2822. ‘Cheddar Man,’ Britain’s Oldest Skeleton, Had Dark Skin, DNA Shows

By Ceylan Yeginsu and Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, February y, 2018

A likeness of “Cheddar Man,” Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton, at the Natural History Museum. Genetic evidence showed that he was dark-skinned and blue-eyed, scientists said. Photo: London Natural History Museum.

LONDON — He had dark skin, brown curly hair and blue eyes, DNA tests suggest, upending a common assumption that Britain’s indigenous populations were all pale skinned with fair features.

He is “Cheddar Man,” Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, which was discovered in 1903 in Gough’s Cave near the village of Cheddar in Somerset, in southwest England. He lived about 10,000 years ago in the Mesolithic period, the middle part of the Stone Age.

Scientists have now reconstructed his features, demonstrating that he was part of a population of ancient Western Europeans that, scientists have shown in recent years, had dark skin. Research has shown that fair skin pigmentation — long considered a defining feature of Europe — only goes back less than 6,000 years.

The research was led by the Natural History Museum and University College London. A news release about the research was released Wednesday, but the study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

“I first studied Cheddar Man more than 40 years ago, but could never have believed that we would one day have his whole genome — the oldest British one to date,” said Prof. Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum.

“To go beyond what the bones tell us and get a scientifically based picture of what he actually looked like is a remarkable and from the results quite a surprising achievement,” said Professor Stringer, who first excavated fossils at Gough’s Cave 30 years ago.

The new research shows that Cheddar Man belonged to a population known as Western hunter-gatherers, who first migrated to Europe about 14,000 years ago, he said. Today, about 10 percent of British ancestry can be linked to that population.

For decades Britons have debated over where they came from and what defines the nature of their genetic heritage.

As scientists are retrieving more DNA from ancient Britons, they are discovering how the isles received wave after wave of immigrants over tens of thousands of years.

This growing knowledge of ancient British genetics is allowing researchers to reconstruct the biology of early Britons — including their skin color.

“What may seem a truth — that people who feel British should have white skin — through time it’s not all something that is an immutable truth,” said Yoan Diekmann, a biologist at University College London who took part in the research.

Researchers studying the skin of living people have been able to determine how some variants influence pigmentation. When humans arose in Africa 300,000 years ago, recent research shows, they had a mixture of light and dark variants.

Humans first arrived in Europe from Africa about 45,000 years ago. Western hunter-gatherers migrated from the Near East much later, mostly replacing the Europeans already there.

Researchers studying a Spanish 7,000-year-old fossil first discovered that at least some Western hunter-gatherers were most likely dark-skinned and blue eyed. Later research confirmed this finding.

Until now, no one knew the affinity of Cheddar Man. The new research shows that he was part of the Western hunter-gatherer population.

“Before, we didn’t know what population lived in Britain, because we didn’t have a genome from there,” Dr. Diekmann said.

Studying a more recent skeleton, the researchers found evidence for the arrival of farmers in England, who descended from people in the Near East. These people carried some variants for lighter skin.Researchers have found genetic variants for light skin in Sweden and elsewhere farther east dating to 7,700 years ago. Later waves of people from the Near East and Central Asia also brought light-skin variants with them. Less than 6,000 years ago, Europeans generally shifted to this new color.

Why Europeans became white, and why it happened about 40,000 years after modern humans arrived in Europe, “are all pretty much open questions,” Dr. Diekmann said.

The DNA analysis on Cheddar Man was carried out by drilling a small hole into the ancient skull and pulling out bone powder, which supplies genetic information for the facial reconstruction.

His name came from the village where he was found. Archaeologists also found bones belonging to early human cannibals in Gough’s Cave that are thought to have existed nearly 5,000 years before Cheddar Man, but their DNA profile has no direct ancestry to him even though they were found in the same place.

Still, Cheddar Man has many living relatives.

One of them still lives in Somerset, according to a 1997 DNA experiment carried out by scientists at Oxford. He was identified as Adrian Targett, a high-school history teacher, who is related to Cheddar Man on his mother’s side, the study found.

Mr. Targett could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday, but in 1997 when a group of tourists from Los Angeles saw a sign with pictures that explained the relationship between the two men, one of them said, “They don’t look anything alike.”

2821. Large-Group Living Boosts Magpie Intelligence

By Science Daily, February 7, 2018

Australian magpies

Growing up in a large social group makes Australian magpies more intelligent, new research shows.

Using four tasks to test intelligence, scientists from the University of Exeter and the University of Western Australia found wild Australian magpies from larger groups showed "elevated cognitive performance."

