US behind more than a third of global oil and gas expansion plans, report finds
The Guardian – September 12, 2023 – Fiona Harvey
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/12/us-behind-more-than-a-third-of-global-oil-and-gas-expansion-plans-report-finds
The data, in a report from the campaign group Oil Change International, also showed that five “global north countries” – the US, Canada, Australia, Norway and the UK – will be responsible for just over half of all the planned expansion from new oil and gas fields to 2050. Greenhouse gas emissions from all of the oil and gas expansion that is planned in the next three decades would be more than enough to drive global temperatures well beyond the limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels that countries agreed in 2021 at Cop26 in Glasgow, the report found.
Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change
Reader Supported News – Wall Street Journal – September 17, 2023 – Christopher M. Matthews
https://www.rsn.org/001/inside-exxons-strategy-to-downplay-climate-change.html
Tillerson, as well as some of Exxon’s board directors and other top executives, sought to cast doubt on the severity of climate change’s impacts. Exxon scientists supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial. Exxon is now a defendant in dozens of lawsuits around the U.S. that accuse it and other oil companies of deception over climate change and that aim to collect billions of dollars in damages. Prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents reviewed by the Journal, which were part of a previous investigation by New York’s attorney general but never made public.. Exxon currently plans to spend as much as $25 billion a year in capital expenditures through 2027, mostly on oil and gas.
Half of Earth’s Glaciers Could Melt With 1.5°C of Warming, NASA Study Finds
Ecowatch – September 8, 2023 – Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-glaciers-sea-level-rise-nasa.html
While they found that half the world’s glaciers would melt at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, if the planet warms by 2.7 degrees Celsius, which is the predicted temperature increase based on COP26 climate pledges, almost all of the glaciers in western Canada, the U.S. (including Alaska) and Central Europe would disappear. If temperatures warm by four degrees Celsius, 80 percent of Earth’s glaciers would be gone and cause sea levels to rise by six inches. “Regardless of temperature increase, the glaciers are going to experience a lot of loss,” Rounce said in the press release. “That’s inevitable.” The study by Rounce and his team was the first to use mass change data taken from satellites of all 215,000 of the planet’s glaciers… “We are not trying to frame this as a negative look at the loss of these glaciers, but instead how we have the ability to make a difference,” Rounce said in the press release. “I think it’s a very important message: a message of hope.”
Was the freak ‘medicane’ storm that devastated Libya a glimpse of North Africa’s future?
The Conversation – September 21, 2023 – Mike Rogerson, Belkasem Alkaryani and Mahjoor Lone
https://theconversation.com/was-the-freak-medicane-storm-that-devastated-libya-a-glimpse-of-north-africas-future-213680
Storm Daniel was a Mediterranean cyclone or hurricane (a so-called medicane) which struck Greece, Bulgaria, Libya, Egypt and Turkey over the course of a week. Medicanes are not rare. Such large storms happen in this part of the world every few years. But Daniel has proved to be the deadliest… Since medicanes are formed in part by excess heat, events like this are highly sensitive to climate change. A rapid attribution study suggested greenhouse gas emissions made Daniel 50 times more likely.
“We Will Not Give Up”: AOC, Vanessa Nakate Lead Calls at Massive NY Climate Rally to End Fossil Fuels
Democracy Now! – September 18, 2023 – interview
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/9/18/march_to_end_fossil_fuels_aoc
Sunday’s March to End Fossil Fuels culminated in a rally after some 75,000 people marched through the streets of Manhattan toward the United Nations, where world leaders are gathering this week for the United Nations General Assembly that includes a Climate Ambition Summit Wednesday. While the rally addressed world leaders, it focused on President Biden, with a banner over the stage at the rally saying, “Biden, end fossil fuels.” Among those who spoke was New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along with local and international grassroots activists. These are some of their voices… And that is what we are here to do today, to tell our leaders, from President Biden to the U.N. General Assembly to all of our elected officials, that we demand a change. It will happen now. It begins today. It is occurring today. And it’s because of you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Keep marching, and we’re going to accomplish this.
