GERMANY

Activists form human chain demanding exit from coal mining
August 7, 2021

Environmental and climate activists as well as residents of neighbouring villages have form a human chain on the edge of the Garzweiler open-cast mine in Juechen, Germany, Saturday, Aug. 7, 2021. About 2,500 people have protested for a quick exit from coal mining in western Germany. They formed a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) human chain between the villages of Luetzerath and Keyenberg on Saturday. Protesters were campaigning to save Luetzerath from being bulldozed to make way for a coal mine. (Malte Krudewig/dpa via AP)

LUETZERATH, Germany (AP) — About 2,500 people in western Germany demonstrated Saturday for a quick halt to coal mining in the region, where a village could be bulldozed to make way for a mine.

Participants in the protest formed a 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) human chain between the threatened village of Luetzerath and nearby Keyenberg.

 

A sign reading "Stop coal now!" is written on a banner at a demonstration at the Garzweiler open-cast mine in Juechen, Germany, Saturday, Aug. 7, 2021. About 2,500 people have protested for a quick exit from coal mining in western Germany. They formed a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) human chain between the villages of Luetzerath and Keyenberg on Saturday. Protesters were campaigning to save Luetzerath from being bulldozed to make way for a coal mine. (Malte Krudewig/dpa via AP)

A sign reading "Climate protection now!" is written on a banner at a demonstration at the Garzweiler open-cast mine in Juechen, Germany, Saturday, Aug. 7, 2021. About 2,500 people have protested for a quick exit from coal mining in western Germany. They formed a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) human chain between the villages of Luetzerath and Keyenberg on Saturday. Protesters were campaigning to save Luetzerath from being bulldozed to make way for a coal mine. (Malte Krudewig/dpa via AP)

Luetzerath stands a few hundred meters (yards) away from a vast pit where German utility giant RWE is extracting lignite coal to burn in nearby power plants.

Coal mining is due to end in Germany by 2038, but environmentalists say it needs to stop at least 10 years earlier if the country is to play its part in meeting the Paris climate accord goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

“If we want to survive on this planet, we have to take measures now,” protester Michael Zobel told The Associated Press. “Survival on this planet is endangered and it starts right here. So coal mining needs to be stopped, and there will need to be other measures, too.”

The village of Luetzerath is located in North Rhine-Westphalia state, which was among the regions of Germany hit hardest by floods last months that killed more than 200 people and caused billions of euros (dollars) worth of damage.

Scientists have said that while it’s hard to attribute specific storms to climate change, extreme weather of the kind that caused the flash floods in parts of Western Europe last month will become more severe and frequent in a warming world.

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-change

IT'S TOO LATE CLIMATE CHANGE IS HAPPENING

Landmark U.N. report says some climate effects permanent, still time to avoid others

"[This] report is a code red for humanity," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday of the IPCC climate report.



Climate activists gather outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on July 28. Photo by Sarah Silbiger/UPI | License Photo

Aug. 9 (UPI) -- A landmark report released on Monday cautions that global temperatures worldwide will probably surpass a level in about a decade that experts and officials have been trying to avert.

The nearly 4,000-page assessment was released by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. It's the panel's sixth climate report and the first since 2013.

According to the report, human influence on the climate is "unequivocal" affecting the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere -- but says there's still a chance to avoid the worst case scenario.

The report said the world is already seeing the effects of climate change, including longer heat waves, heavy precipitation, more frequent and sustained droughts and stronger tropical cyclones -- and that it's "widespread, rapid and intensifying."

"Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered," the report states.

"Global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades."

The report adds that the warmer climate will "intensify" very wet and very dry weather swings, climate events and seasons, but noted the "location and frequency of these events depends on projected changes in regional atmospheric circulation, including monsoons and mid-latitude storm tracks."

The lengthy study said although many of the effects of climate change are permanent, there's still a chance to avoid other worst-case changes.

Limiting human impact, it said, would require cutting carbon emissions to "at least net zero" and making "strong reductions" in other greenhouse gas emissions.

"The scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole and the present state of many aspects of the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years," the panel said in a statement.

"Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level."

"This report is a reality check. We now have a much clearer picture of the past, present and future climate," said IPCC Working Group Co-Chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte said.

"Today's ... report is a code red for humanity," said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. "Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible."

"The evidence is irrefutable: Greenhouse gas emissions are choking our planet and placing billions of people in danger," he added in a tweet. "We must act decisively now to avert a climate catastrophe."

Landmark report maps out five scenarios for Earth's climate future

Paris Agreement climate targets could soon be out of reach without immediate and massive greenhouse gas emission reductions, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a landmark report published Monday.

“This report is a reality check,” said IPCC Working Group I co-chair Valérie Masson-Delmotte in a statement. “We now have a much clearer picture of the past, present and future climate, which is essential for understanding where we are headed, what can be done, and how we can prepare.”

The report offers a more granular analysis of how greenhouse gases (GHGs) contribute to global temperature increases, and spells out different emission scenarios to estimate how likely it is the planet will cross the Paris Agreement goal of holding global warming to “well below 2, preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius” compared to pre-industrial levels. The IPCC estimates that from 2011 to 2020, global surface temperature was 1.09 C higher than the 1850 to1900 pre-industrial average.

The five scenarios considered range from very high emissions (doubling of global GHGs by 2050) to very low emissions (net-zero by 2050 and negative emissions thereafter), with its intermediate scenario representing emissions holding at current levels until mid-century.

“Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered,” the report reads. “Global warming of 1.5 C and 2 C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.”

