alanjjohnstone
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Facebook hired a PR firm that attempted to discredit the company’s critics by claiming they were agents of billionaire George Soros, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
Soros is a Jewish philanthropist who is the frequent subject of antisemitic conspiracy theories. At the same time, the social media company urged the Anti-Defamation League to object to a cartoon used by anti-Facebook protesters over its resemblance to antisemitic tropes.
Rashad Robinson, the executive director of one of the groups targeted by the PR campaign, Color of Change, called the antisemitic smear “outrageous and concerning”.
“This narrative has really dangerous antisemitic undertones about Jewish people controlling the world,” Robinson told the Guardian. “It’s also deeply anti-black – the idea that our strategies, our ideas, our vision are somehow built off some puppet master … That Facebook would employ a rightwing firm to say that is deeply troubling.” Robinson also said that over the past year, he has been asked numerous times by journalists about funding from Soros. “No one at the end of a call says, ‘Are you funded by the Ford Foundation?’,”.
<p class=”story-body__introduction”>The number of sheep and cattle in the UK should be reduced by between a fifth and a half to help combat climate change, a report from the government’s advisory Committee on Climate Change (CCC) maintains, because beef and lamb produce most greenhouse gases. The report foresees an increase in the number of pigs and chickens because these produce less methane.</p>
The CCC says a 20-50% reduction in beef and lamb pasture could release 3-7m hectares of grassland from the current 12m hectares in the UK. The un-needed grassland could instead grow forests and biofuels that would help to soak up CO2. Carbon is stored in plants and in the soil, so the CCC recommends that farm subsidies should raise the proportion of UK land under forestry from 14% to 19%, and restore peat bogs.The committee’s advice on producing less red meat is less radical than NHS Eatwell guidelines on healthy eating, which proposes a reduction in consumption of 89% for beef and 63% for lamb, and a 20% decline in dairy products.
BBC News understands that the committee have deliberately taken a more conservative position in order to minimise confrontation with the farmers’ union, the NFU.
Committee on Climate Change (CCC), Chris Stark, told BBC News: “Climate change is going to change the way the UK looks – and we also have to alter the way we use land so we don’t make climate change worse.”
George Monbiot told BBC News: “This is a timid and inadequate report. Roughly four million hectares of uplands is used for sheep, yet sheep account for just 1.2% of our diet. Allowing trees to return to a significant portion on this land has a far greater potential for carbon reduction than the puny measures proposed in this report.”
Friends of the Earth’s Guy Shrubsole said: “We need to reforest far more of Britain than the government’s current puny tree-planting targets – going beyond what this report calls for and doubling forest cover to lock-up carbon and help prevent floods.”
Guy Shrubsole is quoted in the Guardian saying “This report is a wake-up call for a complacent government that we must completely transform the way we use land to avoid climate breakdown and make space for nature.”
The CCC says as UK temperatures have risen by 0.8°C over the last 40 years, farmers have made the impacts worse. Loss of soil fertility, plant and animal species are now apparent, it says, mainly driven by intensive food production.
Projections suggest more warming, sea level rise, greater risks from flooding and drought.
“Despite some opportunities,” the report says, “The negative impacts on our soils, water, vegetation and wildlife are likely to be significant.”
Now the doctors report. Western lifestyle is bad for your health
Dr Noel Mueller, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, who led the research, said: “The idea that blood pressure rises with age as part of a natural phenomenon is increasingly being dispelled through evidence… but a result of longer exposure to risks arising from lifestyle, such as high levels of salt in the diet, lack of exercise and heavy drinking…”
And now here is the weather forecast
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/14/climate-change-hurricanes-study-global-warming
When i took my early retirement, some years after yourself, James, the bank’s interest rate had gone down to virtually zero and there was serious talk of actually charging customers for placing money into an account.
Luckily for the Party, we now have an investment committee to ensure our cash is giving us a financial return.
Despite a significant core of “sleeping” membership, we do have the good fortune to possess active members. We possess many resources and funds that others do not have access to that can compensate for those “missing” members.
Just how numerous is Extinction Rebellion? What sort of organisational strength do they possess behind them? I would say very little.
Yet in one action they received more publicity and exposure for themselves and their statement than we have ever achieved on climate change
As they say, action speaks louder than words. Maybe we should be considering doing something so that our presence and our position is noted. Suggestions welcome. I’m not proposing Fathers 4 Justice stunts
We will attend Saturday’s rally on racism and have our stall. All very good, but we will be just one amongst scores. Will our banner be there? Have we purchased a specifically themed banner to muster under? WORLD SOCIALIST MOVEMENT – ONE WORLD, ONE PEOPLE – WORLD SOCIALISM. Such a banner for 50 quid or even a 100 would have been a wise move something that presently is small change to ourselves. We could have opened HO up and paid for travel and eating expenses for out -of -towners to come to boost our numbers. A free weekend in London as an enticement for the sacrifice of a few hours.
We will have a presence at this rally but will be seen? I have my doubts.
But maybe i’m wrong but no doubt some comrades will be critical of me since i won’t be there. As if i haven’t attended protests before, sometimes being the only SPGBer at them, a lonely wee soul clutching a handful of soggy Standards in the pouring rain. So don’t dare lecture me…I’ve walked the talk.
What is the text of the leaflet we are handing out on Saturday so the blogs (and our other social media) can reproduce it
A few photos of us at the event will be appreciated too for posting.
Don’t expect good news from me. Capitalism doesn’t produce such news. But there are those who understand that there is an urgency but are still blind to the causes and the cures. If we don’t raise our voice, nobody will hear, if we don’t seek out an audience, nobody will listen. We are failing to communicate our message.
“…At a press conference held by climate activists Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us journalists pressed the organisers on whether their aims were realistic. They have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by 2025. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims?
