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friends of the earth
Report Details 'Vicious Cycle' Between Climate and Biodiversity Crises
"What we need is real system change that gets to the root of the current economic, social, and political systems that prioritize maximizing profits over people and the environment," said the report's lead author.
Apr 22, 2025
As the world celebrated the 55th annual Earth Day, one leading green group released a report exploring how the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency and species loss impact each other, existing policies, and "false" and "real" solutions to the intertwined crises.
The Friends of the Earth International (FOIE) report, Climate and Biodiversity in Freefall, says that "the vicious cycle between climate change and biodiversity loss is harmful and dangerous. Climate change negatively impacts biodiversity in multiple ways."
"For example, ecosystems become unbalanced as different species respond and adapt to climate change in different ways and at different paces," the publication notes. "Pests become more prevalent, destroying entire ecosystems, while ocean acidification threatens coral reefs and the many species that depend on them."
"We can forge a path toward system change that protects our planet's ecosystems and provides a sustainable future for peoples and communities."
"At the same time, biodiversity loss further destabilizes the climate," the report continues. "Since life on Earth contains significant amounts of carbon, biodiversity loss also means the loss of important carbon reservoirs. Biodiversity loss will further reduce carbon storage in ecosystems, and we are fast approaching tipping points like the Amazon dieback where forests may turn from carbon sinks into carbon sources."
After sections that lay out how the climate and biodiversity crises affect each other, the report tackles problematic climate projects and policies: tree planting and monoculture tree plantations; carbon offsetting; nature-based solutions; geoengineering; bioenergy, including with carbon capture and storage; nuclear energy; and hydropower dams.
Tree plantations, for example, "are essentially 'green deserts,' often made up of a single non-native species, and thus require extensive pesticide use, provide no habitat for other species, and are highly prone to fire," the document details.
Projects labeled nature-based solutions, the report adds, "are primarily focused on compensating for climate emissions, and often serve as greenwashing tools for heavily polluting corporations, allowing them to continue their harmful practices under the guise of environmental responsibility."
There is also a section on United Nations policies, which points out that although the two crises "each have their own U.N. treaty—the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)—extremely little attention has been paid to the interlinkages."
"While the connection is often made at the discourse level, a systemic view that addresses climate and biodiversity simultaneously is largely absent in real policies," adds the U.N. section of the report, which was published just over six months away from the next United Nations climate summit, COP30, in Brazil.
In this blog, @nelemarien.bsky.social highlights how current climate policies worsen the climate and biodiversity crises, with disastrous consequences for communities & ecosystems! Read more here: www.foei.org/system-chang... #SystemChange #biodiversityloss #climatechange
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— Friends of the Earth International (@foeint.bsky.social) April 22, 2025 at 5:53 AM
The next section of the report, promoting what FOEI dubs "real solutions," calls for "rigorous regulation of all sectors that harm biodiversity," an end to financing for "environmentally destructive corporate activities," a moratorium on harmful "development" projects, ditching industrial agriculture in favor of agroecology, and investments in measures such as "reducing or eliminating pesticides and other toxins, curbing noise and light pollution, and encouraging native species to thrive."
The report also stresses the need for broader impact assessments and that "the impacts of the biodiversity and climate crises hit Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) and poor and marginalized people hard by undermining their livelihoods, jeopardizing food sovereignty, and worsening general living conditions." It calls for protecting these groups, including by "recognizing collective rights to land and community governance of territories."
On the climate front, the document emphasizes the necessity of "a rapid and just energy transition" that guarantees energy sufficiency for all; ensures direct democratic control and governance; guarantees the right to free, prior, and informed consent; and prioritizes "renewable technology that is climate resilient, locally appropriate, low impact, and not harmful to biodiversity."
Nele Marien, the report's lead author and FOEI's forests and biodiversity program coordinator, said in a Tuesday statement that "the intertwined crises of climate change and biodiversity loss call for a fundamental rethinking of our approach."
"What we need is real system change that gets to the root of the current economic, social, and political systems that prioritize maximizing profits over people and the environment," Marien asserted. "By recognizing these interconnections between the climate and biodiversity crises, halting detrimental climate policies, and supporting Indigenous knowledge, we can forge a path toward system change that protects our planet's ecosystems and provides a sustainable future for peoples and communities, especially those in the Global South who are most affected."
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Big Oil Doesn't Just Want to Get Rich Wrecking the Climate—They Want Lower Taxes Too
"If this polluter handout is snuck into the GOP tax bill, then cuts to Medicaid and food stamps could well pay for another giveaway to Big Oil," said the co-author of a new report. "That's obscene."
Mar 24, 2025
Having helped install the most fossil fuel-friendly administration of the climate awareness era, Big Oil and their Republican boosters in Congress are now setting their sights on undermining a tax enacted by during the tenure of former President Joe Biden as part of the landmark Inflation Reduction Act.
Alan Zibel, research director at the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen, and Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director of Friends of the Earth's Climate and Energy Justice Program, noted in a report published Monday that Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who chairs the Senate Ethics Committee, earlier this year introduced industry-backed legislation, the Promoting Domestic Energy Production Act, for possible inclusion in Republicans' proposed $4.5 trillion tax giveaway to corporations and the ultrawealthy.
As Common Dreamsreported in January, the fossil fuel industry spent an estimated $445 million during the 2024 election cycle to elect President Donald Trump and other GOP candidates who serve their climate-wrecking interests, and it expects much in return.