The IPCC’s best estimate in its lowest-emission scenario sees warming held to 1.4 C by the end of the century, with its best estimate in the highest-emission scenario coming in at 4.4 C warming.



As the planet warms, the IPCC warns heat waves, droughts, cyclones, and heavy rain will all become more common, posing a direct threat to agriculture and human safety. Then there is Arctic sea ice, snow cover, and permafrost that is melting and contributing to sea level rise and methane leaking into the atmosphere, potentially representing a tipping point for the Earth’s climate.

Tipping points in climate science refer to a threshold that, when crossed, lock in major damage. Scientists are still developing better understandings of how tipping points work, but they essentially represent a minefield on the road to net-zero given the uncertainty. Carbon sinks turning into carbon emitters, like Canada’s managed forest, or Greenland rapidly losing more than 18 billion tonnes of ice contributing to sea level rise are just potential two examples.

The IPCC report highlights the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the system of ocean currents that includes the Gulf Stream, as one important tipping point. The IPCC says the AMOC is “very likely” to weaken over the 21st century under all scenarios, but only has “medium confidence” there won’t be an “abrupt collapse” before 2100. If it collapsed, the world’s weather patterns would be dramatically impacted.

In fact, one study published last week in Nature Climate Change found evidence the AMOC was weakening, and warned a collapse would have “severe impacts” and increase the risk of cascading problems for other major Earth systems, “such as the Antarctic ice sheet, tropical monsoon systems and Amazon rainforest.”

“Hopefully, as our governments head to COP26, they will have all of this in mind, and they will make those new commitments as ambitious as science requires them to be,” says Pembina Institute director of federal policy Isabelle Turcotte.

“We need to do more at the federal level, (but) we also need to come back home domestically and make sure all provinces are energetically rowing in the same direction,” she said.

Canada has pledged to reduce emissions between 40 and 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, but its latest modelling forecasts a 36 per cent reduction by 2030. Moreover, the IPCC previously said to hold global warming to 1.5 C there should be about a 45 per cent reduction in global GHGs from 2010 levels. Because global GHG emissions were higher in 2010 than in 2005, Canada’s commitment to lower emissions 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels is actually a weaker pledge than what the IPCC called for.

“We are not yet aligned with what science says the global target should be, so Canada needs to do more,” said Turcotte. “But we also need to keep in mind that Canada is a rich country that has hugely benefited from extracting and burning fossil fuels, and so we have a carbon debt to the world, and we need to do more than the global average effort.”

A recent report from the Pembina Institute found 95 per cent of Canadian emissions are not covered by a provincial or territorial 2030 climate target. It also found no jurisdiction had developed a path to net-zero. Because provinces hold jurisdiction over natural resource development, it is a major gap in the country’s climate ambition.

“Absent these provinces stepping up, Canada is unlikely to meet any climate target,” Turcotte said.

Turcotte pointed to the importance of carbon budgets as a tool for decarbonizing. One reason they are helpful is that a carbon budget lays out the amount of emissions a jurisdiction can generate. That shifts the focus somewhat away from the less important goal of net-zero by 2050 toward the more important question of how much carbon is emitted in the intervening years. She said net-zero is an “important longer-term milestone,” but the focus on it can be misleading.

“It could lead us to climate catastrophe, because net-zero is an emissions level in 2050,” she said. “What matters is the cumulative amount of CO2 we emit from now until 2050, or from now until we get to net-zero.”

John Woodside, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Canada's National Observer

‘Nowhere to run’: UN report says global warming nears limits

In this Monday, July 26, 2021 file photo, a man carries goods on his bicycle as he walks out of the the Yubei Agricultural and Aquatic Products World in Xinxiang in central China's Henan Province. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released on Monday, Aug. 9, 2021, says warming already is smacking Earth hard and quickly with accelerating sea level rise, shrinking ice and worsening extremes such as heat waves, droughts, floods and storms. (AP Photo/Dake Kang, File)

Earth is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent, according to a report released Monday that the United Nations called a “code red for humanity.”

“It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

But scientists also eased back a bit on the likelihood of the absolute worst climate catastrophes.

The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and “unequivocal,” makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than it did last time it was issued in 2013.

Each of five scenarios for the future, based on how much carbon emissions are cut, passes the more stringent of two thresholds set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. World leaders agreed then to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above levels in the late 19th century because problems mount quickly after that. The world has already warmed nearly 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since then.

Under each scenario, the report said, the world will cross the 1.5-degree-Celsius warming mark in the 2030s, earlier than some past predictions. Warming has ramped up in recent years, data shows.

“Our report shows that we need to be prepared for going into that level of warming in the coming decades. But we can avoid further levels of warming by acting on greenhouse gas emissions,” said report co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a climate scientist at France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environment Sciences at the University of Paris-Saclay.

In three scenarios, the world will also likely exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times — the less stringent Paris goal — with far worse heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours unless there are deep emissions cuts, the report said.

  

FILE - In this Friday, Aug. 6, 2021 file photo, smoke spreads over Parnitha mountain during a wildfire in the village of Ippokratios Politia, Greece, about 35 kilometres (21 miles), north of Athens. Thousands of people fled wildfires burning out of control in Greece and Turkey on Friday, as a protracted heat wave left forests tinder-dry and flames threatened populated areas and electricity installations. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

 

FILE - This Thursday, July 15, 2021 file photo shows destroyed houses in Schuld, Germany. Due to heavy rains, the Ahr River dramatically flooded over its banks the previous evening. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

FILE - In this Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021 file photo, a floating dock sits on the lakebed of the Suesca lagoon, in Suesca, Colombia. The lagoon, a popular tourist destination near Bogota that has no tributaries and depends on rain runoff, has radically decreased its water surface due to years of severe droughts in the area and the deforestation and erosion of its surroundings. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara, File)

“This report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid and intensifying, unprecedented in thousands of years,” said IPCC Vice Chair Ko Barrett, senior climate adviser for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

With crucial international climate negotiations coming up in Scotland in November, world leaders said the report is causing them to try harder to cut carbon pollution. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called it “a stark reminder.”

