France raises pay for health care workers by more than €8 billion

Issued on: 13/07/2020 -

French Health Minister Olivier Véran (R), flanked by Prime Minister Jean Castex (L), delivers a speech after signing wage agreements as part of talks aimed at improving working conditions, salaries and patient care in the medical sector at the Hotel Matignon in Paris on July 13, 2020. © Thomas Samson, AFP

Text by:NEWS WIRES

The French government and unions signed an agreement Monday giving over eight billion euros in pay rises for health workers, with the prime minister admitting the move was overdue in view of the coronavirus pandemic.

During the peak of the outbreak in France, people applauded every night health workers who in turn said that such gratitude rang hollow if it was not followed by concrete steps.

The bulk of the package comprises 7.5 billion euros ($8.5 billion) for pay increases for nurses and careworkers, who will get an average monthly raise of 183 euros ($208).

There is also 450 million euros ($510 million) for doctors intended to bolster wages for those who solely work in the public sector, a move aimed at luring them from more lucrative private clinics.

"No one can deny that this is a historic moment for our health system," Prime Minister Jean Castex said after a signing ceremony that followed seven weeks of negotiations between government and unions.

"This is first of all recognition of those who have been on the front line in the fight against this epidemic," he said.

"It is also a way of catching up the delay for each and every one -- including perhaps myself -- has their share of responsibility."

But some unions, including the hardline CGT, refrained from signing the accords, an indication that tensions over the issue may not be over.

The coronavirus epidemic has now killed over 30,000 people in France and while infection rates have fallen markedly, officials remain wary of the risk of a second wave.

(AFP)


France’s health workers march for pay raise as country pays homage virus heroes on Bastille Day


Issued on: 14/07/2020 

The French government approved pay raises to health workers on Monday, but unions say it is not enough. While Bastille Day celebrated these same workers who were on the frontline in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, unions marched in Paris asking for a higher raise, as FRANCE 24’s Chris Moore reports.

Superheroes and skater videos: young LA entertainers lead new activism

 14/07/2020

AJ Lovelace, co-founder of Blac 4 Black lives; Melina Abdullah, civic leader; activist and singer Paris Draper; Ciera Foster, actress and co-founder of Blac 4 Black Lives; Jasmyne Cannick, social justice advocate; and Tyson Suzuki, film editor and founder of "Active Advocate" VALERIE MACON AFP

Los Angeles (AFP)

In a town that sells silver-screen fantasies to the world, young Los Angeles entertainers are using their Hollywood talents to inspire and lead a new generation of real-life protesters.

"I tell everybody we're all superheroes, because superheroes are the best of humanity," says Ciera Foster, who plays one in web television series "Ninjak vs. the Valiant Universe."

"We're walking, breathing history right now."

When not controlling machines with her mind as an African-American superhero, Foster organizes demonstrations against racism and police brutality through the streets of Los Angeles.

Like many in the entertainment industry, Foster -- a students' rights and justice reform activist for years -- spoke out after witnessing footage of the killing of George Floyd in May.

Many young volunteers create "super-well produced" images of the protests that go viral on social media, including for her Black Leadership Allied Coalition.

Drone footage of more than 20,000 people peacefully marching down Hollywood Boulevard last month spread rapidly around the world, becoming an enduring image of the mass movement.

"We have photographers hanging off bridges and the sides of buildings covering us. They're sending these full-on Sundance Festival pieces... it's amazing," said Foster.

- 'We are the change' -

Tyson Suzuki, a young black film editor from Hawaii, has led daily anti-racism protests to the Los Angeles mayor's doorstep at City Hall since Floyd's death.

"We start protesting but we do it in harmony: 'Eric Garcetti, listen. Eric Garcetti, listen. We are the change. We are the change.'"

His Active Advocate group aims to achieve 100 continuous days of protest, but the thirtysomething leader's activism also goes back many years.

Suzuki began campaigning as a teenager when he realized his editing skills -- honed making skater videos -- could be of use for a campaign against big tobacco.

"I'm not an overnight activist, I am an organizer," he says, noting that many of those who support him also work in entertainment.

"We all work in the creative economy. When you're creating something, you are innately developing a conceived idea, and the idea is driven with passion. Right now, the passion is destroying racism."

