Saturday, May 15, 2021

AUSTRALIA
Taxpayers in the dark over fossil fuel subsidies as climate backlash mounts



Advocates are angry about Australia's lack of green investment. Photo: TND

May 12, 2021 


Taxpayers have been kept in the dark over the hundreds of millions of dollars they will be asked to pay in fossil fuel subsidies over the next four years.

The government promised in the budget to pay Australia’s two remaining oil refineries for ongoing local production.

But it did not reveal how much it would be handing over as it listed the measure as “not for publication” in Tuesday night’s papers.

A related package of subsidies to help refiners build infrastructure was also kept secret, with the government citing “commercial sensitivities”.


The government has already paid $83.5 million to local oil refiners to fund production through to July 1 under a package aimed at bolstering Australia’s fuel security, which is seen as a national security issue
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A market-based mechanism (read: tax) was expected to be in the budget to fund ongoing payments to ensure local refiners were commercially viable, even though experts like ACCC chair Rod Sims said such a move could increase petrol prices.


But the government instead projected costs partly related to the oil production and infrastructure subsidies through to 2024-25.


Meanwhile, another $50.7 million was pledged over six years to implement and administer a minimum stockholding obligation for local oil refineries.


The government often lists measures as not for publication if it has not finished negotiating with companies.

This is because it does not want them to know how much money has been set aside for their handouts.




A spokesperson for Energy Minister Angus Taylor said negotiations over the subsidies were ongoing.

“The budget flagged the Morrison government’s package for fuel security, with the final details of this currently being finalised with the refining sector,” the spokesperson said.

“The government has worked closely with the fuel industry on the design of the package to secure our stocks, protect motorists from future high prices, and values the fuel security services Australian refineries provide.”

It comes as anger grows over the Morison government’s failure to invest in a green recovery from COVID-19, with Climate Council economist Nicki Hutley grading Tuesday’s budget an ‘F’ on climate.

“While there are a lot of initiatives in this budget that are good, on climate it’s a resounding failure,” Ms Hutley told The New Daily.

“The science is sending a very clear warning about what we should do and the Prime Minister is sitting there with a shiny glass and lots of coal.”
Climate action pales in comparison

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg outlaid $98 billion in new spending in what has been dubbed an election budget, with $2 billion pledged for clean energy and carbon capture projects.

These included $1.6 billion for emissions reduction and new investments technology – including carbon capture and hydrogen hubs – and $100 million for a package targeting ocean health and restoration activity.

But Australia is still lagging far behind on green investment after COVID-19, with UN data showing that before the budget we had pledged only 2 per cent of recovery spending on green investments, while others like Canada had invested in excess of 70 per cent.

In one example of its climate miss, the budget allocated more money ($116.7 million) for looking after nuclear waste than for ocean health and restoration.

More money was pledged to support Australian fashion ($1 million) than for electric vehicles, which were not mentioned at all in the budget, despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested in building new roads.

Meanwhile, more than $100 million was pledged in the budget for subsidising fossil fuels, including $58.6 million for gas projects.

Mr Taylor said the budget struck the right balance between Australia’s climate targets and the government’s energy reliability goals.

“Australia is focused on investing in commercialising technologies, not harmful taxes, in the global effort to reduce emissions,” he said.

On Tuesday, protesters gathered outside Parliament House to express anger about the lack of climate action in the budget.

EY chief economist Jo Masters said the lack of climate leadership from the Australian government stood in stark contrast to other nations.

“Across the 386 pages of the government’s Budget Strategy and Outlook document, the words ‘climate change’ were used once,” Ms Masters said in a statement on Wednesday.

“In an era where global superpowers are touting a green recovery, and transformation to carbon neutrality is seen as a growth generator, the lack of vision about the potential for Australia is arguably a big miss by the government.”
NOT JUST NFL & LAB FISHERS
War on seals: The ‘cruel measures’ used by Tasmania’s salmon farming industry


Long-nosed fur seals' fate at the hands of salmon farmers is particularly cruel. Photo: Getty

Richard Flanagan
May 16, 2021

The profound and perverse environmental imbalance created in Tasmania by industrial salmon production, the ways in which ecosystems are flipped to their detriment by salmon farming, are no better exemplified than by the example of long-nosed fur seals.