A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t spoken before, but the passion, grief and fury of her response was utterly compelling. “What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing extinction. When you ask questions like that, what is it you want me to feel?” We had no answer…[But we do, make socialism an immediacy, not a distant aspiration]
…Economic elites, which benefit from social dysfunction, block the necessary solutions. The oligarchic control of wealth, politics, media and public discourse explains the comprehensive institutional failure now pushing us towards disaster…..Because we cannot save ourselves without contesting oligarchic control, the fight for democracy and justice and the fight against environmental breakdown are one and the same. Do not allow those who have caused this crisis to define the limits of political action. Do not allow those whose magical thinking got us into this mess to tell us what can and cannot be done….”
And what has been our recent contribution to the discussion – a debate on Summer School’s menu …veggie or meat and two veg. Or did it focus on breakfast, sausages and rashers of bacon.
Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.
Another extinction claim.
No doubt the news that heatwaves effect male insects has come across your radar and been expecting a comment by myself. The study by researchers at the University of East Anglia, published today in Nature Communications, shows “clear evidence” that heat-wave stress reduces “sperm number and viability” in insects.
However more alarming is this report
An environmental economist from the University of California in Los Angeles released a study showing that “temperature shocks” linked to climate change were reducing birth rates, despite increased sexual activity in summer months. Derived from 80 years of birth and weather data out of the United States, the study confirmed a higher number of babies being born in August and September (nine months after the depths of winter), while fewer babies were conceived in summer due to higher temperatures.
The researchers warned that the higher frequency and severity of heat waves — which is expected as climate change carries on — will hasten this decline in fertility.
“Climate change projections show dramatic increases in hot weather,” Barreca told DW. “This increase in hot weather will harm our reproductive health in the future.”
A 2017 review of studies into rapidly declining sperm counts in men went as far as to warn of human extinction if the trend of a recorded 50 to 60 percent drop in sperm count in males from North America, Europe and Australia from 1973 to 2011 continues.
But take hope for conclusive evidence linking declining fertility to any specific environmental problem is lacking.
https://www.dw.com/en/climate-change-reduces-male-fertility-could-help-drive-extinction/a-46276058
Another failure reported.
On current commitments the world is on course for a 3.2C rise in average global temperatures, more than double the lower Paris threshold of 1.5C,
Among the G20 nations 15 reported a rise in emissions last year.
82% of energy in these countries still being provided by coal, oil and gas, a factor which has relied on a doubling of subsidies over the past 10 years to compete with increasingly cheap wind, solar and other renewable energy sources.
The G20 nations increased subsidies for fossil fuels from $75bn (£58bn) to $147bn (£114bn) between 2007 and 2016, although they pledged to phase them out more than 10 years ago.
The worst offenders – Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – would take the world beyond 4C.
“There is a huge fight by the fossil fuel industry against cheap renewables. The old economy is well organised and they have put huge lobbying pressure on governments to spend tax money to subsidise the old world,” Jan Buerck, one of the authors of the report, explained. These political pressures are likely to intensify as governments are called upon to extend emissions cuts to the transport and agriculture sectors.
The report said G20 emissions needed to start declining in the next two years and halve by 2030 if the world were to avoid more than 1.5C of warming, though not one country in the group had set a credible target to do this.
Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, said: “Global emissions need to peak in 2020.”
So what are the chances of that, if any of us were betting men?
Perhaps it is the terminology that adds to the confusion
Carbon Neutral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_neutrality
“Regarding terminology in UK and Ireland, in December 2011 the Advertising Standards Authority … ruled that no manufactured product can be marketed as “zero carbon”, because carbon was inevitably emitted during its manufacture. This decision was made in relation to a solar panel system whose embodied carbon was repaid during 1.2 years of use and it appears to mean that no buildings or manufactured products can legitimately be described as zero carbon in its jurisdiction.”<sup id=”cite_ref-12″ class=”reference”></sup>
And then there is Carbon Footprint
Spain has launched an ambitious plan to switch its electricity system entirely to renewable sources by 2050 and completely decarbonise its economy soon after.
By mid-century greenhouse gas emissions would be slashed by 90% from 1990 levels under Spain’s draft climate change and energy transition law.
To do this, the country’s social democratic government is committing to installing at least 3,000MW of wind and solar power capacity every year in the next 10 years ahead.
New licences for fossil fuel drills, hydrocarbon exploitation and fracking wells, will be banned, and a fifth of the state budget will be reserved for measures that can mitigate climate change.
Pet food is always marketed to the “tastes” of people. Pets can’t read the adverts and don’t have money to shop.
When i left the UK i recall a new cat food flavour was lemon sole
I also recall a vet explaining to me the healthiest dog food was Chappie, which was the cheapest of the cheap – because it was mostly fish by-products, not your beefy juicy Chum…..mmmm…similar to that Greggs pasty you been eating 😛
Where i live now, i buy human quality food for my two dogs, just cheap offal cuts that the supermarkets in the UK cannot put on their shelves because of the Western finickity palates.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects per capita chicken consumption will rise only about 1.2 percent next year, compared to gains of 4.3 percent for pork and 2.6 percent for beef. An expansion in the number of U.S. hogs and cattle is contributing to the change in diets by boosting supplies of pork and beef.
If i recall, the motivation for the post came from reading that in the West veterinary surgeries now have more high-tech diagnostic and treatment equipment than many developing countries hospitals and clinics.
I recall from my own anecdotal evidence this is due to the rise of the pet insurance industry because i know vets in my youth would recommended putting your animal down if the cost was high, but now, they’ll offer heart transplants and what not for your pet since the insurance will pay. (Same thing with dentistry – private dentists arose with the growth of dental plans.)