The study also found more intelligent females produced more offspring.

The research suggests that the demands of living in complex social groups may play a role in the evolution of intelligence.

"Australian magpies -- from Western Australia, where we conducted our research -- live in stable social groups," said Dr Alex Thornton, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"We showed that individuals living in larger groups in the wild show elevated cognitive performance, which in turn is linked to increased reproductive success.

"Repeated testing of juveniles at different ages showed that the link between group size and intelligence emerged in early life."

Researchers examined 14 wild groups of Australian magpies (Western Australian subspecies Cracticus tibicen dorsalis) in Perth, ranging in size from three to 12 birds.

Cognitive ability of each magpie was tested using four tasks, including one in which they had to learn to associate a particular colour with the presence of food, a memory task where food was hidden in the same place many times.

There was also a test of self-control, in which magpies had to stop themselves from pecking directly at the food through the transparent barrier and instead had to go round to the sides of the tube to get the food.

Lead researcher Dr Ben Ashton, from the University of Western Australia, said: "The challenges of living in complex social groups have long been thought to drive cognitive evolution.

"However, evidence to support this is contentious, and has recently been called into question."

He added: "Our results suggest that the social environment plays a key role in the development of cognition.

"They also suggest that females who do well in cognitive tasks have more offspring, indicating there is the potential for natural selection to act on cognition.

"Together, these results support the idea that the social environment plays an important role in cognitive evolution."

---

Journal Reference:

1. Benjamin J. Ashton, Amanda R. Ridley, Emily K. Edwards, Alex Thornton. Cognitive performance is linked to group size and affects fitness in Australian magpies. Nature, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/nature25503

2820. Extreme Weather Explicitly Blamed on Humans for the First Time

By The Editors, Nature, December 19, 2017

Aerial view of the Coffey Park neighborhood burned in the October 2017 wildfires. Photo: Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times.

The weird weather just keeps on coming. An oppressive heatwave dubbed Lucifer stifled Europe in August, then a series of powerful Atlantic hurricanes hammered the Americas. Now, unseasonably hot and dry conditions are driving wildfires in California. During and after such events, the same question always arises: is global warming to blame?

Basic theory suggests that climate change will lead to more extreme weather, but making the link to individual events is difficult. There was a time when the typical answer was something along the lines of, ‘Perhaps, but it’s hard to say.’ The science has advanced over the past several years, and scientists have identified global warming’s relative contribution to many extreme weather events. Now, for the first time, climate researchers are reporting that some weather events would have been outright impossible without the warming influence of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

This kind of confident assertion rarely makes its way into the scientific literature. Yet it appeared in three studies included in a special annual edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) dedicated to attributing the causes of extreme weather events. If these results hold up, the implications would be profound and unsettling: humanity has already pushed the global climate into a new regime. To be clear, natural variability will always have a major role, but the blame for some of the most extreme weather phenomena — as well as some of the resulting impacts — would rest squarely on our own shoulders.

Released on 13 December, the research in question focused on 2016, the hottest year on record. One modelling study, led by scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, compared the temperature record to a simulated baseline climate without human greenhouse-gas emissions (T. R. Knutson et al. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc.99, S11–S15; 2018). In baseline simulations of some 24,000 years of weather from seven climate models, nothing like the record warmth of 2016 ever occurred. Greenhouse-gas emissions, chiefly those from fossil-fuel use, are a prerequisite for this kind of heat. What’s more, the paper indicates that greenhouse gases began to push the climate outside the realm of natural variability around 1980.

These conclusions necessarily assume that today’s climate models are sufficiently robust to capture the full range of natural variability. Others will certainly weigh in on the question, but the results suggest that we may need to reframe how we think about extreme events. The epic El Niño warming event in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean in 2015–16, for example, might have pushed global temperatures to record levels, but only because it was amplified by more than a century of greenhouse-gas emissions. From this perspective, global warming might also be to blame for many of the impacts that we normally attribute to El Niño itself, which roils weather patterns across the globe.

Indeed, a second study in the special issue identified global warming as the culprit behind heatwaves that gripped much of southeast Asia in 2016 (Y. Imada et al. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 99, S97–S101; 2018). In India, the heat killed at least 580 people from March to May. Thailand recorded its highest temperature ever — 44.6 °C — on 28 April, and energy consumption across the region hit record levels as people turned on air conditioners for relief. El Niño might have exacerbated the situation, says the study, but the temperatures “would never have happened without the anthropogenic warming”.

