Historic famine looms as drought grips East Africa
Grist – September 15, 2022 – Jake Bittle
https://grist.org/drought/somalia-ethiopia-kenya-famine-drought/
“The drought this year was both the most extensive on record and the most intense on record,” Chris Funk, the director of the Climate Hazards Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Grist. He said a combination of climate change and La Niña weather patterns have produced five consecutive dry seasons, which has all but destroyed the domestic food supply in Somalia and its neighboring countries… Research suggests that climate change will continue to hit the Horn of Africa on multiple fronts, increasing the risk not only of prolonged drought but also of extreme heat and devastating flash floods.
Wetter and stronger: Hurricane Fiona and two typhoons drive home climate concerns
NBC News – September 19, 2022 – Denise Chow
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/climate-change-hurricane-fiona-stronger-storms-rcna48327
Powerful storms battered three disparate, far-flung corners of the planet over the weekend, but they had one thing in common: They were made stronger and wetter by climate change… With climate change making storms rainier and more intense, the weekend’s extreme weather events offer a glimpse of what could become more common in the future, according to experts.
Oil Companies Still Misleading the Public to Keep Polluting, Document Dump Reveals
Ecowatch – September 20, 2022 – Olivia Rosane
https://www.ecowatch.com/big-oil-greenwashing-fossil-fuels-climate.html
New internal documents subpoenaed as part of a House Committee on Oversight and Reform investigation reveal how the fossil fuel industry has updated its misinformation playbook for the 21st century by publicly touting net-zero plans and renewable technologies it dismisses behind closed doors. “As we face more deadly, extreme weather around the globe, fossil fuel companies are reaping record profits and ramping up their misleading PR tactics to distract from their central role in fueling the climate crisis,” committee chairwoman Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) said in a press release. “My Committee’s investigation leaves no doubt that, in the words of one company official, Big Oil is ‘gaslighting’ the public. These companies claim they are part of the solution to climate change, but internal documents reveal that they are continuing with business as usual.”
‘Polluters must pay’: UN chief calls for windfall tax on fossil fuel companies
The Guardian – September 20, 2022 – Oliver Milman and Julian Borger
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/20/un-secretary-general-tax-fossil-fuel-companies-climate-crisis
Countries should impose windfall taxes on fossil fuel companies and divert the money to vulnerable nations suffering worsening losses from the climate crisis, the United Nations secretary general has urged. António Guterres said that “polluters must pay” for the escalating damage caused by heatwaves, floods, drought and other climate impacts, and demanded that it was “high time to put fossil fuel producers, investors and enablers on notice”. “Today, I am calling on all developed economies to tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies,” Guterres said in a speech to the UN general assembly on Tuesday. “Those funds should be redirected in two ways – to countries suffering loss and damage caused by the climate crisis and to people struggling with rising food and energy prices.”… An analysis this week showed there are plenty of known fossil fuel reserves in the world still left to burn – enough to unleash 3.5tn tons of greenhouse gases, which would smash the carbon budget before we get to 1.5C seven times over.
‘We will all die if we continue like this’: Indigenous people push UN for climate justice
Grist – September 21,, 2022 – Joseph Lee
https://grist.org/global-indigenous-affairs-desk/we-will-all-die-if-we-continue-like-this-indigenous-people-push-un-for-climate-justice/
Starting Saturday, activists have protested in front of consulates, projected images of deforestation on buildings in midtown, sailed down the Hudson and East Rivers, and held a die-in in front of the New York Stock Exchange. “Every day we see violence increasing, Indigenous Peoples being murdered and the destruction of our territories happening at an accelerated rate,” said Dinaman Tuxá, Executive Coordinator at Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), a national organization that unites Indigenous communities in support of their rights. “We demand the immediate demarcation of our lands and full protection of our rights and lives, as this is the only way in which we can continue to contribute to the fight against the climate crisis.”… “We are not just fighting for the rights of people now, but those that come after us.”
How a 100-year-old miscalculation drained the Colorado River
Vox – September 23, 2022 – Benji Jones
https://www.vox.com/2022/9/23/23357093/colorado-river-drought-cuts
One hundred years ago, government officials divvied up water in the Colorado River among the seven states that rely on it including Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The agreement, known as the Colorado River Compact, was based on one critically important number: the total amount of water that the Colorado River can supply yearly. Ignoring the best science of the time, officials claimed the river could provide about 20 million acre-feet per year (an acre-foot is the amount of water needed to fill an acre with one foot of water), according to the 2021 book Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River. That number was way too high, the authors write, meaning that officials promised states water that simply didn’t exist.
