The dangers of eco-gentrification: what’s the best way to make a city greener?
Jeanne Haffner, The Guardian
…Over the past few years, a new trend has emerged in direct response to the problem of eco-gentrification. I will label it “conscious anti-gentrification”. This kind of greening project aims to increase the environmental quality and public health of a neighbourhood but without changing its socio-economic character. This is done by explicitly rejecting elements that tend to lead to gentrification, such as fancy waterfronts; by including neighbourhood residents in the planning process; and by implementing changes gradually. Interestingly, many of the main players in today’s “conscious anti-gentrification” movement were themselves gentrifiers in another era, especially the 1980s.
The American academics Winifred Curran and Trina Hamilton brilliantly call this the “just-green-enough approach”, and point to Newtown Creek, a neighbourhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as an example. In the 19th century, Newtown Creek was a centre for oil refining and other industries, which left behind a massive oil plume. Over the last 10 or so years, Newtown’s community has become increasingly active in the environmental clean-up of its own neighbourhood. Most recently, in 2010, Newtown Creek was declared a Superfund site; an Environmental Protection Agency designation that brings federal funding but also the fear of stigmatisation.
The 1 percent are parasites: Debunking the lies about free enterprise, trickle -down, capitalism and celebrity entrepreneurs
Andrew Sayer, Salon
Excerpted from "Why We Can’t Afford The Rich"
‘When did you last get a job from a poor person?’ So goes my favorite Tea Party slogan. The Americans are good at slogans but the Tea Party specializes in discombobulatingly daft ones. Of course you won’t get a job from a poor person, we wearily concede, but it doesn’t follow that the rich create jobs, as if they have special powers that turn their gains into a gift of jobs to the rest of us. U.S. billionaire Nick Hanauer is refreshingly honest about this: ‘If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth for the wealthy led to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.’ So why hasn’t the spectacular shift in income and financial wealth to the rich over the last four decades led to unprecedented jobs growth?
First of all, we need to ask what the rich and super-rich do with their spare money. They generally use it to try to get even more, through either real investment or financial ‘investment.’ In the latter case, whether by betting on market movements or buying income-yielding assets, or the many other ways unearned income can be extracted, their actions are unlikely to result in net job creation. Some ‘investment’ is used to buy up firms in order to sell off parts of them – to asset-strip them, in other words. This is likely to result in job losses, and indeed may reduce the ability of the firm to produce in the long run. Many companies have boosted their profits by cutting jobs.
But even if the rich do fund real investment in productive businesses – in equipment, training, new infrastructures or whatever – this may or may not result in job creation. Some businesses need to employ more people if they are to expand, but some do not: they may make more profit by reducing the number of workers they employ, whether by intensifying work for the remaining workers or automating their jobs. Either way, as Nick Hanauer makes clear, hiring more workers ‘is a course of last resort for the capitalist.’ Extra workers may enable more output, but if firms can find other ways of expanding output that are cheaper, they will…
Shale looks more like dotcom boom than Lehman debt bubble
Ed Crooks, Financial Times
How David Einhorn flagged up important weaknesses in shale oil business model…
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Denmark suspends fracking over ‘hazardous’ chemicals
Staff, RT
Denmark has suspended the first exploratory drilling for shale gas which lasted only one day after it discovered that French gas-giant Total, in charge of the project, had used “unauthorized” chemicals.
"They used a product that was not part of those authorized" for the procedure, Ture Falbe-Hansen, a Danish Energy Agency spokesman told AFP Wednesday…
Poor Communities Bear Greatest Burden from Fracking
Brian Bienkowski, Scientific American
Fracking wells in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region are disproportionately located in poor rural communities, which bear the brunt of associated pollution, according to a new study.
The study bolsters concerns that poor people are more likely to deal with hydraulic fracturing in their community and raises concerns that such vulnerable populations will suffer the potential health impacts of air and water pollution associated with pulling gas from the ground…
Fracking Chemicals Detected in Pennsylvania Drinking Water
Nicholas St. Fleur, New York Times
An analysis of drinking water sampled from three homes in Bradford County, Pa., revealed traces of a compound commonly found in Marcellus Shale drilling fluids, according to a study published on Monday.
The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, addresses a longstanding question about potential risks to underground drinking water from the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The authors suggested a chain of events by which the drilling chemical ended up in a homeowner’s water supply.
