Environment and Spirituality

[kmaherali]

The Egyptian government has demolished historic tombs, cultural centers, artisan workshops and gardens in pursuit of large-scale urban renewal.


Construction of highways and roadworks in the Fustat area of Cairo this month.Credit...Sima Diab for The New York Times

Ancient tombs have been shattered. Gardens have vanished, and with them many of Cairo’s trees.

A growing number of historic but shabby working-class neighborhoods have all but disappeared, too, handed over to developers to build concrete high-rises while families who have lived there for generations are pushed to the fringes of the sprawling Egyptian capital.

Few cities live and breathe antiquity like Cairo, a sun-strafed, traffic-choked desert metropolis jammed with roughly 22 million people. But President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is modernizing this superannuated city, fast.

He is trying to buff its unruly complexity into a place of efficient uniformity — the traffic tamed, the Nile River promoted as a tourist attraction, the slums cleaned up and their residents rehoused in modern apartments. And he considers the construction as one of the major accomplishments of his tenure.

“There is not a single place in Egypt that has not been touched by the hand of development,” Mr. el-Sisi proclaimed in a recent speech.

So the old stone and brick must go, paved over by concrete. New elevated highways undulate over ancient cemeteries, riding skinny struts like giant gray roller coasters. A freshly built walkway lined with fast-food joints runs along the Nile, the entrance fee out of reach for many Egyptians, with consumer inflation running at about 38 percent annually.

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A walkway spanning the Nile with high-rise buildings in the background.

A new Nile walkway under construction in the Zamalek neighborhood of Cairo.Credit...Sima Diab for The New York Times

New roads, overpasses and offramps materialize so quickly that taxi drivers and Google Maps alike can barely keep up. And Cairo is not just being made over, but replaced: Mr. el-Sisi is erecting a supersized new capital, all right angles, tall towers and luxury villas, in the desert just outside of Cairo.

The estimated cost of the new capital alone is $59 billion, with billions more going to other construction projects, including roads and high-speed trains meant to link the new capital to the old. Most of it was paid for by debt, the sheer mass of which has crippled Egypt’s ability to handle a deep economic crisis set off by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A few weeks ago, the modernization efforts reached Fustat, the city’s most ancient district, founded as Egypt’s capital centuries before Cairo was even a thought.

A district official knocked on the door of the artist Moataz Nasreldin and told him to start packing up Darb 1718, the popular cultural center he founded in the neighborhood 16 years ago. The government would be widening the road behind it to build an elevated highway, Mr. Nasreldin, 62, said the official told him.

Darb, along with some of the nearby pottery workshops run for decades by local craftsmen and some nearby housing, would have to go.

As often happens nowadays in Egypt, where stories abound of government excavators and bulldozers appearing on private property with barely any notice, information about the decision was scant. Mr. Nasreldin and the owners of the pottery workshops said local officials had not presented a written demolition order or any other paperwork.

“Every day, you wake up and you don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Mohamed Abdin, 48, who owns one of the workshops slated for destruction. He said his family has been making pottery in the area since the 1920s.

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A few trees with a construction site and buildings in the background.

What greenery Cairo has is increasingly being cut down and paved over.Credit...Sima Diab for The New York Times

“These are the developments that the country had to see,” a pro-Sisi TV presenter, Ahmed Moussa, said on his program recently.

Others say they no longer recognize their own city.

“If you were being invaded, all what you’d care about is your monuments, your trees, your history, your culture,” said Mamdouh Sakr, an architect and urbanist. “And now, it’s all being destroyed, without any reason, without any explanation, without any need.”

Most of the time, Egyptians simply submit, powerless before the state. But not Mr. Nasreldin, who sued to stop the destruction and raised a fuss on social media. The municipality said it was reconsidering the plans, but did not say when a final decision would be made or who would make it.

Construction of roads, bridges and major projects such as the new capital is usually overseen by Egypt’s powerful military. It was the military that elevated Mr. el-Sisi, a former general, to power in 2013 amid mass protests demanding the ouster of the country’s first democratically elected president, who took office after the country’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising.

Cairenes, as this city’s residents are known, who have contacted government officials to push back against the development say those in charge tend to wave off experts’ advice and dismiss the concerns of local residents. Only in isolated cases have preservationists managed to save historical monuments.

The proliferation of military-led projects has given rise to a sarcastic phrase, “the generals’ taste,” implying a certain drab boxiness, a monotony occasionally spritzed with glitz.

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A man dressed in a T-shirt walks in front of an array of pottery outside a workshop in Cairo.

A pottery workshop inside the Darb 1718 community center in the Fustat area of Cairo.Credit...Sima Diab for The New York Times

The style is exemplified by the gleaming new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, not far from Darb, where ancient Egypt’s most famous royal mummies are housed. Bulldozers and heavy machinery have nosed around the surrounding district for years, demolishing housing in working-class neighborhoods, apparently to make way for new construction.

A new lakeside restaurant next to the museum boasts the Frenchified name “Le Lac du Caire.” While diners enjoy the greenery around the water, trees elsewhere have been felled one by one.

It might be a stretch to call Cairo lush. But Egypt’s 19th-century rulers adorned their capital with public gardens, importing greenery that now seems inseparable from the city itself, like the flame trees that flare with bright red flowers every spring.

Many of those gardens and trees have disappeared in the past few years, reducing what little public space Cairo once had — usually without any environmental review, and often over the objections of local residents.

In their place have come fast-food stalls and cafes, new roads and military-owned gas stations, lining the once-green Nile banks and leafy neighborhoods like Zamalek and Heliopolis.

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Broken walls and rubble on the ground is all that remains from a shattered mausoleum in Cairo’s famed City of the Dead.

Little more than rubble remained of this mausoleum in a cemetery in the Cairo’s famed City of the Dead last year.Credit...Heba Khamis for The New York Times

Amid unrelenting bad press at home and abroad over the demolitions, the prime minister, Mostafa Madbouly, recently said new gardens, parks and roads would be built where large swaths of the ancient cemeteries known as the City of the Dead have been leveled. A new “Garden for the Immortals” will house the remains of some historic figures whose original tombs were razed “due to urgent development needs,” as a state-owned newspaper, Al Ahram, put it.

So far, only the roads have appeared.

Locals say modernization is not unwelcome, but wholesale destruction is.

When Mr. Nasreldin and a few other artists started working and living in the area near Darb in the 1990s, it was a crowded jumble of illegally, often unsafely built housing. It has only grown bigger and unrulier since.

Hearing that the government had its eye on the neighborhood, he envisioned better housing, maybe designed by an architect with an eye for preservation and community needs, definitely with reliable electricity and running water. Smoother roads. More businesses opening to serve food to those who came to Darb from around Cairo and beyond for concerts, film screenings and exhibitions.

Not the wrecking of what, to him, was drawing more life and economic activity to the area: art studios, cultural ferment, a symbiotic relationship between the traditional pottery workshops and the artists who came to Darb from Egypt and elsewhere.

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Moataz Nasreldin, dressed in a black T-shirt, sits at a turquoise table with a full bookshelf in the background.

Moataz Nasreldin, an artist and the founder of Darb 1718, a community space in the Fustat neighborhood of Cairo.Credit...Sima Diab for The New York Times

“There should be 100 Darbs all over Egypt,” Mr. Nasreldin said. “To me, this is not a very wise decision at all.”

One of the homes slated for demolition belongs to Mohamed Amin, 56, a former construction worker turned jack-of-all-trades at Darb.

Yes, the neighborhood was unprepossessing, he said, but it was home, and had been for generations. Yes, the housing was illegally built. But, he argued, the government had refused to issue building permits, forcing residents to take matters into their own hands.

In such cases, the government usually offers new subsidized apartments. But they tend to be a considerable distance away from the original neighborhood and, in many cases, ultimately unaffordable.

Clearing everyone out for the new highway meant that while some people would be able to reach the new museum more easily, former residents of the area would now have to make an exhausting commute across Cairo to get to work, if their livelihoods survived.

“Everyone is scared,” said Mr. Amin, adding that no one in the neighborhood had been told what the plan was. “Why are you suffocating us like this?”

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A man in shadow on the right under a bridge being built in Cairo, with high-rise buildings in the background.

A highway under construction near the neighborhood of Maadi in Cairo.Credit...Sima Diab for The New York Times


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/worl ... ition.html

[kmaherali]

A Virgin Atlantic Boeing 787 arrives at John F. Kennedy International Airport, completing the first transatlantic flight powered by 100% sustainable aviation fuel. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

For the first time ever, a commercial plane flew across the Atlantic Ocean without using fossil fuels.

Virgin Atlantic said the test flight Tuesday from London to New York was powered only by sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, a broad category of jet fuel that creates fewer carbon emissions than standard kerosene blends. The fuel on this flight was made from waste fats and plant sugars and emits 70% less carbon than petroleum-based jet fuel, according to a press release. It landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Tuesday afternoon.

//10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

Experts say sustainable aviation fuels may one day play a big role in shrinking the aviation industry’s carbon footprint — even though its production is minuscule today. SAF accounts for about 0.1% of airlines’ current fuel consumption.


“SAF is a major aspect of the transition for aviation [to zero carbon emissions], and it’s especially critical this decade,” said Andrew Chen, principal for aviation decarbonization at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean-energy think tank. “But today, our big issue is we don’t make enough SAF.”


Virgin Atlantic’s 100% SAF flight is a one-time stunt, and the airline won’t regularly offer all-SAF flights. Standard jet engines aren’t designed to run on only sustainable fuel, and it is too expensive and rare for it to be practical for airlines to run all-SAF routes.

Still, Chen says it’s a milestone. “It’s a really important flight to highlight the progress that’s being made, the need for more SAF and the critical role they can play in decarbonizing aviation,” he said.


Virgin Atlantic’s first 100% sustainable aviation fuel transatlantic flight is fueled ahead of its takeoff from London Heathrow Airport on Tuesday. (PA Media Assignments)

A bridge to zero-carbon flight

Sustainable aviation fuels are a broad category that includes biofuels made from raw materials such as corn, animal fat, algae, municipal trash and sewage. By definition, they must emit at least 50% less carbon than petroleum-based jet fuel, according to federal guidelines.

But all of these fuels still produce some emissions. SAF, on its own, will not get the airline industry to zero carbon emissions.

To do that, the industry will have to develop new technologies that will allow planes to run on electric batteries, liquid hydrogen or some other as-yet-unproven fuel source. But it will take years of research to fully develop these technologies, and decades more for airlines to fully replace their existing fleets with planes that can run on new fuels, according to Chen.

In the meantime, existing planes will keep running on liquid fuel. “There’s no getting around having to burn a fuel, so SAF is our way to displace fossil fuels” and reduce planes’ carbon emissions now, Chen said.

An immediate solution

The main advantage of SAF is that they are “drop-in” fuels, meaning they can have an impact right away because they can be blended with standard jet fuel and poured into engines.

But there’s a limit on how much sustainable fuel a standard jet engine can take, according to Chen. Petroleum-based jet fuel contains aromatic compounds that keep jet engines running properly. Many versions of SAF don’t have these compounds.


To operate the flight powered only by SAF, Virgin Atlantic mixed a fat-based biofuel with a bit of plant-based “synthetic aromatic kerosene,” a form of sustainable aviation fuel made from plant sugars that has the aromatic compounds needed to keep a jet engine running smoothly.

The absence of aromatics is an obstacle for a 100% SAF flight, but Chen calls that a “champagne problem.” First, he said, the industry has to figure out how to ramp up sustainable fuel production so that it makes up more than 0.1% of jet fuel.

“I would love it if we were talking about the fact that we’re bumping up against blending limits,” he said. “But we’re not there yet. We still have a lot of work to do.”

SAF supply and demand are limited

The SAF market is small and growing slowly. Chen says it suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem: Airlines don’t want to buy SAF because it can be several times more expensive than standard aviation fuel. And fuel refiners don’t want to invest in new manufacturing facilities — which could bring down the cost of sustainable fuels — because there isn’t enough demand from airlines.

Governments and industry groups are trying to break that impasse and jump-start the growth of the SAF market.

