As the 60th anniversary of conquest looms, climbers and environmentalists fear new strains on the terrain and its people

Unusually for someone who likes to chat, Kenton Cool can barely speak. Exerting himself at high altitude has left his voice a throaty growl. "I cultivate it before going out in the evening," he says from Kathmandu, Nepal, having flown down from Everest base camp that morning.

Cool is reflecting on a startling sequence of climbs completed over the course of last weekend. Early on Saturday morning, he reached the summit of Nuptse, the first and lowest of the three main summits in the Everest "horseshoe" that surrounds the glaciated valley called the Western Cwm.

That same day, he descended back into the cwm, and climbed up to the summit of Everest itself, reaching the top in complete darkness early on Sunday. He and his climbing partner, Dorje Gylgen, then climbed down to the South Col, before continuing on to the summit of Lhotse, the third of this spectacular three-peaks challenge, on Monday morning.

"It was a snatched opportunity," he says. "For the first time since the late 1990s there were fixed ropes on all three mountains. That doesn't take away the physical achievement of what I did. I've set the bar at a certain level. But whoever comes along next will move the bar further and do it without ropes or bottled oxygen."

As the 60th anniversary of the first ascent rolls by, much of the coverage is looking back to Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and their age of innocence from the modern era of commercialism and environmental degradation. I've asked Cool to look forward, and imagine what top climbers might be doing 60 years from now, in 2073.

"I hate to think," he says, but mentions the Swiss climber Ueli Steck, who fled the mountain in April following what Cool terms "an altercation" with a crowd of Sherpas at Camp 2. Steck, he says, was planning to climb Everest's west ridge, first done in 1963, descend to the South Col and then immediately climb Lhotse via a new route, all without fixed ropes.

"Ueli had been training like a machine," Cool says. "He's a climber in a class all his own. He's technically brilliant but he had also taken his physical condition to an astronomic level. It would have been amazing to see what he could have done. People say that Bradley Wiggins had the best year in 2012 he could ever have had. Ueli could have done the same."

Steck's plan would have brought high-altitude mountaineering one step closer to one of the challenges on Everest that is often mentioned but usually dismissed as fantasy: the Everest horseshoe, climbing the entire ridge that surrounds the Western Cwm. "Ueli's plan would have brought us closer," says Cool, "but while the altitude is lower, the horseshoe gets very complicated between Lhotse and Nuptse."

What tourism will look like is another matter. One clue is in the stunning helicopter rescue performed by Simone Moro, Steck's climbing partner, whose intemperate language provoked the confrontation at Camp 2. Moro flew back to Everest on Tuesday at the controls of a high-powered helicopter to pluck a stricken climber off the mountain at an altitude of 7,800 metres (25,600ft). The Canadian had been lowered by Sherpas working for British expedition company Jagged Globe from 8,500 metres.

It was the highest rescue yet performed on Everest and highlights the exponential rise in helicopter flights in recent years. By 2073, the infrastructure on the mountain could include a helipad on the South Col bringing tourists breathing bottled oxygen. In the meantime, they are transforming the potential for rescuing both climbers and the far more numerous trekkers heading as far as base camp.

It is the future impact of these tourists that concerns environmental and porters' welfare NGOs. Dr Jim Duff was a climbing doctor on Chris Bonington's 1975 expedition to Everest's south-west face. In 1997, he founded the International Porter Protection Group (IPPG) "as a response to the exploitation, injuries and deaths among Nepali porters carrying for trekkers and up to expedition base camps".

These are not the Sherpas working on Everest, but other ethnic groups on lower wages at the mercy of a cut-throat trekking industry where "Nepalis themselves end up exploiting their porters". IPPG has helped build porter shelters and health posts and open warm-clothing banks. As a result, he says, the number of porter deaths has fallen, particularly in the Gokyo region.

Duff sees social change as the best hope for their future, as communities find their voice. "Maybe one day the prime minister of Nepal will be a porter with a degree in law and political science from Beijing University, who speaks fluent Mandarin." At the very least, he adds, porters could have access to renewable electricity from solar and hydro – and access to the internet, already routine at Everest base camp.

Whether the Everest region can continue to cope with a booming tourism sector remains to be seen, according to mountain geographer and environmentalist Alton Byers. Director of science and exploration at the Mountain Institute in Washington DC, Byers is widely regarded as a leading expert on Everest's environment, and looks at the future of the region in The Call of Everest, newly published by National Geographic.

The combination of climate change and tourism, he says, is causing new stresses on the Sherpa homeland. The retreat and in some cases disappearance of glaciers in the Everest region is having a major impact already. "Everywhere you go people are talking about how there's less water. There's less water for agriculture and less water for all the new lodges that are getting built."

In the Sherpa town of Namche Bazaar, he says, a new five-mile pipeline is being laid to bring water to service the growing tourist demand for showers and flush toilets. The local stream has become contaminated with human waste and does not provide enough for a place that in high season is bursting at the seams.

