Covid-19: World's top latex glove maker shuts factories

A volunteer delivers food to Top Glove workers at a hostel after it was locked down

The world's largest maker of latex gloves will shut more than half of its factories after almost 2,500 employees tested positive for coronavirus.


Malaysia's Top Glove will close down 28 plants in phases as it seeks to control the outbreak, authorities said.

The company has seen a huge surge in demand for its personal protective gear since the start of the pandemic.

However, there have been concerns about the working conditions of the low-paid migrant workers it relies upon.

On Monday, Malaysia's health ministry reported a sharp rise in Covid-19 cases in areas where Top Glove factories and dormitories are located.

Nearly 5,800 workers have been screened so far with 2,453 testing positive, it said.

Top Glove operates 41 factories in Malaysia, with many of its workers coming from Nepal and living in crowded dormitory complexes.

"All those who tested positive have been hospitalised and their close contacts have been quarantined to avoid infecting other workers," Director-General of Health Noor Hisham Abdullah told Reuters news agency.

It is unclear when the factory closures will begin but they are scheduled to take place in stages.

A worker inspects disposable gloves at a Top Glove factory in August

Top Glove has been in the global spotlight for its record high profits this year, but also over allegations of exploitative labour practices at the firm.

In July, the United States banned the import of gloves from two of the company's subsidiaries following forced labour concerns.

A recent report from the US Department of Labour raised the same issue, pointing to the high recruitment fees overseas migrant workers must pay to secure employment in the rubber glove industry which often results in debt bondage.

In September migrant workers told the Los Angeles Times about difficult working conditions at Top Glove factories, describing 72-hour work weeks, cramped living conditions and low wages.

A few weeks later, Top Glove said it had raised remediation payments to compensate workers for recruitment fees after recommendations from an independent consultant.

media captionEverything you need to know about the coronavirus – explained in one minute by the BBC's Laura Foster

Glorene Das, executive director of Tenaganita, a Kuala Lumpur-based NGO that focuses on labour rights, said some Malaysian firms that depend on a migrant workforce were "failing to meet the basic needs of their workers".

"These workers are vulnerable because they live and work in congested shared quarters and do work that does not make it possible to practice strict social distancing," she told the BBC.

"During these times employers have a huge responsibility towards them but we are hearing of cases where they are not providing workers with sufficient food or even withholding their wages," she added.

Shares in Top Glove fell by 7.5% on Tuesday after the factory closures were announced. But despite the slump the company's shares have surged over four fold this year, reported Reuters.

Men discover mysterious metal monolith in Utah wilderness, immediately touch it

Britt Hayes
Yesterday 11:56AM


Screenshot: HBO Max

General rule of thumb for when you stumble upon something weird: Don’t touch it. Especially if it’s a big-ass metal structure of unknown (though, okay, likely human) origin. But that’s exactly what the folks on a sheep-counting expedition (truly) in a remote area of southern Utah did over the weekend. 

As reported by local NBC affiliate KSL TV, a helicopter crew from the Utah Department Of Public Safety was assisting Division Of Wildlife officers on a mission to count bighorn sheep last week when a biologist spotted a large metal structure on the ground and told them to circle back. Reminiscent of the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, this metal structure is said to be about 10 to 12 feet high and looks as though it was planted—not dropped—into the ground.

“We were kind of joking around that if one of us suddenly disappears, then the rest of us make a run for it,” said pilot Bret Hutchings. “We were, like, thinking is this something NASA stuck up there or something. Are they bouncing satellites off it or something?” Hutchings also noted the similarity to 2001 and posited that the monolith could’ve been made by “some new wave artist or something.”

Andrew Adams

@AndrewAdamsKSL

The

@UtahDPS

helicopter was assisting the

@UtahDWR

in counting bighorn sheep in remote southern Utah Wednesday when the crew encountered something entirely 'out of this world'...

