Imagine if NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover—now on its way to the red planet—discovered microbial life there.It would change everything we know about life in the Solar System and far beyond.Or would it? What if we accidentally transported life to Mars on a spacecraft? And what if that is how life moves around the Universe?
A new paper published this week in Frontiers in Microbiology explores the possibility that microbes and extremophiles may migrate between planets and distribute life around the Universe—and that includes on spacecraft sent from Earth to Mars.This is the controversial theory of “panspermia.”
What is ‘panspermia?’
It’s an untested, unproven and rather wild theory regarding the interplanetary transfer of life. It theorizes that microscopic life-forms, such as bacteria, can be transported through space and land on another planet. Thus sparking life elsewhere. It could happen by accident—such as on spacecraft—via comets and asteroids in the Solar System, and perhaps even between star systems on interstellar objects like ʻOumuamua.
However, for “panspermia” to have any credence requires proof that bacteria could survive a long journey through the vacuum, temperature fluctuations, and intense UV radiation in outer space.Cue the “Tanpopo” project.
What is the ‘Tanpopo’ mission?
Tanpopo—dandelion in English—is a scientific experiment to see if bacteria can survive in the extremes of outer space. The researchers from Tokyo University—in conjunction with Japanese national space agency JAXA—wanted to see if the bacteria deinococcus could survive in space, so had it placed in exposure panels on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS). It’s known as being resistant to radiation.
Dried samples of different thicknesses were exposed to space environment for one, two, or three years and then tested to see if any survived. They did, largely by a layer of dead bacteria protecting a colony beneath it. The researchers estimate that a colony of 1 mm of diameter could potentially survive up to 8 years in outer space conditions.
What does this mean for ‘panspermia?’
“The results suggest that deinococcus could survive during the travel from Earth to Mars and vice versa, which is several months or years in the shortest orbit,” said Akihiko Yamagishi, a Professor at Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences and principal investigator of Tanpopo.
That means spacecraft visiting Mars could theoretically carry microorganisms and potentially contaminate its surface. However, this isn’t just about Earth and Mars—the ramifications of panspermia, if proven, are far-reaching. “The origin of life on Earth is the biggest mystery of human beings (and) scientists can have totally different points of view on the matter,” said Dr. Yamagishi.
“Some think that life is very rare and happened only once in the Universe, while others think that life can happen on every suitable planet.” “If panspermia is possible, life must exist much more often than we previously thought.”
What is ‘lithopanspermia?’
This is bacteria surviving in space for a long period when shielded by rock—typically an asteroid or a comet—which could travel between planets, potentially spreading bacteria and biologically-rich matter around the Solar System. However, the theory of panspermia goes even further than that.
What is ‘interstellar panspermia’ and ‘galactic panspermia?’
This is the hypothesis—and it’s one with zero evidence—that life exists throughout the galaxy and/or Universe specifically because bacteria and microorganisms are spread around by asteroids, comets, space dust and possibly even interstellar spacecraft from alien civilizations.
In 2018 a paper concluded that the likelihood of Galactic panspermia is strongly dependent upon the survival lifetime of the organisms as well as the velocity of the comet or asteroid—positing that the entire Milky Way could potentially be exchanging biotic components across vast distances.
Such theories have gained credence in the last few years with the discovery of two extrasolar objects Oumuamua and Borisov passing through our Solar System.However, while the ramifications are mind-boggling, panspermia is definitely not a proven scientific process. There are still many unanswered questions about how the space-surviving microbes could physically transfer from one celestial body to another.
How will Perseverance look for life on Mars?
NASA’s Perseverance rover is due to land on the red planet on February 18, 2021. It will land in a nearly four billion-year-old river delta in Mars’ 28 miles/45 kilometers-wide Jezero Crater.
It’s thought likely that Jezero Crater was home to a lake as large as Lake Tahoe more than 3.5 billion years ago. Ancient rivers there could have carried organic molecules and possibly even microorganisms.
Perseverance’s mission will be to analyze rock and sediment samples to see if Mars may have had conditions for microorganisms to thrive. It will drill a few centimeters into Mars and take core samples, then put the most promising into containers. It will then leave them on the Martian surface to be later collected by a human mission in the early 2030s.
Our planet set a record for completing one rotation faster than scientists had ever previously recorded, according to TimeAndDate.com. Earth rotated once around its axis on Wednesday, June 29, in 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours.Hang on! Earth takes exactly 24 hours to rotate once on its axis, right? Almost, yes, but not exactly.