In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act offers tax credits to airlines that buy SAF, while the European Union has passed laws requiring airlines to use them. In Europe, airlines must use 70% SAF by 2050.

Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum has led an industry push to create carbon credits based on SAF sales. Through an elaborate accounting framework, airlines can calculate how many carbon emissions they’re avoiding through their use of sustainable fuels and sell those credits to companies or passengers who want to offset the emissions they generate by flying.

“We see a lot more attention, a lot more activity and investment and announcements around SAF partnerships, joint ventures and long-term off-take agreements,” Chen said. “So all these things are good signs, but we’re still in the early portion of growing this market to what it needs to be.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... lands-saf/

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Nearly 200 countries convened by the United Nations approved a milestone plan to ramp up renewable energy and transition away from coal, oil and gas.

Video: https://nyti.ms/3QW8SGs

The agreement is the first by the United Nations to explicitly call for countries to move away from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.CreditCredit...Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press

For the first time since nations began meeting three decades ago to confront climate change, diplomats from nearly 200 countries approved a global pact that explicitly calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels” like oil, gas and coal that are dangerously heating the planet.

The sweeping agreement, which comes during the hottest year in recorded history, was reached on Wednesday after two weeks of furious debate at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai. European leaders and many of the nations most vulnerable to climate-fueled disasters were urging language that called for a complete “phaseout” of fossil fuels. But that proposal faced intense pushback from major oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and Iraq, as well as fast-growing countries like India and Nigeria.

In the end, negotiators struck a compromise: The new deal calls on countries to accelerate a global shift away from fossil fuels this decade in a “just, orderly and equitable manner,” and to quit adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere entirely by midcentury. It also calls on nations to triple the amount of renewable energy, like wind and solar power, installed around the world by 2030 and to slash emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term.

While past U.N. climate deals have urged countries to reduce emissions, they have shied away from explicitly mentioning the words “fossil fuels,” even though the burning of oil, gas and coal is the primary cause of global warming.

“Humanity has finally done what is long, long, long overdue,” said Wopke Hoekstra, the European commissioner for climate action. “Thirty years — 30 years! — we spent to arrive at the beginning of the end of fossil fuels.”

The new deal is not legally binding and can’t, on its own, force any country to act. Yet many of the politicians, environmentalists and business leaders gathered in Dubai hoped it would send a message to investors and policymakers that the shift away from fossil fuels was unstoppable. Over the next two years, each nation is supposed to submit a detailed, formal plan for how it intends to curb greenhouse gas emissions through 2035. Wednesday’s agreement is meant to guide those plans.

“This is not a transition that will happen from one day to the other,” Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environmental minister, said this week. “Whole economies and societies are dependent on fossil fuels. Fossil capital will not disappear just because we made a decision here.” But, she added, an agreement sends “a strong political message that this is the pathway.”

ImageThree tall wind turbines, each with a bright yellow base and a white tower, on a calm, deep blue sea. The sky above is clear.
Wind turbines off Block Island, R.I.

The deal calls on nations to triple the amount of renewable energy installed around the world by 2030.Credit...Michael Dwyer/Associated Press

The deal represents a diplomatic victory for the United Arab Emirates, the oil-rich nation that hosted these talks at a glittering, sprawling expo center in Dubai under smoggy skies just 11 miles away from the largest natural gas power plant in the world.

Sultan Al Jaber, the Emirati official and oil executive presiding over the talks, faced complaints about conflicts of interest and weathered early calls for his removal. A record number of fossil fuel lobbyists flooded the summit. Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the company run by Mr. Al Jaber, is investing at least $150 billion over the next five years to increase drilling.

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But Mr. Al Jaber has also called a phaseout of fossil fuels “inevitable” and staked his reputation on being able to persuade other oil-producing nations to sign on to a major new climate agreement.

“Through the night and the early hours of the morning we worked collectively for consensus,” Mr. Al Jaber said on Wednesday morning before a room full of applauding negotiators. “I promised I would roll up my sleeves. We have the basis to make transformational change happen.”

It remains to be seen if countries will follow through on the agreement. Scientists say that nations would need to slash their greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 43 percent this decade if they hope to limit total global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to preindustrial levels. Beyond that level, scientists say, humans could struggle to adapt to rising seas, wildfires, extreme storms and drought.

Yet global fossil-fuel emissions soared to record highs this year, nations are currently on track to cut that pollution by less than 10 percent this decade and the world has already heated by more than 1.2 degrees Celsius. Many scientists say it is now highly unlikely that humanity can limit warming to 1.5 degrees, though they add that countries should still do everything they can to keep warming as low as possible.

Representatives from small islands, whose coasts are disappearing under rising seas and whose wells are filling with saltwater, said that the new climate agreement had a “litany of loopholes” and was not enough to avert catastrophe.

“This process has failed us,” said Anne Rasmussen, the lead negotiator for Samoa, who complained that the deal had been approved while a group of 39 small island nations was not in the room. “The course correction that is needed has not been secured.”

Past climate agreements have often failed to encourage meaningful action. In 2021, nations struck a deal in Glasgow to “phase down” coal-fired power plants. But Britain approved a new coal mine just one year later and global coal use has since soared to record highs.

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About two dozen protesters standing outside a conference center with banners. Six of the banners, lined up side-by-side on tall poles and referring to the global energy transition, read “fair, funded, feminist, full, fast, forever.”

A protest at the climate summit in Dubai on Wednesday.Credit...Rula Rouhana/Reuters

Even as negotiators from the United States and Europe pressed forcefully for a deal to reduce fossil fuel use, environmentalists pointed out that oil production in the United States was surging, while European countries were spending billions on new terminals to import liquefied natural gas amid the war in Ukraine.

American officials talked up the fact that Congress had recently approved hundreds of billions of dollars to adopt and manufacture clean energy technologies like solar panels, electric vehicles and heat pumps that would help curb the world’s appetite for oil, coal and natural gas.

As bleary-eyed diplomats in Dubai argued in all-night sessions over language in the text, they were forced to wrestle with the realities and stark challenges of a global transition away from fossil fuels in greater detail than ever before.

Saudi Arabia and oil and gas companies argued that the talks should focus on emissions, instead of fossil fuels themselves, saying that technologies such as carbon capture and storage could trap and bury greenhouse gases from oil and gas and allow their continued use. To date, nations have struggled to deploy that technology on a broad scale.

Other world leaders countered that the best way to cut emissions was to switch to cleaner forms of energy like solar, wind, or nuclear, reserving carbon capture for rare situations where alternatives are unavailable.

The final text calls on nations to accelerate carbon capture “particularly in hard-to-abate sectors.” But some negotiators expressed concern that fossil-fuel companies could seize on that language to continue emitting at high rates while promising to capture the emissions later.

Some oil producers already see wiggle room in the deal. In a television interview after the summit, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi energy minister, said that the agreement “buried the issue of immediately phasing out or phasing down” fossil fuels and instead “left space for countries to choose their own way.” He also insisted that Saudi Arabia’s oil exports would not be affected.

The final agreement also has language recognizing that so-called transitional fuels can play a role in the transition to clean energy and ensuring energy security. “Transitional fuels” is widely seen as code for natural gas, something that gas-producing countries like Russia and Iran had called for. Some nations seeking an end to fossil fuels lamented the inclusion of that language.

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An oil rig by the side of a two-lane road. The grass around the rig is yellow and the sky is gray.

A drilling site in New Mexico. Some see the inclusion of language on so-called transitional fuels, often used to mean natural gas, as a shortcoming of the deal.Credit...Nick Oxford/Reuters

An earlier draft of the agreement had urged nations to stop issuing permits for new coal-fired power plants unless they could capture and bury their carbon dioxide emissions. But countries like China and India, which are still building large new coal plants to satisfy growing energy demand, opposed overly tight restrictions. The language on new coal plants was removed from the final version.

Many African countries sharply criticized the idea that all countries should reduce their fossil fuel use at the same pace. Without outside financial help, they argued, African nations would need to exploit their own oil and gas reserves in order to grow rich enough to fund the clean energy transition.

“Asking Nigeria, or indeed, asking Africa, to phase out fossil fuels is like asking us to stop breathing without life support,” said Ishaq Salako, Nigeria’s environmental minister. “It is not acceptable and it is not possible.”

Some world leaders criticized wealthy emitters like the United States, Europe and Japan for failing to provide enough financial support to low-income countries to help them transition away from fossil fuels. In places like Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, developing nations are facing soaring interest rates that have made it difficult to finance new renewable energy projects.

The new agreement nods to the importance of finance, but countries agreed to tackle the issue at the next round of climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, next year.

“The text calls for a transition away from fossil fuels in this critical decade, but the transition is not funded or fair,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, an environmental group. “We’re still missing enough finance to help developing countries decarbonize and there needs to be greater expectation on rich fossil fuel producers to phase out first.”

At the same time, war and turmoil elsewhere in the world cast a shadow over the climate talks, which were already marked by sharp disagreements between nations. By tradition, U.N. rules require every agreement at the climate summit to be unanimously endorsed, and any one country can scuttle a consensus.

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A view of the main conference hall in Dubai, taken from the back of the room. All the seats are filled. At the front of the room, a long, beige table for the people presiding over the meeting and a green backdrop with the COP28 logo.

The agreement was reached after two weeks of furious debate at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai.Credit...Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press

For weeks, diplomats struggled to agree even on a location for next year’s summit, because Russia kept vetoing Eastern European nations that had criticized the invasion of Ukraine. Developing countries in the conference halls were furious when the United States vetoed a U.N. resolution for a cease-fire in Gaza.

After the agreement was reached Wednesday, John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, said that it showed countries could still work together despite their sharp differences.

“In a world of Ukraine and Middle East war and all the other challenges of a planet that is foundering, this is a moment where multilateralism has come together and people have taken individual interests and attempted to define the common good,” Mr. Kerry said. “That is hard, it’s the hardest thing in diplomacy, it’s the hardest thing in politics.”

But there were still signs that bitterness and distrust lingered. “Developed countries say a great deal about ambition in tackling the climate crisis when standing before the media,” said Diego Pacheco, the lead negotiator for Bolivia. “But in the negotiation rooms of this conference they are blocking and creating distortions and confusion and adding complexity to all the issues that are priorities for developing countries.”

As workers dismantled the coffee stands at the Dubai climate conference to make way for “Winter City,” a Santa-heavy extravaganza set to open at the venue on Friday, many were already eyeing the next big climate meetings. Governments still need to start taking concrete steps to increase funding for clean energy, including a major overhaul of the World Bank and other international financial institutions.

“Champions for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, both small island states and major economies, have pushed the rest of the world to realize this transition cannot be stopped,” said Tom Evans, a climate policy adviser at E3G, a research organization. “But this is only a small first step.”

Lisa Friedman, Somini Sengupta, Jenny Gross and Vivian Nereim contributed reporting.


Have Climate Questions? Get Answers Here https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... pe=Article
What’s causing global warming? How can we fix it? This interactive F.A.Q. will tackle your climate questions big and sm

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/clim ... 778d3e6de3

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What Can ‘Green Islam’ Achieve in the World’s Largest Muslim Country?

Clerics in Indonesia are issuing fatwas, retrofitting mosques and imploring congregants to help turn the tide against climate change.


Inspecting solar panels that provide electrical power to Istiqlal Mosque in December in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The faithful gathered in an imposing modernist building, thousands of men in skullcaps and women in veils sitting shoulder to shoulder. Their leader took to his perch and delivered a stark warning.

“Our fatal shortcomings as human beings have been that we treat the earth as just an object,” Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar said. “The greedier we are toward nature, the sooner doomsday will arrive.”

Then he prescribed the cure as laid out by their faith, which guides almost a quarter of humanity. Like fasting during Ramadan, it is every Muslim’s Fard al-Ayn, or obligation, to be a guardian of the earth. Like giving alms, his congregants should give waqf, a kind of religious donation, to renewable energy. Like daily prayers, planting trees should be a habit.