"Every village is digging a pit just beyond the houses for garbage. Khumbu has the highest landfill sites in the world," he says. Human waste at base camp is now managed well, and removed in plastic barrels. But, according to Byers, these barrels are emptied into a huge pit a few hours down the valley that could leak into the region's watercourses.

"These problems can be solved but we need to get serious about it," he says. "One climber can spend $85,000 [£56,000] climbing Everest. And that's fine. But at some point we're going to have to address these other priorities. For half a million dollars a year you could solve most of them."

Climate change is another matter. Byers works with local conservation committees to identify and plan for the impacts of climate change, most usually finding new water sources, or introducing rainwater harvesting. The rapid build-up of glacial lakes that threaten to burst and flood the Sherpa homeland is a constant threat. "There's going to come a time when people are going to have to get out of their way."

Changing weather patterns are also having an impact on tourism. Increased cloud cover in periods of normally clear weather is closing Lukla airport, the gateway to the Everest region, more often. A new road for 4x4s is being built to Lukla to guarantee the flow of tourists and their money, but Byers is concerned that the rapid spread of the road network in Nepal is being done on the cheap, with disastrous consequences in terms of soil erosion and landslides.

"Everest is the icon everyone knows," he says. "It's the canary in the coalmine that everyone understands. It's the perfect laboratory for figuring out how to address some of these problems, like the impacts of climate change and tourism."

1. Everest: tourism and climate change provide new challenges
2. Everest: 80-year-old becomes oldest man to climb world’s highest mountain – video

As the 60th anniversary of conquest looms, climbers and environmentalists fear new strains on the terrain and its people

Unusually for someone who likes to chat, Kenton Cool can barely speak. Exerting himself at high altitude has left his voice a throaty growl. "I cultivate it before going out in the evening," he says from Kathmandu, Nepal, having flown down from Everest base camp that morning.

Cool is reflecting on a startling sequence of climbs completed over the course of last weekend. Early on Saturday morning, he reached the summit of Nuptse, the first and lowest of the three main summits in the Everest "horseshoe" that surrounds the glaciated valley called the Western Cwm.

That same day, he descended back into the cwm, and climbed up to the summit of Everest itself, reaching the top in complete darkness early on Sunday. He and his climbing partner, Dorje Gylgen, then climbed down to the South Col, before continuing on to the summit of Lhotse, the third of this spectacular three-peaks challenge, on Monday morning.

"It was a snatched opportunity," he says. "For the first time since the late 1990s there were fixed ropes on all three mountains. That doesn't take away the physical achievement of what I did. I've set the bar at a certain level. But whoever comes along next will move the bar further and do it without ropes or bottled oxygen."

As the 60th anniversary of the first ascent rolls by, much of the coverage is looking back to Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and their age of innocence from the modern era of commercialism and environmental degradation. I've asked Cool to look forward, and imagine what top climbers might be doing 60 years from now, in 2073.

"I hate to think," he says, but mentions the Swiss climber Ueli Steck, who fled the mountain in April following what Cool terms "an altercation" with a crowd of Sherpas at Camp 2. Steck, he says, was planning to climb Everest's west ridge, first done in 1963, descend to the South Col and then immediately climb Lhotse via a new route, all without fixed ropes.

"Ueli had been training like a machine," Cool says. "He's a climber in a class all his own. He's technically brilliant but he had also taken his physical condition to an astronomic level. It would have been amazing to see what he could have done. People say that Bradley Wiggins had the best year in 2012 he could ever have had. Ueli could have done the same."

Steck's plan would have brought high-altitude mountaineering one step closer to one of the challenges on Everest that is often mentioned but usually dismissed as fantasy: the Everest horseshoe, climbing the entire ridge that surrounds the Western Cwm. "Ueli's plan would have brought us closer," says Cool, "but while the altitude is lower, the horseshoe gets very complicated between Lhotse and Nuptse."

What tourism will look like is another matter. One clue is in the stunning helicopter rescue performed by Simone Moro, Steck's climbing partner, whose intemperate language provoked the confrontation at Camp 2. Moro flew back to Everest on Tuesday at the controls of a high-powered helicopter to pluck a stricken climber off the mountain at an altitude of 7,800 metres (25,600ft). The Canadian had been lowered by Sherpas working for British expedition company Jagged Globe from 8,500 metres.

It was the highest rescue yet performed on Everest and highlights the exponential rise in helicopter flights in recent years. By 2073, the infrastructure on the mountain could include a helipad on the South Col bringing tourists breathing bottled oxygen. In the meantime, they are transforming the potential for rescuing both climbers and the far more numerous trekkers heading as far as base camp.