What about the ‘leap seconds?’
Until a few years ago it had been thought that Earth’s rotation was slowing down after several successive measurements by atomic clocks since 1973.
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) had even begun adding leap seconds every now and again to make up for the slower spin (it last happened on December 31, 2016).
Over a longer time period that may still be the case—Earth’s rotation may, in general, still be slowing down.After all, the Moon is gradually slowing down the Earth’s rotation. Its gravitational pull causes tides and makes the Earth’s orbital path around the Sun slightly elliptical.
How fast is Earth rotating?
However, in the last few years the atomic clocks have shown that Earth rotation is now speeding up. In fact, we could be beginning a 50 year period of shorter days.
In 2020 scientists recorded the 28 shortest days since 1960. Last year that trend did not continue, with the shortest day in 2021 being longer than in the previous year.
However, on June 29, 2022 our planet completed its quickest-ever spin, followed quickly by a day that lasted 1.50 milliseconds less on July 26, 2022.The previous record for the shortest rotation was July 19, 2020, when the Earth’s rotation took 1.4602 milliseconds less than 24 hours.
Why is Earth speeding up?
The cause of the differing speed of Earth’s spin is unknown, but theories abound:
The melting of the glaciers means less weight on the poles
Motions of our planet’s inner molten core
Seismic activity
The “Chandler wobble”—the movement of Earth’s geographical poles across its surface
Why Earth’s rotational speed is important
Earth’s quickening rotation has consequences because atomic clocks—which are used in GPS satellites—don’t take into account the Earth’s changing rotation.
If Earth spins faster then it gets to the same position a little earlier. A half-a-millisecond equates to 10-inches or 26 centimetres at the equator. In short, GPS satellites—which already have to be corrected for the effect of Einstein’s general relativity theory (the curve of space and time)—are quickly going to become useless.
There are also potentially confusing consequences for smartphones, computers and communications systems, which synchronize with Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. It’s defined as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970.
To solve all this international timekeepers may need to add a negative leap second— a “drop second.” Though Earth may already be spinning as quickly as it ever will, with a slowdown inevitable.Only time will tell. Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
Our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago, when a dense cloud of interstellar dust and gas collapsed in on itself and began to spin. There are vestiges of this original movement in our planet’s current rotation, thanks to angular momentum — essentially, “the tendency of the body that’s rotating, to carry on rotating until something actively tries to stop it,” explains Peter Whibberley, a senior research scientist at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory.
Thanks to that angular momentum, our planet has been spinning for billions of years and we experience night and day. But it hasn’t always spun at the same rate.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, Earth made about 420 rotations in the time it took to orbit the Sun; we can see evidence of how each year was jam-packed with extra days by examining the growth lines on fossil corals. Although days have gradually grown longer over time (in part because of how the moon pulls at Earth’s oceans, which slows us down a bit), during humanity’s watch, we’ve been holding steady at about 24 hours for a full rotation — which translates to about 365 rotations per trip ’round the Sun.
As scientists have improved at observing Earth’s rotation and keeping track of time, however, they’ve realized that we experience little fluctuations in how long it takes to make a full rotation.
A new way to track time
In the 1950s, scientists developed atomic clocks that kept time based on how electrons in cesium atoms fall from a high-energy, excited state back to their normal ones. Since atomic clocks’ periods are generated by this unchanging atomic behavior, they don’t get thrown off by external changes like temperature shifts the way that traditional clocks can.
Over the years, though, scientists spotted a problem: The unimpeachably steady atomic clocks were shifting slightly from the time that the rest of the world kept.
“As time goes on, there is a gradual divergence between the time of atomic clocks and the time measured by astronomy, that is, by the position of Earth or the moon and stars,” says Judah Levine, a physicist in the time and frequency division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Basically, a year as recorded by atomic clocks was a bit faster than that same year calculated from Earth’s movement. “In order to keep that divergence from getting too big, in 1972, the decision was made to periodically add leap seconds to atomic clocks,” Levine says.
Leap seconds work a little like the leap days that we tack on to the end of February every four years to make up for the fact that it really takes around 365.25 days for Earth to orbit the Sun. But unlike leap years, which come steadily every four years, leap seconds are unpredictable.
