Resilience Roundup – July 3

July 3, 2015

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

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A roundup of news, views and ideas from the main stream press and the blogosphere.  Click on the headline link to see the full article.


The World is Defenceless Againts the Next Financial Crisis Warns BIS

Peter Spence, The Daily Telegraph
The world will be unable to fight the next global financial crash as central banks have used up their ammunition trying to tackle the last crises, the Bank for International Settlements has warned.

The so-called central bank of central banks launched a scatching critique of global monetary policy in its annual report. The BIS claimed that central banks have backed themselves into a corner after repeatedly cutting interest rates to shore up their economies.

These low interest rates have in turn fuelled economic booms, encouraging excessive risk taking. Booms have then turned to busts, which policymakers have responded to with even lower rates…


Global Climate Pact Gains Momentum as China, U.S. and Brazil Detail Plans

Coral Davenport, New York Times
Five months before a United Nations summit meeting aimed at forging a historic global accord to cut climate-warming emissions, significant signs of progress toward an agreement are emerging.

China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas polluter, submitted a 16-page plan to the United Nations on Tuesday detailing how it plans to shift its economy to reduce fossil fuel emissions by 2030. On the same day, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, which is among the top 10 carbon emitters, and President Obama announced in Washington that their nations had agreed to sharply expand electricity generation from renewable sources.

But it is increasingly evident that the policy actions by these countries and others will not be enough to stave off a rise in the atmospheric temperature of 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. At that point, scientists say, the planet will be locked into a future of extreme storms, droughts, food and water shortages, and rising sea levels…


Climate pledge puts China on course to peak emissions as early as 2027

Simon Evans, Carbon Brief
China is aiming to peak its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions "around 2030" and will make "best efforts" to peak early, its climate pledge to the UN confirms.

China’s intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) includes a new target to reduce its carbon intensity by 60-65% of 2005 levels by 2030. Carbon Brief analysis suggests the top end of this range would see CO2 peaking in 2027. China also says it will source 20% of its energy in 2030 from low-carbon sources.

The announcement, which adds to existing Chinese commitments, came on a busy day on Tuesday for climate pledges. South Korea, Serbia and Iceland all filed INDCs with the UN, bringing the share of global emissions covered by pledges to nearly 56%. Tuesday also saw Brazil and the US announce new commitments to renewable energy at a joint summit in Washington…


UN tells oil giants to stop lobbying against climate deal

Ed King, RTCC
The UN’s top climate official has called on oil and gas companies to quit lobbying against efforts to tackle global warming.

In a letter to the CEOs of Shell, BP, Statoil, ENI, BG Group and Total Christiana Figueres said civil society and governments needed clear signals that the industry was committed to a low carbon future.

“I would call on you to ensure that henceforth your government engagement is clearly focused on the outcome you have sought in your letter to me: an ambitious, long term policy framework on climate change that will guide us promptly and resolutely toward a low carbon economy,” she said…


More evidence that global warming is intensifying extreme weather

John Abraham, The Guardian
Just this week, a new article appeared in the journal Nature that provides more evidence of a connection between extreme weather and global warming. This falls on the heels of last week’s article which made a similar connection. So, what is new with the second paper? A lot.

Extreme weather can be exacerbated by global warming either because the currents of atmosphere and oceans change, or it can be exacerbated through thermodynamics (the interaction of heat, energy, moisture, etc.). Last week’s study dealt with just the thermodynamics. This week’s study presents a method to deal with both…


Scorched Earth Is Big Climate Concern in Alaska Wildfires

Brian Kahn, Climate Central
Alaska and its neighbor to the east, Canada, have kicked off wildfire season in a major way. Blazes have raged across the northern stretches of North America, sending smoke streaming down into the Lower 48 and leaving the landscape charred.

The multitudes of fires is a glimpse of things to come as the climate warms, but blackened trees are only the most visible concern. The ground beneath them is what has some truly worried, with vast carbon reserves that could contribute to even more warming of the planet if they’re sent up in smoke…


"People and Planet First": On the Moral Authority of Climate Justice and a New Economy

Naomi Klein, Common Dreams
Our current economic system is both fueling the climate crisis and actively preventing us from taking the necessary actions to avert it.

Naomi delivered the following remarks at a press conference introducing “People and Planet First: the Imperative to Change Course,” a high-level meeting being held at the Vatican this week to explore Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ recently-released encyclical letter on ecology. The gathering will take place on July 2-3, and is being convened by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the International Alliance of Catholic Development Organisations (CIDSE).


Dutch city of Utrecht to experiment with a universal, unconditional ‘basic income’

Louis Doré, The Independent
The Dutch city of Utrecht will start an experiment which hopes to determine whether society works effectively with universal, unconditional income introduced.

The city has paired up with the local university to establish whether the concept of ‘basic income’ can work in real life, and plans to begin the experiment at the end of the summer holidays.

