alanjjohnstone
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If Americans cut their consumption of animal-based foods by half, it could prevent 1.6 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, a 35% reduction.
If U.S. beef consumption is cut by 90%, the climate benefits could be even bigger, leading to a cumulative decrease of 2.4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
The average U.S. diet amounts to 5.0 kg CO2 eq. per person per day. Whereas red meat (beef, pork, lamb) represents 9% of the calories available from this diet, it contributes 47% of the GHGE. All animal-based foods combined (red meat, poultry, fish/seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal based fats) represent 82% of the baseline diet GHGE.
“While a diet shift isn’t a silver bullet, it could play an important role in curbing climate change,” Martin Heller, lead author of the study and a research specialist at University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems at the School for Environment and Sustainability, said in a statement. “This research shows that replacing only half of our animal-based food consumption with plant-based alternatives could account for nearly a quarter of the reductions necessary for the U.S. to meet a Paris Agreement target,”
Will the pandemic stoke American nationalism and anti-China jingoism?
Are we a land of socially responsible citizens or a nation of grasses?
Police say they have received 194,000 calls “snitching” on people alleged to have broken the coronavirus lockdown
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/uk-police-receive-200000-calls-from-lockdown-snitchers
It may have been because of publication of material but I recall alienation and the 1844 manuscripts were all the rage with the trendy left-wing sociologists in the early-mid 70s.
Three nights of unrest in the Paris northern suburbs have stoked fears of a major flare-up in deprived neighbourhoods where weeks of lockdown have exacerbated the simmering tensions.
Strict confinement measures to halt the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, coupled with tough policing to enforce those rules, have mixed up an “explosive cocktail” in areas already blighted by poverty, unemployment and now a worsening health crisis.
“The spark has been lit,”
Biden said that he would keep the US embassy in Israel in Jerusalem if elected.
“now that it’s done, I would not move the embassy back to Tel Aviv,” Biden told a virtual fundraising event.
https://www.france24.com/en/20200429-biden-says-he-ll-keep-us-embassy-in-jerusalem-if-elected
Global efforts to minimise the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic present an historic opportunity to scale up the technologies needed to speed a transition to cleaner energy, Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said.
“I believe there is an opportunity – and I call it an historic opportunity here,” Birol, an economist who took the helm of the Paris-based IEA in 2015, told Reuters. “The big time is about to come, but they need a push,” he said, adding that the economic stimulus packages being delivered worldwide offer an ideal vehicle for change.
Birol cautioned against blanket categorisation of the oil and gas industry as “troublemakers”, saying oil would still be used for years to come and that the coronavirus had underscored the importance of petrochemicals.
“Today the petrochemical industry … is one of the most critical ones helping us with the masks we are using or the sanitisers we are using,” he said.A slump provides a silver lining for Big Business sharks to consolidate their markets and gobble up the small fish.
Liberals in the US try to save small businesses from being taken over
But the major corporation will ensure such proposals do not become law.
“In hard economic times, often the only way to save a business and the jobs it provides is to seek investment from larger market players,” said Carl Szabo, vice president of NetChoice. “The bill’s effect would be to force businesses to go bankrupt rather than merge with a successful market player.”
Vote Biden – Vote Republican
Biden said on Wednesday he would consider announcing the names of some cabinet officials before the election – and that some of the people might be Republicans.
About half of all workers worldwide are in danger of having their livelihoods destroyed because of the pandemic, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has warned. The figure equates to more than 1.5 billion people. Already, two billion informal workers have seen their wages fall by a global average of 60% during the first month that the pandemic unfolded in their region.
“For millions of workers, no income means no food, no security and no future. Millions of businesses around the world are barely breathing,” said ILO Director-General Guy Ryder. “They have no savings or access to credit. These are the real faces of the world of work. If we don’t help them now, they will simply perish.”https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-52466471
Surely there will be a reckoning – consequences for the governments and industries that imposed lockdowns with little or no compensation.
We can debate why it may have seemed necessary. i have already made my position clear that its oranges and apples to compare nations with a fully developed social safety net and those other countries that lack welfare systems or even health systems. (an example is a drought in California is not the same as a drought in Horn of Africa…one has insurance cover and does not lead to famine, the other starves people to death)
And the UN are indicating the full pandemic is still to hit those countries, the ones least prepared to weather the storm. The pandemic is not going to be over just because we relax lockdowns in the UK/US/EU.
There are also scary but so far I believe it is not been fully confirmed stories that some of the patients who are hospitalised and recover, it is not a full recovery and there are long-term chronic after-effects. It is not just solely a matter of possible re-infection. What will be the future burden on health budgets if it transpires to be true?
And of course there is also other bad news with some economists predicting food shortages and price rises occurring.
We got to ask ourselves will people come to a better understanding of how expendable they are under capitalism…just mere collateral damage as our masters endeavour to revert back to normal business as usual.
Just some depressing thoughts
There was the Magdalene laundries – slave labour endorsed by the Irish state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magdalene_Sisters
Then there were the Jesuits and American slavery
But I hope I am not letting out confidences that one elderly member of the Party went into an old folk’s home run by nuns and preferred that they didn’t learn he was a non-believer.
The movie “planet of the humans” has stirred up a hornets nest among environmentalists.
We have been discussing all about the difficulty in getting a reliable analysis of the pandemic. This article highlights the problem we all face, even the experts.
Let’s not forget birching was permitted in Isle of Man until 1976. The last ever UK prison flogging was in 1962.
And I was brought up under a school system that used the leather belt (the Lochgelly tawse) upon the palms of the hands. Such punishment ended in the 1980s.
Not sure when the use of the cane in school ceased in England.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/24/gop-memo-anti-china-coronavirus-207244
The National Republican Senatorial Committee have written 57-page talking points to aggressively attacking China.
It stresses three main lines of assault: That China caused the virus “by covering it up,” that Democrats are “soft on China,” and that Republicans will “push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic. Coronavirus was a Chinese hit-and-run followed by a cover-up that cost thousands of lives,”
“Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban — attack China,”