“This is the first case published with a complete story showing organic compounds attributed to shale gas development found in a homeowner’s well,” said Susan Brantley, one of the study’s authors and a geoscientist from Pennsylvania State University…
Global Carbon Dioxide Levels Just Hit A Disturbing New Threshold
Ari Phillips, Think Progress
Four hundred: it’s a number that will go down in climate history while also continuing to rise.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 400.83 parts per million (ppm) was the average concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide in March. This news from NOAA marks the first time that the entire planet has surpassed the 400 ppm benchmark for an entire month.
With the rate of growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations steadily increasing — rising from about 0.75 ppm per year in 1959 to about 2.25 ppm per year in 2015 — this milestone will soon be surpassed. Still, the 400 ppm average has been a long time coming.
“It was only a matter of time that we would average 400 parts per million globally,” Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, said in a statement. “Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone.”…
19 reasons why the world is missing the 2C climate change limit
Simon Evans, Carbon Brief
The world is falling further behind the goal to avoid more than 2C of global warming despite rapid progress in renewables and other areas, according to a new assessment from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
For the first time since it started tracking progress, none of 19 key areas for tackling climate change are on track to meet their contribution towards a sub-2C world, says the IEA’s Energy Technology Perspectives 2015, published on 4 May. It says five technologies or sectors are off track, and the outlook for the remaining 14 is failing to improve fast enough.
Carbon Brief has summarised the mammoth 412-page assessment in a single graphic, which shows where progress is falling furthest behind the path to 2C, and where there are rays of hope.
Code of Silence
George Monbiot, Monbiot.com
Almost all the issues worth debating are left unmentioned in this election.
…While analysis of the issues dividing the political parties is often weak, coverage of those they have collectively overlooked is almost non-existent. The Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and even the SNP might claim to be at each other’s throats, but they have often reached consensus about which issues are worthy of debate. This article will list a few of the omissions.
The first is so obvious that it should feature in every political discussion: the corrupt and broken system under which we will vote. The argument I’ve heard several Labour activists use – “vote for us because it’s the best we can hope for under first-past-the-post” – would carry more weight if Labour had any plans to change the system…
Fertility of world’s soil reaching peak that will threaten food supplies, scientists warn"
Steve Connor, The independent
The fertility of the world’s soil is reaching a peak that will threaten global food supplies this century unless more is done to preserve the long-term viability of existing farmland, according to a group of leading scientists.
Soil erosion and degradation, combined with the loss of agricultural land to urban sprawl and a booming global population, is one of the most pressing issues facing human security in the 21st century, they said.
Much of the most productive cropland today is due to the “domestication” of wild soils brought about by modern farming practices. But these domesticated soils are seldom able to maintain the quality of their wild ancestral stock, the scientists write in a review of global soil fertility in the journal Science.
“The efforts to improve the management and conservation of domesticated soils, and the preservation of portions of their remaining wild ancestral stock, will be among the most important challenges this century,” said Ronald Amundson, professor of environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley…
How the Midwest’s massive bird flu outbreak could threaten humans
Julia Belluz, Vox
We’re in the midst of the largest-ever bird flu outbreak in the United States. More than 23 million turkeys and chickens have been affected since December.
Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin have all declared states of emergency, and five months in, the outbreak keeps spreading with no sign of slowing down, forcing farms to halt production, slaughter millions of birds, and lay off workers.
But most people haven’t even heard about the outbreak yet — because, so far, it hasn’t spread to humans…
First, let’s be clear: the risk that these pathogens spread to people is low, though not zero. As Tom Philpott points out at Mother Jones, "Public health officials have been warning for decades that massive livestock confinements make an ideal breeding ground for new virus strains." In particular, scenarios like the one that’s playing out in the Midwest right now pose a threat….
Forests are ‘key feature’ of food security landscape
Mark Kinver, BBC
Forests can play a vital role in supplementing global food and nutrition security but this role is currently being overlooked, a report suggests.
The study says that tree-based farming provides resilience against extreme weather events, which can wipe out traditional food crops.
It warns that policies focusing on traditional agriculture often overlook the role forest farming could play.
The findings were presented at the UN Forum on Forests in New York, US. The report is the result of a collaboration of more than 60 leading scientists, co-ordinated by the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO) on behalf of the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF).