‘Mutilating the tree of life’: Wildlife loss accelerating, scientists warn
The Guardian – September 19, 2023 – Patrick Greenfield
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/19/mutilating-the-tree-of-life-wildlife-loss-accelerating-scientists-warn
Groups of animal species are vanishing at a rate 35 times higher than average due to human activity, according to researchers, who say it is further evidence that a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is under way and accelerating. Scientists analysing the rate at which closely related animal species have gone extinct in the past 500 years have found they would have taken 18,000 years to vanish in the absence of humans, and the rate at which they are being lost is increasing. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that at least 73 mammal, bird, reptile and amphibian species groupings have gone extinct since 1500… “The very framework to which all nature – including our own species – adheres is in serious jeopardy. With extinction rates from a whole range of species and species groups being so much higher than we’d typically expect, it’s hard to see why global governments, leading businesses and the general public are not doing everything possible to mitigate this devastating loss,” he said. “Extinction is irreversible,” he added. “From a more human-centric perspective, it’s almost impossible to predict which of these losses will have a significant impact on our own species. It’s an existential gamble we should think very hard about before taking.”
It’s not just coral. Extreme heat is weakening entire marine ecosystems in Florida.
Grist – September 18, 2023 – Abigail Geiger and Gabriela Tejeda
https://grist.org/extreme-heat/its-not-just-coral-extreme-heat-is-weakening-entire-marine-ecosystems-in-florida/
This summer, as water temperatures across the Everglades reached triple digits, much of the nation’s attention focused on the Atlantic side of the Keys, where rapid bleaching devastated much of the Sunshine State’s beautiful coral reefs. But in Florida Bay, which sits on the west side of the Keys, many marine species have been fighting their own battle with bleaching and other effects of extreme heat, sending a strong, if silent, message about their own stress and the health of the essential habitat they inhabit… “It’s not a grass problem, it’s not a coral problem, it’s not a sponge problem,” said Matt Bellinger, owner and operator of Bamboo Charters in the Keys. “It’s a complete ecosystem problem.”… When we see the ecosystem melting around us, I hope it makes people as scared as they should be about this.”
The Era of Rupert Murdoch, a Blight on our Heating Planet and a Fomenter of War and Racial Hatreds, is Passing
Informed Comment – September 22, 2023 – Juan Cole
https://www.juancole.com/2023/09/fomenter-hatreds-passing.html
Observers have been puzzled over why climate denialism has been particularly virulent in English-speaking countries. Murdoch’s media organizations are a part of the answer. In Australia, where Murdoch has a virtual monopoly on the news industry, he has backed climate denialists for elective office and swayed voters to consider human-made climate change a hoax. Only from about 2021 have the Murdoch outlets backed off complete denialism, choosing instead to encourage a “go-slow” approach (which can be just as bad as denialism). By influencing elites in the UK, Canada, Australia, the US and New Zealand to combat efforts to reduce carbon pollution for the past three decades, Murdoch has helped spew nearly a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is now coming back to haunt us in the form of megastorms, mega-floods, and mega-droughts that do billions of dollars of damage a year. In that regard alone Murdoch is one of the most significant mass murderers in human history.
Yes, nuclear weapons are immoral. They’re also, practically speaking, useless.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – September 19, 2023 – Ward Hayes Wilson
https://thebulletin.org/2023/09/yes-nuclear-weapons-are-immoral-theyre-also-practically-speaking-useless/
I believe most people—including national leaders—hesitate to eliminate nuclear weapons not because they are heartless, or lack any sense of morality, or are idiots, but because they believe, for some reason, that nuclear weapons are necessary. After all, people often set their moral feelings aside when they believe their survival is at stake… Before you can move people with moral discourse, you have to first remove the roadblock in their heads that tells them that their country must have nuclear weapons to keep them safe. The key to eliminating nuclear weapons, then, is to start with the practical consideration. Make a case that nuclear weapons could reasonably, realistically be eliminated, neutralize that part of the equation, and the morality argument falls like a hammer blow… If human beings are prone to folly—and we are—and if human beings run the deterrence process, then nuclear deterrence is inherently flawed. It will fail. Over the long run it cannot be safe. Eventually, human failure will lead to a catastrophic nuclear war.
