Warmer soil stores less carbon: study

by University of Exeter

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Global warming will cause the world's soil to release carbon, new research shows.

Scientists used data on more than 9,000 soil samples from around the world, and found that carbon storage "declines strongly" as average temperatures increase.

This is an example of a "positive feedback", where global warming causes more carbon to be released into the atmosphere, further accelerating climate change.

Importantly, the amount of carbon that could be released depends on the soil type, with coarse-textured (low-clay) soils losing three times as much carbon as fine-textured (clay-rich) soils.

The researchers, from the University of Exeter and Stockholm University, say their findings help to identify vulnerable carbon stocks and provide an opportunity to improve Earth System Models (ESMs) that simulate future climate change.

"Because there is more carbon stored in soils than there is in the atmosphere and all the trees on the planet combined, releasing even a small percentage could have a significant impact on our climate," said Professor Iain Hartley of Exeter's College of Life and Environmental Sciences.

"Our analysis identified the carbon stores in coarse-textured soils at high-latitudes (far from the Equator) as likely to be the most vulnerable to climate change.

"Such stores, therefore, may require particular attention given the high rates of warming taking place in cooler regions.

"In contrast, we found carbon stores in fine-textured soils in tropical areas to be less vulnerable to climate warming."

The data on the 9,300 soil profiles came from the World Soil Information database, with the study focusing on the top 50cm of soil.

By comparing carbon storage in places with different average temperatures, the researchers estimated the likely impact of global warming.

For every 10°C of increase in temperature, average carbon storage (across all soils) fell by more than 25%.

"Even bleak forecasts do not anticipate this level of warming, but we used this scale to give us confidence that the effects we observed were caused by temperature rather than other variables," Professor Hartley said.

"Our results make it clear that, as temperatures rise, more and more carbon is release from soil.

"It's important to note that our study did not examine the timescales involved, and further research is needed to investigate how much carbon could be released this century."

The researchers found that their results could not be represented by an established ESM.

"This suggests that there is an opportunity to use the patterns we have observed to improve how models represent soils, and further reduce uncertainty in their projections," Professor Hartley said.

The differences in carbon storage based on soil texture occur because finer soils provide more mineral surface area for carbon-based organic material to bond to, reducing the ability of microbes to access and decompose it.

The paper, published in the journal Nature Communications, is entitled: "Temperature effects on carbon storage are controlled by soil stabilisation capacities."

Warming of 2 C would release billions of tons of soil carbon

More information: Temperature effects on carbon storage are controlled by soil stabilisation capacities, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27101-1

Journal information: Nature Communications 

Provided by University of Exeter 

Green jobs and the green transition: A long, bumpy but exciting journey


By Bertrand Piccard and Maroš Šefčovič
Nov 16, 2021

"If we prepare for and manage the turbulences ahead, the green transition can be the market opportunity of the century," write Maroš Šefčovič and Bertrand Piccard. [European Union, 2019 / Source: EC - Audiovisual Service]

The green transition will profoundly impact Europe’s labour markets. While a few regions will be exposed to job losses in fossil fuel-reliant sectors like coal mining, the energy transition will keep generating demand for low- and medium-skilled roles, write Maroš Šefčovič and Bertrand Piccard.

Maroš Šefčovič is vice-president of the European Commission in charge of interinstitutional relations and foresight. Bertrand Piccard is the initiator behind Solar Impulse, the very first airplane capable of flying perpetually without fuel

It was not so long ago that the notion of an ecological transition remained intangible. We were unsure what it would look like or what it would require. All that has changed.

The decision by the European Commission President von der Leyen – the European Green Deal strategy towards “net-zero” by 2050 – has shown the EU’s “green” global leadership and changed the way the climate question is regarded. It has forced governments worldwide to re-assess what an ecological transition will mean for their economies and political relationships.

With the direction of travel set, we have embarked on a long and bumpy, but exciting journey commonly known as the “green transition”. It is worth reminding that this shift is unprecedented for any government: it has never been done before, and we are learning along the way.

It is not dissimilar to flying a solar aircraft, where you at times fly blind and rely on your instruments to feed the correct information so that you can keep on course to your goal. We need to predict turbulences and be best prepared to navigate through the crucial transitions Europe has embarked upon.

But first we need those instruments. This is why President von der Leyen made the bold decision to embed Strategic Foresight into EU policymaking and have the first-ever College member in charge of it.

Foresight tells us the inconvenient truth that the green transition, as it is the case for most epochal shifts, will not be easy. It dispels the myth that this journey will be for free.

The European Green Deal can be the EU’s growth strategy, benefitting our economies and quality of life, but will require substantial targeted investments and the right policy mix to succeed.

For instance, the risk of carbon leakage – the global relocation of energy-intensive sectors to regions with lower environmental standards – is a major concern, to be managed with the right policy mechanisms.

On the other hand, clean investments are now able to provide attractive returns, and this is in large part because technology is no longer the obstacle it once was. The effort by the Solar Impulse Foundation to identify more than 1,000 solutions that protect the environment and spur growth by generating profit proves just that.

Taken together and implemented across all sectors, these solutions can make a difference for both Europe’s competitiveness and climate action.

From packaging material based on sustainable wood fibres in Finland; to aerogels superinsulation products from recycled construction and demolition waste in France; to sodium-based solutions to mitigate pollutants for air emission control in Belgium.

Each solution grabs a few percent of dangerous emissions, reduces electricity needs by a few kilowatts, and brings us closer to the moment when we can leave fossil fuels in the ground.

This is why the Commission’s 2022 Strategic Foresight Report will focus on the “twinning”, that is how the technological transition can help us reinforce the green one – and vice versa.

Another silver lining comes from the Commission’s recent Green Jobs foresight study.

The green transition will profoundly impact Europe’s labour markets. For example, more ambitious climate targets alone, delivering a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the EU by 2030, could lead to a net increase of up to 884,000 jobs.

This is positive, considering that entire industries may be left behind. It suggests that the green transition is mainly about managing the transformation across sectors and regions, as employment is redirected towards cleaner production to fuel Europe’s flight towards the net-zero.

Regionally, the job impact of the green transition will be unevenly spread: a few regions will be exposed to job losses in fossil fuel-based sectors, like coal mining and manufactured fuels, due to the need to promote alternative fuels in transportation. Other regions will see new jobs in renewable energy and the Circular Economy.

Interestingly, if all countries stick to the climate targets in the Paris Agreement, the Fit-for-55 Package could also lead to employment gains in energy-intensive industries, such as a 7 % rise in the ferrous metals sector.