Researchers came to the same conclusion in a third study, focused on marine warming in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea that began in 2014 and climaxed last year (J. E. Walsh et al. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 99,S39–S43; 2018). El Niño might have been involved, but global warming set the stage, with far-reaching consequences. Ice on Alaskan rivers broke up earlier than ever; a lack of sea ice affected fishing; and toxic plankton blooms reduced shellfish harvests. Tens of thousands of seabirds were found dead, probably starved.

Extreme weather would be expected from time to time, regardless of global warming. In fact, of the 131 papers investigating extreme events that BAMS has published over the past 6 years, 35% found that global warming played no appreciable part. Nevertheless, the latest results suggest that the climate is entering uncharted territory, and that would mean that weather will increasingly fall outside the historical norm. From this perspective, humanity hasn’t just loaded the dice. We have replaced them with a whole new type that behave in ways we don’t fully understand.

The solution has been clear for more than two decades: governments need to take aggressive action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. By attributing real-world impacts to global warming, scientists are providing citizens and political leaders with further evidence that climate change is a clear and present danger, not a distant threat to future generations. Perhaps in 2018, policymakers will finally realize which way the wind is blowing.

2819. Why a Big Utility Is Embracing Wind and Solar

By Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey, The New York Times, February 6, 2018

Turbines at the Spring Canyon Wind Farm outside Peetz, Colo. The farm is owned by Invenergy, and produces energy under contract to Xcel Energy. Photo: Ryan David Brown for The New York Times. 

DENVER — Imagine planning your next trip and finding that Delta was selling first-class seats for less than the cramped middle seats in the back of the plane.

So you fly first class to New York and walk into the best French restaurant, only to discover that every dish is cheaper than the burger and fries down the street. Waiter, bring the duck à l’orange!

Fanciful as that might sound, something a bit like it is happening right now in the world of electricity.

Xcel Energy is a utility company with millions of electric customers in the middle of the country, from Texas to Michigan. In booming Colorado, the company asked for proposals to construct big power plants using wind turbines and solar panels.

The bids have come in so low that the company will be able to build and operate the new plants for less money than it would have to pay just to keep running its old, coal-burning power plants.

You read that right: In parts of the country, wind and solar plants built from scratch now offer the cheapest power available, even counting old coal, which was long seen as unbeatable.

Xcel, Colorado’s biggest power company, has pitched a plan to regulators that will involve replacing two large coal-burning units with renewable energy and possibly some natural gas. The company expects to save tens of millions of dollars as a result. Power bills in Colorado have been falling recently, and they are likely to fall further with this plan.

So the plan will be cheaper, but why will it be better?

Because it will cut Xcel’s emissions. That includes the carbon dioxide that is warming the planet, of course, but it also includes other pollutants, like the fine particles that can send children to the hospital with asthma attacks.

Under the leadership of Benjamin Fowke, a gray-haired chief executive trained in finance, Xcel intends to get far ahead of the clean-power requirements that have been imposed by its regulators.

Across its eight-state system, Xcel predicts that well over half its electricity will come from renewable sources by the mid-2020s. It will be one of the cleanest large utility companies in the country.

Now, to be clear, the low bids that Xcel is getting include some federal subsidies for clean power. Those subsidies are entirely defensible, but both parties in Congress have agreed to phase them out in a couple of years. Mr. Fowke is jumping now in part to lock in the subsidized prices.

Yet costs for renewable technologies are coming down so much that by the time the federal subsidies expire, wind turbines and large-scale solar arrays will still be competitive in large parts of the country.

The same trend is occurring all over the world, even in countries that do not offer subsidies, with renewable projects routinely beating fossil-fuel projects in countries like Mexico and India. We are confident more price declines are coming.

The costs of huge batteries are also falling, and it looks as if they will turn out to be a big help in managing the variability of wind and solar power. Xcel is already testing a battery project near Denver, and it may buy more batteries as part of the new plan.

How, exactly, did the cleanest energy technologies get on a path to become the cheapest?

In a way, the story is as old as Henry Ford and his Model T, or in more recent times, the amazing progress of computer chips.

As they scale up, new technologies often follow a “learning curve” that cuts the cost. But it’s not automatic. You have to build more and more units to drive the prices down.

That happened naturally with consumer products like Model Ts and cellphones, since everybody who saw the things wanted one. But the electricity system was a hidebound, monopolistic industry that used to spend virtually nothing on innovation.

For decades, utility executives who were wedded to coal regarded solar panels and wind turbines as expensive trinkets. But some farsighted political leaders saw the potential as early as the 1970s.

President Jimmy Carter was one. Jerry Brown, then serving as California’s youngest-ever governor, was another. Republican leaders in windy states, like Terry Branstad and Charles Grassley of Iowa, also got on board.

