alanjjohnstone
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The U.S. is projected to see nearly 100,000 more COVID-19 deaths between now and Dec 1st. Health experts say that toll could be cut in half if everyone wore a mask in public spaces.
https://apnews.com/article/science-health-coronavirus-pandemic-6df4471c64e40e7e319ae368d4c1db0b
The American Right used Benghazi relentlessly against Hillary Clinton
We can fully expect them to use Kabul Airport bomb against Biden.
I think there is another topic thread devoted to changing attitudes towards socialism in the USA, but can’t locate right now
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/aug/26/big-scary-s-word-socialism-documentary-film
An article on geo-engineering
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/26/planet-earth-climate-crisis-geoengineering
But an interesting side-issue raised
It would require international cooperation and vast overhauls of infrastructure. It would also mean that the United States and other capitalist countries would have to reorient themselves to a more centrally planned economy, devoted less to maximizing growth than to minimizing carbon. It would mean overcoming vast political differences and competing incentives the world over in order to unite in global common cause.But Buck thinks that the incentives for cooperation in the existential climate intervention project are great enough to ensure at least some success.
“I do think that if people share a common goal, they might disagree about how to reach that goal, but maybe just having the common goal is enough,” she says.
I think a mixed message her that could be mis-interpreted.
Of course, women in undeveloped countries should be given the facilities and products to access control of their own reproduction. The empowerment of females has been one of the reasons that family sizes and fertility rates are falling.
However, the implication that population is related to the environmental emergency is something that shouldn’t be inferred by the call for funding from the climate change funds.
Your comment resulted in a backlash on Libcom. To be expected.
http://libcom.org/forums/announcements/new-acg-pamphlet-id-politics-18082021
Another report describes the search for the origins of covid as having stalled
US intelligence reports that the origin of covid remains inconclusive
The oil industry is resistant
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-58321884The banking industry is resistant
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/08/24/central-banks-accused-dawdling-climate-world-burnsUS vice-president ignores Afghanistan and criticises China
The latest scheme being proposed
Imagine that 1,000 people are employed in an office building whose lot has space for only 300 automobiles. If everyone can park for free, the result is excess demand and congestion. To avoid this, a fee is charged to limit demand to the lot’s capacity. Each month the revenue from the parking fees is distributed in equal payments to everyone who works in the building. Those who travel to work by public transport or bicycle come out well ahead: they pay nothing to park and still get their share of the revenue. Those who carpool more-or-less break even. And those who commute daily in a single-occupancy vehicle pay more than they get back. Dividends apply the same logic to parking carbon in the atmosphere.
Mentioned in passing in my Discord talk was that BP invented the carbon footprint as a diversion to place the blame on individuals
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2021/08/sustainable-socialism.html
But to demonstrate it was no conspiracy theory there is this article
https://in.mashable.com/science/15520/the-carbon-footprint-sham
BP wants you to accept responsibility for the globally disrupted climate. Just like beverage industrialists wanted people to feel bad about the amassing pollution created by their plastics and cans, or more sinisterly, tobacco companies blamed smokers for becoming addicted to addictive carcinogenic products. We’ve seen this manipulative playbook before, and BP played it well.
Another scare-mongering click-bait article?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/20/on-the-ipccs-latest-climate-report-what-does-it-tell-us/
The different scenarios
There are two lower-emissions scenarios in the report, the lowest of which keeps the temperature rise by the century’s end under 1.5 degrees (after exceeding it briefly), but a quick analysis from MIT’s Technology Review points out that this scenario relies mainly on highly speculative “negative emissions” technologies, especially carbon capture and storage, and a shift toward the massive-scale use of biomass (i.e. crops and trees) for energy. We know that a more widespread use of “energy crops” would consume vast areas of the earth’s landmass, and that the regrowing of trees that are cut down to burn for energy would take many decades to absorb the initial carbon release– a scenario the earth clearly cannot afford. The lower-emissions scenarios also accept the prevailing rhetoric of “net-zero,” assuming that more widespread carbon-sequestering methods like protecting forests can serve to compensate for still-rising emissions. We know that many if not most carbon offset schemes to date have been an absolute failure, with Indigenous peoples often driven from their traditional lands in the name of “forest protection,” only to see rates of commercial logging increase rapidly in immediately surrounding areas.
the 2015 Paris Agreement, with some countries now aiming to achieve a peak in climate-altering emissions by mid-century… only approaches the middle range of the IPCC’s latest projections. The scenario based on a 2050 emissions peak is right in the middle of the report’s range of predictions, and shows the world surpassing the important threshold of 1.5 degrees of average warming in the early 2030s, exceeding 2 degrees by mid-century, and reaching an average temperature increase between 2.1 and 3.5 degrees (approximately 4 – 6 degrees Fahrenheit) between 2080 and 2100, nearly two and a half times the current global average temperature rise of 1.1 degrees since preindustrial times.
If carbon emissions continue to increase at current rates, we are looking at a best estimate of a 3.6 degree rise before the end of this century, with a likely range reaching well above 4 degrees – often viewed as a rough threshold for a complete collapse of the climate system.
The author’s conclusion is:
It is increasingly doubtful that genuine long-term climate solutions can be found without a thorough transformation of social and economic systems…Not even the landmark Biden-Sanders budget reconciliation plan that is under consideration in in the US Congress, with all its necessary and helpful climate measures, addresses the full magnitude of changes that are needed to halt emissions by midcentury.People are intuitively against urban living especially when they know of Mumbai and Mexico City over-crowding. Yet very high population densities has not affected the lives of those living in the Netherlands or Belgium.
This article suggests that inner city-living is ecologically friendlier than the suburban sprawl.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/22/cities-climate-change-dense-sprawl-yimby-nimby
the US are typically sprawling and heavily dependent on cars – at just 283 people per square mile, the average American city is more than 100 times less densely populated than Paris or Barcelona
