The climate wars are coming – and more refugees with them
Paul Hockenos, Al Jazeera
In his State of the European Union address on Sept. 9, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker broached a topic that until now has been virtually absent from discussion about Europe’s refugee crisis.
“Tomorrow morning we will have climate refugees,” he said bluntly, urging European leaders to tackle climate change, one of the factors exacerbating the ongoing exodus. “We should not be surprised or astonished if the first climate refugees are coming to Europe.”
Global warming is responsible for longer-lasting droughts, more violent storms and rising sea levels that worsen the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people. Its fallout, Juncker warned, will trigger massive and increasing refugee flows — unless the EU and its international partners get serious about reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere…
Europe Lacks Strategy to Tackle Crisis, but Migrants March On
Rick Lyman, New York Times
Europe’s failure to fashion even the beginnings of a unified solution to the migrant crisis is intensifying confusion and desperation all along the multicontinent trail and breeding animosity among nations extending back to the Middle East.
With the volume of people leaving Syria, Afghanistan and other countries showing no signs of ebbing, the lack of governmental leadership has left thousands of individuals and families on their own and reacting day by day to changing circumstances and conflicting messages, most recently on Thursday when crowds that had been trying to enter Hungary through Serbia diverted to Croatia in search of a new route to Germany…
How to feel good about poverty
TheRulesOrg
If we ask the BIG QUESTIONS about poverty, we can expose its root causes and get real answers about how to stop creating it..
Scorching Year Continues With the Hottest Summer on Record
Tom Randall Brian K Sullivan, Bloomberg
The earth is warming so fast it’s breaking our chart.
UN plan to save Earth is “fig leaf” for Big Business: insiders
Nafeez Ahmed, Medium: Insurge Intelligence
At the end of this month, the UN will launch its new 2030 Sustainable Development agenda for “people, planet and prosperity” in New York, where it will be formally adopted by over 150 world leaders.
The culmination of years of consultations between governments, communities and businesses all over the world, there is no doubt that the agenda’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer an unprecedented vision of the interdependence of global social, economic and environmental issues.
But records from the SDG process reveal that insiders at the heart of the UN’s intergovernment engagement negotiations have criticised the international body for pandering to the interests of big business and ignoring recommendations from grassroots stakeholders representing the world’s poor.
Formal statements issued earlier this year as part of the UN’s Post-2015 Intergovernmental Negotiations on the SDGs, and published by the UN Sustainable Development Division, show that UN ‘Major Groups’ representing indigenous people, civil society, workers, young people and women remain deeply concerned by the general direction of the SDG process — whereas corporate interests from the rich, industrialised world have viewed the process favourably…
Shale Oil’s Retreat Threatens to Leave U.S. Short on Natural Gas
Naureen Malik Dan Murtaugh, Bloomberg
The retrenchment in drilling for U.S. oil is threatening to leave a different market short: natural gas.
“The impacts of oil rig counts extend beyond oil: the outlook for U.S. natural gas is critically dependent on the outcome of this balancing act in U.S. oil rigs,” Anthony Yuen, a strategist at Citigroup Inc. in New York, said in a report to clients Wednesday. “If the oil market remains oversupplied and oil-rig counts fall, the decline in associated gas production would leave the market short of gas.”…
Solar power ‘backbone’ of future energy system – Shell CEO
Alex Pashley , RTCC
Solar power is approaching a “crossover point” where it makes sense for investors to back rays over coal, oil and gas, according to the head of oil major Royal Dutch Shell.
Amid tumultuous oil markets and tumbling costs as photovoltaic cells are rolled out globally, the value of solar is already evident in the world’s sunniest places, Ben van Beurden told BBC’s Radio 4 on Thursday.
“I have no hesitation to predict of course in years to come solar will be the dominant backbone of our energy system, certainly of the electricity system,” said the executive of the Anglo-Dutch energy giant…
Russia opens a new front in its war with Ukraine—the electric car
Steve Levine, Quartz
The war between Russia and Ukraine has a new front.
Earlier this year, ABB, a Swiss engineering company, announced that it was installing fast electric-car charging stations in Ukraine. The special stations can charge a car in 20 minutes, ABB claims, rather than the hours it usually takes. OKKO, a filling station chain, announced late last year that it will install charging equipment in all 34 of its stations across Ukraine.
Now, not to be outdone, Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev has issued an order that every Russian filling station should also have electric car chargers. Medvedev didn’t explicitly say that he was acting in response to Ukraine, but then he probably wouldn’t.
GOP to attack climate pact at home and abroad
Andrew Restuccia , Politico
Top Republican lawmakers are planning a wide-ranging offensive — including outreach to foreign officials by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office — to undermine President Barack Obama’s hopes of reaching an international climate change agreement that would cement his environmental legacy.
The GOP strategy, emerging after months of quiet discussions, includes sowing doubts about Obama’s climate policies at home and abroad, trying to block key environmental regulations in Congress, and challenging the legitimacy of the president’s attempts to craft a global agreement without submitting a treaty to the Senate…
Global warming ‘hiatus’ theory trashed by new study
Alex Pashley, RTCC
A 15-year lull in global warming from 1998-2013 never happened according to new research.