An important conclusion of the foresight study is related to skills: the green transition is not only about jobs for highly-skilled people, with all the rest automated. Rather, it will keep generating demand for low- and medium-skilled roles in the renewable energy sector, with 75% of employees expected to be manual workers and technicians in 2050.

As such, technological skills will be in high demand, and education and retraining will be key to ensure successful job migration from polluting activities to growing green sectors.

In conclusion, the significant economic shift related to the green transition in Europe will come – if Foresight guides our future policies, including re-skilling – with a net gain in jobs in a fair sectoral and regional rebalancing.

Moreover, new technologies can fuel our journey towards net-zero in a cost-effective manner.

That really is an extraordinary silver lining unveiled by Strategic Foresight, which, bouncing forward from inconvenient truths ahead, lends credence to the idea that, if we prepare for and manage the turbulences ahead, the green transition can be the market opportunity of the century.

DISCLAIMER: All opinions in this column reflect the views of the author(s), not of EURACTIV Media network.

America's Terrible God Is a Weapons-Maker

Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you worship. In that context, there can't be the slightest doubt.


U.S. tanks appear during a military training exercise in May of 2016 in Vaziani, Georgia. (Photo: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

WILLIAM ASTORE

November 16, 2021 by TomDispatch

Who is America's god? The Christian god of the beatitudes, the one who healed the sick, helped the poor, and preached love of neighbor? Not in these (dis)United States. In the Pledge of Allegiance, we speak proudly of One Nation under God, but in the aggregate, this country doesn't serve or worship Jesus Christ, or Allah, or any other god of justice and mercy. In truth, the deity America believes in is the five-sided one headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

In God We Trust is on all our coins. But, again, which god? The one of "turn the other cheek"? The one who found his disciples among society's outcasts? The one who wanted nothing to do with moneychangers or swords? As Joe Biden might say, give me a break.

There can't be the slightest doubt: America worships its Pentagod and the weapons and wars that feed it.

America's true god is a deity of wrath, whose keenest followers profit mightily from war and see such gains as virtuous, while its most militant disciples, a crew of losing generals and failed Washington officials, routinely employ murderous violence across the globe. It contains multitudes, its name is legion, but if this deity must have one name, citing a need for some restraint, let it be known as the Pentagod.

Yes, the Pentagon is America's true god. Consider that the Biden administration requested a whopping $753 billion for military spending in fiscal year 2022 even as the Afghan War was cratering. Consider that the House Armed Services Committee then boosted that blockbuster budget to $778 billion in September. Twenty-five billion dollars extra for "defense," hardly debated, easily passed, with strong bipartisan support in Congress. How else, if not religious belief, to explain this, despite the Pentagod's prodigal $8 trillion wars over the last two decades that ended so disastrously? How else to account for future budget projections showing that all-American deity getting another $8 trillion or so over the next decade, even as the political parties fight like rabid dogs over roughly 15% of that figure for much-needed domestic improvements?

Paraphrasing Joe Biden, show me your budget and I'll tell you what you worship. In that context, there can't be the slightest doubt: America worships its Pentagod and the weapons and wars that feed it.

Prefabricated War, Made in the U.S.A.

I confess that I'm floored by this simple fact: for two decades in which "forever war" has served as an apt descriptor of America's true state of the union, the Pentagod has failed to deliver on any of its promises. Iraq and Afghanistan? Just the most obvious of a series of war-on-terror quagmires and failures galore.

That ultimate deity can't even pass a simple financial audit to account for what it does with those endless funds shoved its way, yet our representatives in Washington keep doing so by the trillions. Spectacular failure after spectacular failure and yet that all-American god just rolls on, seemingly unstoppable, unquenchable, rarely questioned, never penalized, always on top.

Talk about blind faith!

The Pentagod advances a peculiar form of war, one that would puzzle most classic military strategists. In fact, its version of war is beyond strategy of the Clausewitzian sort. I think of it as prefabricated war, borrowing a term from the inestimable Ann Jones's recent piece for TomDispatch on our Afghan disaster. It's a term pregnant with meaning.

Prefabricated war is how the Pentagod has ruled for so endlessly long. There is, as a start, the fabrication of false causes for war. In Vietnam, it was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the "attacks" on U.S. Navy ships that never happened. In Afghanistan, it was vengeance for the 9/11 attacks against a people who neither planned nor committed them. In Iraq, it was the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein didn't have. Real causes don't matter much to America's war god since false ones can always be fabricated, after which enough true believers—especially in Congress—will embrace them fervently and faithfully.

But prefabricated war doesn't just start with or consist of manufactured causes. It's fabricated far ahead of time in a colossal cathedral of violence—President Eisenhower's military-industrial-congressional complex—that sends its missionaries and minions around the planet on a mission of global reach, global power, and full-spectrum dominance. War is prefabricated on 750 military bases scattered across the globe on every continent except Antarctica, in America's giant arms corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and by Special Operations forces that act much like the Jesuits of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, spreading the one true faith to 150 countries.

Since America's war god is also a jealous deity, it insists on dominating all domains—not just land, sea, and air but space as well. Even more ethereal realms like cyberspace and virtual/augmented realities must be captured and controlled. It seeks omnipotence and omniscience in the name of your safety and, if you let it, will also know everything about you, while having the power to smite you, should you stop blindly worshipping it and feeding it more money.

Yet, as strong as it may be, its urge to fabricate threats and exaggerate vulnerabilities never ends. China and Russia are allegedly the biggest threats of the moment, two "near-peer" rivals supposedly driving a new cold war. China, for example, now reportedly has a navy of 355 ships, an ostensibly alarming development (even if those vessels are nowhere near as powerful as their American equivalents). That naturally requires yet more shipbuilding by the U.S. Navy.

Russia may have an economy that's smaller than California's, but it's allegedly leading in hypersonic missile development (and China, too, has now entered the fray with, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs put it recently, something "very close" to a "Sputnik moment"). As a result, the Pentagod demands yet more money to bridge this alleged missile gap. Like earlier bomber and missile gaps from the previous Cold War, such vulnerabilities exist mostly in the minds of its proselytizers.

And in that context, here's an article of faith rarely questioned by true believers: while America prides itself on having the world's best and most powerful military, it perennially declares itself in danger of being overmatched. As a result, from aircraft carriers to stealth bombers to nuclear missiles, ever more weaponry must be fabricated. Who cares that it takes the next 11 nations combined to come close to matching the American "defense" budget. Beware the cry, "O ye of little faith!" should you dare to question any of the Pentagod's fabricated "needs."