The environment is a central theme in the sermons of Mr. Nasaruddin, the influential head of the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, Indonesia, who has tried to lead by example. Dismayed by the trash sullying the river that the mosque sits on, he ordered a cleanup. Shocked by astronomical utility bills, he retrofitted Southeast Asia’s largest mosque with solar panels, slow-flow faucets and a water recycling system — changes that helped make it the first place of worship to win a green building accolade from the World Bank.

The Grand Imam says he is simply following the Prophet Muhammad’s instructions that Muslims should care about nature.

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A large prayer hall with about ten pillars and hundreds of people.

Friday Prayer at the Istiqlal Mosque in December.

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A man in a black hat, black robe and red scarf standing barefoot on a marble floor.

Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar says he is following the Prophet Muhammad’s instructions that Muslims should care about nature.

He is not alone in this country of more than 200 million people, the majority of them Muslims, in trying to kindle an environmental awakening through Islam. Top clergy have issued fatwas, or edicts, on how to rein in climate change. Neighborhood activists are beseeching friends, family and neighbors that environmentalism is embedded in the Quran.

“As the country with the largest number of Muslim people in the world, we have to set a good example for Muslim society,” Grand Imam Nasaruddin said in an interview.

The map locates the city of Jakarta, with the Istiqlal Mosque, and the city of Yogyakarta, with the Al-Muharram Mosque, on the island of Java, in Indonesia. It also locates Mount Lemongan, in the province of East Java.

MALAYSIA

INDONESIA

Jakarta

EAST JAVA

JAVA

Istiqlal Mosque

MOUNT LEMONGAN

WEST JAVA

Yogyakarta

Al-Muharram Mosque

Indian Ocean

AUSTRALIA

500 MILES

By The New York Times
While other Muslim nations also have strains of this “Green Islam” movement, Indonesia could be a guide for the rest of the world if it can transform itself. The world’s biggest exporter of coal, it is one of the top global emitters of greenhouse gases. Thousands of hectares of its rainforests have been cleared to produce palm oil or dig for minerals. Wildfires and flooding have become more intense, byproducts of the extreme weather propelled by higher temperatures.

Lasting change is a tall order.

Its vast reserves of nickel, which is used in electric car batteries, are a pathway to a cleaner future. But processing nickel requires burning fossil fuels. The president-elect, Prabowo Subianto, has campaigned to expand production of biofuels that could lead to deforestation. With the capital, Jakarta, sinking into the sea, the departing president, Joko Widodo, is building a new capital that is billed as a green metropolis powered by renewable energy. But to do this, he has cleared forests.

Image
A little girl crouching next to a woman in a head covering who is planting a sapling on the banks of a river.

Planting trees on the banks of the Cikeas River in West Java.
Image
A handful of people, both men and women, bagging trash from the banks of a river.

Hayu Prabowo, the head of environmental protection at the Indonesian Ulema Council, says people “listen to religious leaders because their religious leaders say you can escape worldly laws, but you cannot escape God’s laws.”
Some clerics see environmentalism as peripheral to religion. And surveys suggest there is a widespread belief among Indonesians that climate change is not caused by human activity.

But educating 200 million Muslims, the proponents of the Green Islam movement say, can drive the change.

“People will not listen to laws, they don’t care,” said Hayu Prabowo, the head of environmental protection at the Indonesian Ulema Council, the nation’s highest Islamic authority. “They listen to religious leaders because their religious leaders say you can escape worldly laws, but you cannot escape God’s laws.”

The fatwas issued by the council are not legally binding, but he said they have had a notable effect. He pointed to studies that found that people living in areas with rich forests and peatlands are now more aware that it is wrong to clear these lands because of the fatwas declaring these activities as haram, or forbidden.

Clerics have not always been on board with the movement. Two decades ago, a regional branch of the Ulema Council issued a fatwa against Aak Abdullah al-Kudus, an environmentalist in East Java Province who tried to combine a tree-planting campaign with the celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. He also received death threats.

But support for Mr. Aak grew over time, and he went on to start the Green Army, a group of tree-planting volunteers working to reforest Mount Lemongan, a small volcano where 2,000 hectares of protected forest had been cut down. Today it is covered with verdant bamboo and fruit trees.

Image
A man holding a sapling in his hands and talking a group of children sitting on vividly colored blankets inside a building.

A fatwa was issued against Aak Abdullah al-Kudus, an environmentalist in East Java Province, after he tried to combine a tree-planting campaign with the celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday.
Image
A man leading a prayer in the foreground of a large hill, in what appears to be wilderness.

Mr. Aak started the Green Army, a group of tree-planting volunteers reforesting Mount Lemongan in East Java Province.

“Our task is to be khalifahs, the guardians, of the earth,” Mr. Aak said. “That is the mission of Islam.”

Elok Faiqotul Mutia was inspired by the same sentiment. When she was 6 and growing up in a city in central Java, her father took her along to teak forests where she watched trees being cut down for her family’s furniture business. She said she wanted to “replace my father’s sins to the earth.”

One of her first jobs was a researcher for Greenpeace. She later founded Enter Nusantara, an organization that aims to educate youth on climate change.

Ms. Mutia said she believed Islam could offer Indonesians a gentler message about environmental conservation, pointing to a survey that found that Indonesian Muslims heed religious leaders more than scientists, the media and the president.

“Environmental activism always uses negative terms like ‘Phase out coal, reject coal power plants!’” Ms. Mutia said. “We want to show that in Islam, we already have values that support environmental values.”

Last June, her group raised more than $5,300 so that a small mosque in the city of Yogyakarta could install solar panels. More than 5,500 people donated funds, which went to the Al-Muharram Mosque, where congregants often sat in darkness because of chronic power shortages.

The new panels helped slash the mosque’s monthly power bill 75 percent to $1, its leader, Ananto Isworo, said. Congregants were already using harvested rainwater to cleanse themselves.

Image
A man turning on an indoor wall switch under a small arch.

Switching on the solar-powered lights in the Al-Muharram “eco-mosque.”
Image
A man in a white patterned shirt and black hat with a white motif.

The Prophet Muhammad, Ananto Isworo says, asked Muslims to “preserve the environment by cleaning it.”

Mr. Ananto said many of his peers call him the “crazy ustadz,” or the “crazy Muslim teacher,” saying preaching about the environment has nothing to do with religion. He counters by saying there are roughly 700 verses in the Quran and dozens of hadiths, or sayings, by the Prophet Muhammad that speak about the environment. He cites Prophet Muhammad’s dictum: “God is kind and likes kindness, God is clean and likes cleanliness.”

“This is an order to preserve the environment by cleaning it,” Mr. Ananto said.

The Istiqlal Mosque is a testament to what can be achieved. Mr. Nasaruddin said installing 500 solar panels has lowered the mosque’s power bill by 25 percent. With slow-flow faucets and a water recycling system, worshipers use far less water to cleanse themselves before prayers.

Image
Solar panels on the roof of a building with a large foyer. Jakarta’s skyline is in the background.

Solar panels have helped cut Istiqlal Mosque’s power bills by 25 percent.

Image
Men washing their feet as part of an ablution ritual.

Thanks to slow-flow faucets and a water recycling system, worshipers use much less water to cleanse themselves before prayers.

It was the first place of worship in the world to be awarded a green building certificate by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation. The Grand Imam said that he wants to help transform 70 percent of Indonesia’s 800,000 mosques into “eco-masjids,” or ecological mosques.

The Green Islam movement is also getting a push from Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, the country’s largest Muslim grassroots organizations, which fund schools, hospitals and social services. Nahdlatul Ulama has recruited Mr. Aak, the environmental activist, for its “spiritual ecology” program that uses Islamic teachings to drive environmental conservation.

One effort involves helping Islamic schools upgrade their waste management. Girls are encouraged to use reusable tampons, and the schools have a system that allows students to turn waste into things like organic fertilizer.

On a recent Tuesday, Mr. Aak led more than 50 sixth graders up a small hill on a Green Army mission. Many of the students were panting and sweating as they carried backpacks with plants poking out of them.

“Let’s pray to Allah and plant more often, because the Prophet Muhammad once said that even if you know that the end of the world is tomorrow and there are still seeds in the ground, he ordered: ‘Plant them,’” Mr. Aak said to them.

Stopping near the top of the hill, Mr. Aak knelt down to plant a banyan sapling. A breeze blew through, rustling the leaves of the nearby trees.

Hasya Nindita contributed reporting.

Image
A view of a building with a small minaret.

More than 5,000 people helped raise money to install solar panels at the Al-Muharram mosque in Yogyakarta.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Germans Combat Climate Change From Their Balconies

Plug-and-play solar panels are popping up in yards and on balcony railings across Germany, driven by bargain prices and looser regulations.

Video: https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/07/26/121 ... g_720p.mp4

People across Germany are installing lightweight solar panels, without the need for an electrician or heavy tools.Credit...Photographs and Video by Patrick Junker

By Melissa Eddy
Melissa Eddy visited the Solago warehouse in Hilden, Germany, and has been counting solar panels on balconies across the country for months.

July 29, 2024
At a Berlin trade fair for sustainability, a new gadget caught Waltraud Berg’s eye — a solar panel small enough to be easily installed on the side of a balcony and then plugged into a wall socket to feed energy produced by the sun directly into her home.

“I was absolutely thrilled to learn that such a thing even existed, that you can generate your own power and be more independent,” said Ms. Berg, a retiree who installed several panels on the south-facing balcony of her Berlin apartment by herself.

Each of the lightweight panels produces only enough electricity to charge a laptop or run a small refrigerator. But in homes across Germany, they are powering a quiet transformation, bringing the green revolution into the hands of people without requiring them to make a large investment, find an electrician or use heavy tools.

“You don’t need to drill or hammer anything,” Ms. Berg said. “You just hang them from the balcony like wet laundry in Italy.”

ImageHouses with solar panels attached to their balconies.

In Germany, individual plug-in panels sell for as low as 200 euros, or about $217, at big box stores.Credit...Patrick Junker for The New York Times

More than 500,000 of the systems have already been set up across Germany, and new laws that relaxed rules around solar panel installation have contributed to a boom in use. In the first six months of the year, the country added nine gigawatts of photovoltaic capacity, the amount of solar power a system produces, according to the Federal Network Agency, a German regulator.

“We are seeing a continuous increase in solar installations in particular,” said Klaus Müller, president of the agency. “Compared to the total capacity at the end of 2023, almost 10 percent more solar capacity was added. Of that, two-thirds was installed on buildings, which includes balcony systems.”

As part of its push to move away from dependence on Russian natural gas, the European Union is looking to quadruple the amount of power generated through photovoltaic sources by 2030, to 600 gigawatts. Germany aims to reach a third of that amount by the same year. This year, Germany is expected to add more solar power capacity than any other European country, according to Rystad Energy.

Some of the solar panels sold in Germany are made by European companies, but most are produced in China, whose dominance of the global industry allows it to deliver solar panels at increasingly lower costs, said Nicholas Lua, an analyst with Rystad Energy.

“Small-scale panels have benefited from the same economies of scale that China’s solar manufacturing system has at its disposal,” he said.

In the early 2000s, Germany encouraged people to install solar panels on the roofs of their homes by rewarding them with payments, known as feed-in tariffs, for sending energy to the grid. But those have become less lucrative in recent years, making such large-scale investments less attractive.

Image
An aerial photo of buildings with solar panels on top in a rural area of trees and fields.

Solar installations are not only popular on homes in Germany: More and more businesses are installing photovoltaic systems.Credit...Patrick Junker for The New York Times

The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.

Janik Nolden, who together with two friends founded Solago, a German start-up that sells rooftop solar panels and the plug-in versions, said most of his customers were interested in installing the panels on their own.

Most of the ones that he sells are produced in China, which makes better quality and less expensive panels than anything being produced in Europe. “If my customers were demanding European-made panels, I would stock them,” he said. “But they aren’t.”

Prompted by questions from do-it-yourselfers, Mr. Nolden started posting videos online explaining how the panels work, as well as how to plan, install and optimize them. “D.I.Y. is the future,” he said. “People want to do as much by themselves as possible.”

