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Author Topic: Fossil Fuels: Degraded Democracy and Profit Over Planet Pollution  (Read 30202 times)

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AGelbert

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Donald 🦀 Trump has even found a way to ruin the Statue of Liberty

Robert Harrington | 12:01 pm EDT August 15, 2019
Palmer Report » Analysis

I recall a time when white nationalist talking points inserted into any discussion about the Statue of Liberty would have been politically dangerous, even for a Republican. Lest we forget, a mere seven years ago a Republican candidate for president of the United States was castigated endlessly (and, let’s face it, fatuously) for referring to “binders full of women.” We knew what he meant, and, what he meant was clumsily put, albeit innocently intended, and the backlash was a simple case of taking cynicism too far. The truth was then much easier to come by than it is now. Mitt Romney shouldn’t have become president of the United States, not because he kept actual women locked up in actual binders, but because he was a weak-minded fool and a coward, and Americans understood that.

But if one could add another verse to the Book of Ecclesiastes, one would be forgiven for wishing to include “a time to be cynical,” because that time is certainly now. These days there are fewer and fewer instances where extreme reactions to mildly and (ostensibly) innocently-phrased pronouncements are not warranted – barring irresponsible accusations of murder without evidence, of course.

When the concluding lines of the sonnet “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus, was first cast in bronze in 1903, and added to the plinth of the Statue of Liberty 17 years after Lady Liberty first lifted her lamp beside the golden door of New York Harbor, I doubt any realized then how pregnant with dangerous meaning those 17 years “too late” would become, in the hard and humorless eyes of white nationalists a century later. That 17 year gap in time subverted, in their view, “what the statute originally meant,” and hastily, they insist, tacked on this popular nonsense about letting brown people come flooding in, for goodness’ sake.

Never mind that the poem was actually written in 1883, three years before the statue was dedicated. Never mind it was written precisely to raise money for the very plinth upon which Lady Liberty was to rest and to which the poem was ultimately affixed. Just don’t confuse a white nationalist with the facts. Besides, if we destroy this precious little talking point of theirs they’ll jolly well go in search of another.For those of you who don’t know or have forgotten what the plaque says, here is the entire text:

Give me your tired, your poor,
 Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
 I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

All of which brings me to 🐍 Ken Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli is the Trump administration’s acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services. It was he who in a recent PBS interview changed the words of the poem. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Cuccinelli began, then he added the words, “who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”

All of which is to distract Americans into believing that immigrants are an undue strain on the system, despite the fact that they pay billions in taxes, billions into social security, and, for those who are undocumented, are not allowed to vote, collect benefits or qualify for Medicare. It was immigrants who helped build Trump Tower at the below-minimum-wage rate of $4 an hour. And, no, it was not millions of undocumented immigrants who voted for Hillary Clinton. No matter how much Trump would love to blame them for that, Hillary legitimately won the popular vote in 2016.

Donald Trump’s recent disavowal of white supremacy rings hollow in the shadow of Cuccinelli’s rewrite of the Statue of Liberty poem. Insisting that however duck-like the appearance, the walk and the quack may be, that this administration is not a duck is laughable. We know what the poem on Lady Liberty says, we know what it means and we know when it was written. All Americans ought to understand this, particularly a man named “Cuccilini.”

All of which puts me in mind of another poem written by another woman, Marya Mannes ✨:

Borders are scratched across the
hearts of men

By strangers with a calm, judicial

pen,

And when the borders bleed we
watch with dread

The lines of ink across the map
turn red.


Help fund Palmer Report's editorial takedown of Donald Trump!

https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/statue-of-liberty-ruin-donald-trump/20056/


Agelbert NOTE: Speaking of PUBLIC 🦕 CHARGES   >:(, you never will hear any members of Trump's Wrecking Crew utter a peep about the MASSIVE CHARGES the Federal Government bills we-the-people for each and every day in the form of "Subsidies"for the Hydrocarbon 🦕🦖 "Industries", which MUST HAVE those GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS in order to "stand on their own two feet". IOW, everything Ken Cuccinelli said is .



« Last Edit: October 23, 2021, 10:03:12 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Just How Dangerous Is ☠️ Fracking?
« Reply #361 on: August 22, 2019, 06:56:17 pm »
Just How Dangerous Is ☠️ Fracking?
1,771 views



Thom Hartmann Program
Published on Aug 21, 2019

Is there any way fracking can be done safely, for both humans and the environment?