A combination of state clean-power mandates and federal subsidies helped to increase the market, as did similar policies in Europe. It has taken a couple of decades, but we are reaching a point where the new energy technologies are going to be cheap enough to drive a lot of the old coal-burning power plants off the market.

Nowadays, of course, the Trump administration is trying to take the country backward. It recently offered a scheme to subsidize coal and nuclear plants, but the plan was so ludicrous, a federal panel dominated by Trump appointees voted it down 5-0.

More ominously, the administration recently imposed costly tariffs on solar panels made in China. That is unquestionably bad for the solar industry, but we think it will turn out to be a temporary setback.

The real question now is how fast can the fossil-fuel plants be shut down. Even with favorable economics, human and institutional inertia is such that the remaining coal plants could take a long time to die.

States need to find ways to help utilities make the right decisions, perhaps by sharing some of the short-term costs of the shutdowns. They also need to protect workers who lose their jobs, and compensate communities that stand to lose part of their tax base.

Despite such concerns, the cost trends are clear, and inexorable. Mr. Fowke has positioned Xcel to take advantage of them, and a handful of other power companies across the country are taking similar steps.

But most utilities are still doing only what governments have required of them. With the best power plants becoming the cheapest, isn’t it time for their leaders to seize the future, too?

2818. IG Metall Union in Germany Win 28-Hour Work Week

By The Local, February 6, 2018

Almost one million employees with Germany's powerful metalworking union IG Metall won higher pay and the right to a reduced working week in an agreement with employers late Monday, potentially staving off the threat of fresh strikes after a week of walkouts.

Both the union and employers said in overnight statements they had reached a "tolerable compromise" with some "painful elements" covering 900,000 workers in key industrial state Baden-Württemberg, which could be extended to the 3.9 million workers in the sector across the country.

The key concession is the right for more senior employees to cut their working week to 28 hours for a limited period of six to 24 months.

The union had pushed for staff to have a right to more flexible working conditions around key life moments such as the birth of a child, looking after a relative or ill health - with the right to return to full-time hours afterwards.

But bosses rejected unions' demand that they continue paying full-time salaries to some of those who choose a limited period of reduced working hours.

Meanwhile, employers also gained more flexibility, to increase willing workers' weeks to 40 hours from the standard 35.

The compromise was "reasonably balanced" between the needs of the two sides, said Stefan Wolf, head of regional employers' federation Südwestmetall.

"Employees get more options to reduce their working time, while companies have more ways to increase the total number of hours worked."

Firms had feared that granting too generous a deal on hours would drastically slash the amount of labour available - at a time when the economy is bounding ahead, leaving some companies struggling to fill orders and to find skilled workers for open positions.

For IG Metall, "the agreement is a milestone on the way to a modern, self-determined world of work," said leader Jörg Hofmann.

The deal came after half a million workers drawn from sectors as varied as carmaking, electrical and electronic goods or metal production downed tools last week in 24-hour "warning strikes" as talks made little headway.

Union chiefs threatened an indefinite strike if their demands were not met, something that has not occurred in the sector since 2003.

Wage sideshow

With the focus on the union's unprecedented working time vision, their opening demand for a six-percent salary increase received less attention.

In the event, the two sides agreed a compromise of a 4.3-percent salary increase from April, with some additional one-off payments.

The deal "does justice to the outstanding economic position of the sector and will have a positive effect on the whole economy" by strengthening domestic demand, IG Metall chief Hofmann said.

But employers' leader Wolf said combined with the complex working time agreement, the wage increase would be "difficult to bear" for some firms.

With the increased pay packets agreed for 27 months, "it is not the start of an upward wage-price spiral in Germany," commented analyst Carsten Brzeski of ING Diba bank.

Some observers had suggested a muscular pay increase in Germany could help stoke inflation across the 19-nation euro single currency area, which the European Central Bank has struggled to steer towards its target of just below 2.0 percent.

The metalworkers' deal is, however, certain to be picked over in detail by other labour groups including civil servants, whose contracts are up for renegotiation in the coming months.

2817. The African Anthropocene

By Gabrielle Hecht, Aeon, February 6, 2018

Lagos, Nigeria, population 14.6 million.

Every year, human activity moves more sediment and rock than all natural processes combined, including erosion and rivers. This might not shock you. In fact, you’ve probably seen similar soundbites circulating online, signals of the sheer scale of how we’re terraforming the planet in the era of the Anthropocene. Natural and social scientists argue passionately about almost everything Anthropocenic, from the nuances of nomenclature to the start-date of the new geological epoch, but most agree on one thing: the Earth will outlive humanity. What’s in doubt is how long we will populate the planet, and under what conditions.