@KSL5TV

#KSLTV #Utah Photojournalist:

@Photog_Steve5https://twitter.com/AndrewAdamsKSL/status/1330191662518312962

9:49 AM · Nov 21, 2020·Twitter Web App 

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As you can see in the above video, these chuckleheads wasted absolutely no time monkeying around with the structure, and while it’s almost definitely man made and probably harmless, that’s not an assertion that can be made with 100 percent certainty. At the very least, the officials involved are intentionally not sharing specific details of the monolith’s location, lest some other chucklehead ruin the fun. SPEAKING OF WHICH: None of you better spoil this mystery with some boring information like “it’s for satellites.”

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/11/theories-abound-over-mystery-metal.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/11/mysterious-obelisk-in-us-desert.html

Trump’s Attempt to Rush Drilling Plans for the Arctic Would ‘Lock in Climate Chaos’

Dharna Noor
11/16/20 4:40PM

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Save this place!

Photo: Alaska Region USFWS

The Arctic is the latest victim of the outgoing president’s post-defeat tantrum, as the Trump administration takes steps to advance oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management’s Alaska office is set to publish request for nominations on the refuge’s coastal plain, letting fossil fuel companies suggest which pieces of the protected land should be auctioned off for extraction. This will bring the Trump administration one major step closer to locking in drilling leases before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

The move comes three months after the Department of the Interior finalized the approval process for drilling on the pristine plain, opening nearly 1.6 million acres of land up to the oil and gas industry for the first time. At the time, the agency said it aimed to sell off the leases by the end of 2020. Doing so spells disaster for Indigenous communities and wildlife. The threatened Porcupine caribou, for instance, use the region as a birthing ground, and the Gwich’in Nation, who live nearby and consider the plain sacred, rely on the caribou for food and cultural practices.

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“Our food security, our land, and our way of life is on the verge of being destroyed,” Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, said in a statement. “Handing up this very sacred area to oil companies is a violation of our human rights.”

The area is also home to the last 900 Southern Beaufort Sea polar bears in the world, that will be put at risk by the oil and gas machinery. And of course, selling off oil leases lays the groundwork for even more climate-warming fossil fuels to be extracted and used.

“Trump is trying to lock in climate chaos and the extinction of polar bears and other endangered Arctic species on his way out the door,” Kristen Monsell, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an email. “This is unconscionable. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge can’t be replaced, so we can’t let this lame-duck president give it away to Big Oil.”

Though the lease sale would make it possible for oil and gas drilling, it’s not clear if the industry will actually bite. Due to the unprecedented crash in fuel demand spurred by covid-19 lockdowns, the oil market isn’t exactly thriving right now. Companies have also faced enormous public pressure to halt Arctic exploration. Nearly all major banks have halted funding for such projects, and the one big exception, Bank of America, is being pushed hard by climate organizers to do the same. The climate movement is also pushing insurance companies and asset managers to quit supporting fossil fuel companies in their Arctic drilling endeavors.

Despite that, some companies, especially smaller ones who haven’t faced the onslaught of public pressure that oil majors have, might still gobble the leases up. In fact, a proposed seismic exploration project to find the oil in the area is already under environmental review by the U.S.

“In addition to disturbing denning polar bears, it would involve heavy equipment driven over uncertain snow coverage and dragging mobile camps for 180 people as their work moves across one of the wildest and most ecologically and culturally significant undeveloped landscapes in North America,” Tim Woody, The Wilderness Society’s regional communications manager for Alaska, said in an emailed statement about that seismic project.

If the lease sale happens, President-elect Biden could undo the damage once he takes office. The Department of the Interior’s environmental analysis of the effects of opening the plain, Monsell said, is “woefully inadequate and fails to comply with the agency’s legal obligations.” By making this case, Biden’s Interior Department could roll the leases back.

A coalition of organizations focused on Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and climate action—including the Center for Biological Diversity—have also promised to take “any company that is foolish enough to participate in this sham process” to court.

“We’ll keep fighting to ensure the Arctic Refuge stays off limits to the oil industry,” Monsell said.