A president’s derangement, a general’s duty
The Atlantic – September 21, 2023 – Tom Nichols
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/09/mark-milley-trump-administration-profile/675407/
For almost two years, the safety of the United States and the sanctity of its Constitution may well have depended more than any American could have known on Mark Milley, a career Army officer who became the 20th chairman in late 2019. Milley’s experiences in the waning days of the Trump administration should appall and alarm every sensible American… Milley, unlike so many in Washington, continued to honor his oath to the Constitution. The next time, we will not be so lucky. The next time, Trump will not make the same mistake twice: He will ensure that no one like Mark Milley will be in the National Security Council, or at the Pentagon— or guarding America’s nuclear forces at Strategic Command. The next time, when Trump’s narcissism and cruelty tell him that he must exact revenge on the country, perhaps even on the world, no one will be there to stop him.
The Patriot
The Atlantic – September 21, 2023 – Jeffrey Goldberg
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/general-mark-milley-trump-coup/675375/
In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said…. In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’” These views of Trump align with those of many officials who served in his administration.
Is America uniquely vulnerable to tyranny?
Vox – September 24, 2023 – Zack Beauchamp
https://www.vox.com/23873476/america-democracy-authoritarianism-tyranny-minority-levitsky-ziblatt
In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew are forced to navigate a strait bounded by two equally dangerous obstacles: Scylla, a six-headed sea serpent, and Charybdis, an underwater horror that sucks down ships through a massive whirlpool… In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced an analogous problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country… The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side of the strait: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority. “By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule,” they write. This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down the anti-democratic whirlpool.
Wrongly Arrested Because of Facial Recognition: Why New Police Tech Risks Serious Miscarriages of Justice
The Independent – September 17, 2023 – Josh Marcus and Alex Woodward
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/facial-recognition-technology-police-arrests-b2413116.html
Police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country increasingly adopt facial-recognition and other mass surveillance technologies, often used as an unreliable shortcut around methodical human police work. Criminal justice advocates and the people targeted by this burgeoning police tech argue these programmes are riddled with the same biases and opaque or nonexistent oversight measures plaguing policing at large… “We have no idea how often facial recognition is getting it wrong,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), told The Independent… Facial recognition software often is “a force multiplier for police racism,” worsening racial disparities and amplifying existing biases, according to Mr Cahn. It can spur a vicious cycle.
It’s Easy to Dramatically Cut Poverty. US Policymakers Just Don’t Want To.
Jacobin – September 20, 2023 – Matt Bruenig
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/poverty-child-tax-credit-pandemic-era-welfare-policy-poor
As 2021 shows, dramatically reducing the level of poverty is not a technically challenging problem. Increasing the generosity and reach of the benefit programs for nonworking population groups can get the job done quickly even in an emergency situation and even in a country with very poor administrative capacity. Poverty lingers only because lawmakers do not care to reduce it any further.
Here’s What Striking Autoworkers Are Fighting For
Portside – September 16, 2023 – Jeff Schuhrke
https://portside.org/2023-09-16/heres-what-striking-autoworkers-are-fighting
The Big Three have made a combined nearly quarter trillion dollars in profits in North America over the past decade — including $21 billion in the first six months of 2023 alone. The companies’ shareholders and executives have been richly rewarded through stock buybacks and exorbitant salaries… The union’s contract proposals, which UAW President Shawn Fain describes as “audacious and ambitious,” aim to not only counter the effects of recent inflation, but also to undo the consequences of years of concessionary bargaining by the UAW’s corrupt former leadership clique, whom Fain and a slate of rank-and-file-backed reformers replaced this March in the union’s first-ever election where top officers were directly chosen by the membership. “You cannot make $21 billion in profits in half a year and expect members to take a mediocre contract,” said Fain. “Our campaign slogan is simple: record profits mean record contracts.”