But who, exactly, are ‘we’?

Consider the cover of Nature in March 2015, in which two Earths, one blue-green and one grey, are entangled in a human body. The title emblazoned across the man’s six-pack invites us to see this body as representative of ‘thehuman’. But there’s no such thing as a generic human, of course; the image repeats the centuries-old conflation of human with white man. Perhaps the artist sought to subvert such racist overtones by obscuring the man’s eyes, making him an unseeing subject blind to the damage he’s wreaked on his body and his planet. Still, the image impels a common critique of the Anthropocene concept: it attributes ecological collapse to an undifferentiated ‘humanity’, when in practice both responsibility and vulnerability are unevenly distributed.

While the Anthropocene continually inscribes itself in all our bodies – we allhave endocrine disruptors, microplastics and other toxic things chugging through our metabolisms – it manifests differently in different bodies. Those differences, along with the histories that generated them, matter a great deal – not just to the people who suffer from them, but also to humanity’s relationship with the planet.

What picture of the Anthropocene, for example, emerges when we begin our analytic adventure in Africa instead of in Europe? Minerals from Africa played a big role in motivating colonialism and powering industrialisation. Their extraction fuelled the Anthropocene. Saying that ‘we’ move more rock than all natural processes combined doesn’t even begin to capture these violent dynamics. Who actually moved the rock? How did this movement affect the people and ecosystems around the mines, not just at the time of extraction but decades later?

frica is a large continent with a complex history, and answers differ by place and time. So let’s begin by considering two minerals with global significance: gold and uranium. A common means of exchange for centuries, gold became a major lubricant of industrial capitalism, underpinning national currencies in Europe and North America during periods of massive industrial expansion and investment. Uranium, for its part, fuelled the Cold War. Some of the waste from its fission in power plants and weapons will remain radioactive for more than 100,000 years – a clear flag of the Anthropocene epoch for future geologists (if there are any).

Over the course of the 20th century, South Africa’s Witwatersrand plateau – known more commonly as the Rand – supplied ample quantities of both minerals. Industrial gold mining began there in 1886. During the century that followed, hundreds of thousands of men migrated to the Rand for work, tunnelling deeper underground than anywhere else on the planet and making South Africa the world’s top gold producer. Workers lugged ore to the surface through narrow, hot, poorly ventilated stopes. Many lost their lives to rock bursts. Among those who survived, tens of thousands contracted silicosis from breathing dust year after year. The term did not yet exist, but the Anthropocene was nevertheless etching itself into the lungs of generation after generation of young African men.

In the early decades, much of the rock hauled so laboriously to the surface was too low-grade to justify processing costs. These residues (known in the industry as tailings) were dumped near the shaft openings. By the 1930s, enormous tailings piles had reshaped the region’s topography. In the months of July and August, winter winds blew dust from these dumps across the plateau and over the urban sprawl around Johannesburg. Recognising the mounting pollution problems, a handful of botanists looked into how to vegetate the mine dumps to prevent erosion. But their efforts remained underfunded for decades, eventually shut down altogether by their opponents in the mining industry. This too followed a quintessentially Anthropocenic dynamic, one that has operated since at least the 19th century: industries knowingly pollute; scientists investigate the extent of the pollution and propose solutions; industries, often with state approval, deem mitigation too expensive; scientists are starved of resources; the problems are ignored.

After the Second World War, rocks previously deemed waste acquired new economic value. Bound in their matrix was uranium, the element whose fission had levelled two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The gold industry rejoiced to discover this new source of revenue. In 1952, South Africa’s new Apartheid government launched its first uranium-processing plant with considerable fanfare. In short order, the tailings piles yielded 10,000 tons of uranium oxide, which was exported to the US and the UK for their nuclear arsenals. Today, much of this uranium remains locked in ageing missiles. But during the frenzied nuclear-testing of the late 1950s and early ’60s, some of it exploded in the atmosphere, plummeting back to Earth in the form of chemical products created by fission. Today, earth scientists searching for indicators of a definitive break from the Holocene argue that these radioactive deposits constitute the ‘golden spike’ that marks the start of the Anthropocene.

