alanjjohnstone
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Exxon greenwashing net-zero emissions
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/18/exxon-net-zero-plan-called-greenwashing-climate-liar
“I don’t give a damn if Exxon is changing the lightbulbs at their office: It’s the millions of barrels of oil they’re producing that are the problem,” said Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn
Exxon’s net-zero plan should be treated “as a tobacco company promising all their staff will quit smoking and then expecting to be congratulated for having solved the lung cancer problem,” Fossil Free Media analyst Ketan Joshi said
For those who are now far in the majority who read the on-line version, there exists the option at a click of the key-board to enlarge text.
On the print version, various text sizes of articles would not be particularly pleasing to the eye.
So the problem isn’t the print size of the text but the size of the picture used to accompany the article.
I see no problem for the lay-out team to select suitably sized images that are not too small, nor too big, but as Goldilocks said, just right.
It may impose a bit more demand upon lay-out editor’s time, energy and resources, at a time when we find it difficult acquiring a volunteer for the task.
Isn’t there a well-known saying that a picture tells a story worth a thousand words?
The lucrative advertising industry would not use images on products if they did not hold the merit of that saying.
Comics has led to the graphic novel as a legitimate form of literature.
I recall much of my socialist education arose from the series of “…made easy” picture books by Rius.
Another WSM post that may be of use for those who become engaged in online exchanges about Mondragon and cooperatives
Not the best exposition but I think sufficient to portray co-ops weaknesses.
https://www.worldsocialism.org/wsm/2022/01/19/capitalism-co-opts-co-ops/
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated “The risk of a conflict is real.”
Stoletenberg at a separate event on Tuesday said that NATO has information backing up US claims made last week that Russia has operatives currently in Ukraine for the purpose of carrying out “false flag” operations as a pretext for invasion. He says it’s “absolutely possible” they’re planning “incidents, accidents, false flag operations.”
https://www.dw.com/en/german-nato-leaders-warn-real-risk-of-ukraine-russia-conflict/a-60463185
The capitalist case for environmentalism
Larry Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment fund manager which manages about $10tn (£7.4tn) in assets, said pushing climate policies was about profits, not being “woke”.
“Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not ‘woke’,” he wrote. “We focus on sustainability not because we’re environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients.”
“It is through effective stakeholder capitalism that capital is efficiently allocated, companies achieve durable profitability, and value is created and sustained over the long term. Make no mistake, the fair pursuit of profit is still what animates markets; and long-term profitability is the measure by which markets will ultimately determine your company’s success.”
“the next 1,000 unicorns won’t be search engines or social media companies, they’ll be sustainable, scalable innovators – startups that help the world decarbonise and make the energy transition affordable for all consumers”, adding that established companies should strive to do the same.
My personal take is that an emotional crowd was incited by a demagogue into becoming a mob and when faced with under-manned and reluctant police (why is a question that remains to be answered), their security barriers relatively easy to overrun, it transformed into a riot. Shocked and surprised by how easy the occupation was accomplished, that had not a clue on what to do next, to the point of asking Capitol police for directions on where to go.
Insurrections and revolutions have, nevertheless, been stirred by lesser unplanned events.
The Trump movement is a nebulous and amorphous phenomenon.
Seeing we can reliably judge that pro-Trumpers is over 45%, have anybody wondered why the general strike has never been voiced much less advocated and exercised.
Is it reflective of the social strata who support him, self-employed, small business owners, evangelical Christian nationalists, predominantly non-working class despite his popularity with many blue-collared in the rust states?
Is it a sign of just how narrow his support really is? Unable to organise any mass industrial action, much less an armed mass revolt by the various collections of militia groups.
Regardless of sympathy within the military ranks, Trump has been unable to influence the higher echelons of the command structure to involve itself. He has had to rely on the paramilitary federal forces of ICE and Border Patrol, for example, in Portland and Seattle hotbeds of leftist activity.
But it is clear that the Democratic Party will lose 2022 mid-terms and both houses will return Republican majorities. Rather than now being stubborn obstructionists thwarting the Democrats (other than authorising increased defence budget), Republicans will then enact their own partisan policies and Biden will have to veto by executive directives many of them, acquiring among many Republicans all the signs of an autocratic despot. It will empower more right-wing subversives. Challenging and reinforcing the already lack of legitimacy Biden holds with the Right. Destabilise the future political scene and only a few extremists using terrorism could spark off, a constitutional crisis.
Anyways, mere speculation. A rather less generous analysis of the American public opinion is that it is apathetic and passive on both right and left. Too self-centred and consumerist oriented to care about politics. They sit on the fence on most occasions, isolationist in domestic and well as foreign policy, more excited by the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
Another sign that the COP failed in its object.
China’s coal production reached record levels last year as the state encouraged miners to ramp up their fossil fuel output to safeguard the country’s energy supplies through the winter gas crisis.
The world’s biggest coal producer and consumer mined 384.67m tonnes of the fossil fuel last month, easily topping its previous record of 370.84m tonnes set in November,after the government called for miners to work at maximum capacity to help fuel the country’s economic growth.
China’s coal binge also spurred the country to record high coal output over the year as a whole. Chinese coal production climbed to an all-time high of 4.07bn tonnes, up 4.7% on the previous year, in a blow to climate campaigners months after the UN’s Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/17/chinas-coal-production-hit-record-levels-in-2021
Britain has begun supplying Ukraine with new light anti-tank weapons in response to “the increasingly threatening behaviour from Russia”, the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has announced.
Because of what is probably self-alienation we have many becoming fans and adulating various “star” figures such as show-biz and sporting personalities, transferring their success into “our” own and apparently sharing in their talent as our “own”.
Such status and esteem may well not be given.
BJ demonstrates how tribalism has an influence under capitalism regards football. Would that persist? (As an aside I notice over the years that football club managers have gained the same type of adoration as the actual players but the head coach who frequently are in partnership with certain managers and are appointed along with the manager rarely gets a mention)
Other than radio and news, BBC is blocked. I cannot access iPlayer but I could download one of those programmes that disguises your location.
Also if I watch BBC News, I get advertising
As for the future of the BBC, I imagine it will follow the course set by Netflix and HBO and pay for content.
A new Covid-19 vaccine is being developed by Texas scientists using a decades-old conventional method that will make the production and distribution cheaper and more accessible for countries most affected by the pandemic and where new variants are likely to originate due to low inoculation rates.
Although more than 60 other vaccines are in development using the same technology, Bottazzi said their vaccine is unique because they do not intend to patent it, allowing anyone with the capacity to reproduce it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/15/corbevax-covid-vaccine-texas-scientists
A British arm of the camera company Canon will this year become one of the latest businesses to trial a four-day working week with no loss of pay, as part of a six-month trial run by academics at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/jan/16/canon-uk-arm-trial-four-day-week-pilot-shorter-working
Posted on our WSM site. Not the definitive analysis that we need but merely a contribution to the debunking of UBI that some can link to.
https://www.worldsocialism.org/wsm/2022/01/16/ubi-redistributing-poverty/