The notion of prefab war goes deeper still, notes Ann Jones. As she wrote me recently:

"I would also carry the implications of prefabricated war to its source in the industrial world that does the material fabrication that dictates the strategy and style of war and pockets the profits.

"In Afghanistan prefabrication meant forcing Afghan soldiers to drop their trusty Kalashnikovs and retrain endlessly on new U.S. rifles (I forget the model) so heavy and temperamental as to be close to useless; they were particularly sensitive to dust, which in Afghanistan is the principal constituent of the air. The U.S. also trained Afghan soldiers how to enter houses, to search inside and kill every occupant; it erected on the training ground some prefabricated wooden houses for the practice of home invasions. (I witnessed this stuff myself.)"

To her point, I'd add the notion of a prefab "government in a box," a bizarre aspect of the Afghan surge early in President Barack Obama's first term in office. The idea was to drop ready-made mini-democracies into less-than-stable regions of Afghanistan that had been conditionally secured by U.S. troops. Those prefab governments would then supposedly provide a democratic toehold, freeing American troops to do what they did best: apply "kinetic" force elsewhere through massive firepower.

But the Pentagod didn't deliver democracy in a box to Afghanistan. Instead, it brought prefab war, made in the U.S.A., exported globally. Or, as Ann Jones put it to me, "The Afghan war was pulled from a box to be used to pave the way for the Big Box war already planned for Iraq by the Bush/Cheney administration." That such a "Big Box" war then failed so dismally led, of course, to no diminution in the Pentagod's power or authority, blind devotion being what it is.

Judging by the Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq wars, a shoddy yet destructive form of prefab war has been the ultimate American export of these years.

Losing My Religion

I was once an acolyte of the Pentagod. I served for 20 years in the U.S. Air Force, working in Cheyenne Mountain near the end of the original Cold War. I hunkered down there waiting for the nuclear Armageddon that fortunately never came (though the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was certainly a near miss). A cathedral of power, Cheyenne Mountain could have served as the ultimate temple of doom, but America ultimately "won" the Cold War when the Soviet Union imploded after a disastrous conflict in Afghanistan. That proved a setback indeed for a deity that feared the very thought of a "peace dividend" in the wind. Fortunately, that singular moment of victory proved only temporary, as America's incessant conflicts since Desert Storm in 1991 have shown.

In 1992, the year after the Soviet collapse, I found myself walking around the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the first atomic blast rumbled and roared in July 1945. You might say that, before using two atomic bombs on the Japanese, this country used the first one on ourselves, or at least on all the creatures living near ground zero at that desert site.

"I have become death, the destroyer of worlds," mused J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, after his "gadget" exploded, irradiating the surrounding desert in a historically unprecedented way. Oppenheimer himself emerged a changed man. He tried unsuccessfully to block the development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, an act of clarity and conscience for which, he would be accused of communist sympathies in 1953 and stripped of his security clearance. He and others who followed learned how unwise it is to resist America's god of war and its drive for yet more power.

During that same trip in 1992, I visited Los Alamos National Laboratory, the site where those atomic "gadgets" were first assembled. Fifty years earlier, during World War II, America began to bring together its best and brightest to create a device more destructive than any ever built. They succeeded, in a sense, in tapping into the power of the gods, even if in a remarkably one-sided fashion, gaining an astonishing ability to destroy, but none whatsoever to create. Armageddon, not genesis, became and remains the Pentagod's ultimate power.

Back in 1992, the mood at Los Alamos was glum. A national laboratory to create ever newer, more powerful nuclear warheads and weapons didn't seem to have a promising future with the demise of the Soviet Union. Where, then, did the future lie? Perhaps the best and brightest could turn their thoughts from bombs to consumer goods, or computers, or even what we today call green-energy technologies?

But no such luck. So here I sit, 30 years later, a bit heavier, my hair and beard greying, having lost whatever faith I had. Why? Because the god I served always wanted more. Even now, it wants to spend up to $2 trillion in the coming decades to build "modernized" versions of the nuclear weaponry that I knew, even then, could only create a darker future.

Consider the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD. It's an innocuous acronym for what someday will be hundreds of land-based nuclear missiles, one leg of this country's nuclear "triad" (the others being the Navy's Trident submarine force and the Air Force's strategic bombers). Deploying the GBSD, the Air Force plans to replace its "aging" ICBMs with "youthful" ones, even though such missiles, old or new, were rendered redundant decades ago by equally accurate ones that could be launched from stealthy submarines.

No matter. Northrop Grumman won the contract at a potential lifecycle cost of $264 billion. Think of those future missiles and the silos where the present ones sit in flyover states like Wyoming and North Dakota as so many subterranean chapels of utter destructive power, serviced by dedicated Air Force crews who believe that deterrence is best achieved by a policy that once was all-too-accurately known as MAD, or mutual assured destruction.

Yet, before I bled Air Force blue, before I was stationed in a cathedral of military power under who knows how many tons of solid granite, I was raised a Roman Catholic. Recently, I caught the words of Pope Francis, God's representative on earth for Catholic believers. Among other entreaties, he asked "in the name of God" for "arms manufacturers and dealers to completely stop their activity, because it foments violence and war, it contributes to those awful geopolitical games which cost millions of lives displaced and millions dead."

Which country has the most arms manufacturers? Which routinely and proudly leads the world in weapons exports? And which spends more on wars and weaponry than any other, with hardly a challenge from Congress or a demurral from the mainstream media?

And as I stared into the abyss created by those questions, who stared back at me but, of course, the Pentagod.

© 2021 TomDispatch.com

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), who has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.

SEE  LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

'Now Fire DeJoy': Biden Moves to Replace Trump-Picked Postal Board Members

"We need a Postal Service board of governors that is committed to replacing Mr. DeJoy with a postmaster general who will protect and strengthen the Postal Service, not undermine and sabotage it."


U.S. Postal Service Postmaster General Louis DeJoy speaks during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on February 24, 2021. (Photo: Jim Watson/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON

November 19, 2021

President Joe Biden won applause Friday for moving to replace Ron Bloom and John Barger, two members of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors who've shown unwavering loyalty to scandal-plagued Postmaster General Louis DeJoy even as he's dramatically worsened mail delivery performance.

"It's affirmatively good to remove Bloom and Barger from the board, men who said they were 'tickled pink' with DeJoy's actions."

But replacing Bloom—a Democrat and the USPS board's current chairman—and Barger, a Republican, is just the first step toward rescuing the mail service from the ongoing right-wing assault, progressive advocates and Democratic lawmakers stressed Friday.

Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) called Biden's decision to replace Bloom "great news," slamming the outgoing postal board chair as DeJoy's "chief enabler and cheerleader."

"Now fire DeJoy," Pascrell added.

On Friday, Biden nominated former General Services Administration official Daniel Tangherlini and Derek Kan—a Republican and the former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget—to replace Bloom and Barger.

If Biden's picks are confirmed by the Senate, his nominees will have a majority on the nine-member postal board—enough votes to remove DeJoy.



Bloom and Barger were both nominated to the postal board by former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly attempted to sabotage the USPS ahead of the 2020 presidential election, which relied heavily on mail-in ballots amid the coronavirus pandemic.

DeJoy—a Trump donor—was selected to head the USPS by the postal board in May of 2020. Upon taking charge of the agency in June, DeJoy wasted little time moving to overhaul mail service operations and slow package delivery.

Last month, DeJoy's decade-long plan for the USPS took effect as experts and Democratic lawmakers warned the changes would ensure the continued decline of Postal Service performance for years to come.

Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, told Common Dreams on Friday that Bloom and Barger "disqualified themselves from serving in positions of public trust by their enthusiastic support for Trump donor Louis DeJoy despite all the ways DeJoy has harmed the American people through his dictates, including charging people more for slower and less reliable mail."

"They failed to object to his 'ten-year' plan to weaken the service standards or to DeJoy continuing to receive millions each year from an arrangement he has with his former company, a contractor of the Postal Service that got a $100+ million contract to outsource postal work, among other things," Graves noted. "It's affirmatively good to remove Bloom and Barger from the board, men who said they were 'tickled pink' with DeJoy's actions."

Related Content

'Dereliction of Duty': Outrage as USPS Board Issues Gushing Praise for DeJoy Amid Mail Slowdowns, Medicine Delays, and Straw-Donor Scandal

While Graves expressed concern over Biden's choice to replace Bloom and Barger with Tangherlini and Kan—calling them "not the right people at all" for the roles—she said the transition will be "an opportunity for the Postal Service to move in a new direction, given the destructive path chosen by DeJoy and enabled by Trump's appointees."

The Washington Post reported Friday that Biden's decision to remove Bloom—who's currently serving a one-year holdover term that expires in December—"came as a surprise to the postal industry and policymakers in Washington."

"Bloom as recently as last week told confidants he expected to be renominated," according to the Post. "Last week, Trump appointees on the governing board reelected him as chairman over the objections of Biden-appointed Democrats."

The Post noted that at least four members of the Senate Democratic caucus—Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—have pointed to Bloom's enthusiastic support for DeJoy as a reason to oust him from the postal board.

"We need a Postal Service board of governors that is committed to replacing Mr. DeJoy with a postmaster general who will protect and strengthen the Postal Service, not undermine and sabotage it," Sanders told the Post.

In a statement on Friday, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said he's "tickled pink that two DeJoy enablers" are on the verge of being replaced.

"This action is a good thing for the Postal Service and, most importantly, a great thing for the American people," he added.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Biden nominates two to USPS board of governors, replacing DeJoy allies


U.S. Postmaster General Louis Dejoy speaks during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on February 24. 

File Photo by Graeme Jennings/UPI | License Photo

Nov. 19 (UPI) -- President Joe Biden on Friday nominated two Derek Kan and Daniel Tangherlini to positions on the U.S. Postal Service's governing board.

They'll replace two allies of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy whose terms are expiring -- Ron Bloom and John Barger.

The announcement comes after more than a year of scrutiny of DeJoy, whose plans to cut costs at the USPS have led to slower mail delivery times and worries over mail-in ballots ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The FBI, meanwhile, launched an investigation over the summer into DeJoy over an alleged private sector campaign finance scheme. He was accused of pressuring employees to donate to Republican candidates in exchange for reimbursement through bonuses while he was leading North Carolina-based New Breed Logistics from 2000-14.

The USPS board of governors selects the postmaster general and even after the replacement of two of DeJoy's allies, his position is likely still secure. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that Biden doesn't have the authority to replace DeJoy, but that the administration is "deeply troubled" by the job he's doing.

Biden Applauded for Reversing Trump Assault on 'Priceless' Tongass National Forest

"The Tongass National Forest's indispensable habitats serve as home to a multitude of species and also play a vital role in helping fight global warming," said one conservation advocate.


A brown bear fishing for salmon in a creek at Pavlof Harbor in Chatham Strait, Tongass National Forest in Alaska. (Photo: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)

JULIA CONLEY

November 19, 2021

Environmental protection groups on Friday applauded the United States Department of Agriculture's proposal to reinstate a 20-year-old rule protecting North America's largest temperate rainforest, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska—which climate scientists say plays a crucial role in keeping carbon from entering the atmosphere.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the administration plans to restore the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, commonly known as the "roadless rule," which was originally put in place by the Clinton administration in 2001, aiming to protect about 9.3 million acres in the forest from development by loggers and other industries.

"We need to continue to protect old forests and big trees, such as those in the Tongass, to ensure our future includes essential species and a livable climate."
If finalized, the rule will protect more than half of the 17-acre forest, which contains about five million acres of old-growth trees.

Alaska Native leaders and conservation groups have long demanded the federal government maintain the roadless rule and other protections for the forest, which ensures food sovereignty for tribes including the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian, and provides a habitat for more than 400 species of fish and other wildlife.

"Having protections for close to 10 million acres of old growth means that we have the resources needed to continue teaching our traditional practices, continue harvesting our traditional foods and medicines and to not only prosper as Indigenous people, but to come to the world's aid right now so people can learn our ways of living and our ways of being," Marina Anderson, tribal administrator for the Organized Village of Kasaan, told The Washington Post. "In the future, we would hope that tribal governments are listened to, and properly consulted with, in the beginning."

The roadless rule was rescinded by former President Donald Trump last fall—a decision that was condemned as "vandalism" by climate activist and author Bill McKibben. The gutting of the rule left the forest vulnerable to the pollution that comes with logging and road building as well as soil erosion and the destruction of natural habitats.

Tongass also serves as an important carbon sink for North America, with its trees absorbing 8% of the carbon stored in all of the continental United States' forests combined. More than 95% of the public comments submitted to the U.S. Forest Service regarding Trump's decision were in favor of the roadless rule.