At least two of South Africa’s contributions to the Anthropocene, uranium and gold, are distributed all over the planet. But the consequences of these contributions for South Africans have barely begun. Pierced by hundreds of shafts and tunnels, the Rand has become what the architect Eyal Weizman at Goldsmiths University of London calls, in a different context, a ‘hollow land’. And hollow lands are treacherous. Over time, water has filled the abandoned stopes, where it reacts with the pyrite in the exposed rock and becomes acidic. Heavy metals previously trapped in the conglomerate rock – including known toxins such as arsenic, mercury and lead – readily dissolve in the acidified water. This toxic soup has been rising steadily; in many spots it has ‘decanted’ onto the surface or into the water table. Thousands of people – farmers, informal settlement residents, and others with no access to alternative sources – use this water for irrigation, drinking and bathing. And while many of the tailings dumps have been remined, many still remain, unvegetated. The winter winds still blow dust – some of it radioactive, with uranium residue – across the farms, settlements and suburbs. For the 14 million residents of Gauteng province, mine residues form a major signature of the (African) Anthropocene.

As African minerals continue to fuel industrialised life across the globe, the toxic residues of their extraction plague communities throughout the continent. Take the Niger delta, one of the world’s most significant sources of petroleum. In the past half-century, more than 7,000 oil spills have contaminated water, land and communities in this vast region. Converted into fuel and poured into gasoline tanks, this oil generates additional Anthropocenic signatures that also scream for attention – particularly in dense urban conglomerations such as Cairo, Dakar, Lagos and Nairobi (among many others). Residents of these cities spend hours working and commuting in fearsome traffic jams, inhaling the diesel fumes emitted by mopeds, taxis and buses. The problem steadily worsened in recent decades, closely following the continent’s increased pace of urbanisation. According to one recent report, the annual premature death-rate attributable to outdoor pollution in African cities rose by 36 per cent between 1990 and 2013; current estimates put it at a quarter of a million lives a year.

Air pollution is by no means unique to urban Africa, of course. It’s at least as old as British industrialisation, powered by exponential increases in the extraction and burning of coal. Some researchers date the start of the Anthropocene to around 1750, when the first massive displacements of carbon into the atmosphere began. A century and a half later, Claude Monet’s painterly renditions of the British Houses of Parliament depicted the colourful consequences of this displacement, refracted in the dense smog of late 19th-century London. In 2017, the prestigious medical journal TheLancet published a robust research report that showed pollution is the world’s leading environmental cause of disease. Pollution caused some 9 million premature deaths in 2015, and 16 per cent of all deaths worldwide – ‘three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence’, the report added. The vast majority of these deaths took place in low- and middle-income countries, and in the poor communities of rich countries.

None of which should come as a surprise. Chances are you’ve seen photos of masked residents in Beijing and Delhi struggling through grey and brown air. Yet despite similarly hazardous breathing conditions, African cities rarely turn up in media reports about urban smog. Just take a look at Wikipedia’s entry on smog: you’ll find paragraphs on cities in North and South America, Europe and Asia, but not a single mention of Africa at the time of writing.

Similarly, scientific research pays disproportionately little attention to African cities. In part this is because of the difficulty in obtaining good data, due to the near-absence of infrastructures for monitoring air quality, but that is not the only reason. Among large sections of the scientific community, there’s a tacit assumption that since so much of Africa is rural, outdoor air pollution isn’t a major concern. But Africa currently has the highest rate of urbanisation in the world. So the casualties from outdoor air pollution are climbing quickly, and will continue to accelerate. The ultra-rapid growth of cities intensifies pollution problems, especially in poor countries, where public services can’t keep up with the population increase. Many city-dwellers inhale a toxic synergy of both outdoor and indoor air pollution, the latter from burning the likes of wood, coal or plastics in the home – another way in which the Anthropocene etches itself onto African lungs.

Consider the example of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, where a team of researchers has been studying ambient air pollution for the past few years. The population is projected to grow by 81 per cent between 2010 and 2020, when the city is likely to reach 3.4 million people. Most of Ouagadougou’s new residents live in informal settlements, with no electricity, water or sanitation. Lacking access to modern infrastructures leaves them with few choices. They must burn fuel on open fires to cook. To earn their livelihoods, they must travel unpaved roads, where dust exacerbates the effects of other pollutants. Lower respiratory infections form Burkina Faso’s leading cause of death.

Ouagadougans are not alone. Respiratory and other health problems posed by ambient particulate matter – composed of compounds such as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and black carbon – are well-known. For several years now, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has flagged pollution as the world’s most severe environmental health problem, one whose effects were intensified by poverty. Yet, as critics have noted, the WHO does not have air-quality programmes in place for sub-Saharan Africa, though it does for Europe, the Western Pacific, and the Americas. Scientific studies of outdoor air pollution in African settings – although ramping up in recent years – still remain few and far between.

