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Indigenous-led resistance to 21 fossil fuel projects in the U.S. and Canada over the past decade has stopped or delayed an amount of greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.
This is despite an onslaught of attacks against Indigenous activists over the past few years. Over the last few years, victories won against projects through direct actions have led to more than 35 states enacting anti-protest laws, jail time for protestors, thousands of dollars of fines, and even the killingof prominent activists.
Indigenous rights and responsibilities “are far more than rhetorical devices — they are tangible structures impacting the viability of fossil fuel expansion.” Through physically disrupting construction and legally challenging projects, Indigenous resistance has directly stopped projects expected to produce 780 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year and is actively fighting projects that would dump more than 800 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year.
The analysis, which used publicly released data and calculations from nine different environmental and oil regulation groups, found that roughly 1.587 billion metric tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions have been halted. That’s the equivalent pollution of approximately 400 new coal-fired power plants — more than are still operating in the United States and Canada — or roughly 345 million passenger vehicles — more than all vehicles on the road in these countries.
“From an Indigenous perspective, when we are confronting the climate crisis we are inherently confronting the systems of colonization and white supremacy as well,” Goldtooth said. “In order to do that, you have to reevaluate how you relate to the world around you and define what your obligations are to the world around you. It’s more than just stopping fracking development and pipelines and it’s more than just developing clean energy, it’s about actually fundamentally changing how we see the world itself.”
If you want to lessen climate change, this is the way to do it
Researchers
say they have cracked how air pollution leads to cancer, in a discovery
that completely transforms our understanding of how tumours arise.
The
team at the Francis Crick Institute in London showed that rather than
causing damage, air pollution was waking up old damaged cells.
One of the world’s leading experts, Prof Charles Swanton, said the breakthrough marked a “new era”.
And it may now be possible to develop drugs that stop cancers forming.
The findings could explain how hundreds of cancer-causing substances act on the body.
The
classical view of cancer starts with a healthy cell. It acquires more
and more mutations in its genetic code, or DNA, until it reaches a
tipping point. Then it becomes a cancer and grows uncontrollably.
But
there are problems with this idea: cancerous mutations are found in
seemingly healthy tissue, and many substances known to cause cancer -
including air pollution - don’t seem to damage people’s DNA.
So what is going on?
The
researchers have produced evidence of a different idea. The damage is
already there in our cell’s DNA, picked up as we grow and age, but
something needs to pull the trigger that actually makes it cancerous.
The
Crick scientists focused on a form of pollution called particulate
matter 2.5 (known as PM2.5), which is far smaller than the diameter of a
human hair.
Through a series of detailed human and animal experiments they showed:
Places with higher levels of air pollution had more lung cancers not caused by smoking
Breathing in PM2.5 leads to the release of a chemical alarm - interleukin-1-beta - in the lungs
This causes inflammation and activates cells in the lungs to help repair any damage
But around one in every 600,000 cells in the lungs of a 50-year-old already contains potentially cancerous mutations
These are acquired as we age but appear completely healthy until they are activated by the chemical alarm and become cancerous
Crucially,
the researchers were able to stop cancers forming in mice exposed to
air pollution by using a drug that blocks the alarm signal.
The
results are a double breakthrough, both for understanding the impact of
air pollution and the fundamentals of how we get cancer.
Dr Emilia Lim, one of the Crick researchers, said people who had never smoked but developed lung cancer often had no idea why.
“To give them some clues about how this might work is really, really important,” she said.
“It’s
super-important - 99% of people in the world live in places where air
pollution exceeds the WHO guidelines so it really impacts all of us.”
Rethinking cancer
But the results also showed mutations alone are not always enough to cause cancer. It can need an extra element.
Prof
Swanton said this was the most exciting finding his lab had come
across, as it “actually rethinks our understanding of how tumours are
initiated”. He said it would lead to a “new era” of molecular cancer
prevention.
The idea of taking a cancer-blocking pill if you live in a heavily polluted area is not completely fanciful.
Doctors have already trialled an interleukin-1-beta drug in cardiovascular disease and found, by complete accident, they cut the risk of lung cancer.
Speaking
to the BBC from the conference, Prof Swanton said: “Pollution is a
lovely example, but there are going to be 200 other examples of this
over the next 10 years.”
And
he said we needed to rethink how even smoking causes cancer - is it
just the known DNA damage caused by the chemicals in tobacco or is the
smoke causing inflammation, too?
Curiously, the idea that mutated DNA is not enough and cancers need another trigger to grow was first proposed by scientist Isaac Berenblum in 1947.
“Philosophically,
it’s fascinating. These incredible biologists have done this work 75
years ago and it’s largely been ignored,” said Dr Lim.
Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, stressed that “smoking remains the biggest cause of lung cancer”.
But
she added: “Science, which takes years of painstaking work, is changing
our thinking around how cancer develops. We now have a much better
understanding of the driving forces behind lung cancer.”
Women in France are fighting to wear the hijab while women in Iran are fighting to not wear the hijab
This is not a fight about Islam this is not a fight about religion this is a fight about women not having the right to do whatever they want with their bodies and being killed and persecuted for it