"We applaud the Biden administration for listening to the voices of Southeast Alaska communities who have been relentless in their advocacy to protect the livelihoods, local economies, and wildlife that depend on the Tongass," said Sierra Club Alaska chapter director Andrea Feniger in a statement. "The Tongass is a priceless resource and a critical tool in the fight against climate change, and this action brings us one step closer to ensuring that our forest wildlands remain protected for good.”
Environment America said it was "thrilled" with the administration's proposal.


"We've had our fingers crossed, hoping this would be announced soon," said Ellen Montgomery, public lands director for the group. "The Tongass National Forest's indispensable habitats serve as home to a multitude of species and also play a vital role in helping fight global warming. We need to continue to protect old forests and big trees, such as those in the Tongass, to ensure our future includes essential species and a livable climate."

Related Content

'One Word for This: Vandalism': Six Days Before Election, Trump Finalizes Plan for 'Catastrophic' Attack on Largest National Forest
Andrea Germanos

Vilsack's announcement came four months after the administration said it would ban large-scale logging for the entire 16 million acres of forest and invest $25 million in sustainable community development to improve the health of the forest. Officials also announced plans in July to cancel a timber sale from three major old-growth forests, including ones on Prince of Wales Island and Revillagigedo Island in the Tongass, while continuing to auction off newer trees.

The proposal also comes days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled against the state of Alaska in its attempt to have the roadless rule vacated, with the court saying it would be "entirely inappropriate" to issue an opinion pushing the USDA to keep Trump's rollback of the rule intact.

By reversing the rule, Alaska Wilderness League said the administration "will preserve a natural climate solution that benefits communities around the globe," and help support Alaska's economy—contrary to claims by the logging industry and its supporters.

"The Tongass is the linchpin of Southeast Alaska's economy, supporting a $2 billion sustainable economy and more than one-quarter of jobs in the region," said Andy Moderow, Alaska director for the group. "The forest attracts people from around the world for world-class recreation, hunting, and sport and commercial salmon fishing. And it remains as essential now as it has for thousands of years to Indigenous communities that continue to rely on the forest for their cultural and subsistence traditions."

"We look forward to the upcoming public process and working with the administration to make sure the diverse constituencies of the Tongass are heard and that America's largest national forest and one of the largest remaining temperate rainforests in the world remains intact," he continued.

Vilsack's proposal kicked off a 60-day public comment period, and advocates urged Americans to speak out on behalf of the Tongass.

"We hope that Americans head to their computers and submit lots of public comments in favor of both this forest and the idea that we need more nature," said Montgomery.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

The Corporate Plan to Murder Medicare Runs Through Medicare Advantage

If they can move more than half of Americans off traditional Medicare and onto these corporate plans, it’ll provide the political cover to kill off Medicare altogether—and they're nearly there now.

George W. Bush visits New Britain, Connecticut on June 12, 2003 to Pitch a Plan to Strengthen Medicare at New Britain General Hospital. (Photo: James Devaney/WireImage)

THOM HARTMANN

November 19, 2021

In 2003, George W Bush set up the destruction and privatization of Medicare. The end of "real Medicare" is getting closer every day, and Congress and Medicare's administrators are doing nothing.

Last Friday the Centers for Medicare Services (CMS) announced a 14.5% increase in Medicare Part B premiums, raising the monthly payments by the lowest-income Medicare recipients from $148.50 a month to $170.10 a month next year.

Congress must stop these for-profit parasites who are steadily draining "real" Medicare of funds and resources while producing billions in profits and often outright stolen funds for the insurance industry.

If you're trying to live on the bottom rung of Social Security (about $365/month), that's consequential. People with Medigap policies are also seeing their policy price rises announced this month.

Two months ago I wrote about the Medicare Advantage Scam and how it can screw consumers. This price hike, though, raises the larger issue of what's happening to Medicare itself and whether the entire system may be out of business in a few years, in part because our government is being robbed blind by all these so-called "Advantage" plans.

It all began with George W. Bush, who'd spent most of his life openly and proudly campaigning to privatize Medicare and Social Security.

In 2003 Congress and the Bush administration rolled out a privatization option, allowing private for-profit insurance companies to sell policies branded as "Medicare Advantage" to gullible seniors who think they're buying the actual Medicare Parts A and B. As a result, today companies eager to rip off seniors are flooding the market, particularly with TV advertising.

As I note in considerable detail in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, Medicare Advantage is hurting traditional Medicare, because that system is paying the insurance companies, in most cases, far more than it would be paying to simply cover the costs of its regular Medicare recipients.

Medicare Advantage is also one of the most effective ways that insurance companies can kill a real "Medicare for All" system, since so many people who think they're on Medicare are actually on these privatized plans instead.

Nearly from its beginning, Medicare allowed private companies to offer plans that essentially compete with it, but they were an obscure corner of the market and didn't really take off until the Bush administration and Congress rolled out the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003.

This was the GOP's (and a few corporate-owned Democrats') big chance to finally privatize Medicare, albeit one customer at a time.

That law legalized a brand known as "Medicare Advantage" under the Medicare Part C provision and a year later it phased in what are known as risk-adjusted large-batch payments to insurance companies offering Advantage plans.

Medicare Advantage plans are not government-provided Medicare. They're private health insurance most often offered by the big for-profit insurance companies (although some nonprofits participate, particularly the larger HMOs), and the rules they must live by are considerably looser than those for Medicare.

Even more consequential, they don't get reimbursed directly on a person-by-person, procedure-by-procedure basis. Instead, every year, Advantage providers submit a bill to the federal government based on the aggregate risk score of all their customers and, practically speaking, are paid in a massive lump sum for all of their customers.

The higher their risk score, the larger the payment. Profit-seeking insurance companies, being the predators that they are, have found a number of ways to raise their risk scores without raising their expenses.

For example, many Medicare Advantage plans promote an "annual home visit" by a nurse or physician's assistant as a "benefit" of the plan. What the companies are doing, though, is trying to upcode (raise their payments from Medicare) customers to make them seem sicker than they are.

"Heart failure," for example, can be a severe and expensive condition to treat . . . or a barely perceptible tic on an EKG that represents little or no threat to a person for years or even decades. Depression is similarly variable; if it lasts less than two weeks, there's no reimbursement; if it lasts longer than two weeks, it's called a "major depressive episode" and rapidly jacks up a risk score — and thus the payments to the insurance company, even if it provides no services.

The home health visits are so profitable that an entire industry has sprung up of companies that send nurses out on behalf of the smaller insurance companies.

In summer 2014, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) published an in-depth investigative report titled Why Medicare Advantage Costs Taxpayers Billions More Than It Should.