Of course, urban pollution is both visible and palpable to those who experience it firsthand. The residents of Port Harcourt in Nigeria – no strangers to smoke from the oil refineries and other factories that dominate their city’s economy – certainly noticed when the smoke grew denser and darker in late 2016, enveloping the town in layers of soot. They noticed the black phlegm they coughed up in the mornings, and the black powder that covered their food and homes. They felt the stinging in their throats and the labouring in their lungs as they wheezed their way to work. Furious in the face of government inaction, some took to social media with the hashtag #StopTheSoot. Thanks to this and other forms of activism, the problem became more visible, but the soot has not disappeared.

Beyond the particularities of any single case, systemic issues remain. Until recently, the inattention to air quality in African cities helped to obscure a startling fact. The diesel fumes emitted by motorists in Accra, Bamako or Dakar contain substantially higher proportions of deadly pollutants, measured in parts per million, than those breathed by denizens of Paris, Rome or Los Angeles.

This is not a matter of consumer choice or carelessness. Rather, the high contaminant content results from a deliberate strategy on the part of fuel brokers such as Trafigura and Vitol. These commodity traders blend the fuel stocks that they purchase from refineries, using different recipes for different destinations. Taking advantage of relaxed (or non-existent) regulatory limits across much of Africa, commodity traders maximise their profits by creating high-sulphur blends that are outlawed in Europe and North America. The Swiss NGO Public Eye found that some amalgams in Africa contain up to 630 times more sulphur than European diesel. Much of the blending takes place in the giant port region of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp, but the process is so cheap and easy that it can be conducted on ships, off the West African coast. Traders unabashedly name these blends ‘African-quality’ fuels, as they are saleable only on the continent – often in the very same countries that produced the initial stocks of crude oil. Such ‘dirty diesel’ is a significant part of why Lagos air contains 13 times more particulate matter than London air.

When these practices were documented by Public Eye in 2016, brokers insisted that their actions were legal. Which was true. European limits on sulphur in fuel stood at 10 parts per million (ppm). North America offered polluters a bit more leeway, with 15 ppm. Across Africa, however, the average limit was 2,000 ppm; Nigeria, the continent’s largest oil producer, had a standard of 3,000 ppm. By leveraging these differences, commodity traders engaged in an utterly ordinary profit-maximisation strategy known as ‘regulatory arbitrage’: avoiding legal restrictions in rich countries by moving manufacturing and waste to poor countries. 

In this case, media attention mattered. In November 2016, Ghana lowered its sulphur standard for imported diesel to 50 ppm. The city of Amsterdam voted to ban the blending and export of fuels whose contaminant content exceeded EU limits. In December, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) convened a meeting in Abuja, where the host country Nigeria and several others announced that they too would lower sulphur limits in diesel to 50 ppm.

Sulphur is just one particulate among many. Thousands of chemicals spew, spray and spurt into the air every day, all over the world. So far, the main mode of mitigation has been to legislate substance by substance – a laborious and inherently inadequate approach. Plus, tighter regulation is only one step. Enforcing rules requires extensive infrastructures: government agencies, experts to staff them, labs and monitoring networks, data-processing capacity, and much more. All this costs money, putting pressure on already strained state resources. Furthermore, it would be foolish to assume that companies will obediently comply with new rules. Recall the diesel scandal of 2015 in which Volkswagen was caught using ‘defeat devices’ to falsify nitrogen-oxide emissions in laboratory testing. Other manufacturers engaged in similar practices. In the face of emission controls aimed at limiting Anthropocenic damage, such tactics seem like polluters’ middle-finger response. And some are much larger than a little sensor in an engine.

Regulatory arbitrage is a defeat device that operates on a planetary scale. The oil industry complies with tighter restrictions on some continents by offloading dirtier fuel on others. Diesel vehicles that no longer adhere to European standards end up in African cities, increasing the incentive to export highly toxic fuel. Ultimately, all the pollutants end up in the atmosphere, driving climate change. But along the way, some people pay a higher price than others. This is why understanding the Anthropocene requires tacking between particular places and planetary perspectives.

Some writers insist that a change in terminology can best capture these differences. The ‘Capitalocene’ has attracted special favour from social scientists because it signals how global inequality and capitalism’s dependence on ‘cheap’ nature have produced the current predicament. Nomenclature does political work; a single word can create a discursive infrastructure for political change. (Consider the potency of ‘communism’ – which also, not incidentally, led to regimes with toxic legacies.)

But words have such power only if they’re widely adopted, and it’s hard to imagine geologists or climate scientists embracing alternatives. The political leverage of the Anthropocene concept lies precisely in its analytic potential to bring together researchers across the natural, social and human sciences – as well as the arts – in order to better understand the complex dynamics that put our species at risk.