It is the future impact of these tourists that concerns environmental and porters' welfare NGOs. Dr Jim Duff was a climbing doctor on Chris Bonington's 1975 expedition to Everest's south-west face. In 1997, he founded the International Porter Protection Group (IPPG) "as a response to the exploitation, injuries and deaths among Nepali porters carrying for trekkers and up to expedition base camps".

These are not the Sherpas working on Everest, but other ethnic groups on lower wages at the mercy of a cut-throat trekking industry where "Nepalis themselves end up exploiting their porters". IPPG has helped build porter shelters and health posts and open warm-clothing banks. As a result, he says, the number of porter deaths has fallen, particularly in the Gokyo region.

Duff sees social change as the best hope for their future, as communities find their voice. "Maybe one day the prime minister of Nepal will be a porter with a degree in law and political science from Beijing University, who speaks fluent Mandarin." At the very least, he adds, porters could have access to renewable electricity from solar and hydro – and access to the internet, already routine at Everest base camp.

Whether the Everest region can continue to cope with a booming tourism sector remains to be seen, according to mountain geographer and environmentalist Alton Byers. Director of science and exploration at the Mountain Institute in Washington DC, Byers is widely regarded as a leading expert on Everest's environment, and looks at the future of the region in The Call of Everest, newly published by National Geographic.

The combination of climate change and tourism, he says, is causing new stresses on the Sherpa homeland. The retreat and in some cases disappearance of glaciers in the Everest region is having a major impact already. "Everywhere you go people are talking about how there's less water. There's less water for agriculture and less water for all the new lodges that are getting built."

In the Sherpa town of Namche Bazaar, he says, a new five-mile pipeline is being laid to bring water to service the growing tourist demand for showers and flush toilets. The local stream has become contaminated with human waste and does not provide enough for a place that in high season is bursting at the seams.

"Every village is digging a pit just beyond the houses for garbage. Khumbu has the highest landfill sites in the world," he says. Human waste at base camp is now managed well, and removed in plastic barrels. But, according to Byers, these barrels are emptied into a huge pit a few hours down the valley that could leak into the region's watercourses.

"These problems can be solved but we need to get serious about it," he says. "One climber can spend $85,000 [£56,000] climbing Everest. And that's fine. But at some point we're going to have to address these other priorities. For half a million dollars a year you could solve most of them."

Climate change is another matter. Byers works with local conservation committees to identify and plan for the impacts of climate change, most usually finding new water sources, or introducing rainwater harvesting. The rapid build-up of glacial lakes that threaten to burst and flood the Sherpa homeland is a constant threat. "There's going to come a time when people are going to have to get out of their way."

Changing weather patterns are also having an impact on tourism. Increased cloud cover in periods of normally clear weather is closing Lukla airport, the gateway to the Everest region, more often. A new road for 4x4s is being built to Lukla to guarantee the flow of tourists and their money, but Byers is concerned that the rapid spread of the road network in Nepal is being done on the cheap, with disastrous consequences in terms of soil erosion and landslides.

"Everest is the icon everyone knows," he says. "It's the canary in the coalmine that everyone understands. It's the perfect laboratory for figuring out how to address some of these problems, like the impacts of climate change and tourism."

1. Everest: tourism and climate change provide new challenges
2. Everest: 80-year-old becomes oldest man to climb world’s highest mountain – video

Experts call on governments to start conserving water in face of climate change, pollution and over-use

The majority of the 9 billion people on Earth will live with severe pressure on fresh water within the space of two generations as climate change, pollution and over-use of resources take their toll, 500 scientists have warned.

The world's water systems would soon reach a tipping point that "could trigger irreversible change with potentially catastrophic consequences", more than 500 water experts warned on Friday as they called on governments to start conserving the vital resource. They said it was wrong to see fresh water as an endlessly renewable resource because, in many cases, people are pumping out water from underground sources at such a rate that it will not be restored within several lifetimes.

"These are self-inflicted wounds," said Charles Vörösmarty, a professor at the Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology Centre. "We have discovered tipping points in the system. Already, there are 1 billion people relying on ground water supplies that are simply not there as renewable water supplies."

A majority of the population – about 4.5 billion people globally – already live within 50km of an "impaired" water resource – one that is running dry, or polluted. If these trends continue, millions more will see the water on which they depend running out or so filthy that it no longer supports life.

The threats are numerous. Climate change is likely to cause an increase in the frequency and severity of droughts, floods, heatwaves and storms. The run-off from agricultural fertilisers containing nitrogen has already created more than 200 large "dead zones" in seas, near to rivermouths, where fish can no longer live. Cheap technology to pump water from underground and rivers, and few restrictions on its use, has led to the over-use of scarce resources for irrigation or industrial purposes, with much of the water wasted because of poor techniques. And a rapidly rising population has increased demand beyond the capability of some water resources.