The company, which opened in a small storefront in a suburb of Düsseldorf, has since grown to a fill a warehouse roughly the size of a Manhattan square block, with 50 employees helping to ship eight trucks worth of deliveries across the country and into neighboring Austria.

Elsewhere in Europe, plug-in solar panels are popular in the Netherlands, and interest is growing in France, Italy and Spain, in part driven by a steady drop in prices.

In Germany, individual plug-in panels sell for as low as 200 euros, or about $217, at big box stores. Complete sets, including mountings, an inverter and cables, are about twice that cost.

Electricity prices in Germany jumped after Russia invaded Ukraine, and have now settled at around 25 euro cents per kilowatt-hour. But they remain among the highest in Europe.

Image
Janik Nolden, Julian Dienst and Kevin Malek inside a factory.

The founders of the German company Solago, from left: Janik Nolden, Julian Dienst and Kevin Malek. The company sells rooftop solar panels and the plug-in versions.Credit...Patrick Junker for The New York Times

Image
Two people inside a warehouse moving solar panels onto a table.

Solago, which opened in a small storefront in a suburb of Düsseldorf, has since grown to a fill a warehouse roughly the size of a Manhattan square block.Credit...Patrick Junker for The New York Times

Adding to the appeal in Germany are recently passed laws that effectively prevent landlords and co-op boards from blocking solar panel installations and drop some of the more cumbersome registration requirements.

Together, these changes have made the idea of installing a personal solar system attractive to a wider consumer base.

“We are seeing more diversity, more older people and more women,” said Christian Ofenheusle, who founded and runs EmpowerSource, an enterprise that promotes small-scale solar use. A growing user group, he said, is young people with families who are concerned about climate change.

“They say they want to make a contribution,” Mr. Ofenheusle said. “Even if it amounts to savings of less than €100 a year, they will gladly take it because it’s for the next generation.”

A recent development is the introduction of small-scale batteries that allow users to store electricity generated during peak hours to be used in the evenings or overnight.

Apps allow users to check how much electricity they are producing at any given time. For some, that has become as addictive as social media or a video game, generating friendly rivalries among neighbors, but also whetting their appetites for more savings.

Image
Hands holding a phone with an app showing a home with solar panels on the roof.

The Solago app that allows customers to track the electricity yield of their solar panel systems.Credit...Patrick Junker for The New York Times

Image
A man walking with a stick, with a pool in the foreground and solar panels on the roof of a structure behind him.

German laws have made solar panel installations attractive to more consumers.Credit...Patrick Junker for The New York Times

When Thomas Losch first heard about a neighbor’s solar setup — several plug-in panels connected to smart meters that allowed the neighbor to optimize electricity use — he scoffed at the idea.

But he became overcome with curiosity, and two months ago, he purchased his own set of plug-in panels to place on his garage roof. Now the first thing he does every morning is open his app to check how much electricity is being generated.

“I am now completely hooked on how I can produce energy from the sun,” he said. “It has become like taking a drug.”

That phenomenon is not uncommon, Mr. Nolden said. Many of his customers who buy the smaller plug-and-play kits eventually return to order a full rooftop system.

After only two months of having the smaller system on his garage, Mr. Losch said he was already contemplating the possibilities of things he could power with a full rooftop installation, such as an electric vehicle with a larger battery.

His system already generates enough energy during the day to run portable air-conditioners in the bedrooms on the upper floor of his home. Beyond what he is saving financially, however, he said he felt a sense of satisfaction to be taking steps to reduce his carbon footprint.

“It’s not like I’m saving the world, but I am doing my bit,” he said. “It’s a good feeling.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/busi ... hange.html

[kmaherali]

This Is How the World’s Favorite Scent Disappears



By Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Ms. Nezhukumatathil is a professor at the University of Mississippi, a poet and the author of “Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees,” from which this essay is adapted.

Aug. 4, 2024
Once you notice vanilla, you’ll smell it everywhere. It’s in sweets, pharmaceuticals, mosquito repellents, seltzers, makeup and hair products. When real estate agents host open houses or advise clients, they suggest infusing the house with vanilla, for its particular ability to put potential buyers at ease.

Two years ago, scientists from the University of Oxford and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden presented 225 people from nine cultures around the world with 10 different scents. All agreed that the scent of fresh vanilla was their favorite. From custard to candles, we live in a world suffused with vanilla.

And the plant that produces it is in danger.

Extracted from the bean pod of a delicate orchid, vanilla must be grown under exceptionally precise conditions along a very narrow band of the earth, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. This supreme finickiness makes it unusually vulnerable to the growing shocks of climate change and deforestation.

Most commercial production of vanilla is in Madagascar, Mexico and Tahiti. As the world warms, cyclones and storms in these regions are growing stronger, toppling the orchid blossoms and vanilla beans before they get a chance to fully mature. In 2017, a Category 4-equivalent cyclone decimated an estimated 30 percent of the vanilla vines in Madagascar, which produces 80 percent of the vanilla used around the globe. As a result, the price of vanilla bean pods surged to nearly $300 a pound. The increasingly erratic weather, along with pressure to cut the forests that harbor the orchids, is particularly worrisome for farmers who rely on this crop and wait up to four years for a single orchid to blossom.

Most people I know who brood and despair over climate change might know that extreme weather could soon threaten crops like corn and coffee. But you probably haven’t fathomed what it would be like to lose the scent and the taste of real vanilla. Yes, vanilla substitutes exist, but there is no replacing the symphonic complexities of the real thing. For me, nothing can compare to the memory of baking birthday cakes or leche flan in the kitchen alongside my mother, or having my own teen sons baking alongside me.

To understand how much we could lose if real vanilla disappears, you have to understand the history, some of it dark, of how it became a global commodity. We wouldn’t have vanilla ice cream, perfumes or desserts without a 12-year-old named Edmond Albius. His mother died in the early 19th century, on the island of Réunion (then called Bourbon), off the coast of Madagascar. The man who enslaved him was a botanist who fussed and fumed over his vanilla orchids, which simply would not bloom.

At the time, only bees were known to pollinate vanilla flowers, something that posed a problem for plantation owners in the tropics who wanted to grow this expensive spice, second only to saffron in price. The lure of vanilla’s irresistible flavor and scent was spreading around the globe, creating a feverish demand and desire for it. By the 17th century, the French started adding vanilla to ice cream, as Tim Ecott notes in his book “Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid.” The French writer Marquis de Sade requested vanilla pastilles while in jail. Madame de Pompadour, a mistress of King Louis XV, liked to have chocolate flavored with vanilla and ambergris alongside celery soup and truffles at dinner, Ecott writes.

Historians don’t know if the young Mr. Albius was ordered to find a solution or if he came up with it on his own, but in 1841 he developed the technique — flattening the anther sac and the stigma of the orchid blossom with his finger and thumb — that is still used today all over the world to pollinate vanilla orchids manually and produce large quantities of the extract. This discovery made vanilla far easier to farm commercially, and helped turn vanilla into the essential, pervasive spice it is today.

Farmers also figured out that when you bend vanilla vines, which grow about 30 to 50 feet tall, and keep them low, they produce more flowers. But the orchids’ bloom is brief: Morning sees them unfurl in wide display, but by noon, the flower closes, making the window for hand pollination very narrow.

Then, for each pollinated blossom, it takes nearly a year to fully grow and dry the beans. When the pods shrivel and become supple, they turn a dark brown color and then give off the rich aroma.

Farmers today grow about 4.4 million pounds of dried vanilla beans annually, but it takes about 300 hand-pollinated orchid blossoms to produce just one pound. So if wind and unusually heavy rains knock these blooms off early, farmers must start the whole lengthy yearslong process from scratch. They don’t cultivate them indoors because of the extremely high costs of providing enough space, heat, indirect sunlight and humidity for the vines, which grow draped on trees and shrubs and extend to upward of 100 feet, flourishing under the soft, dappled light that pokes through a tree canopy.

Because the production of real vanilla is so labor-intensive, scientists have experimented with creating substitutes. But many of these substitutes are terrible for the environment, creating large amounts of wastewater.

One vanilla substitute is castoreum — a secretion from beavers that use it to stake their claims and mark their territory. Castoreum extract possesses a warm, sweet odor and may be used as a stand-in for vanilla extract in many dairy products and baked goods, but mostly now is used for perfumes and colognes. I don’t want a world where these are the only vanilla-like scents we have left.

When I cook or make gifts for friends using vanilla beans, my fingertips stay oiled with the scent of vanilla beans and the tiniest whiff of orchids for days. The scent creates a kind of nostalgia of having sweets cooked up for me at various family gatherings — that my grandparents in India and the Philippines have passed on to my parents here in the States, and that I hope gets carried onto my sons living in north Mississippi.

It would be a pity to lose these soothing, warm sensations to something chemically made and one-dimensional, while the real deal gets relegated to the memory bins of an older generation. Mostly, I hope that we’ll learn to recognize the value and the time it takes to grow a single vanilla pod, especially in the tropical belt full of birdsong and bright-colored insects. Under that colorful canopy of wild and audacious feather and carapace, the pale vanilla orchid glows as if it were a sentinel, a lighthouse offering us a gentle warning before it’s too late.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Our Taste for Flesh Has Exhausted the Earth

Are we ready for the future of meat?



More than almost anything else we put into our mouths, meat matters. What flesh we eat — or forsake — tells the world who we are, what class and caste we belong to, what gods we believe in. Halal or kosher. Pure-veg or paleo. Hormel or farmers’ market.

Worldwide, 80 billion animals are slaughtered every year for meat. Raising all those animals has already claimed most of the world’s farmland. It has led to zoonotic diseases and vast deforestation. It has polluted air and water and spewed planet-heating gasses into the atmosphere.

It has also enabled many more people to eat meat more often than ever before, which has in turn put pressure on governments to both keep meat prices affordable and reduce its climate hoofprint.

What will all of this mean for the $1 trillion global meat industry?

A new kind of factory farming is on the horizon, one that grows meat in giant steel vats, either from real-live cells taken from real-live animals or from tiny microorganisms.

This new industry has many names — lab meat, cellular meat, cultivated meat, precision fermentation. I think of it as chicken without wings.

Its fans praise its extreme efficiency: feet, tails, feathers, snouts are eliminated. Its detractors say it’s a threat to culture and livelihoods. To some people, it’s just uncanny, or maybe it’s just the natural next step in how uncannily the modern food system has denatured meat.

Countries most worried about the future of their food supply are racing to conquer the new meat market. The world’s billionaires are making a bet on it too, including global meat giants. The United States is among the first countries to permit its sale. And even though it’s only occasionally available at fancy restaurants in the United States and at one specialized deli in Singapore, it’s already so divisive that it’s pre-emptively banned in places as dissimilar as Florida and Italy.

The commercial future of cellular meats is still unclear. And even if it takes off, it’s unclear whether it’s any better for our health or the health of the planet than the industrially produced meat most of us eat today.

The one certainty is this: Our taste for flesh has already exhausted the Earth. Our relationship to meat is, once again, changing.

ImageRows of prepacked chicken cuts line grocery store shelves.

In 2022, Americans ate 100 pounds of chicken per person, double the amount 40 years ago.Credit...Rory Doyle for The New York Times

Meat, Revolutionized

Years ago, on a reporting trip in Darfur, I was traveling with a group of rebel fighters sustained by cornmeal. We were zigzagging through an arid valley in a pickup truck, when an unlucky bustard — a gangly bird with twigs for legs — ran across the sand. My companions shouted with delight.

They chased it and shot it deftly with one not-to-be-wasted bullet. They feathered it, skinned it, roasted it on an open fire. They shared what tiny filaments of flesh they could pull off that bird’s bones. It had been a long time since they’d eaten meat. It filled them, most of all with joy.

This drove home for me the difference between those of us who take meat for granted and those who do not. When it comes to meat, millions of people around the world eat very little of it.

Our earliest forebears trapped or hunted what meat they ate. When we learned to domesticate animals, we raised them on our land, or we roamed the land with our herds. No matter which tribe we belonged to, whether farmers or pastoralists, our animals were our assets. We ate their flesh in small portions, and we ate almost every bit of them, especially the poorest among us. Guts, feet, heart.