Hunted to the point of near extinction in the 19th century, classified as a rare, threatened species in Tasmania and protected under state and federal law, the fur seals’ fate at the hands of salmon farmers is particularly cruel.

While in South Australia fines of up to $100,000 can be imposed for killing a long-nosed fur seal, in Tasmania what is termed the ‘management’ of fur seals by salmon companies long ago crossed over into programs of systematic cruelty.

Seals represent one more insoluble problem for the salmon industry as they damage nets (and get trapped inside them), kill salmon, and interfere with divers. Yet offering a permanent food source, the floating feedlots that proliferate along the south-east Tasmanian coast are attracting fur seals in ever-growing numbers – in areas where they have not been known in living memory. The industry’s war against the seals is never-ending: all that changes are the weapons used as one scandal begets another.

When the salmon farmers were found to be shooting and killing seals on a large scale, dumping their rotting bodies on local tips, the industry resorted to trapping and relocating the animals to north-west Tasmania. By 2017 over two thousand seals a year were being trapped, sedated and transported for several hours. There, the creatures established colonies that in turn became a major problem for local commercial fishermen. One, Craig Garland, in a submission to the Fin Fish Inquiry run by the Tasmanian government in 2019, claimed that the seals were rendering the fisheries of the north-west small-mesh fishermen uneconomical and “resulting in mental health issues for those fishermen”.

The practice so incensed Garland that he ran for federal parliament on an anti-salmon industry platform in the critical 2018 Braddon by-election. In spite of spending no money on his campaign Garland still garnered 11 per cent of the vote, his preferences delivering the seat to the ALP candidate in what had been expected to be a Liberal Party victory.

As always with the salmon industry, many details of the trapping program are secret. A recent Right to Information request by Environment Tasmania revealed that in 2016 Tassal came under criminal investigation for animal cruelty after wildlife rangers found twenty seals in a pen at a Tassal lease and it was subsequently discovered the seals might have been there for several days without food or haul-out space.

Yet instead of pursuing prosecution, the Tasmanian government quickly acted to cover up the scandal. Tassal was retrospectively granted an extension to the time it could keep the twenty seals captive – from six hours to seven days. All charges were dropped and a Marine Farming Branch bureaucrat advised Tassal on how to spin the story to the media, should it become public.

In recent years the salmon industry has hit upon seal deterrents more suggestive of suppressing a civil uprising than responsible environmental management. One of its method is to fire ‘blunt darts’ at the animals, another is to shoot them with what the international industry trade publication Salmon Business identified as riot guns, using beanbag rounds – a cloth sock enclosing 40 grams of lead pellets fired from 12-gauge shotguns. According to Right to Information documents, in 2016 alone 3770 beanbag rounds were used
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Richard Flanagan investigates Tasmania’s salmon farming industry in ‘Toxic’. Photo: Getty

Though described as non-lethal, such ammunition has been associated with deaths and severe injuries to humans in the US, Hong Kong and Europe. As well as poisoning the marine environment with 150 kilograms of lead every year, in 2018, according to an ABC report, “two industry insiders who work in aquaculture in Tasmania … independently claimed that on a number of occasions they had personally witnessed beanbag rounds blinding seals and hitting them in the head at close range”.

In the view of Malcolm Caulfield, founder and principal lawyer of the Animal Welfare Community Legal Centre Tasmania, “What we are seeing is an industrial-scale use of cruel measures against a protected species in Tasmanian waters.


“What it clearly highlights to me is that the Government isn’t doing its job. The fact of the matter is this is an unacceptable use of these very violent tactics against these marine mammals which have a high level of protected status under the law.”

All of this is ignored by Tasmanian politicians and regulators. The war simply goes on. The state government – which once paid Tasmanians to hunt the thylacine to extinction – continues to permit the trapping and sedation of seals, while allowing their killing as ‘a management option of last resort’.

Tassal is reportedly now trialling a new deterrent, again borrowed from riot control, that of water cannons, which it describes as spraying seals with a ‘low-pressure, high flow’ water stream.

