Författare: Jack Marley Environment Energy Editor UK edition

Plastic pollution and climate change have common culprits – and similar solutions.

The penultimate round of negotiations for a global pact on plastic ended yesterday in Ottawa. Nearly 200 countries have agreed that a treaty must tackle plastic pollution at every stage of its existence, from oil rigs and refineries to factories, shops and homes. But when Rwanda and Peru proposed cutting the amount of plastic produced worldwide by 40% over the next 15 years, the UN talks faltered.

This stalemate has been, at least partially, engineered by the same companies stalling climate action: fossil fuel firms and their petrochemical partners.

This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage comes from our weekly climate action newsletter. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 30,000+ readers who’ve subscribed.

Most plastics are derived from fossil fuels. Oil and gas companies extract these fuels and petrochemical firms refine and synthesise plastic from them. Reports suggest that the number of lobbyists representing both industries at the negotiations is increasing.

Recycled lobbying tactics

Reducing plastic production is the most effective way to cut pollution according to a recent study. Since a proposal for phasing down production failed to gain enough support in Ottawa however, it’s unclear what the agreement – expected later this year – will eventually look like.

“Will it be ambitious, with strict binding measures focusing on all stages of the plastics life cycle (including the ‘upstream’ stages associated with resource extraction, manufacturing and processing)?” ask Antaya March, Cressida Bowyer and Steve Fletcher, researchers who study the plastic waste epidemic at the University of Portsmouth.

“Or will it be a weaker treaty, with voluntary and country-led measures that focus mainly on waste management and pollution prevention (the ‘downstream’ stages)?”

Read more:
A global plastics treaty is being negotiated in Ottawa this week – here’s the latest

Profit-minded petrochemical companies have long insisted that downstream strategies, like ramping up recycling, are the best way to manage plastic waste. An investigation showed this was disingenuous: plastic producers knew more than three decades ago that recycling was complicated, expensive and ineffective – despite what their marketing departments said.

Today, the global recycling system is a mess, says Kutoma Wakunuma, an associate professor of information systems at De Montfort University:

“Although plastic waste can be seen as a trade between developed and developing countries, which allows the latter to be paid in exchange for dealing with that waste, this trade isn’t an equal one.”

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Plastic waste is hurting women in developing countries – but there are ways to stop it

Wakunuma describes how waste pickers in several African countries sift the imported refuse of richer nations for plastic bottles and other recyclable items. These workers, predominantly women, may be paid four pence a kilogram for what they manage to salvage, she says.

Waste pickers toil for a pittance in horrendous conditions.
Tinnakorn jorruang/Shutterstock

“And that waste sometimes ends up burned, rather than being recycled. In 2020, 40% of the UK’s plastic waste was sent to Turkey, where instead of being recycled some of it was illegally dumped and burned.”

Two billion people worldwide lack dedicated rubbish collection services. Many of them breathe toxic fumes from the open burning of plastic according to waste management experts Costas Velis and Ed Cook at the University of Leeds. This is a serious and overlooked health crisis, they say.

Read more:
Health crisis: up to a billion tonnes of waste potentially burned in the open every year

The recycling facilities of developing countries are overwhelmed. Yet oil firms see these places – where environmental regulations are typically weaker – as promising markets for more single-use plastic that is cheap and difficult to recycle says Deirdre McKay, a reader in geography and environmental politics at Keele University.

Read more:
Fossil fuel industry sees the future in hard-to-recycle plastic

Turn off the taps

Fossil fuels and petrochemicals have a long history: the first synthetic chemicals were derived from coal. In the future, global demand for oil and gas will fall as more buildings and vehicles run on renewable electricity – but emissions will remain high if fossil fuel firms are allowed to continuing ploughing money into making plastics instead say industry sustainability experts Fredric Bauer (Lund University) and Tobias Dan Nielsen (IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute).

Read more:
Oil companies are ploughing money into fossil-fuelled plastics production at a record rate – new research

Some of the solutions to plastic waste and climate change are the same. Like scrapping fossil fuel subsidies, which keep plastic production (and fossil fuel extraction) artificially cheap.

Read more:
Fossil fuel subsidies amount to hundreds of billions of dollars a year – here’s how to get rid of them

More generally, evidence supports the idea of phasing out plastic production to curb mounting pollution – and something similar is true for climate change.

Plastic production generates vast quantities of climate-heating greenhouse gas.
Mountaintreks/Shutterstock

“There is a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that a fossil fuel phase-out will be essential for reining in the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change,” says Steve Pye, an associate professor of energy systems at UCL.

“Since no new fields need to be brought into development, global production of oil and gas should be falling.”

Read more:
COP28 president is wrong – science clearly shows fossil fuels must go (and fast)

A legally binding agreement that aims to curtail plastic production could be the best outcome from the final summit in Busan, South Korea in late November. But even this may not deter countries and companies that make a lot of money from plastic. With equivalent climate legislation, “legally binding” in practice has meant campaigners having to drag governments and corporations through the courts for years to make them keep their promises says Rebecca Willis, a governance expert at Lancaster University.

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The UK’s Climate Change Act, once the envy of the world, faces a stress test

At the very least, campaigners on both plastic waste and climate change can benefit from combining their efforts.