The 3,000-plus-page report from 234 scientists said warming is already accelerating sea level rise and worsening extremes such as heat waves, droughts, floods and storms. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger and wetter, while Arctic sea ice is dwindling in the summer and permafrost is thawing. All of these trends will get worse, the report said.

For example, the kind of heat wave that used to happen only once every 50 years now happens once a decade, and if the world warms another degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), it will happen twice every seven years, the report said.

As the planet warms, places will get hit more not just by extreme weather but by multiple climate disasters at once, the report said. That’s like what’s now happening in the Western U.S., where heat waves, drought and wildfires compound the damage, Mearns said. Extreme heat is also driving massive fires in Greece and Turkey.

Some harm from climate change — dwindling ice sheets, rising sea levels and changes in the oceans as they lose oxygen and become more acidic — is “irreversible for centuries to millennia,” the report said.

The world is “locked in” to 15 to 30 centimeters (6 to 12 inches) of sea level rise by mid-century, said report co-author Bob Kopp of Rutgers University.

Scientists have issued this message for more than three decades, but the world hasn’t listened, said United Nations Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen.

For the first time, the report offers an interactive atlas for people to see what has happened and may happen to where they live.

Nearly all of the warming that has happened on Earth can be blamed on emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. At most, natural forces or simple randomness can explain one- or two-tenths of a degree of warming, the report said.


  

FILE - In this Thursday, July 29, 2021 file photo, birds fly over a man taking photos of the exposed riverbed of the Old Parana River, a tributary of the Parana River during a drought in Rosario, Argentina. Parana River Basin and its related aquifers provide potable water to close to 40 million people in South America, and according to environmentalists the falling water levels of the river are due to climate change, diminishing rainfall, deforestation and the advance of agriculture. (AP Photo/Victor Caivano, File)

FILE - In this Tuesday, July 20, 2021 file photok the Staten Island Ferry departs from the Manhattan terminal through a haze of smoke with the Statue of Liberty barely visible in New York. Wildfires in the American West, including one burning in Oregon that's currently the largest in the U.S., are creating hazy skies as far away as New York as the massive infernos spew smoke and ash into the air in columns up to six miles high. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

The report described five different future scenarios based on how much the world reduces carbon emissions. They are: a future with incredibly large and quick pollution cuts; another with intense pollution cuts but not quite as massive; a scenario with moderate emission cuts; a fourth scenario where current plans to make small pollution reductions continue; and a fifth possible future involving continued increases in carbon pollution.

In five previous reports, the world was on that final hottest path, often nicknamed “business as usual.” But this time, the world is somewhere between the moderate path and the small pollution reductions scenario because of progress to curb climate change, said report co-author Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the U.S. Pacific Northwest National Lab.

While calling the report “a code red for humanity,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres kept a sliver of hope that world leaders could still somehow prevent 1.5 degrees of warming, which he said is “perilously close.”

Alok Sharma, the president of the upcoming climate negotiations in Scotland, urged leaders to do more so they can “credibly say that we have kept 1.5 degrees alive.”

“Anything we can do to limit, to slow down, is going to pay off,” Tebaldi said. “And if we cannot get to 1.5, it’s probably going to be painful, but it’s better not to give up.”

In the report’s worst-case scenario, the world could be around 3.3 degrees Celsius (5.9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than now by the end of the century. But that scenario looks increasingly unlikely, said report co-author and climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, climate change director of the Breakthrough Institute.

“We are a lot less likely to get lucky and end up with less warming than we thought,” Hausfather said. “At the same time, the odds of ending up in a much worse place than we expected if we do reduce our emissions are notably lower.”

The report said ultra-catastrophic disasters — commonly called “tipping points,” like ice sheet collapses and the abrupt slowdown of ocean currents — are “low likelihood” but cannot be ruled out. The much talked-about shutdown of Atlantic ocean currents, which would trigger massive weather shifts, is something that’s unlikely to happen in this century, Kopp said.

A “major advance” in the understanding of how fast the world warms with each ton of carbon dioxide emitted allowed scientists to be far more precise in the scenarios in this report, Mason-Delmotte said.

In a new move, scientists emphasized how cutting airborne levels of methane — a powerful but short-lived gas that has soared to record levels — could help curb short-term warming. Lots of methane the atmosphere comes from leaks of natural gas, a major power source. Livestock also produces large amounts of the gas, a good chunk of it in cattle burps.

More than 100 countries have made informal pledges to achieve “net zero” human-caused carbon dioxide emissions sometime around mid-century, which will be a key part of the negotiations in Scotland. The report said those commitments are essential.

“It is still possible to forestall many of the most dire impacts,” Barrett said.

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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/Climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Group wages legal battle to raise Christian flag at Boston City Hall

First Amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 

A lawsuit alleges that a civic association and its director's constitutional rights of free speech and equal protection under the law were violated by the denial of an application to raise the Christian flag during a celebration at Boston City Hall. Image courtesy of Liberty Counsel

Aug. 9 (UPI) -- A civic association and its director are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that rejected their request to fly a Christian flag on a Boston City Hall flagpole.