"Domestic oil and gas companies, including from Lankford's home state of Oklahoma, have warned their investors about the corporate alternative minimum tax," Zibel and Shankar-Ross wrote. "The industry could soon be rewarded with specially tailored tax relief courtesy of their Republican political allies."
As the report explains:
Here's how the tax scheme works: In August 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic climate investments. To help pay for new spending, the bill included a set of corporate tax increases, the largest of which was the $222 billion corporate alternative minimum tax. This tax is meant to prevent corporations that deliver massive profits to investors from paying nothing or nearly nothing in taxes because of corporate-friendly tax loopholes. Under the corporate minimum tax, if a company reports an average of at least $1 billion in annual income over three years, then it must pay 15% of that reported income in taxes, minus certain deductions.
The report highlights Republican efforts to eliminate the minimum tax, including via legislation introduced by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and endorsed by the American Petroleum Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, National Mining Association, Western Energy Alliance, and industry lobbyists.
The bill introduced by Lankford would enable fossil fuel companies to skirt the minimum tax by allowing them to deduct "intangible" drilling costs, a tactic used as an effective subsidy for more than 120 years. Zibel and Shankar-Ross described the tax dodge as "the oldest and the largest fossil fuel subsidy on the books," and one which "allows all of the costs for drilling an oil or gas well to be deducted immediately in the year they are incurred."
"If individual taxpayers understood the magnitude of the extreme subsidies for Big Oil, they would be shocked."
"It is simply outrageous that the GOP is using its trifecta to create yet another fossil fuel subsidy," Shankar-Ross said in a statement, referring to Republicans' control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. "If this polluter handout is snuck into the GOP tax bill, then cuts to Medicaid and food stamps could well pay for another giveaway to Big Oil. That's obscene."
Zibel asserted that "oil and gas companies are using the political influence they purchased to dodge paying even a minimal part of their fair share."
"If individual taxpayers understood the magnitude of the extreme subsidies for Big Oil, they would be shocked," he added. "The newest effort to bypass even the most modest of tax bills by the industry is shocking, but sadly not surprising."
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EU Accused of 'Bowing to Pressure' From Trump With Plan to Increase LNG Investments
"The E.U.'s proposed foray into foreign LNG investments appears to be a high-stakes gamble fraught with pitfalls," wrote one market analyst.
Feb 26, 2025
On Wednesday, the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, unveiled its Affordable Energy Action Plan, a list of actions ostensibly aimed at securing affordable and clean energy for European citizens. But the plan includes a measure focused on funding international liquefied natural gas exports, which has been criticized as a win for Big Oil companies in the United States and for lacking business sense.
The plan calls for the European Union to back export infrastructure for liquefied natural gas (LNG)—which may have a worse carbon footprint than coal—and long-term LNG contracts to secure "a better deal for imported natural gas."
While the document does not directly single out U.S. LNG export projects, during a press conference on Wednesday centered on the Affordable Energy Action Plan, Dan Jørgensen, European Commissioner for Energy and Housing, said that the European Union has "been dependent on LNG from the U.S. and we will continue to be so in the future" when asked about reliable sources of LNG.
This "would mark a major change in the bloc's energy policies, strengthening the continent's links to the carbon-intensive liquefied natural gas it eventually wants to phase out," according to Politico, which reported on this provision of the plan before the full plan was released.
The business case for the LNG proposal would be "disastrous," wrote a spokesperson for the environmental group Friends of the Earth US in a statement Wednesday, adding that "the Action Plan is music to the ears of Trump's Big Oil buddies."
When it comes to LNG, the plan notes that the Commission will "explore options going beyond demand aggregation and will look into other approaches (e.g. the Japanese model)."
For the past five decades, Japan has been the world's biggest buyer of LNG, directly purchasing stakes in overseas LNG ventures in order to secure access to gas at "preferential prices," perPolitico. Using this approach, Japan has become the largest public backer of American LNG projects.
However, as demand for natural gas has fallen in Japan, Japanese utilities—once purely buyers of LNG—are increasingly selling the product abroad, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
This trajectory makes the "Japanese model" more of a "cautionary tale" as opposed to something that the European Commission ought to pursue, wrote to Seb Kennedy, an energy journalist and market analyst.
"The E.U.'s proposed foray into foreign LNG investments appears to be a high-stakes gamble fraught with pitfalls. By risking public funds on ventures that have already demonstrated turbulent market behavior, Europe may be setting the stage for future financial misadventures," Kennedy wrote on Monday.
Meanwhile, Politico also reported that U.S. President Trump—who made restarting reviews of applications for approvals of liquified LNG projects one of his first official moves in office—is "pressing the EU to buy more American LNG, threatening to impose severe tariffs if the bloc doesn't meet that and other demands."
In her response to the European Commission's Action Plan, Laurie van der Burg, global public finance program manager at Oil Change International, a group that fights for a fossil fuel-free world, said that the proposal constitutes "bowing to pressure from the Trump administration and lining the pockets of the fossil fuel industry."
Climate and consumer groups argue U.S. LNG exports are harming public health, devastating the environment, and raising prices for working families.
"In my community, LNG has brought more than just terminals and pipelines; it has ushered in a wave of health crises, environmental degradation, and economic disparities," said Roishetta Ozane, founder of Vessel Project of Louisiana and co-director of Gulf Fossil Finance Hub, in a statement on Wednesday tied to the release of the Affordable Energy Action Plan.
"Our water is contaminated and we're forced to purchase water in plastic bottles. All while the promise of jobs feels hollow against the backdrop of our poisoned land," Ozane wrote. "We deserve better than to be collateral damage in the pursuit of energy profits. Enough is enough."
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