Newly published reports show  that not even the strongest regulations can not  make fracking any safer for the environment or for wildlife or people.

Fracking can be used for both oil and gas and is an industrialized process. Fracking blasts a lot of water and chemicals underground, with hundreds of trucks bring in materials. Fracking is very expensive, and the industry is barely covering its costs. It isn’t always economic to transport the gas produced by fracking and it is burned off, making the whole process pointless while destroying the surface of the ground and deep down.

What Are the Risks of Fracking to People Who Live Close-by?

There are concerns with water and the water table becoming contaminated with chemicals. Wastewater can sometimes be dumped into streams, which could impact drinking water and wildlife.

Environmental journalist, Tara Lohan 👍 joined Thom Hartmann.

📽️ WATCH NEXT: The Science Revolution:
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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🦉 Well, amid that avalanche of horrible news for the biosphere in general, and humans of good will in particular, there is some good news (see below).

🦖 David Koch has died at age 79: Billionaire businessman was influential GOP donor ... cnn.com
CNN tries to frame 🦖 David Koch as the "enemy" of Trump 🦀. That's total BULLSHIT. The well positioned Kochroaches within the Trump Administration, now wreaking hydrocarbon havoc on wildlife, public lands and also very busy sabotaging previously approved large offshore wind renewable energy projects, gives the lie to any claim that the Trump 🐉🦕🦖 Wrecking Crew isn't composed MOSTLY of the following:

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Make Nexus Hot News part of your morning: click here to subscribe.

August 29, 2019 

« Last Edit: October 23, 2021, 10:04:21 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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The Entire Global Economy Is Complicit In The Destruction Of The Amazon
Hundreds of global corporations have promised to help limit deforestation. None of them is meeting that goal.




Cattle in confined feed lots in a deforested Amazonian area in Brazil’s central state of Para on May 3, 2009. Soon thousands of cows will graze on the freshly cleared land in Para. PAULO WHITAKER/BRAZIL ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIETY VIA REUTERS

A truck transports logs that were illegally extracted from Amazon rainforest on Tuesday. NACHO DOCE/REUTERS

Name any fast-food restaurant, personal care product or home good you have bought recently, and chances are it contributed to the deforestation of the Amazon. Now name a big bank ― any big bank, really. More than likely it has helped finance that destruction. 

Furniture companies like IKEA and La-Z-Boy, and footwear giants like Nike, Adidas and New Balance, are customers of Chinese manufacturers that source leather from Brazilian cattle ranches. Palm oil, produced in Brazil and elsewhere, is used in everything from pizza dough and ice cream to lipstick and shampoo. Soy, paper and wood products that come directly from the Amazon are omnipresent. 

It’s not hard to pinpoint our unquenchable thirst for cattle, soy, timber, palm oil and other commodities as the main driver of Amazonian deforestation and the underlying cause of the record number of fires this year. 

What’s more difficult is figuring out what to do about it. The sheer scale of the global economy and the complexity of the supply chains and financial systems that make it work mean that nearly every company, corporation and banking and investment institution on the planet is complicit in the destruction of the Amazon and other forest ecosystems around the world. 

Although hundreds of companies have made high-profile public commitments to combating deforestation, none is doing enough to actually limit ― much less end ― the practice. 

“It’s very challenging to live your day without touching deforestation,” said Stephen Donofrio, a senior adviser at Forest Trends, a nonprofit that tracks corporate deforestation.

The world loses 30 football fields of trees to deforestation every minute, but few places highlight the problem quite like the Amazon, a rainforest that has been the subject of extensive global attention and protectionist efforts from past Brazilian leaders and conservation groups for decades. 

Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has reversed many gains made under past administrations. Since taking office in January, he has gutted Brazil’s environmental agencies and moved to strip protections from the Amazon and indigenous land there. But he has not acted alone: A vast network of U.S. and European corporations, backed by large financial institutions and supplied by smaller Brazilian companies, farmers and ranchers, are also playing a part, as the environmental nonprofit Amazon Watch highlighted in an April report.  

The Amazon Watch report named the world’s largest soy trading companies ― Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, known collectively as the ABCDs ― along with smaller, lesser-known corporations linked to timber, beef and palm oil production that had helped spur deforestation. 

In 2014, Cargill was among the hundreds of global companies that pledged to limit its effect on global forests, including the Amazon, by refusing to purchase commodities from suppliers that deforested the land to produce them. This year, it has touted its efforts to build “deforestation-free supply chains” by 2030 and said it would no longer rely on suppliers that violated that aim. 