Why all Americans should be paying attention to Puerto Rico’s power grid
Vox – September 21, 2022 – Umair Irfan
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/23362974/puerto-rico-fiona-blackout-outage-power-electricity
Puerto Rico’s blackouts are an important warning of what could happen to more places if climate change goes unaddressed and power providers remain stuck in their old ways of business… Groups like Queremos Sol, which translates as We Want the Sun, are helping to advocate for this transition on the island. The proposals include bringing energy production closer to where it’s used, minimizing reliance on long-distance transmission, as well as fragmenting the distribution network into microgrids so that an outage in one area doesn’t ripple across the whole island. They also want more investment in financing to help lower-income residents get tools like solar panels and batteries to ensure more reliable power… The US power grid is far more fragile than many have realized. Fixing it up will require not just hardware, but a way of sharing the burden equitably.
The Nightmare of Military Spending on an Overheating Planet: A Big Carbon Bootprint and a Giant Sucking Sound in the National Budget
Informed Comment – September 24, 2022 – Stan Cox
https://www.juancole.com/2022/09/nightmare-overheating-bootprint.html
As far as the Pentagon is concerned, an overheated world will only open up further opportunities for the military. In a classic case of projection, its analysts warn that “malign actors may try to exploit regional instability exacerbated by the impacts of climate change to gain influence or for political or military advantage.” (Of course, Americans would never act in such a manner since, by definition, the Pentagon is a benign actor, but will have to respond accordingly.) The CIA and other intelligence agencies seem to share the Pentagon’s vision of our hotter future as a growth opportunity. A 2021 climate risk assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) paid special attention to the globe’s fastest-warming region, the Arctic. Did it draw the intelligence community’s interest because of the need to prevent a meltdown of the planet’s ice caps if the Earth is to remain a livable place for humanity?… If, in climate change terms, the military worries about anything globally, it’s increased human migration from devastated areas like today’s flood-ridden Pakistan, and the conflicts that could come with it. In cold bureaucratese, that DNI report predicted that, as ever more of us (or rather, in national security state terms, of them) begin fleeing heat, droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones, “Displaced populations will increasingly demand changes to international refugee law to consider their claims and provide protection as climate migrants or refugees, and affected populations will fight for legal payouts for loss and damages resulting from climate effects.” Translation: We won’t pay climate reparations and we won’t pay to help keep other peoples’ home climates livable, but we’re more than willing to spend as much as it takes to block them from coming here, no matter the resulting humanitarian nightmares.
Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools [excellent report]
PEN Ameeica – September 19, 2022 – Jonathan Friedman, Ph.D. and Nadine Farid Johnson
https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/
This movement to ban books is deeply undemocratic, in that it often seeks to impose restrictions on all students and families based on the preferences of those calling for the bans and notwithstanding polls that consistently show that Americans of all political persuasions oppose book bans. And it is having multifaceted, harmful impacts: on students who have a right to access a diverse range of stories and perspectives, and especially on those from historically marginalized backgrounds who are watching their library shelves emptied of books that reflect and speak to them; on educators and librarians who are operating in some states in an increasingly punitive and surveillance-oriented environment with a chilling effect on teaching and learning; on the authors whose works are being targeted; and on parents who want to raise students in schools that remain open to curiosity, discovery, and the freedom to read… More often than not, current challenges to books originate not from concerned parents acting individually but from political and advocacy groups working in concert to achieve the goal of limiting what books students can access and read in public schools… Against the backdrop of other efforts to roll back civil liberties and erode democratic norms, the dynamics surrounding school book bans are a canary in the coal mine for the future of American democracy, public education, and free expression. We should heed this warning.
‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy [another sharp report]
The New York Times – September 17, 2022 – David Leonhardt
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/us/american-democracy-threats.html
The United States today finds itself in a situation with little historical precedent. American democracy is facing two distinct threats, which together represent the most serious challenge to the country’s governing ideals in decades. The first threat is acute: a growing movement inside one of the country’s two major parties — the Republican Party — to refuse to accept defeat in an election… The second threat to democracy is chronic but also growing: The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion… The acute threats to democracy — and the rise of authoritarian sentiment, or at least the acceptance of it, among many voters — have different causes. They partly reflect frustration over nearly a half-century of slow-growing living standards for the American working class and middle class. They also reflect cultural fears, especially among white people, that the United States is being transformed into a new country, more racially diverse and less religious, with rapidly changing attitudes toward gender, language and more… The makeup of the federal government reflects public opinion less closely than it once did. And the chance of a true constitutional crisis — in which the rightful winner of an election cannot take office — has risen substantially. That combination shows that American democracy has never faced a threat quite like the current one.
