Coronavirus – facts and what to do
Facts about the COVID-19 pandemic and what you can do. Sources for more information.
Bart Anderson
What to do when you’re cooped up at home
For the next few weeks, many of us here in Ireland – and possibly where you are — will feel like we are in a permanent state of house arrest, working from home and looking after children kept home from school. Most of us are, rightly, staying away from crowds of people and making food at home, so most of us need to stock up on the basics durable foods that will keep over time – beans, lentils, rice, flour, salt, sugar and other staples.
The Politics of the Coronavirus: a lesson from Italy on how to deal with emergencies
If Italy is an example, it may be that in case of a truly serious climate emergency, governments may finally decide to react and do something serious. At the same time, the same people who are now thundering against “climate alarmism” would fall in line and ask for national unity against the climate threat.
Coronavirus, economic networks, and social fabric
We need to be thinking of ways to keep civic connections alive for the next while. The pandemic will not last indefinitely: the virus itself may be here for good, but one way or another it and humanity will negotiate some sort of biological accommodation… Our urgent task is to keep our communities healthy and resilient in the interim.
Coronavirus reminds us we are organisms in an environment
The first pandemic in a century is forcefully and sadly reminding all of us that Darwin was right about our place in the natural world, more specifically, that we will never be outside of it.
Coronavirus financial collapse: “Central banks can’t come up with vaccines”
Oblivious to the risks, we have now built a globalized society that from the point of view of a coronavirus is a near perfect vehicle for the virus’ propagation. But that is only one part of the story. For when all the tightly coupled logistical and financial nodes of the global system start transmitting signals of distress and breakdown, this really threatens panic and ruin.
The rise of Sinn Fein: Ireland’s Bernie moment
The former political arm of the IRA now draws support from the economically besieged young. A risky game.
Italy under the coronavirus attack: the return of the Plague Spreaders
The Web can spread hate and fake news at an unbelievably fast speed. In Italy, the COVID-19 epidemics arrived just a couple of days ago and the social media are already exploding in a wave of hate against the current untori, in this case supposed to be the Greens, the Government, the Communists, Immigrants, Africans, and in general the “do-gooders” (in Italian, buonisti), supposed to have done nothing to avoid the spreading of the pandemics when it was still possible to stop it.
The return of resource nationalism
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The fall of the Berlin Wall was to bring about one, integrated world market where goods and services freely traversed borders without the interference of meddling ideologues—where the agricultural, mineral and man-made treasures of one country would be available to anyone, anywhere who was willing to pay for them: oil, gold, diamonds, soybeans, palm oil, wheat, computers, software and myriad other products of the earth and of human endeavor.
The winning strategy
Having lived through the Vietnam, antinuclear, and antiwar protest era of the past half-century, I thought that protest was a fool’s errand. I am here today to say I was wrong.
Turns out McKibben was right, albeit only by an unexpected turn of events. Protests are bringing the beast to heel, and the key battleground came not in Washington or Paris but to a lonely field in South Dakota, not very far from Wounded Knee. It was the young water keepers that killed the dinosaur.
Note to EIA: Major shale operator sending cash elsewhere
Someone should send a note to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) that maybe it’s not all going to work out. If Hess is right about a peak in U.S. shale oil production soon, that peak will come about a decade earlier than the peak forecast by the EIA.
The Fight Against Climate Science. Why is Italy at the Forefront of the Battle?
Sometimes, my American friends tell me how lucky I am because I live in a country where the top politicians haven’t embraced climate science denial as they did in the US. But things are changing: climate is becoming a politically explosive issue in Italy.