Dharna Noor
Staff writer, Earther

The Department of Agriculture Killed 1.2 Million Wild Animals Last Year

Dharna Noor
10/08/20



Among the animals the Wildlife Services program killed this year are 61,882 adult coyotes, plus an unknown number of coyote pups in 251 destroyed dens.Photo: David McNew (Getty Images)

The mission of Wildlife Services, an office in the Department of Agriculture (USDA), is “to provide federal leadership and expertise to resolve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist.” In practice, that means slaughtering animals in droves.

New data the USDA released this week shows that in 2019, the program killed approximately 1.2 million animals native to North America. That includes hundreds of gray wolves, black bears, and bobcats, thousands of red foxes, tens of thousands of beavers, and hundreds of thousands of birds. Fewer than 3,000 of those animals were killed unintentionally.

Program employees are deployed to deal with dangerous feral hog populations and keep bird populations at airports under control so planes can safely takeoff and land. But the primary reason for the blood on Wildlife Services’ hands is their allegiance to the ranching industry, which relies on the service to clear out wild animals that prey on livestock and make way for industrial farming in states like Texas, Colorado and Idaho.

There is arguably no kind way to kill an animal, but some of the program’s methods are pretty brutal. Internal documents place focus on the use of “noise making devices,” “predator-proof fencing,” and other non-lethal methods. But a 2016 investigation by reporter Christopher Ketcham found that the agency used poisoned bait and spring-loaded cyanide traps to kill animals. It also uses leghold traps, which are banned in 88 countries.

Trappers with the service also use guns. A lot. An internal safety review document states that “employees fire tens of thousands of rounds while conducting wildlife damage management activities,” which it notes is more than any other federal or state agency except the military—more, even, than federal law agencies.

Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that this is largely unnecessary carnage because in most cases, killing predators is not a scientifically sound population control method.

“When coyote populations are exploited, the remaining individuals increase their reproduction by having a second litter that season or by increasing litter size,” she wrote in an email. “As such, killing coyotes only results in a temporary population decline followed by an increase and more conflicts.”

All of this killing also creates other ecological problems, throwing balanced ecosystems out of whack. “Many of the animals killed by Wildlife Services are ecologically important, including carnivores like wolves and mountain lions,” Adkins said. “Removing these top predators disrupts the ecosystem and can cause increases in their prey, such as rodents that damage crops and spread disease.”

The misguided approach to predators has been a hallmark of U.S. conservation policy, though it’s being challenged and overturned in some cases. Wolves, for example, were reintroduced to Yellowstone 25 years ago, and scientists have observed numerous positive ecosystem benefits and attracted scores of tourists. Despite that, state governments have been hostile to wolves and locked in a tug-of-war over hunting them. And last year, Wildlife Services killed 302 gray wolves across the Rockies and Midwest.

In many cases, there are other, non-lethal methods the agency could use to avoid all of this killing, Adkins said. Livestock producers can protect their animals with guard dogs, fences, and by using scare tactics like flashing lights.

There is evidence that Wildlife Services is taking this into account due to public pressure. Killing 1.2 million animals is a lot, but it’s actually relatively low for the program’s annual death toll. Wildlife Services took the lives of 1.5 million, 2.7 million, and 3.2 million in 2018, 2017, and 2016 respectively. This tapering may be due in part to local and state government opposition. In recent years, states including California, Washington state, and Idaho have waged successful lawsuits against Wildlife Services, and some municipalities have reformed their contracts with the agency to prioritize nonlethal wildlife control methods.

“There has been more public attention to these practices and that may be part of the reason for the downward trend,” said Adkins. “We can’t know for sure, but it seems to be making some impact.”

But the U.S. could also simply stand to reduce its livestock production altogether, reducing the need for wildlife death squads in the first place. Scientists have long warned that raising animals is far more resource-intensive than vegetable and grain production, and therefore should be ramped down dramatically. The Wildlife Service’s new data provides even more reasons that we need to dramatically rethink how we produce food.

Dharna Noor
Staff writer, Earther

Cancel the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree for Good


Brian Kahn

That’s it?