For 28-year-old filmmaker AJ Lovelace, that means "doing socially conscious films and plays" as well as using technology and social media to help protesters "find the specific group they align with the most."

"My plan to keep the momentum going is to continue to create content," he says.

- 'A better future' -

The Los Angeles movement against racism does not just emerge from and employ the techniques of Hollywood, but actively targets the movie industry itself.

Jasmyne Cannick, a 42-year-old social justice advocate, says it is no surprise "that young people in entertainment are pushing back" given the racism still rampant in the sector.

"All the people who 'love black people' in Hollywood -- they haven't done a good job, because it's still been allowed to continue all this time," she said.

"I guess it just takes young people to come in basically with the attitude of 'we don't care -- we're going to get this done.'"

For Paris Draper, a 20-year-old singer and activist, her generation's focus on empathy and kindness offer hope for radical change.

"We definitely differ from past generations because we are taking the time to hear each other out," she says.

"I think in this day and age we are all trying to have a better future."

© 2020 AFP

BIGGEST FRENCH UNION OPPOSES MACRON REOPENING FRANCE
 BECAUSE IT CAN'T BE DONE SAFELY

Paradise regained then lost: Med mammals mourn lockdown end

Issued on: 14/07/2020 -

Aquatic creatures such as these common dolphins swimming off the southern French coast benefited from less sound pollution from pleasure craft during lockdown Christophe SIMON AFP

La Ciotat (France) (AFP)

When Europeans retreated into their homes to observe strict stay-at-home rules to contain the coronavirus, dolphins and whales on the Mediterranean coast basked and thrived in a hitherto unknown calm.

But the return of tourists, noisy boats and heavy sea transport with the end of lockdowns in France and other Mediterranean littoral countries has signalled the return of danger and harm caused by human activity for underwater creatures.

Nowhere is this more true then in the crystalline waters outside France's second biggest city of Marseille, a nature reserve important for wildlife but also thronged with day-trippers in the summer season.


"As soon as the pleasure boaters came back, we saw footage that really annoyed us," said Marion Leclerc from the conservationist organisation Souffleurs d'Ecume (Sea Foam Blowers).

In one video, three teenagers jump from a boat close to a finback whale while wearing snorkelling masks, which is dangerous for both animal and human, said Leclerc.

"We're speaking of an animal that weighs 70 tons," she lamented.

"Many forget that the Mediterranean is also a home, where animals rest, feed and reproduce," Leclerc said.

The Mediterranean Sea is home to more than 10,000 species, despite only amounting to 1 percent of the Earth's oceans.

But the sea which separates Africa from Europe draws 25 percent of marine traffic.

Heavy traffic increases the risk of fatal collision with the sea mammals.

"It's the first cause of non-natural mortality for big cetaceans," said Leclerc.

- Reduce speed -

Out of the 87 marine mammals in the world registered by the UN, 21 have been spotted in the Mediterranean. Most of them are considered at risk of extinction.

On a bright summer's morning, a group of fifty striped dolphins splash around an inflatable blue speedboat off La Ciotat bay a short boat ride from Marseille.

"We need to reduce our speed and place ourselves parallel to their trajectory to avoid cutting their path. They come and play if they want to," said Laurene Trudelle, at the helm of the boat belonging to the scientific research group GIS3M.

The lockdown brought maritime traffic to an almost complete standstill, giving dolphins and whales the opportunity to explore areas from which they are normally kept at bay by tourists.

All scientific studies were put on hold in the Mediterranean during lockdown, but marine drone manufacturer Sea Proven got the necessary authorisation and funds from Prince Albert II of Monaco to continue observations in the Pelagos Sanctuary, a marine area protected by Italy, Monaco and France.

- 'Reversible pollution' -

Bioacoustics researchers from a Toulon University team who analysed Sea Proven's data, observed a 30 decibel decrease in noise on the coastal areas as a result of the total lack of pleasure boaters.

And the silence allowed the aquatic creatures to interact in areas between two and six times as large, said researcher Herve Glotin.

"The lockdown period showed that we really are responsible for the noise in the bays and that this pollution is completely reversible," Glotin said.

"When you think that reducing boats' speed by 10 percent in areas highly populated with marine mammals would be enough to significantly decrease sound pollution and the risk of collision" Glotin added.