In some areas, so much water has been pumped out from underground that salt water has rushed in to fill the gap, forcing farmers to move to other areas because the salination makes their former water sources unusable.

Most of the areas where water will be scarcest soonest are in poor countries, which have little resilience to cope. Many are also in areas where there is already political instability, tension or outright conflict, and the competition for water resources will heighten these problems.

But the scientists warned that the developed world would also suffer. For instance, there are now 210 million citizens of the US living within 10 miles of an "impaired" water source, and that number is likely to rise as the effects of global warming take hold. In Europe, some water sources are running dry because of over-extraction for irrigation, much of which is carried on in an unsustainable fashion.

Pollutants are also causing severe problems in the rich world – the scientists highlighted the role of endocrine disruptors, which can cause fish to change gender, and the long-term effects of which on human populations are as yet barely known.

"There is no citizen of the world who can be complacent about this," said Janos Bogardy, director of the UN University's Institute for Environment and Human Security.

On Wednesday, UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, added his voice to concerns about water security: "We live in an increasingly water insecure world where demand often outstrips supply and where water quality often fails to meet minimum standards. Under current trends, future demands for water will not be met," he said.

The scientists, meeting in Bonn this week, called on politicians to include tough new targets on improving water in the sustainable development goals that will be introduced when the current millennium development goals expire in 2015. They want governments to introduce water management systems that will address the problems of pollution, over-use, wastage and climate change.

1. Global majority faces water shortages ‘within two generations’
2. World on course to run out of water, warns Ban Ki-moon
3. Rapid drop in Lake Malawi’s water levels drives down fish stocks

Experts call on governments to start conserving water in face of climate change, pollution and over-use

The majority of the 9 billion people on Earth will live with severe pressure on fresh water within the space of two generations as climate change, pollution and over-use of resources take their toll, 500 scientists have warned.

The world's water systems would soon reach a tipping point that "could trigger irreversible change with potentially catastrophic consequences", more than 500 water experts warned on Friday as they called on governments to start conserving the vital resource. They said it was wrong to see fresh water as an endlessly renewable resource because, in many cases, people are pumping out water from underground sources at such a rate that it will not be restored within several lifetimes.

"These are self-inflicted wounds," said Charles Vörösmarty, a professor at the Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology Centre. "We have discovered tipping points in the system. Already, there are 1 billion people relying on ground water supplies that are simply not there as renewable water supplies."

A majority of the population – about 4.5 billion people globally – already live within 50km of an "impaired" water resource – one that is running dry, or polluted. If these trends continue, millions more will see the water on which they depend running out or so filthy that it no longer supports life.

The threats are numerous. Climate change is likely to cause an increase in the frequency and severity of droughts, floods, heatwaves and storms. The run-off from agricultural fertilisers containing nitrogen has already created more than 200 large "dead zones" in seas, near to rivermouths, where fish can no longer live. Cheap technology to pump water from underground and rivers, and few restrictions on its use, has led to the over-use of scarce resources for irrigation or industrial purposes, with much of the water wasted because of poor techniques. And a rapidly rising population has increased demand beyond the capability of some water resources.

In some areas, so much water has been pumped out from underground that salt water has rushed in to fill the gap, forcing farmers to move to other areas because the salination makes their former water sources unusable.

Most of the areas where water will be scarcest soonest are in poor countries, which have little resilience to cope. Many are also in areas where there is already political instability, tension or outright conflict, and the competition for water resources will heighten these problems.

But the scientists warned that the developed world would also suffer. For instance, there are now 210 million citizens of the US living within 10 miles of an "impaired" water source, and that number is likely to rise as the effects of global warming take hold. In Europe, some water sources are running dry because of over-extraction for irrigation, much of which is carried on in an unsustainable fashion.

Pollutants are also causing severe problems in the rich world – the scientists highlighted the role of endocrine disruptors, which can cause fish to change gender, and the long-term effects of which on human populations are as yet barely known.

"There is no citizen of the world who can be complacent about this," said Janos Bogardy, director of the UN University's Institute for Environment and Human Security.

On Wednesday, UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, added his voice to concerns about water security: "We live in an increasingly water insecure world where demand often outstrips supply and where water quality often fails to meet minimum standards. Under current trends, future demands for water will not be met," he said.

The scientists, meeting in Bonn this week, called on politicians to include tough new targets on improving water in the sustainable development goals that will be introduced when the current millennium development goals expire in 2015. They want governments to introduce water management systems that will address the problems of pollution, over-use, wastage and climate change.

1. Global majority faces water shortages ‘within two generations’
2. World on course to run out of water, warns Ban Ki-moon
3. Rapid drop in Lake Malawi’s water levels drives down fish stocks

Analysis shows royals crowding out coverage of global warming, as Prince Charles makes his strongest climate warning yet

Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, made one of his strongest speeches yet on the dangers of a warming planet when he warned this month that climate change is "the greatest risk we have ever faced". Action must be taken now, the Prince said, because the risk of doing nothing is "too great."