The Industrial Revolution changed meat. In the 19th century, refrigeration enabled meat to be trucked in from far away, or shipped from even further away, which eventually led to the razing of forests in places like Brazil.

//All About the Things We Love to Eat

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Oct. 21, 2020

Production became more efficient. By the late 1940s, antibiotics became routine in chicken feed. By the late 1990s, genetically modified corn and soy brought bumper crops of animal feed. Animals were bred to be bigger and faster-growing. In the U.S., government subsidies helped: free groundwater, federally backed loans, price guarantees for feed crops.

And meat went big. Today the $1 trillion global meat industry is dominated by a handful of corporations, including JBS, Cargill, and Tyson. Since 1961, meat production has quadrupled, dwarfing the growth in the human population, which merely doubled.

Meat went from being special to being an everyday entitlement. The more we prospered, the more flesh we ate.

China’s meat consumption jumped sharply, from about 6.6 pounds per capita in 1961 to more than 140 pounds in 2021. But the United States became the lions of Planet Carnivore. On average, Americans went from eating around 207 pounds of meat in 1961 to 280 pounds, in 2021, and chicken came to dominate. In 2022, Americans ate 100 pounds of chicken per capita, double the amount 40 years ago.

It wasn’t just chicken consumption that changed. It was the bird itself.

Follow, as I have, a chicken truck to the slaughterhouse — birds crammed into cages, feathers flying across the road — and you realize how profoundly we have altered the nature of the animal. Thanks to feed and breeding, an 8-week-old chicken today is about four times heavier than an 8-week-old chicken was 60 years ago. Their breasts are so large that they can have a hard time standing.

The New Factory Farm

Image
Two people wearing white lab coats and plastic hairnets stand amid a tangle of stainless steel pipes and tanks. One of the tanks is labeled “Future Meat.”

Bioreactors at a Believer Meats facility in Israel.Credit...Emma H. Tobin/Associated Press

Future chicken may not have to stand at all. Why bother having feet? Or wings? Or beaks? All that animal eats up scarce resources: land, water, feed, time.

This is the theory of change for the cellular-meat industry. Take away the animal. Grow the animal tissue.

Cellular meat injects itself into many of the fraught ethical, environmental and financial dilemmas around meat consumption. Industrial farms, where animals live short, crowded lives, often produce fewer emissions per pound of meat. On small farms that eschew chemicals, animals live arguably better lives, but they produce more expensive meat and, usually, more greenhouse gas emissions.

With cultivated meats, there are no animals, and no concern over animal welfare. They may still rely on genetically modified corn and soy for feedstock, but if bioreactors run on renewable energy they will have a smaller climate footprint.

Meat production today accounts for somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, depending on how you measure it. Reducing those emissions is vital if the world is to reduce the hazards of planetary heating.

The new factory farm grows chicken cells in giant steel vats called bioreactors, swilling with amino acids, vitamins and sugars, all the things cells need to grow. The time it takes for the cells to multiply enough to make solid pieces of chicken tissue: roughly two weeks.

Little wonder that the world’s food giants, including ADM, Cargill and Tyson Foods, have invested in the new meat upstarts, albeit nominally compared to what they pour into legacy meat operations. This new industry is still, well, embryonic. It’s tough to scale up production in bioreactors.

Nonetheless, in North Carolina, the old industrial meat country, a new meat hub is emerging. With money from Big Food, an Israeli firm called Believer Meats is building a 200,000-square-foot factory near Wilson, N.C. That plant, when finished, aims to produce 26 million pounds of cultivated chicken a year.

Image
Two people stand at a hot plate preparing food in a frying pan as a third person photographs them with a phone.

Chef Mika Leon, left, preparing tostadas made of lab-grown chicken at a tasting event in Florida recently.Credit...Josh Ritchie for The New York Times

Nearby, on the North Carolina State University campus, Jeff Bezos, whose empire includes the Whole Foods supermarket chain, is funding a research hub through his charitable foundation. Its goal: Figure out how to ramp up production, reduce costs and make it possible for alternative proteins, including cultivated meats, to be on supermarket shelves.

A handful of countries, concerned about ensuring their future food supply, are promoting meat alternatives, including cellular meats. They include Israel, Singapore and South Korea as well as China, which has identified cultivated-meat research as a priority in its latest five-year plan for agriculture.

On a blazing Thursday evening, I got a taste of future chicken in the unlikeliest of places, a rooftop party in Miami. The whole thing was for show. Florida would ban the sale of cultivated meat in three days’ time. And anyway, cultivated meat wasn’t yet available in Florida or anywhere else in the country.


Have Climate Questions? Get Answers Here. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... latedLinks

Upside Foods, the cellular-meat startup hosting the party, passed out stickers. “Chicken so delicious it’s illegal,” they read. (In August, the company sued Florida over the ban.)

A crowd gathered around the chef, Mika Leon, as she laid chicken strips onto a pan, rubbed with Cuban spices. The oil sizzled as she flipped the strips over, showing how the tissue charred. She laid the strips on a crisp fried tortilla, with a dollop of mashed avocado and some lime.

When I took a bite, it was more or less standard supermarket chicken — chewy, fleshy, somewhat bland. It worked well with all the fixings, and it would be just fine in a nugget or a breakfast sausage, which I’m not a fan of. It tasted nothing like the gamy, rich country chicken I’ve eaten in home-cooked stew in the Himalayan foothills.

When Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida, signed into law the ban on cultivated meat, he said he was “fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.” In treating meat’s future as a culture war issue — feet-and-feathers traditionalists vs. lab-grown disrupters — he was signaling just how deeply people feel about the matter.

The Meaning of Meat

I understand the meaning of meat. I grew up eating it. My father prepared giant vats of goat curry for Durga Puja, the most auspicious holiday in the Bengali Hindu calendar. For family birthdays, we ordered shredded pork at our favorite Sichuan restaurant. When we could splurge, we got dressed up for steak. My greatest pleasure on a cold winter’s night is still a burger, medium rare, with a whiskey, neat.

For many of us, meat carries memories. It signals who we are. It is the stuff of a Juneteenth barbecue. It’s Thanksgiving turkey. Biryani for Eid.

But we are now confronting nature’s limits. There simply isn’t enough land or water on Earth for the world’s 8 billion people to eat meat like Americans. That reality is crashing against our love of flesh, and it’s going to force us to reconsider our relationship to it once again.

Meat could go one of two ways: Cultivated meat could sputter out. Livestock’s effects on our health and the environment could drive up its costs. We in the rich world could have to return to a time when we ate meat for special occasions, as millions of others still do, because they can only rarely afford it.

Or the new factory-farmed meat could take off. In this future, our supermarket meat counters could offer bioreactor beef alongside a grass-fed option. And in that future, we would have to confront some new meaty questions. Will we still sacrifice a goat to praise our gods? Is a Sunday roast still special if there’s no skin and bone? Who will get to bite into what kind of meat? How will we make sense of the flesh on our plates?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/clim ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Silicon Valley Renegades Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet

Some restless entrepreneurs are releasing pollutants in the sky to try to cool the planet.


Luke Iseman, a co-founder, with Andrew Song, of Make Sunsets, prepared a weather balloon full of sulfur dioxide and helium for launching into the sky near Saratoga, Calif.Credit...

SARATOGA, Calif. — A silver Winnebago pulled up to a self storage warehouse on the outskirts of a Silicon Valley suburb and three renegade climate entrepreneurs piled out, all mohawks, mustaches and camouflage shorts.

Working swiftly, the men unlocked a storage unit crammed with drones and canisters of pressurized gas. Using a dolly, they wheeled out four tanks containing sulfur dioxide and helium, and stacked them on the floor of the camper van. Then, almost as quickly as they arrived, they were on the road, headed for the golden hills near the Pacific Ocean.

With their jury-rigged equipment and the confidence that comes with having raised more than $1 million in venture capital, they were executing a plan to release pollutants into the sky, all in the name of combating global warming.

“We’re stealth,” said Luke Iseman, one of the co-founders of Make Sunsets, delighting in their anonymity as he rode in the back. “This looks like just another R.V.”

Make Sunsets is one of the most unusual start-ups in a region brimming with wild ideas. Mr. Iseman, 41, and his co-founder, Andrew Song, 38, claim that by releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, they can reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space, thereby cooling the planet.

It’s a gutsy undertaking, yet it has at least a partial grounding in science. For 50 years, climate scientists have suggested that releasing aerosols into the stratosphere could act as a buffer and reduce the heat from the sun. Volcanic eruptions have temporarily cooled the planet this way in the past, but no one has attempted to intentionally replicate the effect at scale.

As the perils of climate change become more extreme, interest in the idea, known as stratospheric solar geoengineering, is growing. Scientists at Harvard, Cornell, Colorado State and Princeton are studying it and the University of Chicago recently launched an ambitious research program.

ImageThree men wearing respirators stand in a grassy clearing as they fill a large white balloon with gas from several large canisters.

Make Sunsets’ founders claim that by releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, they can reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space, cooling the planet.

But all geoengineering is not created equal. While universities are pouring millions of dollars into research, others, avowing concern about global warming and seeing a business opportunity, are barreling ahead without any scientific study. Mr. Iseman got the idea for Make Sunsets from a sci-fi novel.

So far, the company is releasing sulfur dioxide on a tiny scale. But some experts say that broader efforts to disrupt the delicate interactions between the Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, land and sea ice could result in catastrophic unintended consequences. For example, blocking sunlight could interfere with the monsoon season, which is critical for agriculture, income and food supply in India.

Animated by the “move fast and break things” credo that permeates Silicon Valley, the founders of Make Sunsets have no such concerns. They are selling “cooling credits” to customers who want to offset their personal carbon emissions. And a few times each month, after selling enough credits, they head for the hills and release balloons full of sulfur dioxide into the California sky.

“This is the one tool realistically that can cool Earth in our lifetime,” said Mr. Iseman. “Every day we’re not doing this leads to needless harm.”

Sikina Jinnah, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California Santa Cruz who has studied geoengineering, is also concerned about harm. “They are a couple of tech bros who have no expertise in doing what they’re claiming to do,” she said. “They’re not scientists and they’re making claims about cooling credits that nobody has validated.”

∴
A 30 minute drive along winding roads led the men to a steep unpaved road, and then to a patch of dirt on an undeveloped hillside. Mr. Iseman bought the land during an online foreclosure auction a few years ago, thinking he might camp on it someday and commute to work. That never happened, but when he started sending up balloons, he realized he already owned an ideal launch site.

After bringing the Winnebago to a rest, Mr. Iseman and Mr. Song, along with another Make Sunsets employee, Kiran Kling, got to work. They spread out a dirty canvas tarp and rolled out the tanks of sulfur dioxide and helium. Then Mr. Iseman produced a large, cream-colored weather balloon from a blue Ikea shopping bag.

The men donned respirators, then ran a hose from one of the tanks to the balloon. As Mr. Iseman held the balloon off the ground, Mr. Song opened the tank’s valve, releasing a steady stream of sulfur dioxide.

Image
A recreational vehicle is parked at the top of a hill overlooking a stream that cuts through a hilly expanse lined with trees.

The Make Sunsets R.V., parked at the launch site, a property Mr. Iseman bought during an online foreclosure auction a few years ago, thinking he might camp on it someday and commute to work.

After a few minutes, Mr. Kling, who stands well over six feet tall, used a hand-held scale to weigh the balloon. It contained about 1.7 kilograms, or almost four pounds, of sulfur dioxide.

The men then switched tanks and continued to inflate the balloon, this time with helium. When the balloon was full and Mr. Iseman was holding it above his head, he sealed it with rubber bands and some electrical tape, then affixed a GPS device that would track its movements.

The technology is rudimentary and little changed from Mr. Iseman’s first efforts to alter the stratosphere, which he attempted after a peripatetic career on the fringes of the tech industry.

Mr. Iseman grew up near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and studied business at the University of Pennsylvania. After backpacking around the world, he moved to Austin, Tex., where he started a bicycle taxi company. It was an entrepreneurial lark for Mr. Iseman, and an expression of his belief that societal change could follow individual action.