The Quiet Sea research project also saw the amount of hydrocarbon -– the principal component of petrol –- halve during lockdown.

"It's really good for biodiversity, so indirectly for all of the food chain," said Glotin.

No binding international law obliges ship-owners to preserve marine mammals' natural habitat.

But since 2017, France requires boats that are over 24 metres (78 feet) in the Pelagos Sanctuary to have onboard equipment which detects the animals.

© 2020 AFP

Mystery as Argentine sailors infected with virus after 35 days at sea
Issued on: 14/07/2020

The Echizen Maru fishing trawler returned to port in Ushuaia after some of its crew began exhibiting symptoms typical of COVID-19 EITAN ABRAMOVICH AFP/File
Buenos Aires (AFP)

Argentina is trying to solve a medical mystery after 57 sailors were infected with the coronavirus after 35 days at sea, despite the entire crew testing negative before leaving port.

The Echizen Maru fishing trawler returned to port after some of its crew began exhibiting symptoms typical of COVID-19, the health ministry for the southern Tierra del Fuego province said Monday.

According to the ministry, 57 sailors, out of 61 crew members, were diagnosed with the virus after undergoing a new test.


However, all of the crew members had undergone 14 days of mandatory quarantine at a hotel in the city of Ushuaia. Prior to that, they had negative results, the ministry said in a statement.

Two of the other sailors have tested negative, and two others are awaiting test results, the province's emergency operations committee said.

Two sailors were hospitalized.

"It's hard to establish how this crew was infected, considering that for 35 days, they had no contact with dry land and that supplies were only brought in from the port of Ushuaia," said Alejandra Alfaro, the director of primary health care in Tierra del Fuego.

A team was examining "the chronology of symptoms in the crew to establish the chronology of contagion," she said.

The head of the infectious diseases department at Ushuaia Regional Hospital, Leandro Ballatore, said he believed this is a "case that escapes all description in publications, because an incubation period this long has not been described anywhere."

"We cannot yet explain how the symptoms appeared," said Ballatore.

The crew was placed in isolation on board the ship and returned to the port of Ushuaia.

Argentina exceeded 100,000 total cases on Sunday, and the death toll rose to 1,859. The majority of infections are in the Buenos Aires area.

© 2020 AFP

Denmark's German refugees remember forgotten WWII chapter

Issued on: 14/07/2020 -
   

In a largely forgotten chapter of the dying days of World War II, some 250,000 German refugees were interned in refugee camps across Denmark -- still then occupied by the Nazis -- where they were not made to feel welcome Erik PETERSEN Ritzau Scanpix/AFP

Copenhagen (AFP)

Barbed wire and tunneling beneath it to go and pick flowers outside his refugee camp in Denmark are what Jorg Baden remembers most clearly 75 years on from World War II.

Baden's experience -- a largely forgotten chapter of history -- was one shared by some 250,000 fellow Germans interned in neighbouring Denmark following the conflict.

Between the ages of five and eight, Baden -- now a cheerful German pensioner -- was a refugee in Denmark, after his family and tens of thousands of his compatriots fled Germany as the Red Army advanced towards Berlin.

From February 1945 Denmark, then occupied by the Nazis, was forced to take those refugees, the majority consisting of old people, women and children, as well as wounded soldiers.

Mostly spared the fighting, the Scandinavian nation was Berlin's favoured destination for exiles.

The lion's share of the refugees arrived by boat, some of which were torpedoed by the Allies, across the Baltic Sea. They initially ended up in makeshift camps around the country.

After the May 5 "liberation of Denmark by the Allies, the Danish resistance realised that there were about 250.000 German refugees all over Denmark," accounting for five percent of the population, John Jensen, historian at Varde Museum, told AFP.

Fearing the establishment of a German minority with too much influence, the refugees were gathered up into new larger camps or re-purposed military camps.

- Curtailed Hippocratic oath -

Exhausted from the journey and plagued by various illnesses, many refugees died shortly after arriving.

Some never received medical assistance as the Danish Medical Association recommended that its members should refrain from intervening.

"The common thought was if Danish doctors helped a refugee they were indirectly helping the German war machine," Sine Vinther, historian at Roskilde University, said.