It is therefore a little ironic to look at the latest results from a study by the monitoring organisation Media Matters for America and find that the goings-on of the British royal family – but not their comments on the dire state of the planet – feature far more prominently on the major US networks than any topic related to climate change.

"Even during the warmest year on record in the US, the nightly news programmes combined devoted only 12 full segments to climate change," Media Matters reports. "By contrast, these programmes dedicated over seven times more coverage to the royals in 2012."

One programme, ABC World News, devoted 43 segments to the British royal family in 2012 and only one to climate change, says Media Matters.

Earlier this month, as scientists announced the amount of CO² in the atmosphere had gone beyond 400 parts per million, two of the major US news programmes ignored the story, preferring instead to cover the visit to the country of Prince Harry, the younger son of Prince Charles.

"In 2012, the US experienced record-breaking heat, a historic drought, massive wildfires in the West, and Hurricane Sandy," Media Matters says. "Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice extent shattered the previous record low and the Greenland ice sheet saw the greatest melt in recorded history…

"Yet despite these illustrations of climate change, the broadcast news outlets devoted very little time to climate change in 2012, following a downward trend since 2009."

Evidence suggests the paucity of reporting on climate change is not limited to the US alone. An ongoing study of various media outlets around the world by the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder charts global climate change media coverage, noting a peak at the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009.

A separate study found that more than 3,200 climate-related stories appeared in the world's mainstream newspapers concerning events at the ill-fated Copenhagen meeting. By the time of the climate summit in Durban two years later, the number of stories had shrunk to a quarter of that amount.

Meanwhile, the scientific consensus on the causes and impacts of climate change seems never to have been stronger.

Despite the lack of media coverage, it seems that public perceptions about climate change are also changing − perhaps influenced by a rise in extreme weather events around the world.

The subject of climate change and its causes continues to be hotly debated in the US. However, an analysis carried out late last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that nearly 70% of Americans now say there is solid evidence that the world has been getting warmer over recent decades, with more than 40% saying it is caused by human activity – up from 34% in 2010.

A petition, which already has more than 70,000 signatures, has been organised by Media Matters, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters. It urges the major broadcast networks to give more attention to climate change and allow scientists the opportunity to explain the connections between humanity activity, climate change and extreme weather events.

1. Oklahoma tornado: is climate change to blame? | Harry Enten
2. Climate change meltdown unlikely but human disaster looms, claims new research

Glaciers on or around Everest have shrunk 13% in 50 years with the snow line 180 metres higher than it was 50 years ago

Global warming is melting snow and ice on the world's highest mountain at an accelerating rate, researchers have claimed.

A study by a team led by a Nepali scientist at the University of Milan has found that glaciers on or around Mount Everest have shrunk by 13% in the last 50 years with the snow line 180 metres higher than it was 50 years ago. The glaciers are disappearing faster every year, it says.

The 60th anniversary of the first ascent of the 8,848 metre (29,028ft) peak by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay will be celebrated next week.

The researchers say they suspect that the decline of snow and ice in the Everest region is a result of changes in global climate caused by human-generated greenhouse gases. However, they have not yet established a firm connection, Sudeep Thakuri, who led the team, said.

The landscape around Mount Everest has changed dramatically since the world's highest mountain was first climbed. Mountaineers now report more rock and less snow and ice on well known routes. The ends of glaciers around the peak have also retreated by an average of 400 meters since 1962, the new research found, and some smaller glaciers were now nearly half the size they were in the 1960s.

The researchers used satellite imagery of the peak and the 713-square-mile Sagarmatha national park around the mountain as well as long-term meteorological data.

Small glaciers of less than a square kilometre (about 247 acres), are vanishing fastest, registering a 43% decline in surface area since the 1960s, Thakuri said.

Specialists in Kathmandu said the rate of change through the Himalayas was variable. Though clear in places such as Nepal, at the eastern end of the chain, the situation was different in Pakistan and further west, said Arun Shrestha of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu.

"The glaciers are in retreat but rates are different," he said. "It is quite rapid in the east Himalaya but in the west some are advancing while others are in retreat."

Other research suggests the ice of the main Khumbu glacier which flows down from Everest is less thick than it was previously.

The issue of the future of glaciers in the Himalayas is highly controversial. A United Nations report in 2007included a false claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.

Though all say there is a change, scientists working in the field urge caution over any estimates, saying data is insufficient especially when looking at a small area.

"It is very difficult to scientifically say what are the trends on one particular mountain," Shrestha said.

The impact of climate change on the Himalayas will have consequences across south Asia and beyond. Rivers such as the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra depend to some extent on seasonal glacier melt. Countries across the region are already suffering acute water shortages.