Ken Burns: ‘We’re in Perhaps the Most Difficult Crisis in the History of America’
The Guardian – September 19, 2022 – David Smith
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/19/ken-burns-interview-holocaust-docuseries
In a new docuseries, the film-maker looks back to the Holocaust and US apathy to make links toward where we are right now… “After three previous great crises, I think we’re in the fourth and perhaps the most difficult crisis in the history of America. The three being the civil war, the great depression and the second world war, the institutions were not under assault as they are today and that makes the fragility of Benjamin Franklin’s statement, ‘A republic, if you can keep it,’ all the more relevant… As the Nazi atrocities worsened, America hardened its borders. Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina declared: “If I had my way, I would today build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of this earth could possibly scale or ascend it.” Building a wall is an undeniable echo of Trump’s presidential campaign launch in 2015, repeated countless times since. The film describes anti-immigrant sentiment in the 1930s and 1940s rooted in fear of being “replaced” – a foreshadowing of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that now animates the far right… Burns, who is fond of a quotation often attributed to Mark Twain – “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” – reflects: “As we worked on the film, it became increasingly clear with a great deal of anxiety and urgency just how much nearly every sentence was rhyming. The conservatives that installed Adolf Hitler were certain they could control him; in a few months they were either dead or completely marginalised. It is a telling story: he wished to make Germany great again.
America’s Open Wound: The CIA Is Not Your Friend
Edward Snowden’s blog Continuing Ed – September 20, 2022
https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/americas-open-wound
What would happen if we were to insert into this beautiful nation of laws an extralegal entity that is not directed by the people, but a person: the President? Have we protected the nation’s security, or have we placed it at risk? This is the unvarnished truth: the establishment of an institution charged with breaking the law within a nation of laws has mortally wounded its founding precept. From the year it was established, Presidents and their cadres have regularly directed the CIA to go beyond the law for reasons that cannot be justified, and therefore must be concealed — classified. The primary result of the classification system is not an increase in national security, but a decrease in transparency. Without meaningful transparency, there is no accountability, and without accountability, there is no learning… Yet it is those who question the wisdom of placing a paramilitary organization beyond the reach of our courts that are dismissed as “naive.” For 75 years, the American people have been unable to bend the CIA to fit the law, and so the law has been bent to fit the CIA. As Biden stood on the crimson stage, at the site where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were debated and adopted, his words rang out like the cry of a cracked-to-hell Liberty Bell: “What’s happening in our country is not normal.” If only that were true.
Oops, they did it again: How the right’s “unitary executive” theory unleashed Trump
Salon – September 21, 2022 – Heather Digby Parton
https://www.salon.com/2022/09/21/what-hath-bill-barr-wrought-how-the-unitary-executive-theory-unleashed-trumpism/
Bill Barr, John Yoo and their Federalist Society pals told Trump that presidential power had no limits. Whoops!… It’s pretty obvious that Yoo never really cared about Donald Trump, and neither did Bill Barr. They cared about their “unitary executive” theory and found in Trump a man who was so ignorant and so easily manipulated that when they told him he had unlimited power under Article II of the Constitution, he was willing to go far beyond what any sensible person would do — even someone who fully bought into their theory, like former Vice President Dick Cheney. Trump was their guinea pig. How far would he go? What would the system bear before it snapped?… Barr and Yoo and others who encouraged Trump to believe that the Constitution gave him unlimited power didn’t anticipate that he might think that included the power to determine the outcome of a presidential election. After Trump lost, even Barr and his cronies wouldn’t go along with the notion that a “unitary executive” has the power to overturn an election. So they cut their losses and moved on, assuming that Trump would be forced to do the same. Apparently, it never occurred to them that telling a benighted, narcissistic (but cunning) head case like Donald Trump that there were no limits to his authority might not work out so well.
New research shows US Republican politicians increasingly spread news on social media from untrustworthy sources
Phys.org – September 24, 2022 – University of Bristol
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-republican-politicians-increasingly-news-social.html
Corresponding author Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Bristol, said, “Politicians are part of the educated elite; their behavior is a kind of compass of what is socially acceptable and what is not. When people in politics increasingly post misinformation or news from sources that are not very trustworthy, I think that is very problematic. “Despite their high social standing, it is therefore important to take information shared by politicians critically and to question the sources.”
Ruling the US supreme court isn’t enough. The right wants to amend the constitution
The Guardian – September 19, 2022 – Russ Feingold
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/19/conservative-supreme-court-amend-constitution
To be clear, a constitutional convention under Article V has never before been held. Moreover, the constitution provides no rules on how a constitutional convention would actually be run in practice. There is nothing in the constitution about how delegates would be selected, how they would be apportioned, or how amendments would be proposed or agreed to by delegates. And there is little useful historical precedent that lends insight to these important questions. This means that nearly any amendment could be proposed at such a convention, giving delegates enormous power to engage in political and constitutional redrafting.