Between 1945 and 1949, when the last refugees left the country, 17,000 died, with 13,000 of those in 1945 alone -- 60 percent of whom were children under the age of five.

According to Vinther that is more than the number of Danes killed during the occupation.

But even after the end of the occupation, Danish doctors remained hesitant to offer help.

"They could not get rid of their enemy image of Germans... Danish doctors failed their oaths in this period of Danish history," Vinther told AFP at the Vestre Kierkegaard cemetery in Copenhagen, where more than 5,000 German refugees were laid to rest.

Jorg Baden was one of the lucky ones to receive help. At five years old he came down with diphtheria, but was hospitalised and treated.

"It was a critical time for many children, but I made it through," the former English and history teacher said.

He recalled his family's hasty escape from Warnemunde in north Germany and the perilous journey across the Baltic to Haderslev in Denmark.

- Not welcome -

At the end of September 1945, they were transferred the Oksbol camp -- which would come to house up to 37,000 people, becoming the de facto sixth largest town in Denmark.

"We were first accommodated in horse stables which was very primitive... we had very little privacy," Baden said.

"But my father was asked to teach mathematics... because of that we were allowed to move to a stone house where we had a room for ourselves, running water and flushing toilets which was a great step forward," Baden, who is now 80, explained.

That was a luxury at the camp which allowed the family to live a "quite unspectacular and normal" life.

The camps were set up on the fringes of Danish society with the authorities aiming to "de-Nazify" the refugees.

"The general idea was to re-educate them to a more democratic way of thinking," Jensen noted.

According to Vinther, the "refugees were almost prisoners."

"Danes were not allowed to interact with German refugees, the German refugees were not allowed to learn Danish or to talk to Danes because they were not supposed to get the feeling that they were wanted," she said.

However, leaving Denmark took longer than expected.

"The Germans wanted to go back but they weren't welcome in the areas they came from, so the Danes had to negotiate with the Allied powers to repatriate them," Jensen explained.

Jorg Baden and his family left Denmark for his father's hometown of Duisburg, where he had found work with the British army, in September 1947.

© 2020 AFP

SUNNI DAESH WAR ON THE SUFI
Malian jihadist on trial at ICC over Timbuktu destruction, crimes against humanity
Issued on: 14/07/2020 

Malian Muslim militant Al-Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud arrives for his trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, The Netherlands. He is accused of demolishing Timbuktu's fabled shrines, as well as for rape, torture and sex slavery. AFP - EVA PLEVIER

Text by:NEWS WIRES

The trial of a Malian jihadist accused of demolishing Timbuktu's fabled shrines and unleashing a reign of terror begins at the International Criminal Court on Tuesday.

Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, 42, has been charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, rape and sexual slavery.

The charges cover a period when Islamic fundamentalists exploited an ethnic Tuareg uprising in 2012 to take over cities in Mali's volatile north.

Prosecutors at the tribunal in The Hague will give their opening statement against the man they described in pre-trial hearings as having "terrorised" local residents.

The defence and the legal representatives of alleged victims will deliver their statements at a later date when evidence is presented to the court.


Because of the coronavirus pandemic some participants in the trial will take part remotely, and it was unclear whether Al Hassan would personally be in court.

Jihadists who swept into Timbuktu, dubbed the "Pearl of the Desert", considered the shrines there to be idolatrous and wrecked them with pickaxes and bulldozers.

Built between the fifth and the 12th centuries by Tuareg tribes, Timbuktu has also been dubbed "The City of 333 Saints" who were buried there during the golden age of Islam.

'Essential, undeniable role'

ICC prosecutors said there were "substantial grounds" to convict Al Hassan for "crimes against humanity... torture, rape, sexual slavery (and) other inhumane acts including, inter alia, forced marriages, persecution and war crimes."

"Al Hassan played an essential and undeniable role in the system of persecution established by the armed groups... in Timbuktu," ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said last year.

The jihadist police imposed draconian measures on the city's residents who lived in constant fear of "despicable" violence and repression, prosecutors said.

They cited an example in which a man had his hand amputated after he was accused of petty theft.

Al Hassan is the second Islamist extremist to face trial at the ICC for the destruction of the Timbuktu shrines, following a 2016 landmark ruling at the world's only permanent war crimes court.

