Millions Are Spent on Climate Research in Africa. Western Institutes Get Most of It
Mongabay – November 17, 2022 – Malavika Vyawahare
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/11/millions-are-spent-on-climate-research-in-africa-western-institutes-get-most-of-it/
A rare analysis has uncovered a striking pattern: more than 75% of funds earmarked for Africa-related climate research go to institutes in the U.S. and Europe, according to the study in the journal Climate and Development, which tracked grants from more than 500 funders. There is already a deep funding deficit: less than 5% of the funds allocated for climate research globally focus on African countries, even though the 10 nations considered most vulnerable to climate change impacts in 2020 were all in Africa… The uneven distribution of climate research funds reflects and feeds into a stark underrepresentation of African scientists (residing in or from African countries) in the climate change debate.
Climate change made deadly rainfall in West Africa 80% more likely to happen
Grist – November 21, 2022 – Brett Marsh
https://grist.org/climate/deadly-rainfall-floods-west-africa-linked-climate-change/
The team of researchers used historic weather data and computerized climate models to compare the likely intensity of seasonal rainfall in the Lake Chad Basin with and without human activities altering the climate. They found that the region’s extreme rainfall would have been unlikely without human-caused warming. Now, such rain is likely to occur once every 10 years… Flood vulnerability has also increased the risk of water-born diseases being transmitted to communities. Cholera outbreaks were feared in Nigeria in the aftermath of September’s flooding. In Pakistan, where the summer’s monsoon rains displaced millions and submerged a third of the country, malaria, diarrhea, and other diseases spiked in flood-ravaged communities.
Did the World Make Progress on Climate Change? Here’s What Was Decided at Global Talks
NPR – November 20, 2022 – Nathan Rott, Michael Copley, Lauren Sommer and Rebecca Hersher
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/20/1137349916/did-the-world-make-progress-on-climate-change-heres-what-was-decided-at-global-t
The final deal, announced Sunday morning in Egypt, reiterates the goal set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement to keep overall global warming from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (about 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial era of the 1800s. But it is unclear how that goal will be achieved, because negotiators could not agree that fossil fuels must be phased out. The vast majority of planet-warming pollution comes from humans’ use of oil, gas and coal, and most remaining fossil fuel deposits must remain untapped in order to rein in global warming, scientists have determined.
The Coldhearted Carbon Math
Reader Supported News – The New York Times – November 22, 2022 – David Wallace-Wells
https://www.rsn.org/001/the-coldhearted-carbon-math.html
In a world full of climate promises without any meaningful leadership for carbon-based sanctions, enforcement looks less like planetary governance forcing countries and corporations to move faster than like finding ways to hold them to their promises. That is the premise of a report delivered to the secretary general in Egypt this week that pointed squarely at the problem of climate hypocrisy — and the delusion that promises and good intentions could substitute for good math.
The world can’t recycle its way out of the plastics crisis
The Boston Globe – November 26, 2022 – Carroll Muffett
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/11/26/opinion/world-cant-recycle-its-way-out-plastics-crisis/
As demand for oil and gas in energy and transport declines, fossil fuel producers are looking to plastics as a way to continue profiting from fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency projects that by 2050, more than half of all oil and gas will be used to make plastics and petrochemicals. This has enormous climate impacts. On our present trajectory, plastic production, use, and disposal could emit 56 gigatons of CO2 by 2050 — equivalent to 13 percent of the earth’s entire remaining carbon budget that keeps warming below the critical 1.5 degree Celsius threshold. These impacts would be compounded if plastic pollution disrupts natural carbon sinks in the ocean and soils. Accordingly, the plastics treaty is being hailed as the “most important climate deal” since the Paris Agreement.
Greta Thunberg, 600 others sue Sweden for climate inaction
Al Jazeera – November 25, 2022
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/25/greta-thunberg-600-others-sue-sweden-for-climate-inaction
While the lawsuit is a first in the Swedish courts, six Portuguese youths have taken Sweden and 32 other countries to the European Court of Human Rights, accusing them of failing to adequately address the climate crisis… In recent years, a growing number of organisations and citizens have turned to the courts to criticise what they claim is government inaction on the climate.
Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It
The New Yorker – November 22, 2022 – Bill McKibben
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/dimming-the-sun-to-cool-the-planet-is-a-desperate-idea-yet-were-inching-toward-it
There are at least three initiatives under way that are studying the potential implementation of solar-radiation management, or S.R.M., as it is sometimes called: a commission under the auspices of the Paris Peace Forum, composed of fifteen current and former global leaders and some environmental and governance experts, that is exploring “policy options” to combat climate change and how these policies might be monitored; a Carnegie Council initiative of how the United Nations might govern geoengineering; and Degrees Initiative, an academic effort based in the United Kingdom and funded by a collection of foundations, that in turn funds research on the effects of such a scheme across the developing world. The result of these initiatives, if not the goal, may be to normalize the idea of geoengineering. It is being taken seriously because of something else that’s speeding up: the horrors that come with an overheating world and now regularly threaten its most densely populated places.
Democrats Need to Realize How Much Dobbs Mattered
The New York Times – November 19, 2022 – Amy Littlefield
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/opinion/midterm-election-abortion-roe-dobbs-democrats.html
The midterms offer lessons about where and how reproductive rights supporters should focus their efforts to have the most immediate and most widespread impact. A federal solution to the end of the constitutional right to abortion (like Roe codification) might not be on offer, but momentum is building behind campaigns to restore or expand reproductive rights in the states, especially through ballot measures.
The Attack on a Gay Bar in Colorado Springs Didn’t Happen in a Vacuum
Time Magazine – November 21, 2022 – Philip Elliott
https://time.com/6235835/colorado-springs-america-muting-atrocity/
Ultimately nothing can be done about guns in a country that has more weapons than citizens… It also demands an aggressive suspension of suspicion to think the current national environment toward LGBTQ rights has no bearing when a 22-year-old man allegedly walks into a gay bar and starts killing.
The US right is stoking anti-LGBT hate. This shooting was no surprise
The Guardian – November 22, 2022 – Moira Donegan
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/22/the-us-right-is-stoking-anti-lgbt-hate-this-shooting-was-no-surprise
There’s a morbid randomness to American gun violence – that fatal combination of scarce mental health treatment and superabundant firearms that makes America, and only America, a place where mass public massacres are common even when the nation is ostensibly at peace. But if the Colorado attack was enabled by America’s pervasive gun violence problem, it seems to have been prompted by the tenor of rightwing media, both broadcast and online, which over the past years has turned a virulent, conspiratorial and obsessively hateful eye towards the LGBT community.
The Meaning of the Colorado Springs Attack
The New Yorker – November 22, 2022 – Masha Gessen
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-meaning-of-the-colorado-springs-attack
The essential precondition for mass violence, it seems, is not guns or hate but a culture of terror, a common imaginary that includes the possibility of a mass shooting. It may be most useful to think of a politics of terror. People—and states—carry out terror for the sake of terror. The senselessness is the point, even as our brains desperately seek to make logical connections and find explanations.
Guns and Hatred
Steady – November 22, 2022 – Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner
https://steady.substack.com/p/guns-and-hatred?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
In what sane world do we accept a national impotence in the face of unending bloodshed? None. Why do we demonize people for how they express their love for others? Or for what they look like? Or for how they pray? Why is celebrating our common humanity not enough? What do we tell our children? How do we teach them? Hate is learned, and it is being taught. If we are honest with our history, we know that hatred has been a constant in our national story. But so too have attempts to rise above it, to make progress toward a more just and equitable nation, to strive for that “more perfect union.”… Cultivated terror is a poison that infects our society. Once unleashed, it is impossible to control. It easily explodes in violence, as it did in Colorado Springs. There will be another set of charges to mark, another court case to cover, another verdict to await. But we can already pass a verdict on a society that allows this to continue. Completely eliminating cultivated hate and violence is not possible, but we can drastically reduce it — if only enough Americans unite to make it happen.
Jail Is a Death Sentence for a Growing Number of Americans
The New York Times – November 22, 2022 – Shaila Dewan
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/us/jails-deaths.html
Jails have also in many cases violated minimum safety standards or failed to provide adequate medical and mental health care for their inmates, about two-thirds of whom are awaiting trial and presumed innocent… There are indications of a much wider crisis whose dimensions are not yet fully understood. The Justice Department has failed to fulfill a 2013 congressional mandate to conduct a comprehensive count of all deaths in custody, at one point acknowledging that its new system had recorded only 39 percent of deaths in local jails.