But in June, Cargill told Brazilian farmers that it opposed a moratorium on soy production in the Cerrado, a savannah region of Brazil, a priority for environmental groups that had already helped establish a similar moratorium in the Amazon more than a decade ago. Cargill’s justification was that other companies and suppliers would continue producing soy and destroying forests even if it stopped; indeed, other soy giants had also resisted the moratorium. 

Instead, the company committed to spending $30 million to fund new ideas to meet its goal of limiting deforestation, but environmental groups have criticized the company for its inability to choose between its destructive suppliers and its sustainability goals, which Cargill has admitted it is still not on track to meet.

Cargill declined to comment and referred HuffPost to the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries, or ABIOVE, which represents its industry in Brazil.

ABIOVE responded late Wednesday that “it is a mistake to affirm that soy crop is a driver of deforestation,” noting that soybean production is occurring in “only 1.14%” of the entire Amazon biome. The statement also said, in part:

“Brazilian environmental legislation is one of the strictest and most complete on the world. The challenge is to prove that this legislation is, in fact, complied and monitored. So, ABIOVE will continue committed not to trade soy produced on properties with deforested areas, or those embargoed by environmental monitoring entities.”

Together, soy and cattle production accounts for almost 80% of Amazon deforestation, and the April report pointed, too, to Brazilian meat giants, such as JBS, a company that also operates in the U.S. and Europe and, together with two other Brazilian corporations, is responsible for roughly 70% of Brazil’s beef exports to the United States and Europe. 

JBS faced millions of dollars in fines for buying cattle raised on protected lands in 2017, and earlier this year, it was among the Brazilian meat companies linked to similar practices in a joint investigation published by The Guardian, Repórter Brasil and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The financial institutions that provide financing to those companies are also responsible. 

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is a “key financier of the agribusiness giants most implicated in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon,” the report said, noting that it holds more than $2.5 billion worth of shares in Brazil’s largest agribusiness companies.

BlackRock CEO Laurence Fink, the report noted, has earned the reputation as “the conscience of Wall Street” for his public positioning of the company as one committed to sustainability. At the same time, it remains “the common denominator in the financing of some of the most destructive industries on the planet,” said Christian Porier, a program director at Amazon Watch and the lead author of the April report. (Amazon Watch launched a campaign against BlackRock this year, seeking to “hold it accountable.”)

BlackRock, according to the report, has provided financing to both Cargill and Bunge, both of which faced fines from the Brazilian government last year for purchasing grain linked to illegal deforestation. Both companies disputed the fines and said they had complied with the law. 

In a lengthy email statement that never mentioned the Amazon, BlackRock spokesman Farrell Denby said the the majority of the company’s holdings are held through index and exchange-traded funds that are selected by its investor clients and that its “obligation as an asset manager and a fiduciary is to manage our clients’ assets consistent with their investment priorities.” He said BlackRock encourages clients “to adopt the robust business practices consistent with sustainable long-term performance” and, when it has concerns, stands “ready to vote against proposals from management or the board.” Denby did not respond to a question about whether BlackRock is taking any steps in light on the record number of fires in the rainforest.

Banks including Santander, JPMorgan Chase and Barclay’s have also provided financing to JBS, according to the report. Other large financial institutions, including HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Credit Suisse, have underwritten Marfrig and Minerva, two other large beef companies based in Brazil, over the last five years, the report said.

Many of the world’s largest banks, especially those based in Europe and the United States, have in recent years announced plans to reduce their financing of companies linked to deforestation. In 2017, for instance, HSBC implemented a “no deforestation” policy in response to a Greenpeace report that linked the bank to more than $16 billion in investments into firms accused of illegally deforesting land. Barclay’s and Credit Suisse were among a group of financial institutions that in 2014 committed to reaching zero net deforestation, meaning they’d help mitigate the loss by replanting elsewhere. 

Marfrig, meanwhile, has touted its compliance with Amazon conservation standards but has been linked to ranchers and beef suppliers who have recently faced fines for illegal deforestation from Brazil’s environmental ministry. 

But that highlights a larger issue with corporate efforts to limit their destructive practices: Though they claim to meet sustainability standards, they often only account for the practices of their immediate partners and don’t take responsibility for what happens further down the supply chain. 