“This is still a noxious deterrent that has potential to injure seals,” the RSPCA’s chief executive Dr Andrew Byrne has been quoted as saying. “The RSPCA would prefer investigating options that may encourage the seals to move away from pens or the holy grail of seal safety, better pen designs.”

Like so many unfixed, unresolved and ultimately unresolvable problems with salmon farming, the Tasmanian salmon industry has been talking about seal-proofing nets for almost as long as there has been a Tasmanian salmon industry. The companies do invest significantly in improving their net technology because loss of stock represents loss of profit, but a failsafe design remains elusive and the war between Big Salmon and the marine environment continues to escalate.

In that war, the most common weapon used against seals is the innocuously named ‘seal cracker’. In the US it is more accurately called a seal bomb and is classified as a ‘high explosive’ by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Either lit and thrown into the water, or set up as booby-trapped underwater devices, seal bombs ‘have been shown to shatter bones of marine mammals and to kill fish within the blast vicinity’. In one instance, a seal bomb killed a human swimmer. The victim was found to have “ruptured both eardrums, herniated brain tissue through ruptured areas in the cribriform plates, fractured cranial bones including the wings of the sphenoid and the left petrosal, and caused a 1.5 centimetre deep wound above the scapula”.


In 2016 the Tasmanian salmon industry used 39,024 seal bombs, and yet no research has been conducted on their actual physical impact on fur seals, nor is there any consideration given or science being undertaken on their consequences on the surrounding marine environment, though it may be grave. Dead seals are often found washed up near Tasmanian salmon farms.

This is an edited extract from Toxic by Richard Flanagan. $24.99. Copyright 2021. Available from all book retailers now.
Cooking a curry? Your rice could be hiding micro-plastics, warn scientists


Scientists are encouraging Australians to wash rice with water before cooking it to avoid eating micro-plastics. Photo: TND/Getty

Samantha Dick Reporter

Australians who love curries and risotto could be unknowingly eating one kilogram of micro-plastics every year, warn Queensland researchers.

Their caution was issued after discovering rice can contain traces of potentially harmful micro-plastics.

In their world-first study, led by the University of Queensland and published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, the scientists found an average 100-gram single serve of uncooked rice can contain 3 to 4 milligrams of plastic.


In instant or pre-cooked rice packets, the risk of eating plastics is four times higher, with an average of 13 milligrams per 100 grams serve.

UQ researchers used their innovative technique to detect these tiny plastic pieces – similar to one they’ve used previously to study plastics in seafood and sewage.
UQ researchers used their unique method to test rice for micro-plastics. Image: UQ

They tested for seven different plastic types ranging from the most common plastic, polyethylene, to plastics used in clothing and food production, laminates, technical engineering, polystyrene, acrylics and tube piping.

Read: Sir David Attenborough given role for climate summit

The average grain of rice tested measured 8 millimetres in length. Micro-plastics are defined as a plastic material 5 millimetres or less.

The study’s lead author Dr Jake O’Brien, from UQ’s Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences, said the study was able to quantify the levels of micro-plastics in rice for the first time.

“Rice is a staple food around the world, so it is important we understand the quantity of micro-plastics we could be consuming,” Dr O’Brien said.
What’s the harm anyway?

Micro-plastics can carry a range of contaminants like trace metals and some potentially harmful organic chemicals.

They can also have carcinogenic properties, meaning they potentially cause cancer, and they can damage our DNA.


Sadly, micro-plastics are everywhere.

They’re virtually impossible to avoid around the home, with the little pieces often hiding in food and drinks without us even realising.

“Currently there are many unknowns about how harmful consuming micro-plastics is to human health, but we do know exposure can cause an element of risk,” Dr O’Brien said.

“It is important to recognise that we are in the early stages of developing methods to measure plastic contamination of foods and at the moment we are limited to only a few plastic types.”

One thing you can start doing now is washing your rice with water before cooking it.

According to the researchers, washing rice reduced plastic contamination by 20 to 40 per cent.

TOMMOROWS NEWS TODAY

India's infertility war: Exposure to chemicals lowers sperm count, egg quality
THE WEEK MAGAZINE 
Illustration Job P.K.