In the court's first case to focus on cultural destruction, the ICC judges found Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi guilty of directing attacks on the UNESCO World Heritage site in 2012.

He was sentenced to nine years in jail.

Timbuktu's tombs were rebuilt after the jihadists were thrown out, but the city remains in the grip of insecurity and tourists who once flocked there are no

Arctic spill fuels calls for shakeup at Russia mining giant



Issued on: 14/07/2020 - 10:20Modified: 14/07/2020 - 10:19

  

A massive clean up effort involved trapping floating diesel with booms on crucial water ways to prevent it flowing into fresh water lakes Irina YARINSKAYA AFP/File

Moscow (AFP)

Russian mining giant Norilsk Nickel faced pressure from a key shareholder on Tuesday to overhaul management after disasters including a massive Arctic fuel spill that sparked a state of emergency.

Aluminium producer Rusal, which owns 28 percent in Norilsk Nickel, said it was "seriously concerned" over recent environmental accidents in the Russian Arctic and called for a shakeup in management.

"What is currently happening at Nornickel invites to seriously question the competence of the company's management as well as their suitability to be in charge of running the business," Rusal said in a statement.


It also criticised the management's "collective inertia" that it said was likely to lead to "damaging criticism from the environmental and investment communities".

President Vladimir Putin declared a state of emergency after 21,000 tonnes of diesel leaked from a fuel storage tank at one of Norilsk Nickel's subsidiary plants in the Arctic in late May.

A massive clean up effort involved trapping floating diesel with booms on crucial waterways to prevent it flowing into freshwater lakes.

Putin has said he expected Norilsk Nickel to fully restore the environment.

Rusal said it was calling on Norilsk Nickel to move its headquarters from Moscow to the Arctic city of Norilsk -- the site of several recent environmental accidents including the fuel spill.

In the statement, the aluminium producer appealed to Norilsk Nickel to overhaul "corporate policies towards environmental and safety issues".

Russia's environmental watchdog Rosprirodnadzor fined a Norilsk Nickel subsidiary 147.8 billion rubles ($2.05 billion) over the spill, but the company is contesting the sum.

© 2020 AFP

"ORC'S ON THE HORIZON" GANDALF  
Astronomers perplexed by "Odd Radio Circles," a newly discovered, very rare space phenomenon
"I AM PERPLEXED" ALEISTER CROWLEY
Invisible except in the radio wave portion of the spectrum, only four Odd Radio Circles have been discovered
CROP CIRCLES IN SPACE

The Australian Square Kilometre Array (ESO/CSIRO)


NICOLE KARLIS
JULY 13, 2020 

Astronomers believe they have discovered a new, bizarre type of cosmic object that is invisible to all wavelengths of light except radio.

The strange circular objects in question have been unofficially dubbed "Odd Radio Circles" (ORCs); three of them were discovered in a recent data accumulated during a preliminary survey by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, a radio telescope array in Western Australia. A fourth Odd Radio Circle was discovered when researchers sifted through old data from 2013.

The new phenomenon is the focus of a new paper published on the preprint website arXiv, which was submitted to Nature Astronomy by a group of international astronomers. It is yet to be peer-reviewed.

"Here we report the discovery of a class of circular feature in radio images that do not seem to correspond to any of these known types of object or artefact, but rather appear to be a new class of astronomical object," the authors of the paper write.

The ORCs are mostly circular in shape, with the exception of one shaped like a disc, and they cannot be seen with infrared, optical, or X-ray telescopes. Three of them are brighter around the edges.

The circular nature of the ORCs has led to some curiosity over their true nature. "Circular features are well-known in radio astronomical images, and usually represent a spherical object such as a supernova remnant, a planetary nebula, a circumstellar shell, or a face-on disc such as a protoplanetary disc or a star-forming galaxy," the researchers write.

Astronomers initially believed the ORCs may have been a telescope glitch — which is why the discovery of the fourth ORC, from data that was gathered in 2013 by the Giant MetreWave Radio Telescope in India, was key to the finding. That observation ruled out the possibility that the phenomenon was merely an artifact of the specific Australian radiotelescope array.