Many companies “can demonstrate [compliance] in terms of their primary suppliers, but...their supply chain due diligence ends there,” Porier said. 

That isn’t always a result of nefarious practices. Companies often simply don’t have the information they need to get on board with efforts to better protect ecosystems like the Amazon, said Michael Coe, an earth system scientist and director of the Amazon program at Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.  

“We have to think about all the different players and ask what levers are there that we can try to apply to reduce the demand to deforest,” he said. 

Intact ecosystems are becoming increasingly key. The United Nations warned in a report this month that unsustainable land use has helped drive atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to their highest levels in human history and devastated natural buffers against planetary warming. And even before the U.N.’s warnings turned increasingly urgent, the global environmental crisis had led to an increased focus on sustainable products from consumers and corporations alike. 

Whether the cause is a lack of information or a drive for profits, there remains a significant gap between what companies say they are doing to combat deforestation and what they’re actually accomplishing when it comes to limiting it.

In 2014, hundreds of companies pledged to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains and financial portfolios by 2020. But less than six months before that deadline arrives, not a single one of them is on track to meet the goal, according to Global Canopy, a British nonprofit that tracks more than 500 companies and financial institutions that put forests at risk through their reliance on or financing of commodity-rich supply chains. 

The Carbon Disclosure Project, another British nonprofit, has attempted to persuade corporations to be more transparent about their environmentally destructive practices in an effort to improve them. 

But more than 70% of the 1,500 companies it asked to disclose information on timber, palm oil, cattle and soy production in 2018 didn’t share data, and more than 350 of them ― including companies like Dominos Pizza and Mondelez, the Illinois-based food company whose top brands include Oreo, Nabisco and Kraft Foods ― haven’t disclosed information in any of the last three years.  

Nearly 25% of the companies that did share data said they have taken no action at all to limit their effect on deforestation or have moved to address it on only one of the four commodity groups. The survey also showed that a third of the responding companies had yet to start working with suppliers to limit deforestation.

More than half of the 865 companies whose practices risk contributing to deforestation have committed to relying on sustainable commodities, Forest Trends said in a June report

But it found than less than 10% of them have committed to net-zero deforestation, and fewer than a third of those have reported making substantive progress toward the goal. 

“Despite the commitments that have been made,” Global Canopy said in its annual “Forest 500” report, “evidence shows that rates of commodity-driven deforestation have not decreased.”

« Last Edit: October 23, 2021, 10:35:29 pm by AGelbert »

AGelbert

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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
Biden, 🐍 Biden, you can’t hide, we can see your 🦕 greedy side!”

Protests Erupt Outside Fundraiser for 🐍 Biden Co-Hosted by 🦕 Natural Gas Executives

JAKE JOHNSON, COMMON DREAMS

Dozens of environmentalists gathered outside the New York home of investment banker David Solomon on Thursday to protest 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden's decision to attend a fundraiser there. Biden attended the event despite calls for him to cancel it following news of the co-host's deep ties to the fossil fuel industry. The high-dollar fundraiser came just 24 hours after Biden participated in a CNN presidential town hall on the climate crisis.

Read the Article →

https://truthout.org/articles/protests-erupt-outside-fundraiser-for-biden-co-hosted-by-natural-gas-executives/

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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« Last Edit: October 23, 2021, 10:24:37 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37


Surly1

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George Monbiot: Oil Strike
by Vox Populi
The oil companies have successfully transferred blame for their actions to us. It is time to fight back.

 

Let’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the First Great Extermination. A recent essay by the environmental historian Justin McBrien argues that describing the current eradication of living systems (including human societies) as an extinction event makes this catastrophe sound like a passive accident. 

While we are all participants in the First Great Extermination, our responsibility is not evenly shared. The impacts of most of the world’s people are minimal. Even middle-class people in the rich world, whose effects are significant, are guided by a system of thought and action shaped in large part by corporations. 

The Guardian’s new Polluters series reveals that just 20 fossil fuel companies, some owned by states, some by shareholders, have produced 35% of the carbon dioxide and methane released by human activities since 1965. This was the year in which the president of the American Petroleum Institute told his members that the carbon dioxide they produced could cause “marked changes in climate” by the year 2000. They knew what they were doing.

Even as their own scientists warned that the continued extraction of fossil fuels could cause “catastrophic” consequences, the oil companies poured billions of dollars into thwarting government action. They funded think tanks and paid retired scientists and fake grassroots organisations to pour doubt and scorn on climate science. They sponsored politicians, particularly in the US Congress, to block international attempts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. They invested heavily in greenwashing their public image.