Basic income is a universal, unconditional form of payment to individuals, which covers their living costs. The concept is to allow people to choose to work more flexible hours in a less regimented society, allowing more time for care, volunteering and study.


There’s a lot more solar power in the US than we thought

David Roberts, Vox
How much solar photovoltaic (PV) power is generated in the United States? According to a new report, official government figures may be understating the total by as much as 50 percent. That’s a pretty big deal!

Here’s the problem: the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and other energy agencies can easily gather data on electricity from big, utility-scale solar power plants that sell into wholesale markets. But it’s much, much more difficult to get data about electricity from solar panels on the customer side of the meter. That means that rooftop solar power on homes and businesses gets overlooked and undercounted.

By how much? According to the latest Solar Market Insight Report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and GTM Research (with an assist from kWh Analytics), it adds up to an enormous gap. Basically, some 9.2 gigawatts of customer-side solar capacity has been left out of official statistics. That’s 45 percent of total solar PV…


Shale drillers’ safety net is vanishing

Bloomberg via Fuelfix
The insurance protecting shale drillers against plummeting prices has become so crucial that for one company, SandRidge Energy Inc., payments from the hedges accounted for a stunning 64 percent of first-quarter revenue.

Now the safety net is going away.

The insurance that producers bought before the collapse in oil — much of which guaranteed minimum prices of $90 a barrel or more — is expiring. As they do, investors are left to wonder how these companies will make up the $3.7 billion the hedges earned them in the first quarter after crude sunk below $60 from a peak of $107 in mid-2014…


Here’s the real thing killing bees: Us

Nathanael Johnson, Grist
I hear all the time that bees are vanishing — but are they really? The apocalyptic tenor of the rhetoric just isn’t appropriate for talking about honeybees (as I argued here). Beekeepers now have to replace hives every year in North America and Europe; but despite that struggle, domestic honeybee populations are strong (as I showed here). But what about wild bees and other pollinators?

There’s a lot of evidence that the number wild pollinators is declining in the U.S. and Europe, said Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society, a nonprofit that advocates for invertebrates. (There’s a lot less information about pollinator populations in the developing world.) The species that have vanished are rare ones — isolated and low in population — but there’s also a widespread reduction in numbers.

“A few years back we started seeing something different,” Black said. “Real declines in common species.”…


Greece crisis: a failure of economics in the face of politics

Paul Mason, Channel 4 News
The IMF’s report yesterday got swamped amid the gloom, despondency and fractiousness of the Greek crisis.

It said, in short, Greece’s debt has become unsustainable. Greece needs an extra €50bn now, a twenty-year holiday from its debt repayments and a substantial write off.

It’s not quite a mea culpa, because the IMF says if Greece had followed the course dictated by the Troika the debt would have been sustainable.

But it comes close. Once you add in politics to the economics, the IMF’s document reads like an early autopsy on the policy of austerity first, debt relief maybe. And it contains a horrible sting for any government – right wing, technocratic or national – that succeeds Syriza if it loses the referendum on Sunday…


Why Greece’s financial crisis is a health crisis too

Julia Belluz, Vox
Greece’s crisis isn’t only an economic one; it’s a health crisis, too. Athina Tatsioni sees it every day at the University Hospital of Ioannina, where she is an emergency-room doctor. When she started in 2009, there was a maximum of 280 patients per day. Now, she and her colleagues are overwhelmed by more than 600 patients a day. Many have lost their health insurance with their jobs and can’t afford to pay for care. They show up with late-stage disease, leaving serious conditions like diabetes untreated until they can’t live another day without seeing a doctor.

"There are days when we see several patients in a row, and they all come for similar complaints — chest tightness, headaches. We run all the tests, and we find nothing," she told Vox. "And then they start talking about their personal life: how they lost their job, their financial difficulties."

To meet their needs, Dr. Tatsioni now works double shifts — 16 hours as opposed to eight — every other day. And she wonders how she’ll keep it up. Not only is the pace exhausting, but there are drug and medical supply shortages that have made it increasingly difficult to deliver the kind of care her patients need. She says she now has to worry about whether she’ll have the basics to help her patients: saline, antibiotics, painkillers…


Orwell, Huxley and America’s Plunge into Authoritarianism

Henry A. Giroux, Counter Punch
In spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of the totalitarian superstate and how it exercised power and control over its residents, George Orwell and Aldus Huxley shared a fundamental conviction. They both argued that the established democracies of the West were moving quickly toward an historical moment when they would willingly relinquish the noble promises and ideals of liberal democracy and enter that menacing space where totalitarianism perverts the modern ideals of justice, freedom, and political emancipation. Both believed that Western democracies were devolving into pathological states in which politics was recognized in the interest of death over life and justice. Both were unequivocal in the shared understanding that the future of civilization was on the verge of total domination or what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.”

