alanjjohnstone
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A US article calling for the 4-day week
We Work Too Damn Much. Let’s Demand a 4-Day Workweek by 2022.
KEEP 1.5 ALIVE protest
Huge crowd of protestors from the movements for #ClimateJustice including the large numbers who walked out after the #PeoplesPlenary outside the gates of #COP26 chanting "Keep 1.5 Alive!"#ClimateJustice #JustTransition
Credit: @agisilaos_k Agisilaos Koulouris | #COPCollab26 pic.twitter.com/sHKpJK3pND— Climate Justice Coalition (@CJ_Coalition) November 12, 2021
COP27 in 2022 will be in the wealthy tourist resort of Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt.
COP28 in 2023 will be in the United Arab Emirates
During a “People’s Plenary” on the last day of COP26 Ta’Kaiya Blaney, 19, a member of Canada’s Tla’Amin First Nation, decried the summit as a “performance”.
👏👏 "COP26 is a performance. It's an illusion constructed to salvage capitalist economy rooted in resource extraction & colonialism.
I didn't come here to fix the agenda, I came here to disrupt it. I'm not going to my coloniser for solutions"- @salishmemer at People's Plenary pic.twitter.com/Tbre2CKnvA
— Climate Justice Coalition (@CJ_Coalition) November 12, 2021
Protests or not, nuclear power will increase
China is planning to build at least 150 nuclear reactors over the next 15 years. That is more than the entire world has built over the past 35 years.
Macron said that France will revive the construction of nuclear reactors.
But of course, some countries such as Iran are being prohibited from going ahead with nuclear plants.
Does the UK or the US really want Libya and Iraq and Syria to build nuclear power stations to wean them off oil?
In socialism, that would be very different
Other countries find them prohibitively expensive. And will take time to build, certainly not within the 2030 timeline.
trade officials have been accused of “taking a chainsaw” to a draft EU law to protect the world’s forests, as a leaked document revealed an attempt to water down the plans.
Wearing a pro-Hamas t-shirt designated a terrorist act
Hundreds of delegates have walked out of COP26 to join a protest outside the summit to express frustration at a lack of results from the UN conference on its final day.
Members of environmental groups and trade unions were among those who sang “power to the people” as they left the arena to join hundreds of protesters in the street outside the blue zone.
There is a case against large centralised developments in much of Africa which lacks an electricity grid to disseminate the power.
Nuclear energy explains why France could join the alliance for the speedy exit from fossil fuels.
I think there will always be debate about the location of renewables. The RSPB would oppose the erection of any wind turbines in their many bird reserves, for instance.
Horses for courses.
I simply thought that it indicates that scientists self-censor their research by choosing their terminology to exclude political ideological connotations
To go nuclear or not?
https://www.dw.com/en/scientists-pour-cold-water-on-bill-gates-nuclear-plans/a-59751405
“Smaller, advanced reactors like those being developed under the funding from Bill Gates and others offer novel applications, approaches, and opportunities for one of the world’s largest sources of noncarbon emitting energy, nuclear energy,” Brett Rampal, director of nuclear innovation at nonprofit Clean Air Task Force
OR
“Bill Gates has continually downplayed the role of proven, safe renewable energy technology in decarbonizing our economy, playing up instead more dangerous and risky technology like and nuclear,” Michael E. Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University…he finds it troubling that Gates is trying to profit now from what he calls misdirection. “It’s misguided and dangerous, because it leads us down the wrong path. The obstacles to meaningful climate action aren’t technological at this point. They’re political,”
Biden arrived in Glasgow vowing the US will “lead by example” on climate change. Biden’s actions have not matched his words.
The climate talks have produced landmark commitments to phase out coal mining, to call time on the internal combustion engines and to compensate poorer countries for damage caused by the climate crisis.
The United States has not joined any of these pledges.
It is all in the words.
The 2nd draft COP26 apparently softens the pledge on ending fossil fuels.
The latest draft proposal from the meeting’s chair released Friday calls on countries to accelerate “the phaseout of unabated coal power and of inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels.”
A previous version on Wednesday had called on countries to “accelerate the phasing out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuel.”
15 of the world’s largest and most reputable academic publishers – including Elsevier and Cambridge University Press – have, for the first time, made available FOR FREE their most important articles on climate heating.
https://www.growkudos.com/showcase/collections/climate-change
An example is I just read
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2021.708913/full‘…We argue that critical social science should be able to name the global economy as “capitalism”; and instead of speaking about “transforming the global economy” as a necessary precondition for limiting climate change, instead speak about transforming, or even transcending, capitalism. We propose three principles are helpful for critical social science researchers willing to name and analyse the structural features of capitalism and their relation to greenhouse gas removal technology, policy, and governance. These principles are: (1) Greenhouse Gas Removal technologies are likely to emerge within capitalism, which is crisis prone, growth dependent, market expanding, We use a broad Marxist corpus to justify this principle. (2) There are different varieties of capitalism and this will affect the feasibility of different GGR policies and supports in different nations. We draw on varieties of capitalism and comparative political economy literature to justify this principle. (3) Capitalism is more than an economic system, it is ideologically and culturally maintained…Approaching the global economy as “Capitalism” is a bold move. It detaches the discussion from a generalized term (“the global economy”) and allows us to analyse a specific mode of production, as well as the cultural, social, and ecological relations that come along with it.’