What Makes the UAW Strike Historic?
Yes! Magazine – September 22, 2023 – Joshua Murray
https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2023/09/22/uaw-strike-ford-general-motors
In the book “Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete”, sociologist Michael Schwartz and I analyzed the history of labor relations and production systems in the U.S. and Japanese auto industries to better understand the decline of Detroit’s Big Three automakers. In the process, we learned what determined the level of success of previous auto strikes… Generally, strikes succeed when they hurt a company’s bottom line so much that executives decide it makes financial sense to give in to the workers’ demands. Strikes fail when workers can’t create enough disruption to pressure the company to give in before strike funds run out. They also fail when workers give in before securing a contract in line with their demands, potentially ending up worse off than if they had never walked off the job. Fain, who was elected UAW president in March 2023, and the rest of his new leadership team seem to recognize the importance of surprising management and picking strategic targets in a way that many of the union’s previous leaders did not. I believe that the UAW is likely to ultimately have more success with this strike than it has had in decades… If the UAW’s “stand-up” strike strategy succeeds, I think it’s likely that other labor organizers will embrace it too—potentially improving the leverage other workers have in their contract negotiations and strikes.
Al Gore to Fossil Fuel Industry: ‘Get Out of the Way’
Common Dreams – September 22, 2023 – Olivia Rosane
https://www.commondreams.org/news/al-gore-fossil-fuels
“I was one of many who felt for a long time that the fossil fuel companies, or at least many of them, were sincere in saying that they wanted to be a meaningful part of bringing solutions to this crisis,” Gore said, as The Independent reported. “But I think that it’s now clear they are not. Fossil fuel industry speaks with forked tongue.” While he acknowledged that it was not fair to expect the industry to solve a crisis its business model encouraged it to perpetuate, “it’s more than fair to ask them to get out of the way, and stop blocking the efforts of everybody else to solve this crisis,” he said. “I think it’s time to call them out.”… He is also not the only prominent mainstream climate voice to have turned on the fossil fuel sector. Former Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres, who helped negotiate the Paris agreement, said that she did not think the industry should be invited to COP28. “If they are going to be there only to be obstructors, and only to put spanners into the system, they should not be there,” she said at a conference Thursday organized by Covering Climate Now.
Progressives Win American Climate Corps Victory After Pressuring Biden for Years
Common Dreams – September 22, 2023 – Alexandra Rojas, Executive Director of Justice Democrats
https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/progressives-win-american-climate-corps-victory-after-pressuring-biden-for-years
“For years, alongside allies like the Sunrise Movement, we have called on the Democratic Party to provide more than just lip service to the existential climate crisis facing our planet. Now, because of our movement and leaders like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, a Civilian Climate Corps will recruit and train thousands of young people to defend our communities from climate disaster and revitalize our economy. Today, we have demonstrated what the power of our collective action can accomplish at the highest seats of power. ”… this is an important step towards employing a new generation of workers dedicated to combating the climate crisis, defending our communities from disaster, and rebuilding our economy,” said Rojas.
Battling for Hope at the Gates of Hell
Common Dreams – September 23, 2023 – Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/climate-gates-of-hell
Guterres was likely invoking Dante’s epic medieval poem, The Inferno. In it, Dante describes being led by the Greek poet Virgil through the nine circles of hell after passing through gates bearing the warning, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Given the increasing frequency and intensity of climate-driven extreme weather disasters, Guterres’ reference to The Inferno is frighteningly timely; we are entering something akin to the nine circles of catastrophic climate change. Yet, despite what Guterres rightly describes as “the scale of the challenge,” many people around the world are refusing to abandon hope. Climate activists, scientists, water and land defenders and others who deeply care about the future of the planet are stepping up, from the frontlines and fencelines of impacted communities to the heart of global capitalism on Wall Street… The world has changed in the seven centuries since Dante, but human nature hasn’t. It will take concerted, global grassroots climate action to ensure a just transition to a green economy, containing the inferno and slamming shut the gates of hell.