These efforts continue today, with advertisements by Shell    and  which create the misleading impression that they’re switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. In reality, Shell’s annual report reveals that it invested $25 billion in oil and gas last year. But it provides no figure for its much-trumpeted investments in low carbon technologies. Nor was the company able to do so when I challenged it

paper published in Nature shows that we have little chance of preventing more than 1.5°C of global heating unless existing fossil fuel infrastructure is retired. Instead, the fossil fuel industry intends to accelerate production, spending nearly $5 trillion in the next 10 years on developing new reserves. It is committed to ecocide.

But the biggest and most successful lie it tells is this: that the First Great Extermination is a matter of consumer choice. In response to the Guardian’s questions, some of the oil companies argued that they are not responsible for our decisions to use their products. But we are embedded in a system of their creation, a political, economic and physical infrastructure that creates an illusion of choice while, in reality, closing it down.

We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism. It has been crafted with the help of skilful advertisers and marketers, by corporate celebrity culture, and by a media that casts us as the recipients of goods and services rather than the creators of political reality. It is locked in by transport, town planning and energy systems that make good choices all but impossible. It spreads like a stain through political systems, which have been systematically captured by lobbying and campaign finance, until political leaders cease to represent us, and work instead for the pollutocrats who fund them.

Within such a system, individual choices are lost in the noise. Attempts to organise boycotts are notoriously difficult, and tend to work only when there is a narrow and immediate aim. The ideology of consumerism is highly effective at shifting blame: witness the current ranting in the billionaire press about the alleged hypocrisy of environmental activists. Everywhere I see rich Westerners blaming planetary destruction on the birth rates of much poorer people, or on “the Chinese”. This individuation of responsibility, intrinsic to consumerism, blinds us to the real drivers of destruction. 

The power of consumerism is that it renders us powerless. It traps us within a narrow circle of decision-making, in which we mistake insignificant choices between different varieties of destruction for effective change. It is, we must admit, a brilliant con.

It’s the system we need to change, rather than the products of the system. It is as citizens that we must act, rather than as consumers. But how? Part of the answer is provided in a short book published by one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, called Common Sense for the 21st Century. I don’t agree with everything it says, but the rigour and sweep of its analysis will, I think, ensure that it becomes a classic of political theory.

It begins with the premise that gradualist campaigns making small demands cannot prevent the gathering catastrophes of climate and ecological breakdown. Only mass political disruption, out of which can be built new and more responsive democratic structures, can deliver the necessary transformation. 

By studying successful mobilisations, such as the Children’s March in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, that played a critical role in ending racial segregation, the Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig in 1989, that snowballed until they helped bring down the East German regime, and the Jana Andolan movement in Nepal in 2005, that brought down the absolute power of the monarchy and helped end the armed insurgency, Hallam has developed a formula for effective “dilemma actions”. A dilemma action is one that puts the authorities in an awkward position. Either the police allow civil disobedience to continue, thereby encouraging more people to join, or they attack the protesters, creating a powerful “symbolism of fearless sacrifice”… thereby encouraging more people to join. If you get it right, the authorities can’t win.

Among the crucial common elements, he found, are assembling thousands of people in the centre of the capital city, maintaining a strictly non-violent discipline, focusing on the government and continuing for days or weeks at a time. Radical change, his research reveals, “is primarily a numbers game. Ten thousand people breaking the law has historically had more impact than small-scale, high-risk activism.” The key challenge is to organise actions that encourage as many people as possible to join. This means they should be openly planned, inclusive, entertaining, peaceful and actively respectful. You can join such an action today, convened by Extinction Rebellion in central London.

Hallam’s research suggests that this approach offers at least a possibility of breaking the infrastructure of lies the fossil fuel companies have created, and developing a politics matched to the scale of the challenges we face. It is difficult and uncertain of success. But, he points out, the chances that politics as usual will meet our massive predicament with effective action are zero. Mass dilemma actions could be our last, best chance of preventing the great extermination.


Copyright George Monbiot. First published in the Guardian 10th October 2019.

« Last Edit: October 15, 2019, 02:41:05 pm by AGelbert »

AGelbert

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George Monbiot: Oil Strike
by Vox Populi
The 🦕🦖 oil 😈 companies have successfully transferred blame for their actions to us. It is time to fight back.
Let’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the First Great Extermination. ...