He then co-founded Edyn, a start-up that made an automated garden monitoring system. That company was nurtured by Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator previously run by Open A.I. founder Sam Altman.

BUYING TIME
A series on the risky ways humans are starting to manipulate nature to fight climate change

They’ve Got a Plan to Fight Global Warming. It Could Alter the Oceans. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/clim ... moval.html
Sept. 23, 2024

This Scientist Has a Risky Plan to Cool Earth. There’s Growing Interest. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/clim ... ering.html
Aug. 1, 2024

Warming Is Getting Worse. So They Just Tested a Way to Deflect the Sun. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/clim ... ering.html
April 2, 2024

Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/clim ... e-ccs.html
March 31, 2014

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/clim ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

A U.S. Farming Giant Gets a Message 11 Stories Tall

Using natural materials from environmental disasters around the country, a Brazilian activist sends a message to a U.S. farming giant.


A building in downtown São Paulo, Brazil, was painted with a 15,000-square-foot mural of an Indigenous leader, Alessandra Korap.

Two weeks ago, on a rooftop 11 stories above São Paulo, a popular Brazilian street artist, Mundano, sat on an overturned bucket, mixing water, varnish and ash collected from fires that had ripped through a Brazilian rainforest to create a palette of gray tones.

Over the ledge awaited a newly whitewashed, 15,000-square-foot wall of an elegant apartment building in plain view of the buses and cars heading down a main artery leading to the city center.

That evening, he and five assistant artists would start painting a massive mural of an Indigenous leader, Alessandra Korap, in a scorched Amazonian landscape, holding up a sign urging Cargill, the Minnesota-based agricultural giant, to rid its supply chain of crops grown on recently deforested land.

The project is a collaboration with the conservation nonprofit Stand.Earth, which is funding the mural as part of a campaign targeting Cargill.

The final result was officially unveiled on Wednesday, though it is hardly a secret to the supermarket shoppers, passers-by and those who work in the small shops that surround a parking lot below the mural.

“I’m already tired and we haven’t started yet,” said Mundano, whose (rarely mentioned) first name is Thiago.

ImageA man swirls water and other substances in a shallow bowl, and some of it shoots in the air.

Mundano, a street artist, mixing water, varnish and ash collected from fires that had ripped through a Brazilian rainforest to create a palette of gray tones.
Image
People walk in a parking lot next to a building with a partially painted mural.

The mural is near a main street leading into the center of São Paulo.

Over long days and some nights, Mundano and his assistants worked from eight suspended scaffolds (like the ones window-washers use).

They used paints made with ash from fires in the Atlantic Rainforest in Brazil, mud from floods that destroyed swaths of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, charcoal from charred Amazonian trees and clay from drought-plagued river basins across the country.

“I’m connecting the droughts and the floods and the fires because it’s all linked,” said Mundano, who claims this will be Brazil’s largest mural painted with only natural materials (plus a water-based acrylic varnish), a style that has become his trademark.

The final step was to fill in the six-story-high sign held in the mural by Ms. Korap, a member of the Munduruku tribe who was raised in Pará state. It reads: “Stop the destruction” in English and Portuguese, with the hashtag #KeepYourPromise.

The “promise” refers to a pledge Cargill made in November 2023, setting 2025 as a deadline “to eliminate deforestation and land conversion from its direct and indirect supply chain” of soy and other crops in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Cargill is one of the largest exporters of Brazilian soy.

Image
An artist holds a picture of a person next to a white sheet that has different color samples painted on it.

Mundano, left, and his assistant analyzing the color details of the mural against a photo of Ms. Korap.
Image
Two hands hold a large round sieve, which has a mound of rust-colored particles on it. The hands are holding a large pestle.

Artists made their paints using ash from burned Amazon forests, mud from floods, charcoal from charred trees and clay from drought-plagued river basins in Brazil.

“I want to show an image of our struggle, of this fearless warrior woman,” said Ms. Korap, who was one of six winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2023. “It says we’re alive, we’re fighting every single day.”

In an April report, Stand.Earth cited 18 companies with “confirmed or suspected links” to Cargill that have deforested or converted wild land to soy production. The environmental advocacy group covered the mural’s cost, around $80,000, according to Mathew Jacobson, the Cargill campaign’s director.

In a statement, Cargill said it was “on track to deliver” on its commitment “to eliminate deforestation in soy supply chains’’ in the region.

It also accused Stand.Earth of misrepresenting Cargill’s work.

Of the companies listed in the April report, Cargill said, two are not in its supply chain, three have been removed and four have not done business with Cargill for years. Cargill said it had investigated the others and cleared them of using deforested land for crops.

Earlier this week, Mundano and his crew methodically painted, filmed and then used brooms and water-filled fire extinguishers to erase 21 versions of the sign calling out members of the billionaire Cargill-MacMillan family, who together control the company.

Image
A person uses a pressurized tank to spray water on a wall.

Mundano using water to erase signs calling out members of the Cargill-MacMillan family.
Image
A man uses a broom to erase lettering on a wall.

Brooms also were used to erase the names.

The versions were based on paintings made by members of the Munduruku community at a workshop Mundano held with Ms. Korap in July. They will be delivered by Mr. Jacobson to the Cargill families’ homes in the United States.

“We see them as the leaders and the driving force of the industry that’s most responsible for the destruction of the forests and other landscapes as well,” Mr. Jacobson said, noting that Cargill’s private ownership avoids accountability to shareholders.

“Because of the amount of resources the owners have, the idea of putting in place systems to monitor those things is incumbent on them,’’ he added, “instead of continuing to profit from the destruction.”

Cargill more than doubled its profit in Brazil from 2022 to 2023, the company reported in April.

The campaign is also targeting a long-planned and much-delayed 580-mile railway known as the Ferrogrão, or Grain Rail, which is meant to make it easier to transport agricultural and mining products to the Amazonian river port of Miritituba.

Parts of the planned route of the privately financed government project slice through protected lands.

Cargill said it was “not part of the consortium that was formed to build’’ the railway, but said that increasing transportation capacity while protecting the environment was vital to feeding the world.

Image
Two men look upward and gesture with their hands.

The artist known as Hulk, left, and Mundano checking out the progress of the painting.
Image
A man sits in a chair indoors and smokes from a pipe.

Daniel Wera smoking a petyngua, a ceremonial pipe, before starting work.

By last week, the artists at the mural site had their routines down. An artist known as Hullk (whose real name is André França), a native of Manaus, a city in Amazonas State, grated dried guaraná fruit into water to make a natural stimulant commonly used in his region.

Daniel Wera, smoked a petyngua, a ceremonial pipe used by the Guarani people he has worked with in the São Paulo region. “I use it so I don’t forget why I’m here,” he said. “I’m here to represent the forest.”

Two sheets of paper displayed over 20 earth and ash tones and their “recipes.” Mundano sat on a varnish bucket, grating clay collected from a drought-stricken region near Ms. Korap’s home in Pará state.. The resulting shade would be used for the traces of smoke floating by trees in the mural’s background.

“Is there any Atlantic rainforest left?” said another artist, André Firmiano, referring not to the fast-disappearing Brazilian ecosystem but to the dark gray tone used to outline the trees.

“No,” someone said.

“So let’s make some more.”

Later, Mr. Wera and Mr. Hullk hung from one of the eight scaffolds, adding detail to the feathers that make up Ms. Korap’s towering tiara, checking their work against a laminated photo of her.

Image
People work along three scaffolds on the side of a building. A large mural is behind them.

Mundano and his assistants worked from eight suspended scaffolds.
Image
Two people stand on a scaffold along the side of a building. One of them is holding sheets of paper.

“I’m connecting the droughts and the floods and the fires because it’s all linked,” Mundano said.

Down below, shoppers and workers regularly looked up, curious and mostly admiring.

“This mural was a gift,” said Frankie Medici, 46, who runs the XBull Grill burger stand next to the lot and had grown accustomed to the drab gray paint that preceded the mural.

“Customers have taken so many photos and wondering what’s going in the sign,’’ he said. “It will be a jab at someone, at the very least.”

A few shoppers made pointed jokes, wondering if taxpayer money was financing the art (it was not) and whether the warning to “stop the destruction” was directed at Brazil’s leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. (It wasn’t).

Ms. Korap planned to visit São Paulo next month and view the mural, and has posted drone footage of the in-progress artwork on Instagram.

“Whether we are rich or poor, whether we live in the forest or in the city,” she said, “if we don’t protect our Mother Earth, we will all crumble.”

Image
People walk along a street. Across the street, a giant mural looms.

During the project, shoppers and workers regularly looked up, curious and mostly admiring it.


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/trav ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Record Air Pollution Hospitalizes Hundreds in Pakistani City

The authorities in Lahore, home to 13 million people and the country’s second-biggest city, have told half the work force to stay home.

Video: https://nyti.ms/3NYucKo

Residents of Lahore are suffering from the toxic haze that has pushed the city’s Air Quality Index to off-the-chart levels by U.S. standards.CreditCredit...Rahat Dar/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Yan Zhuang and Zia ur-Rehman
Zia ur-Rehman reported from Karachi, Pakistan.

Nov. 7, 2024
Updated 8:01 a.m. ET
Impounding polluting vehicles. Tearing down kilns. Banning rickshaws. Closing some barbecue restaurants.

These are some of the measures officials in Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab, have put in place as record-breaking air pollution chokes the region, hospitalizing hundreds and forcing students and workers to stay home.

Lahore, the capital of Punjab and Pakistan’s second-largest city, on Sunday had its worst air quality ever recorded, prompting the government to shut all primary schools this week. In the days since, the city has been cloaked in toxic, eye-irritating smog. On Thursday, Lahore had the worst air quality of any city in the world, according to IQAir, a Swiss air quality monitoring company.

“The air feels thick, and it’s exhausting just to breathe,” Safdar Masih, 42, a gardener in Lahore, said on Thursday. Even with windows and doors shut, the smog had seeped into homes, he said.

On Wednesday, the authorities announced new public health measures, expanding the school closures to include all secondary schools until Nov. 17, and advising residents to wear masks in public spaces. The directives will affect more than 70 million people in the province. In Lahore, home to 13 million people, the authorities have ordered half of all workers to stay at home.

“This is a critical situation,” Marriyum Aurangzeb, a senior minister in Punjab Province, said at a news conference on Wednesday. She warned that the poor air quality could linger for another 10 days.

Lahore regularly tops the list of the world’s most polluted cities, according to IQAir, which last year ranked Pakistan among the four countries with the worst air quality. The World Bank has said that air pollution shortens the average life expectancy of Pakistanis by 4.3 years and leads to losses equivalent to about 6.5 percent of the economy.

ImageA worker arranges bricks at a kiln. The air is thick with smog.

Laborers at a brick kiln, on the outskirts of Lahore on Wednesday.Credit...Arif Ali/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On Sunday morning, the city’s Air Quality Index surpassed 1,000 for the first time since IQAir began keeping records. Anything above 301 on the index is considered a hazardous situation that can cause severe eye and throat irritation and serious heart and lung conditions. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers anything beyond 500 as off the charts.

On Wednesday morning, Lahore had a reading of 1,165.

Most years, crop burning by farmers in northern India and Pakistan contributes to a sharp deterioration in air quality in October and November, according to NASA. Vehicle emissions, industrial activity and the lighting of cooking fires are also factors. Still, the levels of pollution this year have alarmed officials and residents, with medical experts raising concerns about the lasting damage of prolonged smog exposure.

More than 900 people were admitted to hospitals on Tuesday with respiratory problems in Punjab, Ms. Aurangzeb said, adding, “If you don’t want to become one of them, for God’s sake, stay at home.”

Syeda Fatima, a nurse at Jinnah Hospital, a major public health center in Lahore, said children every day were “arriving with severe respiratory problems.”

“Their lungs are still developing, and this air could cause lifelong health issues,” she said.

Image
People walk along a path surrounded by trees and bushes. The air is thick with smog.