Experts call for updated warnings on alcohol
T.H. Chan School of Public Health – September 15, 2022
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/experts-call-for-updated-warnings-on-alcohol-containers/
Despite firmly established evidence linking alcohol to an increased risk of cancers and a wide range of diseases, warning labels on alcohol containers have not been updated in 30 years. In a September 1 Perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), two researchers argued that the warning labels should be redesigned to more clearly spell out alcohol’s potential harms… In their piece, Grummon and Hall noted that current alcohol labels only mention risks related to pregnancy and operating machinery, and vaguely mention that alcohol “may cause health problems.” The co-authors pointed out that the U.S. public is mostly unaware of most of the serious health risks associated with drinking alcohol, and said that the language on the current labels is “so understated that it borders on being misleading.”
Economics In Brief: How The Pandemic Safety Net Slashed Child Poverty
Next City – September 23, 2022 – Marielle Argueza
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/economics-in-brief-how-the-pandemic-safety-net-slashed-child-poverty
Reconfiguring and bolstering safety net programs was key to staving off what could have been a sharp increase in child poverty. An analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that, without the pandemic response, child poverty in 2020 would have seen the second-largest increase to be recorded in U.S. history. This tracks with U.S. Census Bureau figures, which documents that the combination of stimulus payments lifted about 3 million children out of poverty.
Where Is the Mass Mobilized Movement for Medicare for All?
Common Dreams – September 24, 2022 – Ralph Nader
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/09/24/where-mass-mobilized-movement-medicare-all
It wouldn’t take more than 1% of the U.S. population to rise up and get organized behind key popular demands to make them a reality and yet we continue to endlessly wait… With the huge waste, gouging, corruption and preventable casualties documented in today’s health delivery industry, and about 5000 people a week dying in hospitals due to what a peer-reviewed report by Johns Hopkins School of Medicine called “preventable problems” in hospitals, one would think there would be regular marches on Washington to pass Medicare-for-All. The Canadians did this nearly sixty years ago. (See, singlepayeraction.org). Too many people are suffering or ridden with anxiety, dread and fear, without adequate or any health insurance, while too few people are demanding action by Congress… I wrote a small book, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, to explain how optimistic critical masses throughout American history worked together to improve our society. I described the kinds of changes that one percent of the people could advance to revolutionize politics for the common good and “the pursuit of happiness.” For that to happen, a sufficient number of people have to civically believe in themselves and lock arms together on actions for a change.
Workers at Big Brands Like Starbucks Aren’t the Only Ones Unionizing
Portside – Jacobin – September 18, 2022 – Christopher R. Martin
https://portside.org/2022-09-18/workers-big-brands-starbucks-arent-only-ones-unionizing
Workers are organizing in places that aren’t upscale or trendy, but illustrate the desire for collective bargaining, even in places with deep political conservatism. As it turns out, workers can get fed up in any political environment, and unionizing is a way to gain control over one’s work life. These include 725 production and maintenance employees making Bobcat motorized utility vehicles and equipment in Bismark, North Dakota; 238 workers at the Red Wing Shoe Company factory in Potosi, Missouri; 170 workers at the Conagra Brands facility in Saint Elmo, Illinois, where they make salad dressings and Log Cabin pancake syrup; and eighteen zookeepers at Rolling Hills Zoo in Salina, Kansas… The pandemic, decades of austerity, and the impunity of the capitalist class have left all workers fed up. The paper should keep covering the inspiring organizing happening at companies like Starbucks and Amazon — but it should also open its eyes to where and why that organizing is happening elsewhere.
Go Ahead, Ask for Help. People Are Happy to Give It.
The New York Times – September 15, 2022 – Catherine Pearson
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/well/family/asking-for-help.html
Many things can get in the way of asking others for help: Fear of rejection. Fear of imposing. The pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology so ingrained in American culture. But new research suggests many of us underestimate how willing — even happy! — others are to lend a helping hand. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science this month, included six small experiments involving more than 2,000 participants — all designed to compare the perspectives of those asking for help with the perspectives of helpers. Across all of the experiments, those asking for help consistently underestimated how willing friends and strangers were to assist, as well as how good the helpers felt afterward.
Reimagining Safety and Liberation Without Police
Yes! Magazine – September 21, 2022 – Marlene Sanchez
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2022/09/21/safety-liberation-without-police%ef%bf%bc
In Donald Trump’s America, the word “freedom” has been appropriated by the far Right to justify a reckless disregard for the common good, and the idea of safety has been equated with more guns and more militarized policing, both by law enforcement and by rogue civilian militias. For those of us who aspire to an equitably shared multiracial democracy, freedom and safety require, at minimum, dominion over your own body and responsibility for the well-being of the larger community, including those with less power and fewer resources… True safety and freedom come when we work together to heal ourselves and each other beyond the need for policing. It comes with people having their needs met… True safety and freedom come when we change local, state, and national spending priorities to bolster those systemic changes and fund local community people and programs that can implement them.