They found, among other things, that one of the most common scams companies were running involved that very scoring of their customers as being sicker than they actually were, so that their reimbursements were way above the cost of caring for those people.

Here are a few quotes and summaries (in my words) from the report:

"Risk scores of Medicare Advantage patients rose sharply in plans in at least 1,000 counties nationwide between 2007 and 2011, boosting taxpayer costs by more than $36 billion over estimated costs for caring for patients in standard Medicare."

"In more than 200 of these counties, the cost of some Medicare Advantage plans was at least 25 percent higher than the cost of providing standard Medicare coverage."

The report documents how risk scores rose twice as fast for people who joined a Medicare Advantage health plan as for those who didn't.

Patients, the report lays out, never know how their health is rated because neither the health plan nor Medicare shares risk scores with them — and the process itself is so arcane and secretive that it remains unfathomable to many health professionals.

"By 2009, government officials were estimating that just over 15 percent of total Medicare Advantage payments were inaccurate, about $12 billion that year."

Based on its own sampling of data from health plans, the report shows how CMS has estimated that "faulty" risk scores triggered nearly $70 billion in what officials deemed "improper" payments to Medicare Advantage plans from 2008 through 2013.

CMS decided, according to the report, not to chase after overcharges from 2008 through 2010 even though the agency estimated through sampling that it made more than $32 billion in "improper" payments to insurance companies offering Medicare Advantage plans over those three years. CMS did not explain its reasoning.

The report documents how Medicare expects to pay the health plans more than $150 billion in 2014, the year the study was published.

Companies are almost never nailed for these overcharges, and when they are, they usually pay back pennies on the dollar.

For example, when the Office of Inspector General, Health and Human Services (which oversees Medicare), audited six out of the hundreds of plans on the market in 2007, they found that just those six companies "had been overpaid by an estimated $650 million" for that one year. As the Center for Public Integrity states, "CMS settled five of the six audits for a total repayment of just over $1.3 million."

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also, in 2012, decided to audit only 30 plans a year going forward. As CPI noted, "At that rate, it would take CMS more than 15 years to review the hundreds of Medicare Advantage contracts now in force." And that's 15 years to audit just one year's activity!

Things haven't improved since that 2014 investigative report from CPI. In September 2019, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and five Democratic colleagues sent a letter to President Donald Trump's CMS Administrator, Seema Verma.

"The recent HHS Payment Accuracy Report exposes that taxpayers have overpaid Medicare Advantage plans more than $30 billion dollars over the last three years," Brown wrote, wanting to know if the government was going to try to recover any of that essentially stolen money.

Meanwhile, during the four years of the Trump administration, CMS went out of their way to illegally promote Medicare Advantage plans.

A February 2020 report in the New York Times stated, "Under President Trump, some critics contend, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers Medicare, has become a cheerleader for Advantage plans at the expense of original Medicare."

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) compared Medicare Advantage with traditional Medicare and found the Advantage programs to be mind-bogglingly profitable: "MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their healthcare spending. Healthcare spending for enrollees in MA is 25 percent lower than for enrollees in [traditional Medicare] in the same county and [with the same] risk score."

In other words, they are paid more and deliver less, keeping the balance as their profit. And it is hundreds of billions of dollars.

At the same time, Medicare Advantage often screws its customers. According to the NBER study, people with Medicare Advantage got 15 percent fewer colon cancer screening tests, 24 percent fewer diagnostic tests, and 38 percent fewer flu shots.

Today the industry is so entrenched and massively profitable it can buy off members of Congress with the loose change it finds in the couch.

Meanwhile, changes CMS made to the Medicare website during the Trump administration now direct people who want to sign up for Medicare, instead, to a page to sign up for private Medicare Advantage plans.

If they can move more than half of Americans off traditional Medicare and onto these corporate plans, it'll provide the political cover to kill off Medicare altogether—and they're nearly there right now.

While much of the media focus on Medicare's price increase has been around a single Alzheimer's drug, the simple reality is that without the Medicare Advantage scam the Medicare system would be in great shape right now.

Congress must stop these for-profit parasites who are steadily draining "real" Medicare of funds and resources while producing billions in profits and often outright stolen funds for the insurance industry.

This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.



Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.

Progressives Slam GOP's 'Shameful' Attempt to Add Another $25 Billion to Pentagon Budget

"Congress must resist the demands of the military-industrial complex, and instead heed calls to invest taxpayer dollars into true human needs."


This picture taken on December 26, 2011 shows the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C.

 (Photo: Staff/AFP via Getty Images)

KENNY STANCIL

COMMONDREAMS

November 19, 2021

Progressive advocacy groups on Friday denounced Sen. Roger Wicker's last-minute attempt to add another $25 billion on top of the United States' already gargantuan military budget—arguing that the Mississippi Republican's proposal reflects Congress' skewed priorities and underscores the need to redirect Pentagon funding to tackle pressing social and environmental challenges in a humane, rather than violent, fashion.

"It's time to fix our broken budget priorities, and start putting human needs over Pentagon greed."

Filed earlier this week as an amendment to the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which the U.S. Senate is expected to consider in the coming days, Wicker's Shipyard Act of 2021 proposes allocating an additional $25 billion for naval shipyard restoration—a move that would cause the cost of the annual bill to surpass $800 billion.

President Joe Biden's original topline military spending request for fiscal year 2022 was $753 billion​​​​—already up from the $740.5 billion approved for the previous fiscal year under the Trump administration. After the House Armed Services Committee in September approved a Republican-sponsored amendment to tack on an additional $25 billion, House lawmakers from both major parties voted 316-113 to authorize a $778 billion military budget.

As Andrew Lautz, director of federal policy at the National Taxpayers Union, pointed out Friday in a statement, Congress "already increased the defense topline by $25 billion earlier this year, going against the request of top civilian officials at the Department of Defense. They could have chosen to direct that $25 billion to naval shipyards, and they did not."

"Lawmakers shouldn't add yet another $25 billion to the defense budget during NDAA debate," he added. "The Shipyard Act in particular is irresponsible, and would give the Navy a huge pot of money with little accountability and oversight of how the money is spent."

Savannah Wooten, the #PeopleOverPentagon campaign coordinator at Public Citizen, said that "attempting to stuff an additional $50 billion, more funding than the agency itself requested, into a Pentagon budget that is already three-quarters of a trillion dollars is shameful, unjustifiable, and embarrassing."

"Congress must resist the demands of the military-industrial complex," said Wooten, "and instead heed calls to invest taxpayer dollars into true human needs like supporting global Covid-19 vaccine production, expanding healthcare access, and funding climate justice initiatives."