Smoggy conditions in Lahore on Thursday.Credit...Arif Ali/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Northern India is also experiencing high levels of air pollution. New Delhi, the Indian capital, had the second highest air pollution among world cities on Thursday, according to IQAir.

In Pakistan, the authorities in Punjab have also targeted industries they believe contribute to the smog, banning the use of outdoor barbecues that use wood or charcoal, and ordering motorized rickshaws off the roads.

The police in Punjab announced on Tuesday that they had impounded 521 vehicles for excessively polluting the air. And Punjab’s Environment Protection Department said on Wednesday that 12 kilns used for making bricks were torn down as part of its anti-smog measures.

“Smog has made our lives miserable,” said Muhammad Kafil, a rickshaw driver who earns the equivalent of $4 a day. “Children and the elderly at home are sick, struggling to breathe, and now the government has imposed fines on rickshaw drivers, as if we are the only cause of the smog. In these conditions, what is a poor man supposed to do?”

Pollution in Pakistan


Heavy Smog Will Close Schools in Pakistan’s 2nd-Largest City for a Week https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/worl ... ahore.html
Nov. 4, 2024


Pakistan Blames India for Its Air Pollution. Its Citizens Disagree. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/worl ... ution.html
Nov. 22, 2019


In Lahore, Pakistan, Smog Has Become a ‘Fifth Season’ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/worl ... istan.html
Nov. 10,

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/worl ... _id=182539

[kmaherali]

Trump’s Return Hangs Over U.N. Climate Negotiations

The election of Donald J. Trump is sapping momentum from global climate talks as diplomats brace for his pro-fossil-fuel agenda.


A glass and metal structure marks an entry point to venue in Baku Azerbaijan where COP29, the U.N. climate talks, begin on Monday.
Credit...Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press

Lisa Friedman
By Lisa Friedman
Nov. 11, 2024
Updated 2:25 a.m. ET

World leaders gathering in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Monday for a global climate summit face a bleak reality: The United States, the country responsible for pumping the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, is expected to soon drop out of the fight against climate change.

The climate talks are the first significant United Nations gathering since Donald J. Trump won last week’s American presidential election, and foreign diplomats are looking for any signals about how Mr. Trump might approach multilateral negotiations.

After his victory, American priorities are expected to quickly shift.

As he did in his first term, Mr. Trump, who mocks climate change, intends to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, a 2015 international pact to protect the planet that he has called “horrendous.”

That means the United States will renege on its commitment to reducing greenhouse gases at precisely the moment that scientists say nations must sharply and rapidly cut the heat-trapping pollution to avoid the worst consequences of an overheated planet.

It also means that the country, the wealthiest in the world, is likely to abandon plans to give financial aid to poor countries, which have done little to cause global warming but are unable to cope with climate disasters that are growing more severe. Financial aid for developing nations is a focus of the U.N. talks, which are known as COP29 and are scheduled to last two weeks.

Instead of transitioning away from fossil fuels, as the United States and nearly every other country pledged last year, the incoming Trump administration will soon go in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill,” export more gas to other nations — even as the U.S. is already the world’s biggest exporter — and make it easier to burn coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

Image
Donald Trump is pictured on a stage at a campaign rally where one person in the crowd is holding up a sign that says "Drill, Baby Drill!"

Donald J. Trump during a campaign event at Alro Steel in Potterville, Mich., in August.Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times

“We’re not going to worry about emissions anymore,” said Myron Ebell, a former senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization, who helped lead a transition team in Mr. Trump’s first term. “The United States under the Trump administration will lead the world to a better future, and the sooner you forget all this stuff about reducing emissions the better.”

Mr. Trump will not take office until Jan. 20, but his impending return and broader geopolitical tensions appear to be sapping momentum at COP29 even before it gets underway.

The leaders of the European Commission, Germany, France, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, Japan, Australia and Papua New Guinea, along with President Biden, are skipping the event. So are major financiers, including the heads of Bank of America, BlackRock, Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank.

Representatives of the Biden administration in Baku are lame ducks now, with little leverage over any deal. Nations hoped to unlock billions or even trillions of dollars for clean energy and climate adaptation through an agreement, but that is now viewed as harder to achieve. America’s credibility as a reliable partner in the fight against climate change is also on the line.


//What Is COP29? Here’s What to Know About Global Climate Talks. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/clim ... aijan.html
//Nov. 7, 2024

“We do have some experience from the first term of the Trump administration, when he took the U.S. outside the Paris Agreement,” said the ambassador of Samoa, Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr Pa’olelei Luteru, who leads a coalition of small island nations in the climate talks. “If it’s going to be the same, then we are extremely worried.”

Senator Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, said world leaders are correct to be anxious. “Donald Trump will withdraw America’s leadership on the global stage, and he will bend over backward to help the fossil fuel industry,” he said.

Months ago, foreign diplomats insisted that they were prepared for the possibility of a second Trump administration. This week many acknowledged being stunned by his decisive win.

“To find that suddenly Trump has won the popular vote with a big margin, that is a big question. Why is it so?” asked Laurence Tubiana, who served as France’s climate ambassador during the creation of the Paris Agreement. She called it “a blow for climate action.”

Mr. Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests to discuss his plans for the Paris Agreement, but multiple people close to his transition team said an executive order already has been prepared to start the withdrawal process.

Biden administration officials and environmental leaders insisted that the clean energy revolution is unstoppable, regardless of who controls the White House.

They also are assuring global allies that America’s governors and mayors will help fill the void, as they did the last time Mr. Trump made the United States the only country to withdraw from the Paris accord.

“We’ve been in this position before,” said Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, a Democrat who chairs a coalition of 24 governors that is sending a delegation to Baku. “We are going to continue our commitments.”

Many made the case that circumstances are different from 2017, when Mr. Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris accord. The agreement was then in its infancy, and the global transition to clean energy was just getting started. Today, almost every country has a plan to draw down emissions, and clean energy is big business. Last week, more than 650 investors with $33 trillion in assets worldwide urged governments to enact policies aligned with preventing temperatures from reaching catastrophic levels.

The United States has since passed a landmark climate change law. The legislation, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, is pumping at least $390 billion into wind, solar and other clean energy manufacturing.

Image
Two smokestacks release white clouds from a coal-fired power plant.

DTE Energy in Michigan is phasing out coal fired power plants as the company shifts to cleaner, renewable energy sources.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Image
Rows of white wind turbines pop out of flat farm fields.

Wind turbines are part of DTE’s renewable energy initiative.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Mr. Trump wants to repeal the law, but that could be politically challenging since about 80 percent of the investment in new manufacturing so far has flowed to Republican congressional districts.

“The investments that were stimulated by this administration not only are good for the economy but they’re quite stable,” said John Podesta, Mr. Biden’s climate adviser, who is leading the American delegation in Baku.

“If you go sector by sector, the new power generation is going to be clean,” he said. “The desire to build out next generation nuclear is still there. The hyper-scalers are still looking for deals with clean energy. The auto companies are still investing in electrification and hybridization. All these trends are not going to be reversed overnight by Trump.”

And yet climate change math is unforgiving. Without the United States working at the national level to slash emissions and galvanize other countries, hope of preventing average global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels is fading. That is the threshold beyond which climate scientists say the risks significantly increase for more destructive storms, drought, wildfires, heat waves and species extinction.

The European Union agency that monitors global warming said last week that 2024 is shaping up to be the hottest year in recorded history and the first calendar year in which global temperatures had consistently risen 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

A single year above 1.5 degrees Celsius does not mean the Paris Agreement target has been missed. Under the terms of the pact, for that to happen, temperatures would have to stay at or above 1.5 degrees over a 20-year period.

To constrain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, scientists say nations must cut emissions 40 percent by the end of this decade. Instead, global greenhouse gas emissions soared to a record 57 gigatons last year and are not on track to decline much, if at all, this decade, according to a recent U.N. report.

The consequences of that warming are being felt on every continent. This year alone, three months worth of rain fell in a two-week period in Brazil and caused disastrous flooding, and torrential rains led to flash floods in Spain that killed more than 219 people. In the United States, Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit in quick succession, killing more than 230 people and causing as much as $34 billion in damages combined, according to an estimate by Moody’s, a financial ratings agency.

“This is the new normal,” said Niklas Höhne, a scientist with NewClimate Institute, a nonprofit group. “It will not go away. Only once we stop greenhouse gas emitting, the temperature will stop rising and the likelihood of such events will stop rising.”

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A woman carrying a bag is ankle deep in muddy water as she walks along a street.

A person walks through a mud-covered street as the area recovers from last week’s widespread flooding in Massanassa in the Valencia region of Spain, on Saturday.Credit...David Ramos/Getty Images

By some estimates, compared with Mr. Biden’s policies, Mr. Trump’s plans could add about four billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2030. That’s about equal to the amount produced annually by the world’s 140 lowest emitting countries.

If Mr. Trump withdraws the United States from the Paris Agreement, it would be the third time the nation has abandoned an international climate agreement.

Under President Bill Clinton, the United States joined the Kyoto Protocol, a legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that was a precursor to the Paris Agreement. The Senate rejected it, though, because it set binding emissions caps but only for wealthy nations, letting China off the hook.

President Barack Obama reignited the country’s climate efforts and helped design the Paris Agreement. Under that pact, nations of all levels of wealth and responsibility for causing climate change, including China, agreed to set domestic emissions targets.

The accord essentially ties together every nation’s voluntary emissions pledge in a single forum, with the understanding that countries will set even tougher targets over time. It is not legally binding and there are no penalties for failure to meet climate goals.

Mr. Trump nevertheless saw the Paris deal as damaging to the American economy, and called it “draconian.” He also halted American contributions to a global climate fund. Mr. Biden restored American participation on his first day in office in 2021.

Jonathan Pershing, who served as deputy climate envoy in the Obama and Biden administrations, said no other country followed the United States out of Paris under the first Trump administration, and he believes none will now.

But the erratic American behavior makes it hard to win the trust of allies, Mr. Pershing said. And this could be the moment when America finally loses its ability to convince other nations to act more aggressively on climate. “That to me is the worst outcome,” he said.

Mr. Luteru, the ambassador of Samoa, said he is not ready to accept that the United States would abandon the climate fight. “The U.S., we’re hoping that their conscience will tell them that they are part of this world,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/clim ... 778d3e6de3
****************

Why Is a Petrostate Holding This Year’s Climate Talks?

The economy of Azerbaijan, host of COP29, relies almost entirely on the fossil fuels that are the main driver of global warming.


An oil site near the COP29 venue on the outskirts of Baku, Azerbaijan.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times

Heading into this month’s United Nations-sponsored climate negotiations, the world is contending with rising climate chaos and declining democracy.

It won’t be lost on any of the attendees in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, that the talks are being hosted by an autocratic government whose economy relies almost entirely on the fossil fuels that are the primary driver of climate change.

How could such a country become the hosts?

As with so much at the United Nations, which is essentially a globe-spanning bureaucracy, the decision came down to protocol. And that protocol, because of particular weaknesses within it, was easily manipulated by Russia, which is itself an autocratic petrostate.

By tradition, the U.N. climate summit is supposed to take place in a different part of the world each year. The Eastern European group, which includes most former Soviet states, was scheduled to anchor COP29, as the 2024 talks are called, and was required to reach unanimous consensus on which of its members would host.

Over months of rancorous debate within the bloc, Russia blocked the selection of every country that had condemned its invasion of Ukraine, vetoing potential candidates like Bulgaria, Slovenia and Moldova.

That left Armenia and Azerbaijan as the final contenders on the table. One problem? They had been locked in their own war for decades.

In September last year, Azerbaijan forcibly reclaimed an Armenian-backed enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh, the most recent bout in the long-simmering conflict. Tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians fled an Azerbaijani offensive.

For obvious reasons, they threatened to veto each other’s bids to host COP29.

Russia then brokered a deal that would see Azerbaijan return 32 Armenian prisoners of war and Armenia drop its opposition to Azerbaijan’s COP29 host bid.

With less than a year to prepare (far less time than most hosts get) the Azerbaijanis have scrambled to put together a team that can engineer some of the world’s most consequential diplomatic juggling.

