Daily Archives: April 6, 2021

2021-04-06: News Headlines

Juan Cole (2021-04-06). Middle East, Africa, in Special Trouble as Human-Caused Climate Emergency causes 30% drop in Agricultural Productivity Growth. juancole.com Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) — A new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change has found that the human-caused climate emergency is responsible for a 20 percent drop in global agricultural productivity growth in the past 60 years.* A. Ortiz-Bobea and colleagues write: "The cumulative impact of ACC [anthropogenic or human-caused climate change] on global …

Dan Dinello (2021-04-06). Winning the War for Earth: Kim Stanley Robinson's subversive new Novel Rejects Doomism and Imagines a Hopeful Solution to the Climate Emergency. juancole.com Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) — In the wake of a killer heat wave that slaughters millions, eco-terrorism spreads across the globe and capitalism ruptures in Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction novel that envisions a climate crisis scenario of the next thirty years. Despite violence, ecological calamity and a super-depression, The Ministry for the Future …

Kathy Mulvey (2021-04-06). Six ways Chevron imperils climate, human rights, and racial justice. nationofchange.org These six examples illustrate a stunning array of corporate abuse, deception, and misconduct by one of the world's largest and most powerful corporations.

CJ Polychroniou (2021-04-06). A Green New Deal Is More Affordable in the Long Term Than Fossil Fuels. zcomm.org It is naàØve and dangerous to rely on the "invisible hand" of the market either for economic transformation or for a solution to the problem of climate change…

Dan Dinello (2021-04-06). Winning the War for Earth. zcomm.org Kim Stanley Robinson's subversive new Novel Rejects Doomism and Imagines a Hopeful Solution to the Climate Emergency…

Staff (2021-04-06). Biden's $2 Trillion Infrastructure Plan Goes Beyond Bridges & Roads, But Its "Scale Is Inadequate" democracynow.org We speak with economist Darrick Hamilton, founding director of the Institute on Race and Political Economy at The New School, about how U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is calling for a minimum global corporate income tax to help pay for President Joe Biden's proposed $2.25 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan, aimed in part at combating the climate crisis and addressing racial inequities in housing and transportation. The plan includes over $650 billion for roads, bridges, railways and ports; $650 billion to expand broadband, retrofit homes and upgrade water systems and the electrical grid; $400 billion for…

Eurasia Review (2021-04-05). To Intervene Or Not To Intervene? That Is The Future Climate Question. eurasiareview.com Nine of the hottest years in human history have occurred in the past decade. Without a major shift in this climate trajectory, the future of life on Earth is in question, which poses a new question: Should humans, whose fossil fueled society is driving climate change, use technology to put the brakes on global warming? | Michigan State University community ecologist Phoebe Zarnetske is co-lead of the Climate Intervention Biology Working Group, a team of internationally recognized experts in climate science and ecology that is bringing science to bear on the question and consequences of geoengineering a cooler…

Eurasia Review (2021-04-05). Humans Were Apex Predators For Two Million Years. eurasiareview.com Researchers at Tel Aviv University were able to reconstruct the nutrition of stone age humans. In a paper published in the Yearbook of the American Physical Anthropology Association, Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai of the Jacob M. Alkov Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, together with Raphael Sirtoli of Portugal, show that humans were an apex predator for about two million years. Only the extinction of larger animals (megafauna) in various parts of the world, and the decline of animal food sources toward the end of the stone age, led humans to gradually increase the vegetable element in th…

Ralph Nader (2021-04-05). Can the Decline in Letter-Writing be Reversed? counterpunch.org When Cornell University Press sent me an early copy of my sister, Laura Nader's book: Letters To and From an Anthropologist, a collection of correspondences compiled over fifty-five years, I wondered whether such print letter-writing exchanges assembled in books were nearing extinction. My impression preceded young parents relating remarks from their little children asking, "What's a letter?" or "Where do you

Philip Brasor (2021-04-05). How the Cleanup of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Got So Expensive. asia-pacificresearch.com

_____ (2021-04-05). Europe: A Backlash Is Growing Over Incinerating Garbage. popularresistance.org For decades, Europe has poured millions of tons of its trash into incinerators each year, often under the green-sounding label "waste to energy." Now, concerns about incineration's outsized carbon footprint and fears it may undermine recycling are prompting European Union officials to ease their long-standing embrace of a technology that once seemed like an appealing way to make waste disappear. | The EU is in the process of cutting off funding for new incinerators, but there's little sign most existing ones —currently consuming 27 percent of the bloc's municipal waste — will close any time soon. And,…

Jon Queally, staff writer (2021-04-05). NLRB Says Amazon Firing of Workers Who Demanded Better Climate, Labor Policies Was Illegal Retaliation. commondreams.org "It's clear that Amazon has been violating the law when it tries to silence workers who speak out," said Christy Hofmann, general secretary of UNI Global Union. | www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/styles/cd_special_coverage/public/headline/thumbs/amazon-bezos-employees-threatened-climate_0.png

commondreams (2021-04-05). Tampa Bay Wastewater Crisis Demands Federal Action. commondreams.org ______________________________…

Staff (2021-04-05). Florida Workers Race to Prevent Massive Spill of Radioactive Waste. truthout.org Florida workers over the weekend rushed to prevent the collapse of a reservoir wall containing hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater from a defunct phosphate mine, a looming environmental catastrophe that prompted mandatory evacuation orders and a declaration of emergency by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. | A leak in the Piney Point reservoir was first reported late last month, sparking fears of a complete breach and possible upending of stacks of phosphogypsum, a radioactive waste product of fe…

Steven Sahiounie (2021-04-05). US-NATO Provocation in Ukraine to Stop Russia's Nord Stream 2 Pipeline. globalresearch.ca

Brett Wilkins (2021-04-05). First Nations land defenders take direct action against Trans Mountain pipeline. peoplesworld.org A pair of Indigenous land defenders locked themselves to equipment at a fossil fuel pumping station in British Columbia on Saturday, vowing to continue resisting a government-owned oil pipeline that is harming the climate, the environment, and First Nations peoples whose unceded lands it traverses. The pipeline protesters — self-described on social media as "accomplices" …

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