So what could these strange, circular radio objects be? In the paper, the researchers suggest a list of scenarios. First, they rule out that ORCs could be remnants of a supernova, mainly because of how rare ORCs are. Galactic planetary nebulas are ruled out, too, for the same reason. "[I]f the ORCs are [supernova remnants], which they strongly resemble, then this implies a population of SNRs [supernova remnants] in the Galaxy some 50 times larger than the currently accepted figure, or else a new class of SNR which has not previously been reported," the researchers explain.

The circular nature of the ORCs has led to some curiosity over their true nature. "Circular features are well-known in radio astronomical images, and usually represent a spherical object such as a supernova remnant, a planetary nebula, a circumstellar shell, or a face-on disc such as a protoplanetary disc or a star-forming galaxy," the researchers write.

Astronomers initially believed the ORCs may have been a telescope glitch — which is why the discovery of the fourth ORC, from data that was gathered in 2013 by the Giant MetreWave Radio Telescope in India, was key to the finding. That observation ruled out the possibility that the phenomenon was merely an artifact of the specific Australian radiotelescope array.

So what could these strange, circular radio objects be? In the paper, the researchers suggest a list of scenarios. First, they rule out that ORCs could be remnants of a supernova, mainly because of how rare ORCs are. Galactic planetary nebulas are ruled out, too, for the same reason. "[I]f the ORCs are [supernova remnants], which they strongly resemble, then this implies a population of SNRs [supernova remnants] in the Galaxy some 50 times larger than the currently accepted figure, or else a new class of SNR which has not previously been reported," the researchers explain.

Instead, they suspect the ORCs are a circular wave that appeared after some sort of extra-galactic "transient" event—like fast-radio bursts, another mysterious but far better documented astronomical phenomena.

"The edge-brightening in some ORCs suggests that this circular image may represent a spherical object, which in turn suggests a spherical wave from some transient event," the researchers write. "Several such classes of transient events, capable of producing a spherical shock wave, have recently been discovered, such as fast radio bursts, gamma-ray bursts, and neutron star mergers."

The researchers add that because of the "large angular size" the transient event in question "would have taken place in the distant past."

Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard's astronomy department, told Salon via email that he thinks the ORCs are "likely the result of radio emission from a spherical shock that resulted from an energy source at their center."

"They have a characteristic diameter of about an arcminute, corresponding to a physical length of ten light years (a few parsec) at our distance from most stars in the Milky Way or ten million light years (a few mega-parsecs) at our distance from most galaxies in the visible universe," Loeb said. "The former is a reasonable length scale for a supernova remnant, whereas the latter is a reasonable scale for the reach of the jets produced by the most powerful quasars."

However, since the distance to the source of the event is unknown, it remains unclear which interpretation is more likely.

Loeb added that the most likely explanation is that the ORCs are "the result of outflows from galaxies."

"We know that galaxies have powerful winds, driven by supernova explosions and quasar activity in their cores," Loeb said. "The collision of these outflows with the intergalactic medium is predicted to produce radio shells on the scale of the distance between galaxies, which is a few million light years, exactly as needed at a cosmological distance."
Advertisement:

Two decades ago, Loeb co-authored two papers theoretically predicting these "radio halos."
"Perhaps this is an indication that they exist," he added.

NICOLE KARLIS
Nicole Karlis is a news writer at Salon. She covers health, science, tech and gender politics. Tweet her @nicolekarlis.

The affluent are consuming the planet to death: study

1500 BILLIONAIRES OWN OUR COMMONWEALTH 

ALL 8 BILLION OF US!!!

A study argues that it is not enough to invest in green technologies; the world's affluent must stop overconsuming 

Jeff Bezos, laughing at the world (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

MATTHEW ROZSA
JUNE 23, 2020

A new study published this month in the academic journal Nature Communications argues that, despite all of the talk about using green technology to address man-made environmental problems, the only way for human consumption to become sustainable is if we rein in the affluent.

"The key conclusion from our review is that we cannot rely on technology alone to solve existential environmental problems – like climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution – but that we also have to change our affluent lifestyles and reduce overconsumption, in combination with structural change," Professor Tommy Wiedmann from the University of New South Wales Engineering told that college's newspaper regarding the study.

The paper itself argued that "the affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions." The authors added that "existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change" and advocated "a global and rapid decoupling of detrimental impacts from economic activity," pointing out that the efforts made by global North countries to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are "highly unlikely" to occur rapidly enough on a global scale to stave off catastrophic environmental impacts.