U.S. troops recently withdrew from Afghanistan, but "the Senate is preparing to spend over three-quarters of a trillion dollars fueling its addiction to war-making," noted Erica Fein, senior Washington director at Win Without War, even "as the pandemic rages... the rift between rich and poor widens... [and] the existential threat of the climate crisis looms."

"Sen. Wicker's proposal to add $25 billion on top of this already obscene budget may please arms industry lobbyists, but it leaves everyday people out in the cold," said Fein.

Echoing Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) recent critiques of the bipartisan penchant for greenlighting massive levels of military spending while simultaneously opposing relatively modest efforts to improve the lives of working people, she stressed that "it's time to fix our broken budget priorities, and start putting human needs over Pentagon greed."

Related Content

'We Need to Get Our Priorities Right': Bernie Sanders a 'No' on $778 Billion Pentagon Budget Vote
Brett Wilkins

Alluding to the Build Back Better Act—which passed the House on Friday—Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) said that "we've had enough of ever-increasing military budgets from lawmakers who won't support basics like infrastructure, early childhood education, and dental care for our elders."

"How can we even consider allocating a sum of this magnitude to the Pentagon when our country is facing severe challenges around climate change, systemic racial oppression, growing economic inequality, and the ongoing pandemic?"

"The Wicker amendment is a shameful grab for another $25 billion, on top of the $37 billion that the [Biden] administration and Congress have already added to the military budget," said Koshgarian. "But there's another option. Senator Sanders' proposed modest cuts would begin to impose some limits on Pentagon spending for the first time in years."

Sanders, who intends to vote against the NDAA, has introduced an amendment to reduce the proposed military budget by $25 billion, down to the $753 billion first offered by the White House.

In September, House Republicans—as well as Democrats who receive significant campaign contributions from the weapons industry—teamed up to reject similar amendments to reduce Pentagon funding.

Carley Towne, national co-director of CodePink, pointed out that U.S. senators "are considering approving a whopping $800 billion" in military spending just a week after COP26, where "climate and peace activists gathered in Glasgow to demand that global leaders take bold climate action," including by accounting for the military greenhouse gas emissions that are currently excluded from decarbonization pledges.

"Instead of taking the ongoing climate emergency seriously, the U.S. is using the threat of climate change to legitimize spending even more on the Pentagon, which has the largest carbon and greenhouse gas footprint of any organization in the world," said Towne. "To add fuel to this dangerous fire, this $60+ billion increase in military spending will greatly escalate the United States' hybrid war on China, and in doing so, sabotage efforts for mutual cooperation with China on existential crises like nuclear proliferation and climate change mitigation."

Johnny Zokovitch, executive director of Pax Christi USA, said that "as the Senate deliberates on the NDAA, there is urgent need to dramatically cut the bloated Pentagon budget. Our nation's priorities, as reflected in the federal budget, are seriously misplaced."

Citing a recent IPS report, which showed that the U.S. has squandered more than $21 trillion on militarization since 9/11, Jacobin's Luke Savage argued last month that the nation's military spending—now even higher than it was at the height of the Cold War—is not only wasteful but also fundamentally anti-democratic.

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, and annual spending at the Pentagon—which has never passed an audit—accounts for more than half of the federal discretionary budget. According to a 2020 Data for Progress survey, a majority of voters want to reallocate 10% of the military budget to meet human needs.

Zokovitch added that "we need to unmask the role of private military contractors, with large teams of lobbyists, who benefit from the scandalous amount of our nation's treasury spent on weapons systems."

In September, researchers at Brown University's Costs of War project estimated that as much as half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon alone since its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan has gone to private military contractors. Koshgarian and her IPS colleagues, as well as Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute, meanwhile, have said that corporations gobbled up more than half.

"How can we even consider allocating a sum of this magnitude to the Pentagon when our country is facing severe challenges around climate change, systemic racial oppression, growing economic inequality, and the ongoing pandemic?" Sister Karen Donahue of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas Justice Team asked Friday. "We know that a significant portion of this money will end up in the coffers of arms manufacturers and dealers where it will contribute nothing to the security of our country or world peace."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

SEE  LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

How Many Dead Kids Before We Admit US "National Security" Is a Lie?

How many people have to die by our hands—how big do the piles of women's and children's corpses have to get—before mass murder (war) begins looming as wrong?


Smoke and fire billow after shelling on the Islamic State group's last holdout of Baghouz, in the eastern Syrian Deir Ezzor province on March 3, 2019.

 (Photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images)

ROBERT C. KOEHLER

November 19, 2021

A new defense budget looms. Maybe we're running out of wars to fight, but no matter. The proposed figure before Congress is bigger than ever: $778 billion.

How fascinating—and how irrelevant—that the vote is scheduled just a few days after the New York Times published its investigation of a U.S. airstrike in Baghuz, Syria two and a half years ago, which the Defense Department had been desperately trying to cover up.

When people are dehumanized as "the enemy," killing them, especially if powerful weapons are under your control, becomes nothing more than an abstraction.

America, America . . . shall we celebrate our country, boys and girls? Here's a passage from the story: "Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day found piles of dead women and children."

One of the observers said: "There was a lot of freshly bulldozed earth and the stink of bodies underneath, a lot of bodies."

The massacre took place on March 18, 2019. The U.S. military was searching for ISIS members, who apparently were "cornered in a dirt field" just outside Baghuz. A military drone circled overhead, but its camera revealed only "a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank."

Nonetheless, to the amazement of the military personnel who were monitoring the drone, they saw a U.S. fighter jet zoom in and pummel the field with a 500-pound bomb. Another jet followed, dropping two 2,000-pound bombs on the women and children. The instant death toll was about 80 people.

Huh? What happened?

What happened was this: When people are dehumanized as "the enemy," killing them, especially if powerful weapons are under your control, becomes nothing more than an abstraction. This is the nature of war! Even those who aren't actually involved in the conflict—you know, civilians—quickly and easily become collateral damage: They were in the way. We're waging a war against evil. Killing gets easier and easier and easier, and hell remains ensconced on Planet Earth . . . thanks in large part to us, the most powerful nation on Earth, the most financially committed to a future of endless war.

Specifically, as the Times story reported: ". . . the bombing had been called in by a classified American special operations unit, Task Force 9, which was in charge of ground operations in Syria. The task force operated in such secrecy that at times it did not inform even its own military partners of its actions."