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service keeps tabs on how quickly the planet spins by sending laser beams to satellites to measure their movement, along with other techniques. When the time plotted by Earth’s movement approaches one second out of sync with the time measured by atomic clocks, scientists around the world coordinate to stop atomic clocks for exactly one second, at 11:59:59 pm on June 30 or December 31, to allow astronomical clocks to catch up. Voila — a leap second.
Since the first leap second was added in 1972, scientists have added leap seconds every few years. They’re added irregularly because Earth’s rotation is erratic, with intermittent periods of speeding up and slowing down that interrupt the planet’s millions-of-years-long gradual slowdown.
“The rotation rate of Earth is a complicated business. It has to do with exchange of angular momentum between Earth and the atmosphere and the effects of the ocean and the effect of the moon,” Levine says. “You’re not able to predict what’s going to happen very far in the future.”
But in the past decade or so, Earth’s rotational slowdown has … well, slowed down. There hasn’t been a leap second added since 2016, and our planet is currently spinning faster than it has in half a century. Scientists aren’t sure why.
“This lack of the need for leap seconds was not predicted,” Levine says. “The assumption was, in fact, that Earth would continue to slow down and leap seconds would continue to be needed. And so this effect, this result, is very surprising.”
Depending on how much Earth’s rotations speed up and how long that trend continues, scientists might have to take action. “There is this concern at the moment that if Earth’s rotation rate increases further that we might need to have what’s called a negative leap second,” Whibberley says. “In other words, instead of inserting an extra second to allow Earth to catch up, we have to take out a second from the atomic timescale to bring it back into state with Earth.”
But a negative leap second would present scientists with a whole new set of challenges. “There’s never been a negative leap second before and the concern is that software that would have to handle that has never been tested operationally before,” Whibberley adds.
Whether a regular leap second or a negative leap second is called for, in fact, these tiny changes can be a massive headache for industries ranging from telecommunications to navigation systems. That’s because leap seconds meddle with time in a way that computers aren’t prepared to handle.
“The primary backbone of the internet is that time is continuous,” Levine says. When there’s not a steady, continuous feed of information, things fall apart. Repeating a second or skipping over it trips up the whole system and can cause gaps in what’s supposed to be a steady stream of data. Leap seconds also present a challenge for the financial industry, where each transaction must have its own unique time stamp — a potential problem when that 23:59:59 second repeats itself.
Some companies have sought out their own solutions to leap seconds, like the Google smear. Instead of stopping the clock to let Earth catch up with atomic time, Google makes each second a tiny bit longer on a leap second day. “That’s a way of doing it,” Levine says, “but that doesn’t agree with the international standard for how time is defined.”
Time as a tool
In the grand scheme of things, though, we’re talking about very tiny amounts of time — just one second every couple of years. You’ve lived through plenty of leap seconds and probably weren’t even aware of them. And if we view time as a tool to measure things we see in the world around us, like the transition from one day to the next, then there’s an argument to be made for following the time set by the movement of Earth rather than the electrons in an atomic clock — no matter how precise they might be.
Levine says he thinks that leap seconds might not be worth the trouble they cause: “My private opinion is that the cure is worse than the disease.” If we stopped adjusting our clocks to account for leap seconds, it could take a century to get even a minute off from the “true” time recorded by atomic clocks.
Still, he concedes that while it’s true that time is just a construct, a decidedly human attempt to make sense of our experiences in a big, weird universe, “it’s also true that you have the idea that at 12 o’clock noon, the Sun is overhead. And so you, although you don’t think about it often, do have a link to astronomical time.” Leap seconds are just a tiny, nearly invisible way of keeping that link alive.
Simon, J.L.; et al. (February 1994). “Numerical expressions for precession formulae and mean elements for the Moon and planets”. Astronomy and Astrophysics. 282 (2): 663–83. Bibcode:1994A&A…282..663S.
In astronomy, the study of fast radio bursts can sometimes feel like a game of Clue. Astronomy can be, in some ways, a bit like the classic board game Clue. Scientists explore a sprawling but ultimately contained world, collecting pieces of information and testing out theories about a big mystery. You can’t cover every corner, but with the right combination of strategy and luck, you can gather enough clues to make a reasonable guess at the tidy answer—who, where, and how—enclosed in a little yellow envelope at the center of it all.