"This is because renewable energy, electrification, carbon-capturing technologies and even services all have resource requirements, mostly in the form of metals, concrete and land," the authors point out. "Rising energy demand and costs of resource extraction, technical limitations and rebound effects aggravate the problem."

After observing that "the world's top 10% of income earners are responsible for between 25 and 43% of environmental impact" while "the world's bottom 10% income earners exert only around 3–5% of environmental impact," the authors that environmental damage is largely caused by the world's "affluent" and therefore needs to be confronted by demanding lifestyle changes among the wealthy.



In other words, the world's poorest have a negligible effect on overall environmental devastation; focusing on their consumption or behavior is a fool's errand when it comes to environmental policy. 

"Considering that the lifestyles of wealthy citizens are characterised by an abundance of choice, convenience and comfort, we argue that the determinant and driver we have referred to in previous sections as consumption, is more aptly labelled as affluence," the authors point out. They advocate reducing avoiding or reducing consumption "until the remaining consumption level falls within planetary boundaries, while fulfilling human needs," with the wealthy abstain from purchasing overly large homes and secondary residences, large vehicles, excessive quantities of food, and engaging in leisure activities that require a great deal of flying and driving.

The authors also argue for consumption patterns "to be shifted away from resource and carbon-intensive goods and services, e.g. mobility from cars and airplanes to public buses and trains, biking or walking, heating from oil heating to heat pumps, nutrition — where possible — from animal to seasonal plant-based products." In addition, they call for "the adoption of less affluent, simpler and sufficiency-oriented lifestyles to address overconsumption — consuming better but less." This approach would need to include "addressing socially unsustainable underconsumption in impoverished communities in both less affluent and affluent countries, where enough and better is needed to achieve a more equal distribution of wealth and guarantee a minimum level of prosperity to overcome poverty."

 The authors acknowledged that there are several schools of thought regarding how to best meet these goals.

"The reformist group consists of heterogeneous approaches such as a-growth, precautionary/pragmatic post-growth, prosperity and managing without growth as well as steady-state economics," the authors write. "These approaches have in common that they aim to achieve the required socio-ecological transformation through and within today's dominant institutions, such as centralised democratic states and market economies." By contrast the second group, which is "more radical," posits that "the needed socio-ecological transformation will necessarily entail a shift beyond capitalism and/or current centralised states. Although comprising considerable heterogeneity, it can be divided into eco-socialist approaches, viewing the democratic state as an important means to achieve the socio-ecological transformation and eco-anarchist approaches, aiming instead at participatory democracy without a state, thus minimising hierarchies."



Salon interviewed several scientists and scholars earlier this month about how the coronavirus pandemic has illustrated many of the sustainability problems inherent in capitalism. One problem with capitalist economic systems is that they rely on constantly increasing consumption in order to maintain periods of prosperity. If unexpected disasters interrupt that consumption — such as the pandemic requiring an economic shutdown — the whole system grinds to a halt.

"Going with the structural metaphor concept, there always huge cracks underneath the facades of capitalism, and the huge weight of this pandemic has widened those cracks," Norman Solomon, co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org and a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, told Salon. After pointing out how the poor wind up being hurt the most, he added that "the entire political economy is geared to overproduction and over-consumption to maximize corporate profits."

Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told Salon that "I think that there are larger lessons and messages here about the sustainability of a global population of nearly 8 billion and growing people on a planet with finite resources."



He added, "And what COVID-19 has laid bare is the fragility of this massive infrastructure which we've created to artificially maintain consumption far beyond the natural carrying capacity of the planet. And continued exploitation of fossil fuels, obviously, is inconsistent with a sustainable human society.

CONSPIRACISTS RAVE ABOUT THE SECRET RULING CLASS OUT TO KILL US FOR OUR EXCHANGE VALUE
(OUR PROPERTY ON THE CHEAP, END OF LEGACY PAYMENTS TO US ETC. ETC.SOYLENT GREEN ETC. ETC.)


THEY ARE HALF RIGHT, BY IGNORING OUR PLIGHT THIS TINY RULING CLASS OF BILLIONAIRES IS ALLOWING THE COVID-19 TO DO THEIR DIRTY WORK FOR THEM