While Neil Postman and other critical descendants have pitted Orwell and Huxley against each other because of their distinctively separate notions of a future dystopian society,[1] I believe that the dark shadow of authoritarianism that shrouds American society like a thick veil can be lifted by re-examining Orwell’s prescient dystopian fable 1984 as well as Huxley’s Brave New World in light of contemporary neoliberal ascendancy. Rather than pit their dystopian visions against each other, it might be more productive to see them as complementing each other, especially at a time when to quote Antonio Gramsci “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” [2]

Both authors provide insights into the merging of the totalitarian elements that constitute a new and more hybridized form of authoritarian control, appearing less as fiction than a threatening portend of the unfolding 21st century. Consumer fantasies and authoritarian control, “Big Brother” intelligence agencies and the voracious seductions of privatized pleasures, along with the rise of the punishing state—which criminalizes an increasing number of behaviors and invests in institutions that incarcerate and are organized principally for the production of violence–and the collapse of democratic public spheres into narrow market-driven orbits of privatization–these now constitute the new order of authoritarianism…


Explainer: Aviation’s battle to limit rising emissions

Sophie Yeo, Carbon Brief
Globally, aviation is one of the fastest growing sectors in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. According to the UN’s climate body, aviation emissions increased by 76.1% between 1990 and 2012.

In 2012, aeroplanes were responsible for 689MtCO2. By 2013, this had increased to 705MtCO2, according to analysis by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) of figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

This represents around 2% of global CO2 emissions – or around the same volume of CO2 emitted every year by Germany. This means that, if the aviation sector were a country, it would be the world’s seventh largest emitter.

However, unlike a country, the aviation industry will not face a binding requirement to tackle its emissions at the UN climate talks in Paris this December, where a new international deal is set to be signed…


World of Hidden Life Teems Below Our Feet

Elizabeth Svoboda, Scientific American
Janet Jansson first started to wonder about the vast universe of underground life as a student at New Mexico State University in the late 1970s. A handful of soil contains about 10 billion bacteria, but at the time, earth scientists knew very little about what these microbes were and what they did. Later, as a young microbial ecologist at Stockholm University in Sweden, she started to catalog the microorganisms she collected during soil sampling trips, deciphering their genetic code so she could understand both their internal workings and how they fit into their underground habitat.

As Jansson dug, though, she kept running into a problem. The main method then used to amplify and analyze stretches of DNA wasn’t powerful enough to reveal all the workings of a single microorganism, much less an entire community of them. “You could get information about specific genes, but sequencing technologies were very slow,” said Jansson, now a division director of biological sciences at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash. She knew the layers of sediment she studied held a treasure trove of biological finds, but she didn’t yet have the tools she needed to unearth them.

Then, soon after the turn of the century, new high-octane DNA sequencing methods made it possible to sequence thousands or even millions of genes almost instantly…


People power: the secret to Montreal’s success as a bike-friendly city

Peter Walker, The Guardian
When it comes to cycling Montreal has a few undeniable drawbacks. For a start, it’s hilly, the streets rising gradually from the riverside to Mont Royal, a tree-lined peak which reaches eye level with the tops of the city centre skyscrapers. And then there’s the winter, with several months of snow and constant below-zero temperatures, leaving the roads rutted and cracked. But on a still-tepid morning in early summer the cyclists are nonetheless massing in the city’s Jeanne-Mance Park. Lots of them – about 30,000, in fact. Some are dressed in Lycra with lightweight road bikes, but the majority are wearing everyday clothes, many with children, either riding their own tiny machines or on one-wheeled add-ons to a parent’s bike, even toddlers strapped into trailers…

The genesis of all this can be traced back to people like Robert Silverman, better known to his fellow citizens as Bicycle Bob. Now 81, he was among the founding members of Le Monde à Bicyclette in 1975, a loose collection of mainly artists, activists and anarchists who, styling themselves the “poetic velo-rutionary tendency”, pioneered many of the direct action tactics common to modern protest movements…


This Is How I Went Car-Free In Denver

Kurt Woock, Streets Blog
Denver’s share of households without a car remains unremarkable. At 12 percent, it’s just over the national average. But that doesn’t mean it’s difficult to live without a car here — it might just be that too few people are taking advantage of other options…

If you’re thinking of going carless, it’s tempting to fixate on trips that seem the most challenging without an engine — heading to the mountains, for example. Don’t do that. It’s discouraging. Instead, arrange all the trips you take in a year into a pyramid, with the most frequent trips (like your commute) at the bottom. Replace those trips first. Next, work your way up, replacing trips that repeat weekly, like the grocery store. Already you’ve replaced 75 percent of your car trips, which you’ll realize are only to a few different destinations. This discovery builds confidence…

News clippings image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.

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