Harold Shurtleff and Camp Constitution allege in a lawsuit that their constitutional rights of free speech and equal protection under the law were violated by the denial of an application to raise the flag during a September 2017 celebration of Constitution Day and Citizenship Day. Their event was designed to commemorate the contributions of the Christian community to Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

A Boston official has said the refusal was based on a policy to refrain from flying non-secular flags on its pole in accordance with the First Amendment's prohibition of government establishment of religion.

But Shurtleff, an association co-founder and a former Boston resident who now lives in New Hampshire, said Camp Constitution is not trying to force anybody to fly the flag

"We're the ones that are actually going to fly it," Shurtleff told UPI. "The city isn't going to fly it, just us. We're going to raise it and have our ceremony and it will probably come down a day or two later or maybe just a few hours after that."

The flag is white and has a red Latin cross inside a blue square in the upper corner.

The city offered to fly a non-religious flag instead, but Shurtleff and the organization declined the offer. They filed suit in federal court seeking an order allowing them to hold ceremonies with non-secular flags at designated public forums -- which they contend includes the flagpole -- and a declaration that Boston's policy denying the flying of non-secular flags on the City Hall flagpoles based on their content is unconstitutional

A trial court judge found in favor of Boston and the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision, ruling the city could act on legitimate concerns about excessive entanglement with religion and, thus, made a valid choice for its flag-raising program to remain secular.

Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based nonprofit that litigates religious liberty cases, then filed a petition at the Supreme Court asking the justices to overturn the 1st Circuit

"There is a crucial difference between government endorsement of religion and private speech, which government is bound to respect," attorney Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel's chairman, said in a news release. "Censoring religious viewpoints in a public forum where secular viewpoints are permitted is unconstitutional and this must stop."

A decision by the justices on whether to hear the case is pending.

Celebrating Christian contributions

Camp Constitution, a public charitable trust, offers classes and workshops on U.S. history and current events. The organization, which was formed in 2009 and is based in New Hampshire, says its mission is to "enhance understanding of the country's Judeo-Christian heritage, the American heritage of courage and ingenuity, the genius of the United States Constitution and free enterprise."

Boston owns three flagpoles that are 83 feet tall and located in front of City Hall. The city usually raises the U.S. flag and the POW/Mia flag on one of them, the Massachusetts flag on another and its own flag on the third. On request, the city will sometimes replace its flag with another for a limited time.

From June 2005 through June 2017, the city approved 284 flag-raising events requested by private organizations at its third flagpole in connection with ethnic and other cultural celebrations, the arrival of dignitaries from other countries, the commemoration of historic events in other countries and the celebration of certain causes, according to court documents.

Shurtleff made a request in July 2017 to fly the Christian flag close to Sept. 17 as part of an event to "celebrate and recognize the contributions Boston's Christian community has made to our city's cultural diversity, intellectual capital and economic growth."

Liberty Counsel says if the application had not referred to the flag as Christian, Shurtleff's request would not have been rejected. It notes in the Supreme Court petition that Boston has raised flags with religious imagery.

Among them were the Portuguese flag, which has dots inside blue shields that represent the five wounds of Christ when crucified and 30 dots for the coins Judas received for having betrayed Christ, and the Turkish flag, with the star and crescent of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. In addition, Boston's flag includes the city seal, which contains a Latin inscription that translates as "God be with us as he was with our fathers," the petition says.

The city had no written policies for handling flag-raising requests when Camp Constitution asked to fly its flag and no previous application had been denied, according to the petition. Boston put its past policy and practice in writing in October 2018 and did not change how flag requests are handled, court documents say.

Threat to freedom?

The Boston press office said city officials have no comment while the case is still pending.

In a brief opposing the request for the Supreme Court to hear the case, attorneys for Boston argue that people who see a flag flying above City Hall would reasonably interpret it as conveying a message on behalf of the city.

They also point out that the city did not deny Shurtleff and Camp Constitution's request to hold an event at the flagpole celebrating Christian values.

"Rather, the city denied them access to one of three city-owned flagpoles to raise a flag representing a particular religion in place of the city's flag," the brief says. "Thus, it can be inferred from the circumstances that the petitioners are not seeking permission to present their flag as part of an event celebrating the Christian religion or to engage in private speech, but are instead seeking to use the flagpole to obtain the powerful image of city approval of their religious views."

Eighteen religious and civil rights organizations filed a friend-of the-court brief late last month supporting the city's position, including Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, Women of Reform Judaism, the Methodist Federation for Social Action and the New Hampshire Conference, United Church of Christ.

The groups say even modest governmental involvement with religion is a grave threat to religious freedom.

"There is no historical context that can give the Christian flag -- a purely religious symbol -- a nonreligious meaning," the brief says. "The physical context here -- displaying the flag in between the American and Massachusetts flags -- would only accentuate the impression that the city is favoring Christianity."

Shurtleff said a few people have told him they're worried that if he wins at the Supreme Court, the Satanic flag and others that they find objectionable will be allowed on the city poles.

"I said if you're worried about them flying the Satanic flag, which is not likely, you show up and you pass out your Bible tracts and you pray for them," he said.

Queen’s Dr. Brian May Calls Out ‘Fruitcakes’ Eric Clapton And Other Anti-Vaxxers
Aynslee Darmon 23 hrs ago

Brian May isn't holding back his thoughts on anti-COVID-19 vaxxers.

© Photo: Getty Images Brian May

In a new interview with The Independent, the legendary Queen guitarist, 74, slammed fellow musician Eric Clapton after revealing his stance on vaccines.