In other words, the USA and its allies are waging multiple wars in the Middle East. One of them is public and respectable: No war crimes permitted! But the other one is free of any sort of legal bureaucracy and does what it wants, claiming, whenever necessary, that it took the action it did because troops were in imminent danger. Under such circumstances, legal approval of a military strike isn't necessary. Just do it, and if there's fallout later, hide (i.e., classify) the details, minimize (lie about) the results and, if necessary, have an official spokesman express a meaningless and absolutely consequence-free token of regret and wait for everyone (except the families of the dead) to forget about it and move on, e.g.:

"We abhor the loss of innocent life and take all possible measures to prevent them," the chief spokesman for the U.S. Central Command said in a statement, according to the Times. "In this case, we self-reported and investigated the strike according to our own evidence and take full responsibility for the unintended loss of life."

Any questions?

The only questions I have feel too big, that is to say, too naïve, to ask, but let me ask them anyway, directed in particular at those members of Congress who shrug and give the military-industrialists whatever they ask for, year after year:

How many people have to die by our hands—how big do the piles of women's and children's corpses have to get—before mass murder (war) begins looming as wrong? Are you too much of a coward to demand a complete rethinking of the meaning of national defense? Are you too stupid to realize that Planet Earth is a single planet, and that security for one can only mean security for all? Are you incapable of seeing that dehumanizing people is wrong—and counterproductive—and must not be the basis of national security? As "the leader of the free world," can we not take the lead in evolving beyond war, borders and national dominance? Is the soul of the nation dead?

War dehumanizes everyone it touches, as Paul Tritschler put it, writing at Open Democracy:

"Dehumanization—the process of debasing one's perceived enemy—is not the preserve of evil people: humiliation, alienation, non-recognition, exclusion, the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, and even campaigns of genocide, all fall well within the realm of possibility for the majority of human beings. There are many examples since WW2 of dehumanization at the extreme: Vietnam, Indonesia, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria, where populations have also been described as less than human, and where civilians have been killed as a result of so-called 'precision bombing.'. . ."

At best, change comes slowly. At worst, it doesn't come at all—or rather, it comes on its own terms, as the consequence of ignorant behavior. We are at the brink of God knows what. Perhaps oblivion. All of us, you might say, are huddled in the dirt field outside Baghuz.

One way to meet this future is with these words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "Some day, after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the Wound" (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com

SEE  LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

It Will Take Much More Than Electric Cars to Fix the Climate Crisis

Resolving the climate crisis isn't just about shifting from one technology to another; it's about shifting our ways of thinking and being. It’s a point that often gets missed in conversations about major greenhouse gas emission sources.

While electric vehicle sales are increasing rapidly, they're still far outnumbered by gasoline and diesel car sales. (Photo: joel-t/iStock)

DAVID SUZUKI, 

  IAN HANINGTON

November 19, 2021

 by David Suzuki Foundation

That was illustrated at the recent 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) climate summit, in Glasgow, where governments, automakers and airlines worked on deals to cut global transport emissions. Because transportation is responsible for one-fifth to one-quarter of global emissions, that seems like a good step.

But there are problems.

Shifting away from consumerism and supporting local businesses and production would go as far or farther in reducing shipping emissions, although cleaner ways to fuel ships are needed.

With aviation and shipping, the main idea is to switch from polluting fossil fuels to "biofuels." But with expected increases in both sectors, that could mean destroying more natural areas or displacing food-growing lands with crops for fuel production.

And as George Monbiot points out, "Flying accounts for most of the greenhouse gas emissions of the super-rich, which is why the wealthiest 1% generate roughly half the world's aviation emissions. If everyone lived as they do, aviation would be the biggest of all the causes of climate breakdown." Finding better fuels is important, but cutting back on flying—which would mostly affect the affluent—is just as critical. But, of course, that doesn't fit with the current growth-and-profit economic paradigm.

As for shipping, Reuters notes around 90 per cent of traded goods travel by sea, and shipping accounts for about three per cent of global emissions. Our current global economic system encourages corporations to go where resources and labour are cheap and standards are often low to maximize profits. Shifting away from consumerism and supporting local businesses and production would go as far or farther in reducing shipping emissions, although cleaner ways to fuel ships are needed.

With the automobile industry, it's all about electric vehicles. And the focus is on direct emissions rather than the many other environmental impacts, from production to massive infrastructure requirements. Few people even question car culture—why we've decided so many people should each have large machines to transport them in isolation. And why they should be provided with the massive infrastructure to make it possible, from roads and parking to malls and drive-throughs.

This idea of constant economic growth—with the excessive consumption and waste required to fuel it—has become so ingrained that we resort to incremental measures in the midst of a crisis. We just can't imagine different ways of seeing, and so we try to shoehorn solutions into an outdated system that wasn't designed to be sustainable.

As for the COP26 automakers' pledge—which would require all cars and vans sold to be zero-emission by 2040—as inadequate as it is, not everyone is on board.

Again, electric vehicles are important. They pollute far less than internal combustion engine vehicles and can last longer. But what we should really focus on is reducing private automobile use, through good public transit, active transport like cycling and walking, increasingly popular modes like e-bikes and scooters, better urban planning and design, and new technologies like self-driving vehicles that can facilitate car sharing and efficient ride-hailing services. All this would dramatically reduce congestion and pollution, and would even make it possible to convert massive amounts of road and parking to green space.

And while electric vehicle sales are increasing rapidly, they're still far outnumbered by gasoline and diesel car sales. As for the COP26 automakers' pledge—which would require all cars and vans sold to be zero-emission by 2040—as inadequate as it is, not everyone is on board. Even though Volkswagen and Toyota are major electric and hybrid vehicle manufacturers, they didn't back the commitment. The U.S., China and Germany also refused to support the pledge.

According to Reuters, "The wider lesson is that private players can't be relied on to stick their necks out if public action is absent." This shows how essential it is for society to get involved. It's mainly up to governments, business, industry and international agencies to resolve the climate crisis, but without massive public pressure, they'll continue down the status quo road until it's too late to keep the planet from heating to catastrophic levels.

Climate conferences such as COP are important, and perhaps they're more than just "blah, blah, blah," but until we replace the outdated human-invented systems that got us into this mess, we'll only be downshifting rather than putting on the brakes. That's not good enough.

© 2019 David Suzuki Foundation

David Suzuki , an award-winning geneticist and broadcaster, co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990. He was a faculty member at the University of British Columbia, and is currently professor emeritus. Suzuki is widely recognized as a world leader in sustainable ecology and has received numerous awards for his work, including a UNESCO prize for science and a United Nations Environment Program medal.

IAN HANINGTON is a senior editor at the David Suzuki Foundation.