“The environment appears to be drowning in plastic for the same reason that global temperatures continue to rise,” says McKay. “Fossil fuels have remained cheap and abundant.” Läs mer…

A reckless experiment in Earth’s atmosphere caused a desert metropolis to flood.

That was the story last week when more than a year’s worth of rain fell in a day on the Arabian Peninsula, one of the world’s driest regions. Desert cities like Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) suffered floods that submerged motorways and airport runways. Across UAE and Oman, 21 people lost their lives.

The heavy rain of Tuesday April 16 was initially blamed on “cloud seeding”: a method of stimulating precipitation by injecting clouds with tiny particles that moisture can attach to – those droplets then merge and multiply. As the waters receded, however, a more disturbing explanation emerged.

This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage comes from our weekly climate action newsletter. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 30,000+ readers who’ve subscribed.

Richard Washington, a professor of climate science at the University of Oxford, has seen the inside of a storm. To confirm if cloud seeding really could breed record-breaking rain, he once boarded an aeroplane bound for a thundercloud over the South Africa-Mozambique border.

Read more:
Don’t blame Dubai’s freak rain on cloud seeding – the storm was far too big to be human-made

“Our mission was to fly through the most active part of the storm, measure it, fly through again while dumping a bin load of dry ice, turn hard and fly through for a final measurement,” he says.

“Apart from the fun of flying through the core of a thunderstorm in a Learjet, I didn’t think much about the time I was lucky enough to be part of that project. Until I heard about the recent freak storm in Dubai.”

What caused the flood?

There are no two identical clouds with which to compare the outcome of seeding, Washington says, so it’s impossible to prove if this technique can change the outcome of a single storm. But by flying a lot of missions, half with cloud seeding and half without, and measuring rainfall between the two, meteorologists eventually showed that cloud seeding did modify rain rates in some storms.

That’s not what caused Dubai’s floods though.

Cloud seeding works – but not that well.
Fanw/Shutterstock

“It turns out the UAE has been running a cloud seeding project, UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science, for several years. Their approach is to fire hygroscopic (water-attracting) salt flares from aircraft into warm cumuliform clouds,” Washington says.

“So could seeding have built a huge storm system the size of France? Let’s be clear, that would be like a breeze stopping an intercity train going at full tilt. And the seeding flights had not happened that day either. The kind of deep, large-scale clouds formed on April 16 are not the target of the experiment.”

For Washington, the more relevant atmospheric experiment is the one each of us is engaged in everyday.

“The interesting thing is that humans have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that 2,400 gigatonnes of carbon (our total emissions since pre-industrial times) might make a difference to the climate, but very readily get behind the idea of a few hygroscopic flares making 18 months worth of rain fall in a day.”

The experiment of our lives

A hotter atmosphere holds more moisture, which can fall as rain. Although last week’s deluge was unusual, the Arabian Peninsula does tend to receive more of its precipitation in heavy bursts than steady showers.

The latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did not predict future rainfall trends for the region but did say global heating is expected to make such violent downpours more frequent and severe.

What is likely to kill more people as temperatures rise in this part of the world is not water, but heat. Tom Matthews (Loughborough University) and Colin Raymond (California Institute of Technology) are scientists who study the shifting climate and its effect on our bodies.

Read more:
Global warming now pushing heat into territory humans cannot tolerate

Throughout human evolution, the wet-bulb temperature (how hot it is when you subtract the cooling effect of evaporating moisture, like sweat on your skin) has rarely, if ever, strayed beyond 35°C. At this threshold the air is so hot and humid that you cannot lower your temperature to a safe level by sweating. You overheat and, without urgent medical aid, die.

“The frequency of punishing wet-bulb temperatures has more than doubled worldwide since 1979, and in some of the hottest and most humid places on Earth, like the coastal United Arab Emirates, wet-bulb temperatures have already flickered past 35°C,” Matthews and Raymond say.

Extreme heat will threaten lives in the Arabian Peninsula within the near future.
Aappp/Shutterstock

“The climate envelope is pushing into territory where our physiology cannot follow.”

Alarmed by how fast we are making the climate unlivable, some scientists have called for emergency measures. Peter Irvine, a lecturer in earth sciences at UCL, proposes dimming the sun by pumping microscopic particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect some of its rays.

Read more:
Why dimming the Sun would be an effective tool in the fight against climate change

Trying to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption but on a permanent basis (until, presumably, greenhouse gas concentrations can be returned to safe levels) is another gamble with the atmosphere. These layers of gases that surround our planet have nurtured life by keeping temperatures stable and harmful radiation out.

Irvine acknowledges that keeping Earth artificially cool this way is risky, but argues the side effects – like altered wind and rainfall patterns, acid rain and delayed ozone layer recovery – “pale in comparison to the impacts of climate change”.

Catriona McKinnon, a professor of political theory at the University of Reading, has other concerns about attempting to manage solar radiation this way, including the question of who has the right to regulate the global thermostat.

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Time is running out on climate change, but geoengineering has dangers of its own

As humanity contemplates another large-scale experiment in our atmosphere, there is another, even bigger one, waiting to be resolved. Its solution is simple: stop burning fossil fuels. Läs mer…