RELATED: Queen’s Brian May Says They Are ‘Looking At Ideas’ For ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Sequel

Clapton has recently been very vocal about his opposition to lockdown restrictions and the coronavirus vaccinations. Earlier this month, the musician said he will not perform any gigs where proof of vaccine is required.

Video: Brian May says Eric Clapton and anti-vaxxers are 'fruitcakes' (Bang Showbiz)

“I love Eric Clapton, he’s my hero, but he has very different views from me in many ways,” May said. “He’s a person who thinks it’s OK to shoot animals for fun, so we have our disagreements, but I would never stop respecting the man.”

RELATED: Queen’s Brian May Laments ‘Horror In Our House’ After Flash Flood Causes ‘Sewage Overflow’

He continued: “Anti-vax people, I’m sorry, I think they’re fruitcakes. There’s plenty of evidence to show that vaccination helps. On the whole they’ve been very safe. There’s always going to be some side effect in any drug you take, but to go around saying vaccines are a plot to kill you, I’m sorry, that goes in the fruitcake jar for me.”

The comments from both May and Clapton came after the UK government declared that it will be making proof of vaccination a legal requirement at venues from the end of September.

IMAGINING THE WORKER’S REVOLUTION: THE CASE OF GEORGES SOREL

Posted on March 6, 2017

by Age of Revolutions
By Eric Brandom

By the end of the 19th century, Marx’s legacy was attached to political parties that sought to win power democratically, indeed that to a great degree identified revolution with the electoral victory of socialist parties. Many anarchists militated for a competing purely negative vision of revolution—only the destruction of the state, capitalism, and doubtless much else would bring about a new and better world. Georges Sorel’s syndicalism was different yet again. His was not a conservative revolution, but a revolution that would conserve.

Georges Sorel, 1847-1922

This idea is articulated in Sorel’s 1898 pamphlet, “L’Avenir socialiste des syndicats,” which, if we keep in mind that the fin-de-siècle French “syndicat” is a more open and flexible institution than 20th century trade unions, we can call “The Socialist Future of the Unions.” Sorel retired in 1892 from a successful career as civil engineer, moved to Paris, and soon became one of the most respected Marxist theorists in France. His writings cover a staggering range, from ancient history to William James. He described his own work as “philosophical history” in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville; he is often, perhaps dismissively, called a moralist. Sorel is still best remembered for his Reflections on Violence, published in book form in 1908, primarily because this book found a much greater echo on the so-called Right than it did on the Left from which it was written. Without dismissing the importance of this later text as an inspiration for those who wished to be neither Right nor Left, it is worth our time to look more closely at the logic and resources Sorel employed in this earlier intervention. Indeed, when the time came in the fall of 1922 to write obituaries for Sorel, the most thoughtful and balanced of them suggested that “L’Avenir” shaped Sorel’s legacy as much as the Reflections. This was perhaps because “L’Avenir,” while not exactly a work of vulgarization, nonetheless has a clearer argument than most of Sorel’s writing, expressed lucidly in the final line of the text: “the whole future of socialism rests in the autonomous development of the worker syndicats” (60).


This slogan, to be sure, requires some explanation. The place to begin is with Sorel’s interpretation of historical materialism. By this date he had been reading and arguing with Marxist figures like Karl Kautsky, Antonio Labriola, and the young Benedetto Croce, and also confronting Marx with non-Marxist thinkers, most notably Giambattista Vico and Emile Durkheim. Here, though, Sorel draws all of this into the claim that historical materialism, while certainly demanding close attention to economics, means most deeply that “the development of each system provides the material conditions to undertake effective and durable changes in the social relations within which it [the system] was transformed” (3). Or, in less tortured language, that “the working classes will have acquired juridical and political capacity before they are able to triumph” (4). Jacques Julliard has suggested seeing this pair of assertions as an attempt to combine Marx with Proudhon, although the term “capacité” might also point back, for instance, to Guizot’s liberalism. Already, for Sorel, attention must be paid to the internal development of the proletarian institution. We have here not a totality riven by internal contradictions, as later Marxists would perhaps frame it, but institutions that develop according to their own logics.

We cannot know what form economic crisis will take, or when revolution will erupt, or even what form it will take—but we can gauge preparation. Sorel does “not think that the social revolution will look like a scene from the Apocalypse” (38), because the main foreseeable content of the revolution, in good Marxist terms, is that the proletariat will seize control of the productive capacity of modern industry. This does not mean that the proletariat will step into bourgeois roles, but it does mean that it is possible in principle to judge, in the present, whether or not the working classes have the capacity to run the machines of industry without the bourgeoisie. And here Sorel means literally the machines. Technical knowledge is required, of course, but there is every reason to believe that the working classes already possess it to great degree, or can learn. Sorel rails against the cult of science, scientism, which he regards as essentially a screen for class domination and a ploy of the intellectuals, who understand as a class that they will be rendered largely superfluous by the revolution—they may be offered jobs by the proletariat, but can have no directive role in its activities. The intellectuals—Kautsky’s Intelligenz—are a natural enemy of the proletariat because they will experience the revolution as an enormous lock-out.

So the workers must organize themselves. Echoing Durkheim’s terms, Sorel writes that “to organize is not simply to put machinery up on boxes! Organization is the passage from a mechanical, blind, externally imposed order to organic, intelligent, and full accepted differentiation; in a word, it is moral development.” Such development must be the result of long practical experience: “All institutions shape themselves in the same way; they are not the result of decisions made by great statesmen, nor the calculations of scientists; they make themselves in embracing and condensing all the elements of life. What would allow the proletariat to avoid the necessity of making itself in this way?” (36-37). The contrast Sorel draws here is with socialist parties beginning to experience some measure of success on the electoral level and perhaps too willing to claim that a socialist majority in the chamber of deputies would simply equal the revolution.

