Environment Archives - Page 22 of 28

22Mar

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Environment, Health

Nature’s Revenge: Climate Change and COVID-19

by EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS Tehachapi, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. The corona virus pandemic is no accident. Like past global epidemics, it’s a warning that nature has had it with the ecocidal proclivities of man. These outrageous actions are changing climate and are warming and threatening planet Earth. Nature (the Earth) is fighting back. Climate change is sowing pandemic diseases. Corona virus in America No vaccine is likely to block for long the spreading death. Like most people of the world, Americans fail to see the broader significance of the pandemic. In addition, Trump and his sidekick, Mike Pence, spread confusion about the virus. Retired general Barry McCaffrey denounced the “Revolting sycophancy by Pence and others in the [Trump] Administration...

20Mar

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Environment

The IPCC’s Worst Case Scenario

by ROBERT HUNZIKER A recent landmark study of massive ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland fulfills the “worst case” prognosis, as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It’s a nightmare come true, as the impact of global warming on the planet’s most significant/biggest masses of ice multiplied six-fold in only 30 years. It wasn’t supposed to happen so unexpectedly, so suddenly. Studies in the journal Nature conducted by an international team consisting of 89 climatologists reveals an unprecedented rate of ice melt at the planet’s greatest ice masses. They assessed ice loss data from 11 satellites that monitored both Greenland and Antarctica over the past 30 years. Here’s the horrifying truth: The combined rate of ice loss from Greenland and Antarct...

13Mar

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Environment

Peer Pressure? Too Little and Way Too Late for the Climate Emergency

by STAN COX Photograph by Jeffrey St. Clair In a Washington Post opinion piece last month, Robert Frank sought to instruct us in how peer pressure can “help stop climate change.” He wasn’t very convincing on that point; he did help, however, to inadvertently make the case that collective efforts, ones much more sweeping than individual role-modeling, are necessary to staving off climate catastrophe. Franks argued that “social contagion” can trigger a proliferation of climate-friendly actions, writing, “It’s when we consider the effects of our behavior on our peers, and vice versa, that the consequences of individual decisions to reduce carbon use start to grow in importance.” His marquee examples of peer pressure at work were the purchase of hybrid cars an...

11Mar

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Education, Environment, World

Will COVID-19 Kill Globalization?

by JOHN FEFFER Photograph Source: CDC/Dr. Fred Murphy – Public Domain At a dinner party in mid-February, an architect told me that he was having a problem finishing his building projects. It was the carpets. Most wall-to-wall carpeting for big construction projects in the United States, he explained, comes from China. The coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan — and the subsequent shutdown of many Chinese factories — was having a ripple effect across the global economy all the way down to the carpeting in U.S. buildings. The global spread of a new pathogen has exposed the fragility of modern life. As it moves around the world, the coronavirus has compromised the circulatory system of globalization, dramatically reducing the international flow of money, goods, and people. The diseas...

11Mar

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Campaigns, Environment

Global Warming on a Rampage

by ROBERT HUNZIKER Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair Global warming is not waiting around for the signatories to the Paris climate accord ‘15 to go to net zero emissions 2030/50. Sorry, those bold plans are way too little way too late. Already, across the board, the planet is on a hot streak that defies all projections. It’s starting to look downright scary! Listen… when Helsinki has no snow in January/February accompanied by inordinate heat, it’s a powerful signal that “something is not right.” According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute: “Monthly records were not just broken, they were shattered with large margins.” (Source: 9 Freaky Phenomena Revealing How Warm This Winter Was, Treehugger, March 3, 2020) Not only that, across the planet, heat-heat-heat too much heat ...

9Mar

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Campaigns, Environment, Health, United Kingdom

Activists Urging Barclays to ‘Stop Funding the Climate Emergency’ Shut Down Nearly 100 Branches Across UK

"It's time Barclays pulled the plug and backed away from funding fossil fuels for good," said a local Greenpeace campaigner. by: Jessica Corbett, staff writer Greenpeace activists shut down Barclays branches across the United Kingdom on March 2 to pressure the bank to cut ties with the fossil fuel industry. (Photo: Tim Morozzo/Greenpeace) In a coordinated action to pressure Barclays to stop financing climate destruction, Greenpeace activists on Monday morning shut down 97 of the British investment bank's branches across the United Kingdom. "Barclays must stop funding the climate emergency; that's why we've taken action today," Morten Thaysen, climate finance campaigner at Greenpeace U.K., said in a statement. "From floods to bushfires and record heat in Antar...

9Mar

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Environment, Health, Spain, World

The World’s Waste-Pickers Under Threat

New waste management policies undermine the informal recycling sector in the Global South. by: Barcelona Research Group on Informal Recyclers Waste pickers oppose policies that exclude them from their source of livelihood: recyclable waste. (Photo: Global Alliance of Waste Pickers)On the occasion of the Global Waste Picker Day (March 1st), the Barcelona Research Group on Informal Recyclers—in collaboration with EnvJustice, the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers and WIEGO—releases a thematic map of socio-environmental conflicts in the Global South related to informal recyclers, whose livelihoods are put at greater risk due to a global policy shift towards waste management privatization that limits their access to recyclables. This map (below) do...

4Mar

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Environment

The Call for an Extinction Rebellion

by CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM Mexican Wolf. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. In the age of coming climate apocalypse, the narcissistic self-regard of humans in their exploitive relationship with the natural world is so disgusting, so utterly reprehensible, so vain and vacuous and unworthy of intelligent beings that it makes me want to repudiate humanism altogether and call for humans to be wiped off the goddamn planet. The film Planet of the Apes, issued in 1968, had it right when the apes quoted their sacred scrolls: Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Th...

25Feb

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Brazil, Environment

Amazon Onslaught

by ROBERT HUNZIKER This month Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro proposed a new bill promoting mining, expanded agriculture, and energy production on indigenous lands in the Amazon. Accordingly, private developers as well as private hedge funds will occupy and develop land that’s been home to indigenous people for thousands of years. Meantime during Bolsonaro’s first full year in office, deforestation increased by 85%. More on this eye-popping number follows. Of recent, there have been several deeply disturbing developments in the Amazon. Less than two months ago the world’s leading Amazonian scientists, Thomas Lovejoy (George Mason University) and Carlos Nobre (University of Sao Paulo) issued a harsh warning to the people of the world: “Today, we stand exactly in a moment of ...

24Feb

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Environment, United Kingdom

Water Shortage? Blame Climate Change!

By Paul Homewood Water shortage? Why not blame it on global warming! Within 25 years England will not have enough water to meet demand, the head of the Environment Agency is warning.The impact of climate change, combined with population growth, means the country is facing an “existential threat”, Sir James Bevan told the Waterwise Conference in London.He wants to see wasting water become “as socially unacceptable as blowing smoke in the face of a baby”.“We all need to use less water and use it more efficiently,” he said.Sir James Bevan was appointed chief executive of the Environment Agency – the public body responsible for protecting the environment and wildlife in England – in 2015 after a career as a diplomat.He told his audience that, in around 20 to 25 years, England would...