"The Himalayan glaciers and ice caps are considered a water tower for Asia since they store and supply water downstream during the dry season," said Thakuri. "Downstream populations are dependent on the melt water for agriculture, drinking and power production."

1. Saudi Arabian woman in historic Mount Everest climb
2. Climber Is First Saudi Woman to Scale Mount Everest
3. First Saudi woman climbs Mount Everest

A typical pair of synthetic trainers generates 30lbs of emissions, equivalent to leaving a 100-watt bulb burning for a week

Runners tread more heavily on the earth than they may have ever imagined, especially it seems if they are wearing a pair of Chinese-made men's size nine Asics gel Kayanos, according to a team of MIT scientists.

A new pair of synthetic running shoes typically generates 30lbs of carbon dioxide emissions, the researchers found.

That's an unusually high carbon footprint for a product that does not use electricity, or require sophisticated components. The researchers said it was equivalent to leaving a 100-watt bulb burning for an entire week.

Sports apparel companies have been leaders in trying to reduce their environmental impact. But as the findings suggest, it's an especially complicated problem.

Shoes account for a big share of the emissions produced in clothing manufacture. More than 25bn pairs of shoes are manufactured every year, most of them in developing countries.

More than two-thirds (68%) of the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the shoes tested by the MIT researchers came during the manufacturing process – not in sourcing the materials or in their actual use.

That was an unusual breakdown, said Randolph Kirchain, one of the co-authors. "Folks tend to find that manufacturing is relevant to the carbon footprint in hi-tech or specialised products, such as integrated circuits or that kind of thing," he said.

The researchers tracked the emissions associated with the manufacture of the shoe from extracting the raw materials, manufacturing and assembling the product, and use of detergent to clean it by its eventual owner.

The particular shoe studied by the MIT team was made from 26 different materials, and required 360 different steps to manufacture and assemble. Many of those units, where the shoes were produced on small machines, were powered by coal.

"It's the many small parts – the making it, the manufacturing – cutting out the pieces, injection-molding the rubber, sewing it together. Everything happens in Asia, and that means the shoe has a relatively high burden compared to the extraction of raw materials," said Elsa Olivetti, another co-author.

But the researchers credited apparel makers such as Asics, with trying to account for the emissions generated in the lifecycle of their products.

The study said footwear manufacturers now faced the challenge of trying to streamline processes – and reduce the number of steps in manufacture – without compromising design.

1. China unveils details of pilot carbon-trading programme
2. Heatwave deaths in New York city could rise by up to 22%, study shows

Nation's first trading scheme in the southern city of Shenzhen will cover 638 companies when it begins next month

China has unveiled details of its first pilot carbon-trading programme, which will begin next month in the southern city of Shenzhen.

The trading scheme will cover 638 companies responsible for 38% of the city's total emissions, the Shenzhen branch of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced on Wednesday. The scheme will eventually expand to include transportation, manufacturing and construction companies.

Shenzhen is one of seven designated areas in which the central government plans to roll out experimental carbon trading programmes before 2014.

China is the world's biggest carbon emitter and burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world's countries combined.

Li Yan, Greenpeace east Asia's climate and energy campaign manager, said that the pilot programmes will inform the central government on how to motivate local authorities to adopt low-carbon policies.

The push to reduce carbon emissions coincides with the newly installed leadership's effort to tackle the country's dire air pollution problem, which has emerged as a source of widespread anger and frustration in recent months. "Having a mid-term strategy, and trying to prepare years ahead, is actually in line with China's interests and its political and social priorities," she said.

On Monday, the Chinese newspaper 21st Century Business Herald reported that the NDRC has discussed implementing a national system to control the intensity and volume of carbon emissions by 2020. The agency expects China to reach its carbon emissions peak by 2025, five years earlier than many recent estimates, according to unnamed sources quoted in the article.

At a recent climate change meeting, the agency "announced that it's currently researching and calculating a timetable for the greenhouse gas emissions peak, and will vigorously strive to implement a total emissions control scheme during the '13th five-year plan' period (from 2016-2020)," the paper quoted a NDRC official, also unnamed, as saying.

"The NDRC is looking for a national cap, but nobody knows exactly when that is going to happen," said Wu Changhua, greater China director of the Climate Group. "There's still a lot of work to be done."

The EU's carbon trading scheme, the world's largest, has suffered repeated setbacks in recent months. In April, MEPs voted against a proposed reform aimed to raise the price of carbon, which has been diluted by an overabundance of permits.

1. China going green? World’s no. 1 polluter to cap emissions by 2016

Global climate divestment campaigns led by 350.org and Bill McKibben will have a larger moral impact than financial one

Journalist and climate activist Bill McKibben is in Australia in June on his epic Do The Math tour, which aims to highlight the danger of fossil fuel company oil and coal reserves and encourage divestment.