... Mass dilemma actions could be our last, best chance of preventing the great extermination.


I Agree that there is a great extermination taking place. I disagree that it can be stopped, though I will do all I can to stop and reverse it, as George Monbiot 👍 and XR 👍 are doing. It ain't over till it's over. Hope springs eternal and all that.

Even if we are toast, there is, believe it or not, an upside to this.

You see, the elite  greedballs are going to die even more painfullly and horribly than the 99% that dies from Catastrophic Climate Change before they do. These elites, with their bunkers and 100 year food supplies and renewable energy powered air conditioning, water purification and so on, will get to see and experience, up close and personal, the HORROR of climate 2 degrees C on up to 10 degrees C above pre-industrial causing ALL vertebrate species to go extinct.


Since these money loving BASTARDS are in 100% "Might is right" Satanic brainfuck lockstep (see: "game theory") mode from the time they reach the age of "reason", they simply cannot wrap their materialistic heads around the consequences of industrially shitting where they eat.

So, they will only realize how abysmally stupid they have been when they see that there is NO THERE OUT THERE to rapaciously exploit when their bunker food runs out. Earth's spectacular, majestic life giving biosphere will become a polluted, toxic pile of .


In order to fully appreciate what these Hellspawn Scum of the Earth will experience when it dawns on them that THEIR ANTI-EMPATHY WORLD VIEW CAUSED THIS EXTERMINATION, picture a person waking up from a self-induced catatonic state inside a coffin buried six feet under ground.

It won't be pretty. But, it will be JUST.   They will scream in terror while desperately scratching and pushing with all their might as they lose consciousness and die from lack of oxygen in a state of total panic.


And then their real punishment will begin.
 

Surly, if God wants to save the biosphere, He will save it. As to TPTB Homo SAPs running this show, I see ZERO evidence that they want to save it. Therefore, it is logical for an atheist to harbor no hope for our species. Yet, with the exception of the 'Nature Bats Last' crowd, most atheists out there do not want to engage in that, from their own "god ain't there" professed world view, INESCAPABLE logic, do they? Their God is humanity. Good luck with that...

IF, and ONLY IF, TPTB experience a spiritual awakening and embrace 100% ETHICAL BEHAVIOR, there is hope. That is one way that God could intervene through the minds and hearts of humans.

You and I aren't going to talk TPTB into an embrace of ethical behavior. XR is not going to talk TPTB into an embrace of ethical behavior. Violent bloody revolution is not going convince TPTB to embrace ethical behavior either.

All the writings of every religion and philosophy that edify our discourse by repeatedly warning, in no uncertain terms, that ethical behavior is Sine qua non  for the successful perpetuation of the human family, HAVE NOT convinced TPTB to embrace ethical behavior.

God has shown the way. The most ambitious, intelligent, ethics rejecting humans have cheated, lied and murdered their way to the catbird seat. They have given God the finger. They ARE TPTB at present. Jesus Christ, while He was dying on the cross, said, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do." Well, that is no longer the case. TPTB KNOW EXACTLY what they are doing to their fellow humans and the rest of the biosphere.

I can't speak for God, but it don't look good for humanity, bro.

Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not thy law. Ps 119:136


« Last Edit: October 15, 2019, 11:49:00 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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#Sludge Report — Who 👹💵🎩 Is Funding The 🦖 Fossil Fuel 😈 Industry?

October 17th, 2019 by Steve Hanley

SNIPPET:

Other top financiers of fossil fuel companies include Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. In all, 33 financial institutions provided approximately $1.9 trillion in funding to the  fossil fuel sector between 2016 and 2018. The analysis was done for The Guardian by Rainforest Action Network, a US-based environmental organization using Bloomberg financial data and publicly available company disclosures.

The figures show Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America ponied up about $80 billion to finance fracking operations in the Permian basin in Texas over the past three years.  The financing of the tar sands crude oil projects in Alberta, Canada, is dominated by Canadian banks, led by the Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto Dominion. The big four state-owned Chinese banks, which have no fossil fuel financing policies, have dominated services for coal mining and coal generating plants since 2016.

Asked to comment on the findings, JPMorgan Chase offered a typically mealy-mouthed, weasel-worded response, saying it recognizes the complexity of climate change and is actively engaging with all stakeholders on the issue. Isn’t that like saying we will continue to help and pillage the Earth until someone forces us to stop?