Indeed the late 1890s was a moment of debate within socialism about the relationship between “economic” labor organizing and “political” action through electorally-oriented parties. The French delegation to the London Congress of 1896 had split over whether or not political, which is to say electoral, action was a necessary element of socialist activity. In this pamphlet, far from the meeting hall, Sorel presents something like a compromise vision. He does not reject political action—at this point Sorel expresses no hesitation about social legislation improving the lives of the working classes—but he also refuses to make elections the priority. In principle, “to reduce the syndicats to being no more than resistance societies [des sociétés de résistance] is to put a formidable barrier in the way of the development of the proletariat…it is…to refuse it the possibility of becoming a class for itself.” (35-36). The syndicats have a socialist future—they are the future of socialism, because proletarian civilization is simply the full and free development of the new forms of sociability with which the workers surround and manage productive labor. This new civilization would be, Sorel argued, egalitarian, but would not ape the forms of bourgeois democracy. Hierarchy would be task-based, constrained, temporary.

“L’Avenir” is a crucial resource for understanding Sorel’s trajectory across the political field of the pre-WW1 years. But even without that context, we ought to consider carefully the attempt Sorel made to follow the development of proletarian institutions within democracy. The first step is to measure the distance between his moment and what might be ours. Perhaps most immediate is Taylorism. Patrick Gaud has argued that Sorel’s Marxism, and therefore his interpretation of the potentialities of the labor movement, was deeply marked by a French economy that was, in important ways, “behind” the English and Germans. Certainly, Sorel speaks as though he is well aware of the gap between craft labor, for instance, and the mass worker. But it is also true that Taylor’s innovations in labor control would decisively shift the terms of debate—it is not too much to say that it is Taylor, as much as the war, that stands between Sorel and Gramsci or Trotsky.

The revolution that Sorel had in mind was neither the “grand soir” of the anarchists nor the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat. Today, when hardheaded thinking about the conditions of possibility for autonomy takes place, subsistence agriculture is at least for some an imaginative horizon. For one influential group, in fact, “the factory system is not the kernel of a future society, but a machine producing no-future.” Like Marx, Sorel had enormous appreciation for certain achievements of industrial capitalism. The workers, Sorel believed, could have the industry without the capitalism, but only if they could, in fact, run the factories better than the capitalists themselves. This was not implausible, since he believed that the real creativity rested with the workers and that management tended to be parasitical. For Sorel, the factories, the technology of production, was a window into a future of substantive autonomy and practical egalitarianism, at once the fulfillment and the overcoming of liberalism. It was an idea of revolution that would not survive the early 20th century primarily because it rested on the foundation of a liberal state that was, even as Sorel wrote, already in the process of becoming something quite different. The transformations of state structures sometimes called neoliberalism open the way, it seems to me, to a reconsideration of this once obsolete moment.

Eric Brandom is a James Carey Fellow in the History Department at Kansas State University and is at work on a book, Autonomy and Violence, Georges Sorel and the Problem of Liberalism. He is a contributing editor at JHIblog, and tweets at @ebrandom.

Suggested Readings

The resurgence of French interest in Sorel in the 1980s is best represented, but certainly not exhausted, by the collections of essays edited by Michel Charzat and by Jacques Julliard and Shlomo Sand. In English, the works of Jeremy Jennings and John Stanley are standard. For the state of scholarship on Sorel in French, see the 2014 Mil-neuf-cent, formerly the Cahiers Georges Sorel. Despite its age, Isaiah Berlin’s 1970 essay on Sorel, republished in Against the Current, remains an excellent starting place.

Georges Sorel, Autonomy and Violence in the Third Republic

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How did Georges Sorel's philosophy of violence emerge from the moderate, reformist, and liberal philosophy of the French Third Republic? This dissertation answers the question through a contextual intellectual history of Sorel's writings from the 1880s until 1908. Drawing on a variety of archives and printed sources, this dissertation situates Sorel in terms of the intellectual field of the early Third Republic. I locate the roots of Sorel's problematic at once in a broadly European late 19th century philosophy of science and in the liberal values and the political culture of the French 1870s. Sorel's engagement with Karl Marx, but also Émile Durkheim, Giambattista Vico, and other social theorists, is traced in order to explain why, despite his Marxism, Sorel confronted the twin fin-de-siècle crises of the Dreyfus Affair and Revisionism as a political liberal. I show how his syndicalism became radical, scissionistic, and anti-Statist in the post-Dreyfus context of anticlericalism leading up to the separation of Church and State in 1905. Sorel drew on figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedetto Croce to elaborate his Reflections on Violence in 1906-1908, finally transforming his political theory of institutions into an ethics of myth and individual engagement.

Sorel has been best known as an icon of radicalism as such--in shorthand, an inspiration for both Lenin and Mussolini. This political polarization has occluded Sorel's profound engagement with the foundational thinkers of the Third Republic. Against the backdrop of a systematic misunderstanding of the philosophical issues at stake, Sorel's political ideas and interventions have also been misunderstood. Not only his insights about the limits and potentials of the intellectual framework of the French Third Republic, but also their most significant contemporary resonances, have been lost. I show how and why this has been so by studying the reception of Sorel's work in the Anglophone world from the immediate postwar years until the early 1970s. Finally, I investigate resonances between Sorel's work as I have reconstructed it, and some currents in contemporary post-Marxist political thought.