Until about a decade ago, weekdays at the Agatsya Sperm Bank in Rajkot saw men, aged between 20 to 30 years, queue up outside the facility. A quick screening, and the young, athletic, qualified, English-speaking men among them would be picked out. For, it would be certain that they would have sufficient volumes of “healthy swimmers”, enough to be transported to clinics across Gujarat for assisted reproduction. At the time, 70 per cent of the semen samples received were accepted and marked “ready for use”. But that was then, when the Indian sperm was healthy and in abundance.

Infertility is on an alarming rise in India, with the country estimated to be contributing to nearly 25-30 per cent of all couples diagnosed with it the world over. —Dr Neeta Singh, senior consultant and professor,

 AIIMSDEHP, a plasticiser, can migrate from packaging into fatty food, and leaching of plasticisers into food from packaging is the potential danger of this era. —Srinivasan K., Indian Institute of Food Processing Technology, Thanjavur

We are observing a very lifestyle-related infertility that stems from increasing age, late marriages and the kind of chemicals and pollutants we are exposed to. —Dr Aditi Dani, fertility consultant at Masina Hospital, Mumbai

In humans, cross-sectional data suggests that BPA concentrations are higher in women with PCOS than in reproductively healthy women. —Alka Dubey, programme coordinator, chemical and health, Toxics Lin

Today, it is the opposite. “Now, 70 per cent of the samples we receive are rejected,” said Dr Yogesh Choksi, a microbiologist who started the facility in 1997. His is the oldest registered cryobank in Gujarat. “Even as the number of donors has, by and large, remained steady, the quality and volume of semen has fallen down sharply,” he said. When Choksi started the bank, he recalls that any given semen sample would range between 3.5ml and 4ml with a sperm count of 80-100 million per millilitre, which was considered normal at the time. That way, it was possible to fill five vials with a single semen sample. But now, “a single semen sample measures between 1ml and 1.5ml and the sperm count remains as low as 15-20mpm,” he said. “We barely get one full vial from a single sample.”

Shocking, right? But it is a reality that has been staring us in the face all along. And combined with a decline in testosterone levels in Indian men, it has consequently resulted in the rise in infertility cases.

SWIMMERS TAKE A DIP


In 2017, researchers in the US concluded that the sperm count of an average man in western countries had fallen by 59 per cent between 1973 and 2011. Next year, researchers at the CSIR-Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow undertook a similar study, analysing just how steep and continuing the slump was among 6,000 fertile and 7,000 infertile Indian men from 1979 to 2016. The study found that semen parameters in Indian men—including the sperm count, volume and movement—had declined with time and the deterioration was quantitatively higher in the infertile group, with the mean semen volume as low as 0.77ml and the sperm count at 29mpm.

Said Rajender Singh, principal scientist (endocrinology) at CSIR-CDRI: “In the same period of study, if we do not distinguish between fertile and infertile men and take them as one cohort, we, in India, have witnessed a decline of 26 per cent in the overall sperm count, from 87mpm in 1979 to 64mpm in 2016.” Yet, what is concerning is not just that the count and quality are declining, but that they are declining below the World Health Organization’s normal reference range of 15mpm. Any value beyond this renders a man infertile. And, clinicians in India are witnessing a large number of men coming to them with complaints of infertility due to a sperm count that “at times falls down to extremely low (oligospermia) or even zero (azoospermia),” said Dr Aditi Dani, fertility consultant at Mumbai’s Masina Hospital.

‘EGGS’ISTENTIAL CRISIS


But it is not just men. The ability to conceive a child naturally has taken a hit in both men and women equally. “There is no doubt that an ever increasing number of girls in India are experiencing early puberty,” said Dani, “while women are losing good quality eggs at younger ages than their mothers or grandmothers did.”
Trouble shooter: An in vitro fertilisation facility | Getty Images