Photo: Cindy Ord (Getty Images)

This week, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree was unfurled in all its floppy, haggard glory. As many a Twitter user were quick to point out, its appearance was a metaphor for this year of pandemic, a slapdash coup attempt, and a general drubbing of American exceptionalism.

This year’s tree is also perfectly poised to reflect something more than our national mood: It reflects the absolutely toxic relationship we have with the natural world and the need to rapidly reverse course. If this year’s tree sees any justice, it’s that it should be the last.

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Everything about this tree tells a piece of the story of our past century-plus relationship with nature and extractive capitalism. The tree came from Oneonta, New York, located 170 miles outside New York City. It stood in someone’s yard, a 75-foot (23-meter) giant amid an otherwise entirely uninteresting, ecologically destructive swath of lawn. It’s not that this is some old growth, native tree or remnant of the forest that grew where Oneonta now stands. The tree is a Norway spruce, which, as you can likely guess from the name, is not native to the U.S. That in and of itself reflects how upended our relationship with nature is. In its previous home, though, it had an iota of dignity lost completely once it was transported to Midtown Manhattan. And in that home, it served as a veritable island for wildlife in a vast, biodiversity-poor sea of lawns.

As if to reinforce that, workers discovered an owl in the tree after transporting it to Rockefeller Center. The Northern saw-whet owl was “rescued” from the tree, which is, of course, being spun as a feel-good, cute story. NBC’s Today framed it that way, talking to Ravensbeard Wildlife Center founder Ellen Kalish who called the owl “the little gift in the tree this year.” Great, can’t wait for the children’s book to be optioned.

Today host Craig Melvin noted the owl “picked the right tree.” But me, personally, I’d call it picking exactly the wrong tree. (This is why I’m not a morning show host.) This poor owl was transported on a harrowing 170-mile (274-kilometer) journey on a flatbed and miraculously wasn’t crushed. Sure, it’s great the owl survived and will be released back into the wild. But that’s a pretty piss-poor definition of “right.”

To sum things up, the Rockefeller tree was cut down in a town itself carved out of what was, more than a century ago, an old growth forest. The tree itself was a pocket of cover for wildlife who happened to wander into said town. And an owl was scooped up in the process of cutting down the tree and transported to New York. All this reflects the ways in which we’ve subjugated nature to our whims. And really, the evolution of the Rockefeller Center tree tradition is a very apt stand-in for that in general.

The Rockefeller tree is an icon of American exceptionalism. Its story has humble roots in the Great Depression when workers building Rockefeller Center decorated a tree as a pick-me-up for a beleaguered city. It has since morphed into a made-for-TV spectacle to sell ads against and draw onlookers, wowed by a towering Norway spruce set at the center of the beating, concrete-and-steel heart of capitalism. Most years (but likely not this one), an estimated 125 million annual tree visitors crowd Rockefeller Plaza and then spread like red blood cells through the arteries of the underground mall in Rockefeller Center, the shops of Fifth Ave., and the booths of tchotchke-hockers in nearby Times Square, keeping the unnatural system alive.

After 9/11, the tree became a paean to patriotism, decked out in red, white, and blue lights. And in recent years, it’s gone “green” with LED lights instead of incandescent ones; and since 2007, the tree has been donated to Habitat for Humanity. This year’s tree was—like most Rockefeller Center trees, apparently—donated by an Oneonta resident to a multibillion-dollar corporation that then turns around and makes money off the tree. It’s a shiny veneer of corporate social responsibility and giving, but really it just illustrates our broken system and priorities that are also strangling the planet.




Even our adorable feathered stowaway is a symbol of our toxic relationship with nature. The Northern saw-whet owl is currently consider a low-concern species due to human pressures and has even managed to carve a niche out in human landscapes (clearly). But the climate crisis fueled by unending growth and fossil fuels will eventually come for it, too. Audubon Society research shows its habitat will contract in upstate New York, particularly sharply in summer, if the world warms 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). Assuming the world follows through on its climate commitments so far, that’s the trajectory we’re currently on. Norway spruce, meanwhile, are hardiest in the colder, northern end of their natural range where they can live up to 400 years. Climate change, again, is putting that landscape at risk.