Sorel is a revelatory figure in the entangled history of late 19th century liberalism and republicanism. He was profoundly engaged in the intellectual life of the French Third Republic and this, as much as his Marxism although less overtly, has shaped the meaning of his work. To return him to this context gives us a new understanding of the stakes of the philosophy of the period and the limits of its liberalism.

 The Origins And Development Of Fascism [1939]

by Morgan Lorne T.

Publication date 1939

Topics fascism, Italy

Language English

 https://archive.org/details/morgan-lorne-t.-the-origins-and-development-of-fascism-1939/page/n27/mode/2up

 

The burden of the COVID-19 pandemic may contribute to outbreaks of violent protest and antigovernment sentiment

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

The COVID-19 pandemic is the most severe global health crisis of the 21st century. While media reports and policy directives tend to focus on the health and economic aspects of the pandemic, new research suggests that the pandemic is also destabilizing the fundamental relationship between citizens and the state.

“The pandemic has disrupted our normal way of living, generating frustrations, unprecedented social exclusion, and a range of other concerns,” said Henrikas Bartusevičius, a researcher with the Peace Research Institute Oslo and coauthor on a paper published in the journal Psychological Science. “Our investigations show that the psychological toll of living through a pandemic also stoked antigovernment and antisystemic attitudes that led to political violence in a number of countries.”

Bartusevičius and his colleagues asked 6,000 adults from the United States, Denmark, Italy, and Hungary if and how the COVID-19 pandemic had negatively affected their health, finances, relationships, and rights. The interviewees were asked to report if they felt dissatisfaction with their societies and governments and whether they were motivated to engage in or had already engaged in protests or political violence.

The results from this survey uncovered striking associations between the psychological burden of COVID-19 and highly disruptive sentiments and behaviors, including the use of violence for a political cause. In contrast, the research revealed no consistent correlations between the COVID-19 burden and the motivation to engage in peaceful forms of activism.

“We were also surprised to find that COVID-19 burden does not need additional triggers to motivate political violence,” said Bartusevičius. “It is seemingly enough on its own.”

COVID-19 burden is the overall psychological toll of living through a pandemic. It’s the sum total of individual stresses a person experiences during a pandemic and the responses that governments take against it, such as lockdown measures, mask mandates, and physical-distancing directives.

The researchers found that in the United States specifically, those experiencing a higher COVID-19 burden were also more likely to report engagement in violence during the Black Lives Matter protests and counterprotests. The pandemic and associated lockdowns may have contributed to the frustrations that were unleashed in these events, the researchers said.

“This is the first time in the modern era that highly individualized Western democracies have faced a major pandemic,” said coauthor Michael Bang Peterson, a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark. Before the pandemic, there was little knowledge about how societies would respond to or cope with such a crisis. “Our research presents one of the first pieces of evidence on the disruptive potential of pandemics and associated lockdowns,” he said.

The researchers did find differences across nations, with Danish respondents reporting the lowest COVID-19 burden and Hungarian respondents reporting the highest. However, there were no notable differences in the effects of COVID-19 burden across the four countries. For example, although the average Dane felt less burdened by the pandemic than respondents in other countries, Danes who felt more burdened showed anti-systemic attitudes and motivations for political violence similar to those reported elsewhere.

The researchers proposed several potential explanations for why pandemics can lead to civil unrest. The pandemic and lockdowns have unequally afflicted particular social groups, likely producing perceptions of injustice and anger that, in turn, can be directed against governments. Also, the burden of COVID-19 may contribute to social exclusion and marginalization as normal social life disappears, which could fuel antisystemic attitudes and motivations for political violence.

The researchers concluded that in the aftermath of pandemics, recovery programs should do more than address public health concerns and the economy; they should also endeavor to repair the relationship between citizens and the political system.

# # # 

Reference: Bartusevičius, H., Bor, A., Jorgensen, F., & Petersen, M. B. (2021). The psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with anti-systemic attitudes and political violence. Psychological Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211031847

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JOURNAL

Psychological Science

DOI

10.1177/09567976211031847

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with anti-systemic attitudes and political violence

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Aug-2021

Violence in Translation:

Georges Sorel, Liberalism, and Totalitarianism from Weimar to Woodstock

Eric Brandom1,2

This paper traces readings of Georges Sorel (1847-1922) from Carl Schmitt to Saul Bellow.

The image of Sorel that came out of Weimar-era sociological debate around Schmitt and

Karl Mannheim was simplified and hardened by émigré scholars in the war years, put to

good use in the anti-totalitarian combat of the 1950s, and finally shattered when applied to

the unfamiliar situation of the 1960s in the United States. Scholars taken with the problem of

the political intellectual and the closely related problem of the relationship between

instrumental and critical reason play the central role in this reception history. Sorel’s

commingling of left and right justified attempts to replace this organization of political space

with one around totalitarian and free societies.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:11178/datastreams/CONTENT/content

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M 101

Amazon, Walmart's Flipkart must face India antitrust probe, top court says

By Aditya Kalra and Abhirup Roy 3 

© Reuters/DADO RUVIC Small toy shopping cart is seen in front of displayed Amazon and Flipkart logos in this illustration

NEW DELHI (Reuters) -Amazon.com Inc and Walmart's Flipkart must face antitrust investigations ordered against them in India, the country's Supreme Court ruled on Monday, in a blow to the leading e-commerce giants which had urged judges to quash the inquiries.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) ordered the investigation against the companies last year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-antitrust-ecommerce/india-orders-antitrust-probe-of-amazon-walmarts-flipkart-idUSKBN1ZC1BO for allegedly promoting select sellers on their e-commerce platforms and using business practices that stifle competition.