The tour was kick started by McKibben's Rolling Stone article, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math, which argued that in order to stay below the 2C warming limit, the global economy has a budget of less than 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, fossil fuel companies have reserves of carbon from oil, coal and gas of almost 3000 gigatons — far exceeding the climate's safe limit if it were to all be burned.

This "math" has been known for some years before McKibben's article. The Potsdam Institute wrote about humanity's carbon budget back in 2009, noting that even if we stayed within budget, we still had a 25% chance of going over 2 degrees warming. Alarmingly, the Potsdam report said global emissions must start falling by 2015 and that reductions must exceed even the most ambitious public targets tabled by governments so far.

Nevertheless, although McKibben didn't invent the "math", he certainly deserves credit for catapulting it back into the spotlight.

Tied to the tour is the 350.org sponsored carbon divestment campaign, targeting mainly students on campuses around the USA (and now Australia) to pressure their university administrations to dump investments in fossil fuel companies. The message of the campaign is that these students can no longer tolerate "business as usual".

The campaign has started to spread to churches, local councils, and in Australia, work is under way for activists to start campaigning to superannuation funds.

And in the USA it has been remarkably successful. More than 300 American colleges have active Go Fossil Free campaigns.

Universities like Harvard or MIT have multi-billion dollar endowment funds. While individual college funds may represent just a small drop in the ocean of international financial markets, the Go Fossil Free campaigns are trying to tap into something deeper with their divestment campaigns.

Divestment campaigns historically have never been about economic pressure. The effectiveness of the South African apartheid divestment campaigns were due to the moral pressure they placed on governments and businesses. They made toleration of apartheid in the USA, Britain and other countries (including Australia) impossible. University campuses were the hubs of much of the campaign activities, engaging not just students but academics and the trustees of university administered funds.

The divestment by the University of California Berkeley's divestment of $3 billion in 1986 was later credited by Nelson Mandela as a catalyst for the collapse of the apartheid government.

Unfortunately, there's every indication that the big fossil fuel companies targeted by McKibben — like Exxon, BP, Chevron and BHP Billiton — are less concerned than Apartheid South Africa was in global public opinion. For example, BP has managed to bounce back from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

It's likely they also have more economic and political clout. The big fossil fuel companies are some of the most profitable companies in history. BHP Billiton for example made a modest $10 billion profit in 2012, and Exxon made over $42 billion.

Given these numbers, it is unlikely that even the $32 billion Harvard endowment would make much of an impact, even if the entire fund was invested in fossil fuel companies. In Australia, only the University of Melbourne has over a billion dollars in their endowment, and even if all the Australian universities combined divested, the business practices of BHP and Chevron are unlikely to change.

I think the real impact of the divestment campaigns must come from their moral authority. Universities (and hopefully superannuation funds) that do divest are taking a moral stand. That stand must be accompanied by efforts throughout the university to highlight the risks posed by dangerous climate change.

Universities train the business leaders of the future. In fact, the graduate schools are often training the business leaders of today! Most business schools include compulsory courses in ethics, but the carbon budget math needs to be embedded into accounting, finance and economics classes from the undergraduate to graduate level.

Lecturers teaching actuaries about risk should be explaining the effects of runaway global warming and the ecological crisis that will occur if we cross over 2 degrees in warming. Engineering and project management students should look at sustainable energy and ecologically sound product supply chains.

And commerce students need to come to grips with the fact that as we get closer to reaching or exceeding our carbon budget, those fossil fuel reserves may become unburnable, leaving investors stranded.

With more and more reports warning of the dire risks if we do not change course, the Go Fossil Free campaign has its work cut out to ensure we don't cross the limit in 2015.

Last year, I had the opportunity to see McKibben and Naomi Klein at the Boston leg of the Do The Math tour and found it excellent and informative.

The politicians who tweeted while America burned are dismantling our society piece by piece with budget cuts

The streets are so much darker now since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury, and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won't graduate from high school.

It's 2023 – this is America a decade years after the federal budget cuts known as sequestration. They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Traveling back in time to 2013 – the moment the cuts began – no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States looking more like a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested – and won – special relief. Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568bn to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon.

Robust public investment had been a key to US prosperity in the previous century. It was considered a basic part of the social contract and economics 101. As just about everyone knew, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn't adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post-WWII years, the country invested great sums in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.

Austerity Fever

In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a set of manufactured arguments for "austerity", which had been gaining traction for decades, captured the national imagination. In 2011-2012, a congress that seemed capable of doing little else passed trillions of dollars of what was then called "deficit reduction". These across-the-board cuts, instituted in August 2011 and set to kick in on 2 January 2013, were meant to be a storm cloud hanging over Congress. Sequestration was never intended to take effect, but only to force lawmakers to reason – to craft a less terrible plan to reduce deficits. As is now common knowledge, they didn't come to their senses. Although Congress could have cancelled the cuts at any moment, the country never turned back.