Only, instead of a fictional killer, astronomers are trying to track down the source of strange flashes of radio signals that reach Earth from the depths of space. Scientists have discovered hundreds of such flashes, known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), over the past 15 years. The signals are intense and fleeting things. They come from all directions in the night sky and sneak up on our telescopes. Most are one-offs, never to be seen again. A few “repeating FRBs” have shown up more than once.
Astronomers have gathered as much evidence as they can and have traced the approximate origins of FRBs in the enormous mansion that is our universe. Nearly all of them spring from distant galaxies, while just one so far arose from somewhere in our own Milky Way. But astronomers still haven’t figured out whodunit, or how; they don’t know for sure what kind of astrophysical objects produce these powerful emissions of radio waves. But astronomers have found a new, tantalizing clue.
A team of researchers has detected a new FRB from a galaxy several billion light-years from Earth, and this one is weirder than all the rest. Most bursts last for just a few milliseconds, pulsing with such intensity that they shine as brightly as galaxies before vanishing. But this emission of radio waves lasted about 1,000 times longer: three whole seconds. And there was something unusual about the signal itself.
Astronomers detected little pulses, peaking about every 0.2 seconds, within the three-second burst. Researchers had previously detected an FRB source that followed a discernible pattern, producing millisecond-long flickers for several days before quieting down and then starting back up again. But the flashes themselves were random. This was the first time that the signal itself exhibited such a precise rhythm.
“In FRB world, this is certainly big news,” Sarah Burke-Spolaor, an astronomer at West Virginia University who studies FRBs and was not involved in the new detection, told me. “The main question we are still after with FRB is: What is making them? A strict periodicity like this would be major.” The existence of such a pattern supports the growing evidence that suggests the culprit behind FRBs is a neutron star, the leftover core of a once-giant star that has burned through its fuel.
Professor Plum could be a pulsar, a type of neutron star that rotates fast and spits beams of radiation from its poles. Or Miss Scarlet could be a magnetar, another kind of neutron star, known for its powerful magnetic fields. “It is very difficult to contrive a natural clock like that, but pulsars are the only known emitting objects with enough momentum to behave that way,” Burke-Spolaor said.
The researchers behind the detection didn’t have enough to definitively pin the FRB on a pulsar, Shami Chatterjee, an astrophysicist at Cornell University and a co-author on the new research, told me. Nor do they have a good explanation for why this signal was so intense. Perhaps invisible gravitational forces magnified a pulsar’s emissions as they headed our way, making them appear brighter to radio telescopes. Or maybe a magnetar is undergoing a giant flare.
The latest detection bears some similarities to the radio emissions of pulsars and magnetars found in our own Milky Way galaxy, but the weird new signal seems, well, weirder. “The whole thing is just very peculiar,” Chatterjee said. Around this time, you might be thinking, Okay, so astronomers have their suspicions about what’s responsible for FRBs, but they haven’t solved the case. Add in the discovery of a surprisingly clear-cut pattern, and you might wonder: Could it be aliens?
Sorry, no. “Periodic signals are very, very common from normal astronomical sources,” Sofia Sheikh, an astronomer at the SETI Institute who works on the search for signs of advanced technology beyond Earth, told me. Such sources include pulsars and magnetars. “If the source was pulsing out the digits of pi or the Fibonacci sequence or something, then it would be a SETI story,” Sheikh said. If pulsars can indeed produce FRBs, astronomers can study these flashes to help them solve other cosmic mysteries.
Scientists have already used the rhythms of less mysterious pulsars in the Milky Way as a kind of astrophysical clock, allowing them to do such various tasks as measure the mass of Jupiter, study the properties of the space between stars, and even discover an exoplanet made of diamond, Burke-Spolaor said. In the case of the diamond planet, which also began with an unusual signal, the clues quickly added up:
When astronomers noticed some intriguing variation in the radio emissions of a pulsar 4,000 light-years away, they realized that the best explanation was the presence of a nearby planet. The planet, according to their analysis, was mostly made of carbon and oxygen, and dense enough to crystallize into a diamond world.
Astronomers hope they’ll stumble across more FRBs like this one in their search of our cosmic grounds. The Canadian telescope that detected this burst is constantly looking out for more, and future observatories may discover thousands of them every month. “Every step of the way with FRBs, every answer we have gotten comes with so many more questions,” Burke-Spolaor said. “This detection does the same.”