Mukhtar Babayev, the country’s ecology minister and a former executive at the state oil company, was put in charge of the talks. He scarcely anticipated filling such a high-stakes role. “We are not famous as a green-transition ideas developer,” he said in an interview in July. Nearly all of Azerbaijan’s exports are oil and gas.

Their production takes place in plain view of the COP29 venue, a sports stadium on the outskirts of Baku. The city is home to between 2 million and 3 million people, and its skyline has been remade with oil money. That has allowed the relatively small city to put on large, flashy events like this one; each year it hosts a Formula 1 Grand Prix that sees its downtown city streets transformed into a racetrack.

Near the stadium, creaking rigs excrete pools of stagnant oil. Day and night, a refinery less than a mile away burns off methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. Just offshore in the Caspian Sea are scores of drilling platforms.

Much of those fossil fuels flow west toward Europe through pipelines. Even as Europe in recent years barred its banks from financing fossil fuels, it has gobbled up Azerbaijani gas and now hopes others will fund the expansion of the pipelines.

“While Azerbaijan became this year’s host for unusual reasons,” said David Waskow, a climate expert at the World Resources Institute, “being there should once again focus attention on the need to tackle the fossil fuels at the heart of the climate crisis.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/clim ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Emergency Declared as Smog Chokes Parts of India and Pakistan

The authorities in New Delhi closed schools and urged residents to stay home. Similar measures have been implemented in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province.

Video: https://nyti.ms/4hUjuCj

Since moving to New Delhi, which had the world’s worst air quality on Monday, Ameesha Munjal hasn’t been able to exercise or see friends. She has been on several medications to battle sickness caused by the pollution.

By Yan Zhuang
Nov. 18, 2024
Updated 3:07 a.m. ET
The authorities in New Delhi closed schools and urged people to stay indoors as toxic smog, which has plagued neighboring Pakistan for weeks, choked India’s capital in what officials called a medical emergency.

New Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to about 55 million people, had the world’s worst air pollution on Monday, according to IQAir, a Swiss company that measures air quality. The reading on its index rose to over 1,600.

Anything above 301 on that index is considered hazardous, potentially leading to severe eye and throat irritation and serious heart and lung conditions. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency essentially considers anything beyond 500 to be off the charts.

“All of North India has been plunged into a medical emergency,” Atishi Marlena, the chief minister of Delhi, said on Monday, adding that many cities were “reeling under severe levels of pollution.”

The same pollution has enveloped parts of Pakistan, where the authorities have banned most outdoor events, canceled most classes and told some workers to stay home.

Parts of northern India and Pakistan experience severe air pollution each year in the late fall, as farmers burn straw left over from their rice harvests to make room for new planting. But even for a region with cities that regularly top the list of the world’s most polluted, the air quality readings this year have been dire.

ImageThree women, including two that are covering their mouths, walk along a street as smog fills the air.

A street in Lahore, Pakistan, shrouded in smog on Monday.Credit...Arif Ali/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

For weeks, Punjab, the largest province of Pakistan, has experienced some of the worst air pollution on record, surpassing 1,000 on IQAir’s index for the first time earlier this month.

Punjab, which borders India, began closing some schools two weeks ago. It enacted more measures in the following days and asked workers to stay at home last week. It has also banned outdoor events and most construction activity, and it has closed parks, playgrounds and monuments.

The authorities there declared a health emergency on Friday, warning of an “unprecedented rise” in the number of patients with lung and respiratory diseases, allergies and eye and throat irritation.

Delhi announced similar measures last week as its air quality, which had been poor for weeks, deteriorated further. The capital region’s Commission for Air Quality Management said on Thursday that all primary schools would close and shift to online learning and that some construction work that generates dust and pollution would be halted.

On Sunday, more measures were introduced as the pollution worsened. Some secondary school classes moved online, while diesel trucks were banned from entering Delhi. The authorities have not indicated how long the measures will last.

Many scientists have said that farmers burning rice stubble in Punjab are largely responsible for the pollution, although Pakistani officials have also pointed at India, where farmers also burn crops. Falling temperatures also appear to play a part, with cooler air trapping pollutants and preventing them from dispersing over the Himalayas.


Record Air Pollution Hospitalizes Hundreds in Pakistani City https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/worl ... unjab.html
Nov. 7, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Bathing in Oil at a Climate Summit? It Leaves a Stain.

In Azerbaijan, site of the COP29 climate talks and a petrostate, people aren’t only proud of their oil. They swear by its health benefits and visit resorts to soak in it.


People from across the former Soviet Union flock to the health resorts in Naftalan, Azerbaijan, to bathe in the area’s oil.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

I bathed in oil during the U.N. climate summit.

It was crude oil from a half-mile underground, pumped into a bathtub at a hotel in Azerbaijan. It crept into every crevice of my submerged body and every fold of my skin. It smothered the hair on my limbs, making me look a little like an animal stuck in an oil spill.

Then came an attendant to scrape it all off.

Just a day earlier, I had been covering the United Nations’ annual climate conference, COP29, which is being held this month in Baku, Azerbaijan, a place that helped give rise to the modern oil industry more than a century ago, enabling and endangering our civilization.

Much has been made of the incongruity of those fighting to reduce fossil-fuel emissions gathering in a petrostate, but Azerbaijanis are proud of their oil, whatever conference attendees might think of it. For instance, it fueled the Soviet defeat of the Nazis in World War II.

Another point of pride lies beneath the dusty, shrub-dotted hills of Naftalan, a city a four-hour drive from Baku. The chocolate-colored oil extracted there doesn’t burn. Instead, the locals and Azerbaijani scientists say, it heals. If you bathe in it.

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A woman standing on the side of a street, holding open a passenger side door of a car as she speaks with the driver.

A street scene in Naftalan, about a four-hour drive from the capital, Baku. Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

But this oil, like all oil, is a finite resource. Naftalan’s recoverable deposits of “medical” oil were already halfway gone as of 2022. So the photographer Emile Ducke and I traveled there for an intimate encounter with the dwindling substance.

“They tell us that we’ve got reserves for 60 years,” said Ayten Magerramova, the head doctor at a Naftalan resort called Garabag. “After that, I don’t know.”

Once you bathe in crude oil, it’s hard to get rid of it. For that reason, the Garabag’s towels, bathrobes and bedsheets are all brown. My bed’s headboard had light brown stains. In the brown bathtubs in the spa area, the resin left over after draining the crude was almost black.

“The resin itself is a bit toxic,” Dr. Magerramova said. “But for skin problems, the resin really helps.”

Petroleum’s use as medicine goes back millenniums. Marco Polo, who traveled through present-day Azerbaijan, described its oil as a “salve for men and camels affected with itch or scab.” The Soviets said the unusual molecular makeup of some of the hydrocarbons in Naftalan’s oil made it suitable for treating arthritis, infertility, eczema and a host of other medical conditions.

There’s little Western research on the risks and efficacy of the oil, but an article published in 2020 in an Azerbaijani science journal reported that the oil has been found to work as an antiseptic and to have a “peculiar hormone-like effect on the function of sex hormones.”

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Three people sitting on chairs in a waiting room. A woman wearing a white lab coat is entering through a door.

Patients at a Naftalan health resort; people seek treatment here for a host of medical conditions, including arthritis, infertility and eczema. Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

Aydin Mustafayev, 62, a Naftalan native, remembers people digging wells by hand when he was a child. They filled their own jars with the oil and brought it home to treat the wounds of turkeys, dogs and sheep.

In 1995, Mr. Mustafayev returned from fighting in Azerbaijan’s war with Armenia. He recovered from his back injury, he said, by bathing in Naftalan oil for three years. Now, he oversees Naftalan’s 32 wells for SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-run energy company.

SOCAR gas stations are ubiquitous on Azerbaijani roads. In Naftalan, the company also delivers the local healing oil in its tanker trucks to about 15 resorts, which last week were attracting Baku residents escaping the crush of the climate conference.

Rita Dadasheva, 64, a schoolteacher, had previously sought out Naftalan oil treatments in Baku for her arthritis. But you could tell by the color, she said, that the oil was fresher closer to the source.

“The Naftalan here is the color of melted milk chocolate,” she said. “It’s just what you need.”

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Guests at the resorts swear by the health benefits of soaking in oil, though it requires a lot of effort to clean off.CreditCredit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

At another resort, Nafta, the head doctor, Zaur Valimatov, said he hoped to preserve the subterranean deposits for future generations by phasing out oil baths, which use copious quantities, in favor of oil wraps, which would use more modest amounts. In addition, he said, such wraps could reduce the toxic effects of crude oil’s “undesirable” components.

“Putting people in oil,” he said, “is a bit of a barbarian use of oil.”

Naftalan has seen a surge in visitors since 2020, when Azerbaijan recaptured part of the nearby territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, pushing back the line of contact with Armenian forces and making the city safer to visit. A woman from Omsk, Russia, said that more Russians started coming here “after the sanctions” — a reference to the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The sanitariums reuse their oil for a few months before getting a new delivery, though they say they filter it after each bather.

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A white-haired woman in a bathtub; she is covered with oil up to her neck.

Taslima Galieva, 70, from Russia, taking an oil bath. While the oil may look sticky, it’s actually slippery.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times
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A close-up of an oil-covered hand poking out of a bathtub.

The freshness of the oil can be judged by its color, according to bath veterans.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

Whatever the hygienic concerns, many guests — everyone I met came from a country that, like Azerbaijan, was formerly part of the Soviet Union — swore by the baths. Damira Vaitsel, 30, an executive assistant from Kazakhstan, said she’d successfully treated her psoriasis after two weeks in Naftalan. Bathing in oil, she said, made her feel like “the best oligarch in the city.”

Eventually, I decided I had to try it, too.

As the oil glugged toward my chest, I grew nervous, remembering what the doctors had said about its toxicity. Finally, the attendant turned off the flow and left me to ruminate on being enveloped in a viscous stew consisting of the remains of primordial creatures.

It was warm and pleasingly heavy, so the nervousness gave way to relaxation. It smelled something like paint, rubber or sour milk, but I grew used to it. I felt cocooned by this raw substance that helps define our lives.

I lifted my arms and legs and watched the rivulets. The oil matted down every hair on my arms and filled every cuticle, every line of my palms.

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Two older women wearing head scarves sitting at a table with dishes on it in a restaurant.

Naftalan has seen a surge in visitors since 2020, when Azerbaijan recaptured part of the nearby territory of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

And then the weirdness of this substance hit me. Though it looked like molten chocolate, it wasn’t sticky — it was slippery. My foot slid across my shin, my hands slid over my hips. It was otherworldly — netherworldly?

When it was time to get out, exactly 10 minutes later, the attendant had me stand and grip a handle attached to the wall. Here I was, I thought, a chocolate-covered strawberry before the chocolate had hardened. The attendant scraped the oil off with a long shoehorn, methodically, from top to bottom.

He rubbed me all over with many oversize paper towels that formed a brown pile at my feet. He continued in the shower, using copious gobs of soap, before finally handing me a washcloth and directing me in broken and bawdy Russian to clean my more intimate parts myself.

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A man wearing a suit pointing to about 20 crutches and canes that are either affixed to a wall or leaning against it.

An exhibit at Naftalan’s museum of crutches and canes left behind by patients who felt they no longer needed them after getting treated in the oil baths.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

Back in Baku, I sought to process the experience. At the climate conference, it was becoming clear we humans are failing to stop the planet’s warming to ever more dangerous levels.

So I decided to seek out the place where, in one sense, it all began: a site marked as the world’s first industrially drilled oil well, dating to 1846, now located in a Baku swimming pool parking lot. Nearby, between the Caspian Sea and newly built apartment towers, scores of green-and-red oil derricks still whoosh, creak, rumble and bang.

I stood watching the hypnotic bob of one of them as a worker, Khalid, 54, stood next to me in silence.

“Take it out, sell it,” he eventually said. “It’s like God sent this to us.”

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A dirt road running through a dry landscape covered with shrubs. Mountains are in the distance.

The landscape outside Naftalan.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3