A lack of observed warming over that period has been used by sceptics to question the science behind climate change, but it was the result of dodgy statistical methods, a study published in the journal Climate Change on Thursday said.
“Our results clearly show that, in terms of the statistics of the long-term global temperature data, there was never a hiatus, a pause or a slowdown in global warming,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University and co-author of the study.
Court revokes approval of insecticide, citing ‘alarming’ decline in bees
Maura Dolan and Geoffrey Mohan, LA Times
An appeals court Thursday overturned federal approval of an insecticide used on a variety of crops, ruling that it could hasten an already “alarming” decline in bees.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the federal Environmental Protection Agency approved the insecticide, sulfoxaflor, based on flawed and limited information. Initial studies showed the insecticide was highly toxic to honey bees.
“Bees are essential to pollinate important crops and in recent years have been dying at alarming rates,” Judge Mary M. Schroeder, a Carter appointee, wrote for a three-judge panel.
Beekeepers and beekeeping organizations challenged the EPA’s 2013 approval of sulfoxaflor, made by Dow Agrosciences and designed for use on many crops, including citrus, cotton, canola, strawberries, soybeans and wheat…
Why Politicians Don’t Level the Playing Field
Tanvi Misra, Citylab
American suffers from shockingly deep income and racial gaps—inequalities that persist despite promises by public officials to reduce them. A new study published in Science offers a possible explanation why policymakers have made such little progress on these social problems: simply put, the country’s economic and political elite may be more likely than an average person to make decisions that worsen disparities.
“[The study] helps to make sense of why the policies enacted by the elite seem to diverge from the apparent state of preferences of everyday people,” Raymond Fisman, the now-Boston University economist who co-authored the study, tells CityLab. “Lots of people say they’re looking for more redistribution, yet we get a relatively muted response to rising inequality."…
Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project
Alister Doyle, Reuters
Norway will make a final $100-million payment to Brazil this year to complete a $1-billion project that rewards a slowdown in forest loss in the Amazon basin, Norway’s Environment Ministry said on Tuesday.
Brazil had more than achieved a goal of reducing the rate of deforestation by 75 percent, the condition for the payments under an agreement for 2008-15 meant to protect the forest and slow climate change, it said.
The remaining cash would be paid before a U.N. summit on climate change in Paris in December, the ministry said. Since 2008, Norway has paid about $900 million to Brazil’s Amazon Fund…
Understanding Contemporary Capitalism
David Kotz, Triple Crisis
Part 1: What is Neoliberal Capitalism? “Neoliberalism,” or more accurately neoliberal capitalism, is a form of capitalism in which market relations and market forces operate relatively freely and play the predominant role in the economy. That is, neoliberalism is not just a set of ideas, or an ideology, as it is typically interpreted by those analysts who doubt the relevance or importance of this concept for explaining contemporary capitalism. Under neoliberalism, non-market institutions – such as the state, trade unions, and corporate bureaucracies – play a limited role. By contrast, in “regulated capitalism” such as prevailed in the post-World War II decades – in the United States and other industrial capitalist economies – states, trade unions, and corporate bureaucracies played a major role in regulating economic activity, confining market forces to a lesser role…
Global Consumption Trends Break New Records
Gaelle Gourmelon, Worldwatch Institute Press Release
Worldwatch Institute’s Vital Signs exposes latest global peaks of production and consumption, as well as associated impacts.
Washington, D.C.—From coal to cars to coffee, consumption levels are breaking records. According to the Worldwatch Institute’s latest report, Vital Signs, Volume 22: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future, the acceleration of resource depletion, pollution, and climate change may come with underappreciated social and environmental costs… Vital signs tip sheet
The Iron Mask
George Monbiot, Monbiot.com
What sort of monsters were our ancestors? How could they live with themselves, in countries dominated by slavery, or serfdom, or imperial pillage; endlessly waging war, revelling in public torture and execution? How could they be so deaf to the treatment of women, of children, of minorities, of foreigners? Did they have no empathy? Were most of them psychopaths?
Well, we say to ourselves, the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. You cannot judge its people by the mores of our time, because they weren’t like us.
So has there been a radical evolution of the human brain since, say, the 19th Century? Have we acquired capacities for empathy, horror and disgust, a sense of justice that our predecessors did not possess? Are we, perhaps, a different species?…
Efficiency up, turnover down: Sweden experiments with six-hour working day
David Crouch, The Guardian
A Swedish retirement home may seem an unlikely setting for an experiment about the future of work, but a small group of elderly-care nurses in Sweden have made radical changes to their daily lives in an effort to improve quality and efficiency.
In February the nurses switched from an eight-hour to a six-hour working day for the same wage – the first controlled trial of shorter hours since a rightward political shift in Sweden a decade ago snuffed out earlier efforts to explore alternatives to the traditional working week….