Obviously, capitalism plays an inescapable role in these historical and biophysical connections. But it is too blunt and inadequate a tool for analysing many of the other dynamics that shape these connections: hydrological patterns, radioactive particles, security imperatives, informal economic activities, and much else besides. We need social scientists and humanists to trace the connections between North American cars and African lungs. But we also need natural scientists and medical doctors to detail the molecular compositions that make air and water toxic to biological life. Putting these studies in conversation under the rubric of the Anthropocene clarifies connections between planetary and individual suffering. It shows the importance of attending to both simultaneously. To be sure, understanding and acknowledging complexity does not suffice to address harm. But it’s a crucial step.

Confronting the Anthropocene, in Africa and elsewhere, requires fresh sources of imagination. And these sources must be found at the frontlines of planetary transformation – from the urban advocates for cleaner air and water, to intellectuals who challenge European and North American paradigms for studying the world. That’s why Africa plays a huge role not only in our planet’s present, but also in its future, as the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr and other African scholars have argued. Africa is the continent where population growth is projected to be the highest. It contains 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land. Some pockets of Africa lie at the forefront of decentralised energy systems (such as solar power) that promise to mitigate climate change. And that’s only for starters.

If the Anthropocene is to have real value as a category of thought and a call to action, it must federate people and places, not just disciplines. It requires thinking from, and with, Africa. ‘They’ are ‘us’, and there is no planetary ‘we’ without them.

2816. A Good Life for All Within the Planet's Means

By University of Leeds, Phy.org, February 5, 2018

Anthropocentrism is common place among scientists just as among the general population.  In the evolutionary "tree of life" humans are often placed at the apex even though the theory itself does not provide for an "progressive" evolutionary trend. 

A study led by the University of Leeds has found that no country currently meets its citizens' basic needs at a globally sustainable level of resource use.

The research, published in Nature Sustainability, is the first to quantify the sustainability of national resource use associated with meeting basic human needs for 151 countries.

Each country's resource use and well-being achievements have been made available as a website built by the academics involved in the study.

Lead author, Dr Daniel O'Neill, from the Sustainability Research Institute at Leeds, said: "Almost everything we do, from having dinner to surfing the Internet, uses resources in some way, but the connections between resource use and human well-being are not always visible to us.

"We examined international relationships between the sustainability of resource use and the achievement of social goals, and found that basic needs, such as nutrition, sanitation, and the elimination of extreme poverty, could most likely be achieved in all countries without exceeding global environmental limits.

"Unfortunately, the same is not true for other social goals that go beyond basic subsistence such as secondary education and high life satisfaction. Meeting these goals could require a level of resource use that is two to six times the sustainable level."

Co-author, Dr Andrew Fanning, also from the Sustainability Research Institute, said: "Our results suggest that some of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, such as combatting climate change and its impacts, could be undermined by the pursuit of other goals, particularly those focused on growth or high levels of human well-being."

This study builds on research by the Stockholm Resilience Centre that identified nine environmental processes that regulate the planet and proposed safe "planetary boundaries" for each that—if persistently exceeded—could lead to catastrophic change. The planetary boundaries include issues such as climate change, land-use change, and freshwater use.

The researchers distributed seven planetary boundaries among nations according to their share of global population, and then compared these boundaries to national resource consumption, after correcting for international trade.

At the same time, the study scored countries on 11 social objectives established in previous research on what it would mean for countries to develop in "safe and just" way. The objectives included healthy life expectancy, access to energy, and democratic quality among others.

The study benchmarked each country's resource use against the planetary boundaries, and mapped these alongside the social indicators. The mapping showed no country performed well on both the planetary and social thresholds.

Co-author Dr William Lamb, from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), said: "In general, the more social thresholds a country achieves, the more planetary boundaries it exceeds, and vice versa.

"Although wealthy nations like the US and UK satisfy the basic needs of their citizens, they do so at a level of resource use that is far beyond what is globally sustainable. In contrast, countries that are using resources at a sustainable level, such as Sri Lanka, fail to meet the basic needs of their people."

Co-author Dr Julia Steinberger, from the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, said "Radical changes are needed if all people are to live well within the limits of the planet. These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and significantly reducing inequality.

"Our physical infrastructure and the way we distribute resources are both part of what we call provisioning systems. If all people are to lead a good life within the planet's limits then these provisioning systems need to be fundamentally restructured to allow for basic needs to be met at a much lower level of resource use."

For a PDF version of the full article see here.