Astronomers have so far looked only for FRBs that last a few milliseconds because they didn’t think the flashes could last much longer, and it’s possible that “we could be missing a heap of FRBs that are seconds long,” Vikram Ravi, an astronomer at Caltech who wasn’t involved in the new research but who studies FRBs, told me. The story of FRBs is a long game, and scientists now know to expect sudden twists.
The secret envelope remains unopened, but astronomers still have plenty of cosmic rooms to search, and every turn promises to reveal a new clue.
As part of its ambitions to move to a net-zero economy by 2050, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has been ramping up its plans to facilitate removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and drive down the cost of the technology required to do so. These efforts are set to receive a massive cash injection, with the Biden administration announcing US$3.5 billion in funding for a set of regional direct air capture hubs.
The announcement follows a string of far smaller investments that began with $22 million in 2020 and a further $24 million last year, designed to accelerate research into carbon capture technology. As part of the the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) signed by President Biden in November last year, the the DOE also announced its Carbon Negative Shot initiative. This is centered on deploying carbon capture technologies on a gigaton scale by 2050, by driving down the cost of carbon capture and storage to $100 per ton.
A gigaton is equivalent to one billion metric tons, and to put things into perspective, the world’s largest direct air capture plant currently collects around 4,000 tons of CO2 each year. Humans pump out around 30 billion tons each year, while a single gigaton is about the amount generated annually by the US’s entire light-duty vehicle fleet.
The DOE has today released a Notice of Intent, which acts as a kind of high-level draft ahead of an official funding opportunity announcement later in the year. The $3.5 billion in funding will go towards hubs that will act as regional centers for direct air capture projects, with applicants needing to demonstrate an ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it. The DOE expects each of these hubs to permanently sequester a million metric tons of CO2 each year.
“The UN’s latest climate report made clear that removing legacy carbon pollution from the air through direct air capture and safely storing it is an essential weapon in our fight against the climate crisis,” said US Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is funding new technologies that will not only make our carbon-free future a reality but will help position the US as a net-zero leader while creating good-paying jobs for a transitioning clean energy workforce.”
The project in question, the Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program, is funded under the bipartisan infrastructure law and will involve the construction of four regional hubs for carbon dioxide removal.CO2 removal involves sucking carbon dioxide from the surrounding air and either storing it underground or using it for products that do not release it back into the air.
It is a separate process from carbon capture, which aims to prevent the initial release of emissions outright.“CDR is a key element in scenarios that likely limit warming to 2°C or 1.5°C by 2100,” the report states. “Strategies need to reflect that CDR methods differ in terms of removal process, timescale of carbon storage, technological maturity, mitigation potential, cost, co-benefits, adverse side-effects, and governance requirements.”
Nick has been writing and editing at New Atlas for over six years, where he has covered everything from distant space probes to self-driving cars to oddball animal science. He previously spent time at The Conversation, Mashable and The Santiago Times, earning a Masters degree in communications from Melbourne’s RMIT University along the way.
Carbon removal is the process of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it away for decades, centuries, or millennia. This could slow, limit, or even reverse climate change — but it is not a substitute for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This is because carbon removal is generally slow-acting and may not be able to be deployed at scales commensurate with society’s current greenhouse emissions. Carbon removal is sometimes referred to as carbon dioxide removal or CDR, and technologies for implementing carbon removal are sometimes called Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs).
Some prominent ideas for carbon removal include:
planting massive new forests (afforestation/reforestation)
using no-till agriculture and other practices to increase the amount of carbon stored in soils (soil carbon sequestration)
creating charcoal and burying it or plowing it into fields (biochar)
capturing and sequestering carbon from biofuels and bioenergy plants (bioenergy with CCS or BECCS)
spreading crushed rocks over land to absorb carbon dioxide from the air or exposing them to carbon dioxide-rich fluids (enhanced mineralization)
building machines that would suck carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere and bury it (direct air capture)
oceans-based methods, including:
spreading alkaline materials, such as lime, over the ocean (ocean alkalinization)
fertilizing selected areas of the ocean by spreading nutrients, such as iron, over the surface (ocean fertilization)
fertilizing selected areas of the ocean by pumping nutrient-rich waters from the depths to the surface (artificial upwelling)
accelerating the transport of carbon to the ocean depths by pumping surface waters downward (artificial downwelling)
Kathleen Rogers is President of EARTHDAY.ORG, a global year-round policy and activist organization with programs around the world. She has been at the vanguard of developing campaigns focused on expanding and diversifying the environmental movement. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.