Full article


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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For some reason, this story really struck me to drive home the point that we are well and truly **** as humanity. Faced with catastrophic climate change, our response is to air condition the stadiums. Because money. And we know better, but just don't care.

Facing unbearable heat, Qatar has begun to air-condition the outdoors


DOHA, Qatar — It was 116 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade outside the new Al Janoub soccer stadium, and the air felt to air-conditioning expert Saud Ghani as if God had pointed “a giant hair dryer” at Qatar.

Yet inside the open-air stadium, a cool breeze was blowing. Beneath each of the 40,000 seats, small grates adorned with Arabic-style patterns were pushing out cool air at ankle level. And since cool air sinks, waves of it rolled gently down to the grassy playing field. Vents the size of soccer balls fed more cold air onto the field.

Ghani, an engineering professor at Qatar University, designed the system at Al Janoub, one of eight stadiums that the tiny but fabulously rich Qatar must get in shape for the 2022 World Cup. His breakthrough realization was that he had to cool only people, not the upper reaches of the stadium — a graceful structure designed by the famed Zaha Hadid Architects and inspired by traditional boats known as dhows.

“I don’t need to cool the birds,” Ghani said.

Qatar, the world's leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, may be able to cool its stadiums, but it cannot cool the entire country. Fears that the hundreds of thousands of soccer fans might wilt or even die while shuttling between stadiums and metros and hotels in the unforgiving summer heat prompted the decision to delay the World Cup by five months. It is now scheduled for November, during Qatar's milder winter.

The change in the World Cup date is a symptom of a larger problem — climate change.

Already one of the hottest places on Earth, Qatar has seen average temperatures rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times, the current international goal for limiting the damage of global warming. The 2015 Paris climate summit said it would be better to keep temperatures "well below" that, ideally to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Over the past three decades, temperature increases in Qatar have been accelerating. That’s because of the uneven nature of climate change as well as the surge in construction that drives local climate conditions around Doha, the capital. The temperatures are also rising because Qatar, slightly smaller than Connecticut, juts out from Saudi Arabia into the rapidly warming waters of the Persian Gulf.

In a July 2010 heat wave, the temperature hit an all-time high of 50.4 degrees Celsius.

“Qatar is one of the fastest warming areas of the world, at least outside of the Arctic,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate data scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit temperature analysis group. “Changes there can help give us a sense of what the rest of the world can expect if we do not take action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.”

While climate change inflicts suffering in the world’s poorest places from Somalia to Syria, from Guatemala to Bangladesh, in rich places such as the United States, Europe and Qatar global warming poses an engineering problem, not an existential one. And it can be addressed, at least temporarily, with gobs of money and a little technology.

To survive the summer heat, Qatar not only air-conditions its soccer stadiums, but also the outdoors — in markets, along sidewalks, even at outdoor malls so people can window shop with a cool breeze. “If you turn off air conditioners, it will be unbearable. You cannot function effectively,” says Yousef al-Horr, founder of the Gulf Organization for Research and Development.

Yet outdoor air conditioning is part of a vicious cycle. Carbon emissions create global warming, which creates the desire for air conditioning, which creates the need for burning fuels that emit more carbon dioxide. In Qatar, total cooling capacity is expected to nearly double from 2016 to 2030, according to the International District Cooling & Heating Conference.

And it’s going to get hotter.

By the time average global warming hits 2 degrees Celsius, Qatar’s temperatures would soar, said Mohammed Ayoub, senior research director at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute. In rapidly growing urban areas throughout the Middle East, some predict cities could become uninhabitable.

“We’re talking about 4 to 6 degrees Celsius increase in an area that already experiences high temperatures,” Ayoub said. “So, what we’re looking at more is a question of how does this impact the health and productivity of the population.”

The danger is acute in Qatar because of the Persian Gulf humidity. The human body cools off when its sweat evaporates. But when humidity is very high, evaporation slows or stops. “If it’s hot and humid and the relative humidity is close to 100 percent, you can die from the heat you produce yourself,” said Jos Lelieveld, an atmospheric chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany who is an expert on Middle East climate.

That became abundantly clear in late September, as Doha hosted the 2019 World Athletics Championships. It moved the start time for the women’s marathon to midnight Sept. 28. Water stations handed out sponges dipped in ice-cold water. First-aid responders outnumbered the contestants. But temperatures hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit and 28 of the 68 starters failed to finish, some taken off in wheelchairs.

