination. Since the war began, rice shipments to the Gulf have stopped. Malaysia and the Philippines have absorbed some of the excess supply, but not enough, leaving a glut that keeps rice prices low just as input costs spike.

The human consequences are already visible: farmers taking credit from local loan sharks, planting only part of their land, growing vegetables and fish for subsistence, considering day labour, and reporting anxiety, debt and depression. Pramote Charoensilp, president of the Thai Farmers and Agriculturists Association, says calls from villages now carry the same themes: debt, depression, desperation. His advice is painfully thin because the options are thin: “I ask them to try to keep going. Just to keep going”.

Even a quick reopening of the Strait of Hormuz would not immediately solve the problem. Goyal says cargo would still take one to two months to reach destinations and markets would need time to stabilise; the longer Middle Eastern production plants stay shut, the longer they will take to restart. “This problem builds in a nonlinear fashion”, she said. For farmers whose planting window is measured in days and weeks, a supply chain that recovers in months has already failed them.

Fertiliser shortages will have ‘dramatic’ effect on global food prices, warns farming boss | Supply chain crisis | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/may/06/fertiliser-shortages-iran-war-global-food-prices-farming

Fertiliser shortages caused by the Iran war have driven up costs for UK farmers by up to 70% and will have a “dramatic” impact on food prices globally next year, according to one of Britain’s most powerful property and farming companies.

Mark Preston, executive trustee of the 349-year-old Grosvenor Group, controlled by the Duke of Westminster, said fertiliser “was already quite expensive” before the 50% to 70% surge in prices since the start of the Iran war in late February.

The effective closure of the strait of Hormuz – which Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Wednesday could soon reopen – has throttled global supplies of fertiliser, crucial to growing food crops.

Preston said that, although UK crops were unlikely to be affected this year as most fertiliser had already been used, the knock-on effect could arrive next year. “Farmers are not buying that fertiliser, they’re sitting on their hands and hoping things will improve, which they probably won’t,” he said.

'Food insecurity is no longer just about low-income countries': Environmental economist explains how climate change is pushing agricultural systems to the brink | Live Science https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/food-insecurity-is-no-longer-just-about-low-income-countries-environmental-economist-explains-how-climate-change-is-pushing-agricultural-systems-to-the-brink

hnojiva jsou dobra, kdo nesouhlasi, je blb


Population's cadmium overexposure requires urgent action, French food agency tells government
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/03/25/population-s-cadmium-overexposure-requires-urgent-action-french-food-agency-tells-government_6751800_7.html

Immediate measures must be taken to reduce the French population's dietary exposure to cadmium, France's National Agency for Food Safety (ANSES) has alerted. In a report published on Wednesday, March 25, the agency confirms that a "significant proportion" of the French population is exposed to "preoccupying" levels.

ANSES urged the government to "act at the source" by lowering "as soon as possible" the legal limits for cadmium in fertilizing materials, and particularly in phosphate fertilizers, which are heavily used in French agriculture. That is the only way to control the pollution of agricultural soils, the contamination of foods, and ultimately to reduce cadmium levels in the population, the agency insisted.

az 2030, tak nohy hore



Our National Food Security is at Risk - by Rupert Read
https://rupertsreads.substack.com/p/our-national-food-security-is-at

The contents of a secret U.K. Govt report on Britain’s ‘critical systems’ and their grave vulnerability have just been made public by The Times and The Sunday Times.

The report was stark in its findings:

“Britain’s food security…could be “at strategic risk of catastrophic failure” by 2030”.

Food was only one of the critical systems analysed in the report, and found to be at risk of collapse from the end of the decade, >unless< collectively we change course to a safer, more resilient path.

TADEAS:

Energy shock talk grabs headlines but the Iran war is also driving the world towards a food crisis | Heather Stewart | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/22/energy-shock-iran-war-also-driving-world-towards-food-crisis

P Worms
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AmdTujaWZ/

There's been much discussion of the impact on energy systems of the closure of the Persian Gulf, but rather less than I would have expected of the - to my mind - more alarming impact on several kinds of fertiliser and other feedstocks of the global food system. Without going into details, modelling suggests that will throw several hundred million more people into food insecurity.

Crops need fertility to grow, and in the usual industrial farming systems that dominate the planet, those fertilisers must come from fossil fuels (my tribe of agroecologists has long shown that different production systems can generate more food while damaging soil and biodiversity less with only a fraction of those inputs, yet here we are - the reasons why is a discussion for another day). But plants also need water, and here this year, the problems linked to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz risk being compounded by a phenomenon called El Niño. This redistributes heat from the Western to the eastern Pacific that is then released to the atmosphere, creating a warming pulse that leads to drought conditions across much of the world and weaker monsoons in places like India.

On top of that, there is rising evidence that the climate forcing - i.e. the amount of global heating we get from a doubling of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere - has been seriously underestimated over the past decades: instead of being about 2-3°C, it's more in the region of 4-5°C (the paper i'm sharing here details the reasons).

That higher forcing is a problem for the medium term.. But in the short term, the climate system through El Niño willi amplify the horrors about to be unleashed on the food system by Trump’s war of choice.


Super El Nino? Super Warming is the Main Issue.
https://jimehansen.substack.com/p/super-el-nino-super-warming-is-the

Prej dobry, mame buffer

...

*Half* of the food produced in the world each year is not consumed by people.

Croplands already produce enough calories to support about 14.5 billion people, nearly double today’s population.

But half is lost to feed for factory farmed livestock, biofuels, or lost throughout the supply chain.

[In America the figure is a truly grotesque 77% of food not consumed by people.]

And we're told that rewilding marginal land poses a threat to food security!

Half the world’s food never feeds people — In America, it’s far worse | One Earth
https://www.oneearth.org/half-the-worlds-food-never-feeds-people-in-america-its-far-worse/

but... robots&datacenters

Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature
https://actuaries.org.uk/planetary-solvency

The global economy could face a 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090, unless immediate policy action on risks posed by the climate crisis is taken. Populations are already impacted by food system shocks, water insecurity, heat stress and infectious diseases. If unchecked, mass mortality, mass displacement, severe economic contraction and conflict become more likely.

‘Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature’ is the IFoA’s fourth report in collaboration with climate scientists. The report develops a framework for global risk management to address these risks and show how this approach can support future prosperity. It also shows how a lack of realistic risk messaging to guide policy decisions has led to slower action than is needed.

The report proposes a novel Planetary Solvency risk dashboard, to provide decision-useful risk information to support policymakers to drive human activity within the finite bounds of the planet that we live on.