‘The success is inspirational’: the Fight for $15 movement 10 years on
The Guardian – November 23, 2022 – Steven Greenhouse
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/23/fight-for-15-movement-10-years-old
“The key accomplishment was that the Fight for $15, which was led by black, brown and immigrant workers all across the country, taught all workers that when you join together you can make changes in your jobs and in your lives,” Mary Kay Henry, the SEIU’s president, told the Guardian… Terrence Wise feels considerable pride when he hears that Bank of America announced a $15 minimum wage in 2017 and a $22 minimum wage recently. “Whenever I hear about wages being increased – just the other week in Nebraska, or when we hear about Starbucks workers forming a union or Amazon workers challenging Jeff Bezos – that kind of change is real, and we know it was inspired by the Fight for $15 and those workers in New York City walking out 10 years ago,” Wise said.
Pope Francis compares Russia’s war against Ukraine to a devastating Stalin-era famine
The New York Times – November 23, 2022 – Gaia Pianigiani
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/world/europe/pope-francis-russia-ukraine-stalin-famine.html
The pontiff’s comparison of Moscow’s attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine to Stalin’s decision to let millions in Ukraine starve represents one of his strongest condemnations yet of the Russian invasion. “Let us pray for peace in the world, and for an end to all conflicts, with a special thought for the terrible suffering of the dear and martyred people of Ukraine,” Pope Francis said during his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square. “And let us think of war-torn Ukraine.”… “As for the large-scale war in Ukraine, initiated by the Russian Federation, the interventions of the Holy Father Pope Francis are clear and unequivocal in condemning it as morally unjust, unacceptable, barbaric, senseless, repugnant and sacrilegious,” the Vatican said in the statement.
Indigenous and Black Communities Find Common Cause for Land Justice
Yes! Magazine – Novcember 22, 2022 – PennElys Droz
https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2022/11/22/community-indigenous-colonization-reparations
The economic power of owning land is critical, allowing the building of equity to access resources to fund education, businesses, more land ownership, and more self-determination for one’s descendants… Today, Black and Indigenous communities are navigating these relationships to land while mapping and acting to build community economics that are decoupled from exploitative systems of production and trade… Achieving justice includes restoring power through the reclamation of land and through reparations… Black folks across the country are also continually working to gain access to land, albeit using different approaches to Indigenous communities. Their efforts include attaining farmland, fighting redlining and racist financing systems to achieve land and homeownership, and building political movements to push for the restoration of lands taken from Black families through historical violence and eminent domain.
What the Whiteness Story of America Denies
Yes! Magazine – November 17, 2022 – David Mura
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2022/11/17/america-history-race-diversity-whiteness
History, the German critic Walter Benjamin observed, is the tale of the victors. It is the powerful—or the oppressors—who tell the history, not those without power, not the oppressed. Thus, the telling of history is always a struggle for power… Diversity is our strength. The heroism of Harriet Tubman and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Tuskegee Airmen and the struggle of ordinary Black people to survive slavery—that is a history both white and BIPOC children can learn from and be inspired by. Over and over, African Americans were on the right side of history in the issues of race; they have been a key, if not the chief, actors in our country’s racial conscience—and we are all better for that.
The First Thanksgiving: Separating Myth From Fact
Portside – Teen Vogue – November 23, 2022 – Ruth Hopkins
https://portside.org/2022-11-23/first-thanksgiving-separating-myth-fact
Ruth Hopkins, a Dakota/Lakota Sioux writer, biologist, attorney, and former tribal judge, breaks down the myths and facts about Thanksgiving and early encounters between Pilgrims and the Wampanoag… Unfortunately, like much of U.S. history, the narrative surrounding the landing of the Mayflower, and what happened to the English settlers on board, has been whitewashed, diluted, or just plain fabricated. On the 400th anniversary of that fabled landing at Plymouth Rock, let’s delve into the reality of this famous event by sorting myth from fact… We can use this day to teach history, rather than hide it. Instead of forcing schoolchildren to partake in embarrassing Thanksgiving plays based on ugly stereotypes and colonial fiction, Native speakers and historians can come and educate them about Native culture. We can make this world what we want it to be. Create a more perfect union.