It wasn't that cutting federal spending at those levels would necessarily have been devastating in 2013, though in an already weakened economy any cutbacks would have hurt. Rather, sequestration proved particularly corrosive from the start because all types of public spending – from grants for renewable energy research to disadvantaged public schools to HIV testing – were to be gutted equally, as if all of it were just fat to be trimmed. Even monitoring systems for natural disasters, like flooding or a volcanic eruption, began to be shut down. Over time the cuts would be vast: $85bn in the first year and $110bn in each year after that, for more than $1tn in cuts over a decade on top of other reductions already in place.

Once lawmakers wrote sequestration into law they had more than a year to wise up. Yet they did nothing to draft an alternate plan and didn't even start pointing out the imminent havoc until just weeks before the deadline. Then they gave themselves a couple more months – until 1 March 2013 – to work out a deal, which they didn't. All this is, of course, ancient history, but even a decade later, the record of folly is worth reviewing.

If you remember, they tweeted while Rome burned. Speaker of the House John Boehner, for instance, sent out dozens of tweets to say Democrats were responsible: "The president proposed sequester, had 18 mo. to prioritize cuts, and did nothing," he typically wrote, while he no less typically did nothing. For his part, senate majority leader Harry Reid tweeted back: "It's not too late to avert the damaging #sequester cuts, for which an overwhelming majority of Republicans voted." And that became the pattern for a decade of American political gridlock, still unbroken today.

Destruction Begins

The deadline came and went, so the budgetary axe began to fall.

At first, it didn't seem so bad. Yes, the cuts weren't quite as across the board as expected. The meat industry, for example, protested because health inspector furloughs would slow production lines, so Congress patched the problem and spared those inspectors. There was a sense that the cuts might not be so bad after all.

They were to be doled out based on a formula for meeting the arbitrary target of $85bn in reductions, and no one knew precisely what would happen to any given program. In April, more than a month after the cuts had begun, the White House issued the president's budget proposal for the following year. But across thousands of pages of documents and tables, the new budget ignored sequestration, and so reported meaningless 2013 numbers, because even the White House couldn't say exactly what impact these cuts would have on programs and public investment.

As it happened, they didn't have to wait long to find out. The first ripples began to spread quickly. Losing some government funding, cancer clinics in New Mexico and Connecticut turned away patients. In Kentucky, Oregon and Montana, shelters for victims of domestic violence cut services. In New York, Maryland and Alabama, public defenders were furloughed, limiting access to justice for low-income people. In Illinois and Minnesota, public school teachers were laid off. In Florida, Michigan and Mississippi, Head Start shortened the school year, while in Kansas and Indiana, some low-income children simply lost access entirely. In Alaska, a substance abuse clinic shut down. Across the country, Meals on Wheels cut four million meals for seniors in need.

Only when the FAA imposed furloughs on its air traffic controllers did public irritation threaten to boil over. Long lines and airport delays ensued, and people were angry. And not just any people – people who had access to members of Congress. In a Washington that has gridlocked the most routine business, lawmakers moved at a breakneck pace, taking just five days to pass special legislation to solve the problem. To avoid furloughs and shorten waits for airline passengers, they allowed the FAA to spend funds that had been intended for long-term airport repairs and improvements. Flights left on time – at least until runways cracked and crumbled.

The Pentagon, the military behemoth of planet earth, which in 2013 accounted for 40% of military spending globally and its outlays exceeding the next 10 largest militaries combined, too, wanted a special exemption for some of its share of the cutbacks.

Meat inspectors, the FAA and the Department of Defense enjoyed special treatment, but the rest of the nation was not so lucky. Children from middle-class and low-income families saw ever fewer resources at school and doors of opportunity closing. The young, old and infirm found themselves with dwindling access to basic resources, such as healthcare or even a hot dinner. Federal grants to the states dried up, and there was less money in state budgets for local priorities, from police officers to streetlights.

And remember that, just as the sequestration cuts began, carbon concentration in the atmosphere breached 400 parts per million. (Climate scientists had long been warning that the level should be kept below 350 for human security.) Unfortunately, as with the groundbreaking research that led to the internet, it takes money to do big things, and the long-term effects of cutting environmental protection, general research and basic infrastructure meant that the US government would do little to stem the extreme weather that has, in 2023, become such a part of our world and our lives.

Looking back from a country now eternally in crisis, it's clear that a rubicon was crossed back in 2013. There was then still a chance to reject across-the-board cuts that would undermine a nation built on sound public investment and shared prosperity. At that crossroads, some fought against austerity. Losing that battle, others argued for a smarter approach: close tax loopholes to raise new revenue, or reduce waste in health care, or place a tax on carbon, or cut excessive spending at the Pentagon. But too few Americans – with too little influence – spoke up, and Washington didn't listen. The rest of the story, as you well know, is history.

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