Workers are particularly at risk. A German television report alleged hundreds of deaths among foreign workers in Qatar in recent years, prompting new limits on outdoor work. A July article in the journal Cardiology said that 200 of 571 fatal cardiac problems among Nepalese migrants working there were caused by “severe heat stress” and could have been avoided.

The U.S. Air Force calls very hot days “black flag days” and limits exposure of troops stationed at al-Udeid Air Base. Personnel conducting patrols or aircraft maintenance work for 20 minutes, then rest for 40 minutes and drink two bottles of water an hour. People doing heavy work in the fire department or aircraft repair may work for only 10 minutes at a time, followed by 50 minutes of rest, according to a spokesman for the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing.

In early July, Qatar’s Civil Defense Command warned against doing outdoor work between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., putting gas cylinders in the sun, turning on water heaters, completely filling fuel tanks or car tires, or needlessly running the air conditioner. It urged people to drink plenty of fluids — and to beware of snakes and scorpions.

‘Expect Amazing’

For now, managing climate change in a place like Qatar, whose slogan for the World Cup is “Expect Amazing,” is primarily a matter of money.

And Qatar has plenty. Its sovereign wealth fund is worth about $320 billion. A few of its stakes include Harrods department store, London’s gigantic Canary Wharf, the Paris Saint-Germain soccer club, the CityCenterDC office and residential development and a 10 percent stake in the Empire State Building.

Qatar has used its riches to great effect at home, where 11 winners of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize have built striking high-rises and stadiums. The result is a strange combination of avant-garde architecture, oil wealth, Islamic conservatism, shopping malls and climate change that Qatari American artist Sophia al-Maria has dubbed “Gulf Futurism.”

“With the coming global environmental collapse, to live completely indoors is like, the only way we’ll be able to survive. The Gulf’s a prophecy of what’s to come,” she said in an interview in Dazed Digital, an online magazine covering fashion and culture.

So far, Qatar has maintained outdoor life through a vast expansion of outdoor air conditioning. In the restored Souq Waqif market, a maze of shops, restaurants and small hotels, three- to four-foot-high air-conditioning units blow cool air onto cafe customers. At a cost of $80 to $250 each depending on the quality, they are the only things that make outdoor dining possible in a place where overnight low temperatures in summer rarely dip below 90 degrees.

Recently, the luxury French department store Galeries Lafayette opened in a shopping mall that features stylish air-conditioning grates in the broad cobblestone walkways outside. Each of the vents, about 1 by 6 feet, has a decorative design. Many of them hug the outside of buildings, cooling off window shoppers looking at expensive fashions. Though nearly deserted in the heat, by 5 p.m. some people begin to emerge to sit outside places like Cafe Pouchkine.

One recent afternoon as the temperature eased to 110 degrees Fahrenheit, Aida Adi Baziac, an interior designer, was sharing iced lattes with a friend. They had just finished work and were perched over a cooling grate at an outdoor table at Joe’s Cafe.

“I would say it’s wasteful,” Adi Baziac said. “I know how it impacts the environment negatively.”

But it allows them to enjoy the outdoors in the summer, she added. “We can sit outside in an air-conditioned, controlled area, and we sit and mix and mingle.”

Even Qatar’s small band of climate activists sympathize. Asked about the outdoor air conditioners, Neeshad Shafi, executive director of Arab Youth Climate Movement Qatar, said, “That’s about survival. It’s too hot. That’s the reality.”


Al Janoub stadium is one of eight soccer stadiums that Qatar is prepping for the 2022 World Cup.

Engineering professor Saud Ghani designed the open-air stadium's air-conditioning system.

Small vents push cool air at ankle level inside the stadium.

See the rest of the article, plus more photographs and interactive graphics here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/climate-environment/climate-change-qatar-air-conditioning-outdoors/?utm_source=reddit.com&wpisrc=nl_powerup&wpmm=1
« Last Edit: October 23, 2021, 10:22:28 pm by AGelbert »

AGelbert

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For some reason, this story really struck me to drive home the point that we are well and truly **** as humanity. Faced with catastrophic climate change, our response is to air condition the stadiums. Because money. And we know better, but just don't care.

Facing unbearable heat, Qatar has begun to air-condition the outdoors

Yep. Qatar's outdoor air conditioning is definitely Prima facie evidence of insanity.

Tomorrow is Yesterday...


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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