I know I’ll likely receive many a furious email cussing me out for being a tree hugger perpetrating the war on Christmas and a total killjoy. But my point isn’t that we should end joy and piss on Santa. It’s that now is the perfect moment to consider what we truly value. When I saw the Rockefeller Center tree propped up as it shed entire boughs to the cold plaza ground this year, I felt no elation. I just felt sad that we venerate the continued subjugation of nature at the expense of unfettered growth and consumption—or even simply because we, like those who suffered through the Great Depression, want to feel something like normal again. We need to protect nature and reinvigorate our connection to it, or else we risk losing the planet and fueling more pandemics like the one currently keeping 125 million from mobbing the tree. That isn’t something easily packaged into a flashy, two-hour TV special.

There is poetry in the notion that we could take this tradition, born in the shadow of the Great Depression, and end it for the right reasons in the midst of a new generation-defining catastrophe. We have, in this uniquely horrible moment, the opportunity to look beyond simply what makes us feel good and normal to what we can do to make our future normal truly good.

Brian Kahn
Managing editor, Earther

How We Can Live With Wildlife After Coronavirus Passes

Brian Kahn
4/11/20 10:00AM

The coronavirus has shined a bright light on how much we’ve divorced ourselves from nature. With more than a billion people in various states of lockdown, the air has cleared and wildlife has flourished.

There’s something magical about seeing a cougar lounging in tree in Boulder, Colorado, or orcas patrolling the the waters near metro Vancouver, British Columbia. I say this not to make a dumb “We are the virus” point, because frankly, that’s some serious bullshit. What are you, some kind of ecofascist?

No, I say this because, while the coronavirus lockdowns are definitely not something we’ve undertaken as a choice to benefit the natural world, they are a chance for us to consider how divorced we’ve become from it. More importantly, they show that we don’t have to continue living apart from nature once the lockdowns lift.

There’s a concept in ecology known as the “landscape of fear,” which refers to what our built environment has inadvertently become. Roads have cut the landscape once roamed freely into tiny parcels, and the cars zipping down them are essentially predators. That landscape can trigger an animal’s predation instinct and alter their behavior. With the coronavirus, those threats have disappeared, and animals have quickly adapted to the less-deadly landscape.

“I’m not very surprised that animals seem to be getting some relief,” Katarzyna Nowak, a conservation scientist to CPAWS in the Yukon and a fellow at the Safina Center, told Earther.

That invites us to reconsider the built environment once the coronavirus passes. We could tear up roads or even build ways for animals to get around them. There are even more novel approaches, like green cemeteries that double as wildlife corridors. And with the need for a green stimulus in the wake of the pandemic, it could be a way to put people to work while also restoring the planet.

Beyond reducing fear, we can also make places more appealing for animals to hang. That could mean replacing your ecological disaster of a lawn with wildflowers to help pollinators, or fighting to keep park space open so birds have places to chill, particularly along flyways.

“There is an opportunity here to remind people of the links between healthy, resilient ecosystems and human well-being,” researchers wrote in a new analysis for the journal Biological Conservation. Indeed.

The need to reimagine our relationship with nature is all the more pressing in an era of global warming. The climate crisis is putting even more pressure on plants and animals and upping the risk of up to a million species going extinct. The coronavirus has put humanity at a crossroads, one where we can choose to keep walking down a path of destruction of the biosphere that has sustained us—or build a future that puts us back in balance.

Brian Kahn
Managing editor, Earther

The Danger of Big Oil’s New Methane Emissions Pledge

Dharna Noor

A gas flare at a Total refinery in Donges, France.

Photo: Jean-Sebastien Evrard/AFP (Getty Images)

On Monday, 62 oil majors that represent 30% of the world’s oil and gas production signed an international agreement to report methane emissions with a far higher level of transparency.