(CNN)Environmentalists’ traditional role is to hold governments and corporations accountable and to inform, motivate and engage the broader public of the dangers posed by government inaction or corporate malfeasance. And our relationships with both government and business have often been uneasy.
On the government side, pro-environment leaders come and go. Some have passed forward leaning environmental laws and regulations, others have reversed this progress. Environmentalists have brought innumerable lawsuits against governments for their failure to uphold their own laws yet often we work cooperatively with governments and legislatures to pass critical legislation and regulatory action.
On the other hand, environmentalists and corporations have often been adversaries. In the five-plus decades since the first Earth Day, the global environmental community has filed tens of thousands of lawsuits against corporations and corporations have sued back to block environmental regulations.
And if they aren’t actively blocking environmental laws and regulations, corporations are lobbying to prevent those laws from being passed in the first place. In the United States alone, more than $2 billion was spent on lobbying climate change legislation between 2000 to 2016, according to one analysis, outspending environmentalists by 10 to 1.
Yet compromises have often been possible, and environmentalists also work collaboratively with both corporations and governments to transform industries where there are mutual environmental and economic benefits such as the transformation of the lighting industry to LEDs, supporting renewable energy incentives, and forest certification standards.
Overall, that ebb and flow of the “wins” by governments, environmentalists, and corporations has led to a two steps forward, one step back process for decades, and overall progress on solving or reducing environmental damage and risk has been glacial.
In the meantime, over 1 million species are at risk of extinction, plastics are in our bloodstream, oceans, and food, and chemical toxins still plague the planet. Now climate change has dramatically altered this back and forth and solving the world’s largest environmental disaster has become an imperative, requiring a radical new strategy.
Simply put, it is going to take a lot more than governments, environmentalists, and individuals can provide to solve the climate problem. After decades of treating business leaders as the enemy (and often rightly so), many environmentalists have come to the realization that if we want to save the planet, we cannot do it without them.
“The largest market in the history of the world”
The notion that businesses, innovators, and investors might play a larger role than governments was on full display at the recent Glasgow COP climate summit. Instead of stepped-up ambition to solve climate, most countries did nothing, even stepping backwards.
Environmentalists lobbied vigorously to no avail and if we had all been honest, a sense of despair was growing. On the corporate side, however, there was palpable enthusiasm around deal making, new technologies, and opportunities to make money.
Recently, more than 450 companies with more than $130 trillion in assets, more than the global GDP, pledged deep investments in a net zero transition. US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry described it “the creation of the largest market in the history of the world,” bigger than the industrial revolution. And bankers and investors are saying the same thing.
How do we invest in our planet?
First, governments have long taken the lead in research and development and every economic revolution since the 1800s witnessed massive government investment in technology. Unfortunately, government investments in environmental and climate research, subsidies, and incentives have ebbed and flowed depending on who’s in charge.
Governments must invest, build infrastructure for the transition to renewables and the green economy in general, and regulators must provide some certainty in the marketplace, along with carrots (subsidies and incentives) and sticks (ending fossil fuel subsidies and requiring disclosures from all businesses).
Second, with this extraordinary funding, businesses could create extraordinary chaos and damage. They must agree to complete transparency on their environmental and climate impacts and without the phony net-zero claims.
Many major global companies have chosen to obfuscate and overstate the reality of their net zero promises, undercutting their credibility with both governments and environmentalists. And while we are waiting for national and international bodies to finalize climate risks and impacts’ requirements, more companies must choose to follow a net positive for climate and nature even if profits are impacted.
Environmentalists must acknowledge that as the frenzy of green investment accelerates, we must be better financed to expand our watchdog role, while also keeping accountable those who hide behind greenwashed smokescreens. We must partner with governments and business to build a reliable green consumer movement.
And lastly, given there is ample opportunity to produce future environmental disasters as we redesign the planet — and more likely than not at the expense of the Global South and its very valuable green tech resources — equity and justice have to become a central part of the mission for all three players.
Even if all these steps are taken, proofing the planet against climate change and other environmental woes will be a long and expensive journey that will require investments and new ways of thinking from all sides. Unless all the planet’s stakeholders change their behavior, the causes of climate change will further entrench themselves into the world economy, increasing scarcity, draining profits, and cutting job prospects. That is a recipe for all of us to end up in the red.