The companies deny any wrongdoing and mounted legal challenges in lower courts https://www.reuters.com/technology/india-court-quashes-amazon-flipkart-plea-against-antitrust-probe-2021-07-23 and at the Supreme Court against the investigation, saying the CCI did not have enough evidence to pursue the matter.


A three-judge Supreme Court bench, led by Chief Justice N.V. Ramana, said companies like Amazon and Flipkart should volunteer for such investigations.

"We expect organisations like Amazon and Flipkart, big organisations, they have to volunteer for inquiry and transparency. We expect that and you don’t even want (an) inquiry," Justice Ramana told the court.

"You have to submit and an inquiry has to be conducted."

Amazon in a statement said it complies with all laws and "will extend full cooperation to the CCI investigation". Flipkart too said it complies with Indian laws and will cooperate with investigators.

Amazon and Flipkart are leading players in an e-retail market India forecasts will be worth $200 billion by 2026. The decision is a major setback for both companies as the Supreme Court appeal was seen as the last legal recourse to block the CCI pressing on with its investigation.

In the current antitrust case, filed by trader group Delhi Vyapar Mahasangh, the two companies face allegations of exclusive launches of mobile phones, promotion of select sellers on their websites and deep discounting practices that drive out competition.

Amazon and Flipkart had also asked the Supreme Court to put on hold the CCI's recent request for information in which they were asked 32 questions - including details of top 100 sellers and top-selling products. The companies argue such queries relate to "sensitive" business information.

Justice Ramana said on Monday the companies will have four more weeks to answer those queries.

In February, a Reuters investigation https://reut.rs/3xyz8er based on Amazon documents showed it had given preferential treatment for years to a small group of sellers. The CCI has said the Reuters story corroborated evidence https://reut.rs/3eTV2CX it had received against the company. Amazon has denied any wrongdoing.

The companies are also grappling with the prospect of tougher e-commerce regulations and investigations by the country's financial-crime agency for alleged violation of foreign investment laws.

In another legal challenge, the Supreme Court last week handed Amazon a victory https://reut.rs/37u8FnK by blocking its partner Future Group from selling $3.4 billion in retail assets to rival Reliance Industries. The CCI though has accused Amazon of concealing facts when it sought approval for a 2019 deal with the Future unit that has sparked the legal dispute, Reuters has reported https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-india-watchdog-accuses-amazon-concealing-facts-deal-future-group-unit-2021-07-22.

 Amazon has said it is confident of addressing those concerns.

(Reporting by Aditya Kalra in New Delhi and Abhirup Roy in Mumbai; Editing by Kirsten Donovan, Sanjeev Miglani and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

New research reinforces impact men can have as gender equality allies in the workplace

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SOCIETY FOR PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Men can have a major influence on the extent to which women feel that their identity is safe within a workplace. New research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science reports that the presence of a gender equality supportive ally reduces anticipated feelings of isolation while increasing anticipated support and respect.

While many existing allyship studies focuses on responses to events like misogynistic comments or hiring decisions, this research shows that people do not need to wait for something overtly sexist to happen in order to be an effective ally.

“Simply communicating that you care about gender equality and intend to act as an ally for women can make a difference for women’s feelings of inclusion in male-dominated spaces,” says lead author Charlotte Moser, a graduate student at the University of Kansas.

Researchers conducted three studies in which women were asked to imagine that they had received a job offer and were randomly assigned to view a slideshow of their future coworkers, displaying either all-male coworkers or a gender-balanced staff. Certain slideshows included a man expressing support for gender equality, whereas no coworker mentioned gender equality in the no-ally group. Participants then completed a questionnaire to indicate the degree to which they would feel isolated or supported by coworkers at the company.

“We found that stating allyship intentions significantly reduced women’s anticipation of workplace harassment and hostility,” Moser says. “Our work also demonstrates that these male allies set norms of equality for an organization.”

The first study involved 241 women and examined the impact of male allyship in reducing effects of underrepresentation among women, such as feelings of isolation and perceived lack of support. The second study included 393 participants, an equal mix of Black and White women, and focused on how the races of the participant and ally affected the ally’s impact.

In both studies, the presence of an ally increased feelings of identity-safety such as a sense of belonging in the group and trust that the group would treat the participant fairly. Researchers found no differences in Black or White women’s response to allyship from either a Black or White man.

A group of 398 women with male-dominated, STEM backgrounds participated in the final study to address the impact of the gender of an ally among women in male-dominated fields. Researchers found that allyship in a male-dominated workplace is effective for women, especially when the ally is male. While the female ally was perceived as championing gender equality, this did not reduce expectations of workplace hostility or isolation.

Moser explains that while allyship from men could be interpreted as paternalistic, her research found that women perceived an ally to be an empowering figure. Future research, she notes, would do well to explore men’s perceptions of male allies in such workplaces.

In the meantime, this research can serve as a resource for men who want to learn how to be better allies. Their behavior can have a lasting impact, particularly in male-dominated fields like STEM.

“This is important,” Moser says, “because it means that men can harness their privileged status to make these contexts more welcoming for women.”

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JOURNAL

Social Psychological and Personality Science

DOI

10.1177/19485506211033748

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Male Allies at Work: Gender-Equality Supportive Men Reduce Negative Underrepresentation Effects Among Women

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Aug-2021