The pledge, signed by the likes of BP, Shell, and Total, is a part of the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0, led by the United Nations Environmental Program, the European Union, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Each year, the partnership will publish a report on companies’ emissions and how they compare to reduction targets. It’s a big step but also not in line with what’s needed to really address the climate crisis.

Emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas with more than 80 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide in the short term, are on the rise. Recent research found that global annual methane emissions increased 9 percent from 2000 to 2017 due to the massive uptick in production of natural gas, especially through fracking. In a press statement, UNEP described the new reporting framework as a “new gold standard,” claiming it could help the fossil fuel industry deliver a 45% decrease in methane pollution by 2025 and a 60-75% reduction by 2030.

The pledge is the latest sign that the climate movement has fossil fuel companies sweating. Recent years have seen a massive uptick in protests, lawsuits, and policy proposals demanding the world draw down its greenhouse gas emissions, and the pledge is a sign that corporations can’t ignore those calls any longer.

“For decades, the game plan of the oil majors like Exxon, Shell, and likely many others, was to deny the problem itself,” Sriram Madhusoodanan, deputy campaigns director of Corporate Accountability, said, referring to the troves of evidence that these fossil fuel giants waged misinformation campaigns to quell knowledge of the dangers their products pose to the climate. “What’s clear is the lengths that the industry is going to now, in order to appear that they’re responding to campaigners. It’s a testament to the broader pressure that they’re feeling right now.”

But in reality, the pledge does nothing to meet those organizers’ demands.

“We need an actual plan to stop fossil fuel expansion,” Madhusoodanan said. “At the core of it, what campaigners are demanding isn’t greater transparency around these emissions, it’s an actual plan to do that.”

That’s not to say that misreporting emissions has not been an issue. For instance, in the months leading up to the UN’s 2016 international climate conference, China revealed that it had underestimated its coal burning by 17% and thereby undercounted its greenhouse gas emissions by 1 billion tons. On methane specifically, a 2020 study found that global estimates of methane emissions from natural sources have been far too high, suggesting that the oil and gas industry may be responsible for 40% more methane in the atmosphere than previous estimates.

“The oil and gas industry has routinely and massively underestimated methane emissions associated with drilling, which has helped them sell their bogus narrative that fracking is a cleaner form of fossil fuel extraction,” Mitch Jones, climate and energy program director at Food and Water Watch, said.

But merely reporting methane emission levels will not result in the reduction, no matter how accurate those reports are.

“Without a plan to stop extracting fossil fuels and keep them in the ground, transparency isn’t a real solution...it’s really just greenwashing,” Madhusoodanan said.

agency actually exhibiting regulatory power over these corporations or from from what it seems here is this more about an industry led voluntary initiative, but at the end of the day there’s going to be about more transparency

At best, this pledge could make it easier to push companies to meet more ambitious pollution targets, but do nothing to enforce that they make real reductions. But at worst, it could lend legitimacy to companies that signed by giving them cover to say they’re taking on the climate crisis even if they don’t do anything to actually lower their emissions. Companies that signed the pledge might continue with their same polluting business plans, and yet could be seen as more climate-friendly than those which didn’t (notable ones include Chevron and Exxon) even if they continue producing billions of barrels of climate-warming oil and gas every year.

“The fact that the United Nations is a part of this is troubling. They stand to risk giving that official, United Nations tinge to these companies without doing anything to regulate them,” Madhusoodanan said. “We all know from what [UN scientists] are saying just how little time we have to respond to a problem in 10 years. We don’t want to look back at programs like this and be like, ‘oh, well, they were very transparent about their emissions, so at least we knew that they were continuing to increase.’”

Instead, we need binding, international regulations on fossil fuel production, and fast.

“We cannot waste time on new industry-friendly emissions tracking. What we need to do is ban fracking and transition off fossil fuels,” Jones said. “There is no point in finding novel ways to quantify the harms inflicted on our planet by fossil fuel corporations.”