India, the second most populous country after China, finds itself at the centre of a paradoxical situation: an ever-mushrooming population on one hand and a dramatic year-on-year decline in its fertility rate on the other. A fertility rate of about 2.2—a couple having two children—is generally considered the replacement level, the rate at which the population would hold steady. When the fertility rate dips below this number, the population is expected to decline. As per the National Health Profile 2018, the total fertility rate fell below two children per woman in 12 states, and just about reached replacement levels in nine others. While there is no doubt that family planning has been the chief guiding force behind this, experts believe that the rising incidence of infertility is also to blame. “Infertility is on an alarming rise in India, with the country estimated to be contributing to nearly 25-30 per cent of all couples diagnosed with it the world over,” said Dr Neeta Singh, senior consultant and professor, division of reproductive medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. According to the Indian Society of Assisted Reproduction, one in six couples suffers from infertility, amounting to 27.5 million infertile couples trying for conception. “You can gauge the magnitude of the problem from the patient load at the AIIMS ART Centre,” said Singh. “As per the medical records for 2018-2019, nearly 15 lakh patients consulted the outpatient department, of which 5,468 patients underwent ART (assisted reproductive technology) treatment.”

ABC OF EDCs

And while the reasons vary—age can be a contributing factor, as can lifestyle issues like stress and obesity—scientists and researchers are more worried about what are called endocrine disrupting chemicals. EDCs represent a broad class of chemicals such as organochlorinated and organophosphate pesticides—used in agriculture and mosquito control—and industrial chemicals, plastics and plasticisers (used to soften plastics) and fuels. They are ubiquitous; EDCs can be found in food wraps and plastic water bottles, even in the perfume you wear, the tap water you drink and cook with, and the air you breathe. And, it is their unrestricted use that is harming our ability to have natural pregnancies.

“Their impact becomes even more magnified and frightening for India, as we are witnessing an ever-growing consumerist culture and have relatively easy regulations,” said Dr Kamlesh Sarkar, director, ICMR-National Institute of Occupational Health, Ahmedabad.

EDCs essentially interfere with and disrupt the body’s endocrine system that monitors the hormonal balance across different glands. Sex hormones—oestrogen and progesterone in women and androgens including testosterone in men—are essential for reproduction, as are hormones secreted by the pituitary gland and hypothalamus in both men and women. EDCs either block the connection between these hormones and their receptors or increase or decrease their levels in blood. They also mimic the body’s natural hormonal activity and trick the body into blocking the natural hormones from doing their job. Any alteration in the amount or timing of the release of sex hormones in the body can alter a couple’s chances to conceive. That is because if these hormones do not get to the right place at the right time, sperm production or ovulation—both necessary for reproduction—can get hampered.

Lasting damage: Villages were reporting higher incidence of infertility owing to the “high use” of fertilisers and pesticides | Aayush Goel

And, infertility is not just an urban issue. In a 2018 paper, Dr Sonia Malik, director of Delhi’s Southend IVF, wrote that villages were reporting higher incidence of infertility owing to the “high use” of fertilisers and pesticides. In some ways, it is not surprising that EDCs cause unfortunate consequences. For instance, since human reproductive processes are similar to those of other species, many pest-control chemicals designed to harm pest reproductive systems also damage human reproductive systems.

According to experts, health defects associated with EDCs include a range of reproductive problems, from declining sperm counts and reduced fertility to male and female reproductive tract abnormalities, reduction in the number of healthy eggs in ovarian reserves, loss of foetus, early puberty and menstrual problems. In 2014, professor Kaustubha Mohanty, department of chemical engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, carried out a research on the lingering effects of endosulfan, which was indiscriminately sprayed on cashew plantations in Kerala’s Kasaragod district and caused abnormalities and androgenic defects among children. Ten years after India banned it, it is still found to exist, said Mohanty. “Its residues were detected from air, water and soil. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get it out of the system because of its toxic properties,” he said.

Such toxicity goes beyond state borders. In 2006, Rajvi Mehta from Hope Infertility Clinic and Research Foundation, Bengaluru, evaluated 16,714 semen samples from five different cities of India and found that 38.3 per cent men from Kurnool and 37.4 per cent men in Jodhpur showed complete absence of motile sperms. Fifty-one per cent of men in Kurnool suffered from an abnormally low sperm count—the highest reported prevalence in the world, said Mehta. As per the study, a possible link could be established between infertility and high use of pesticides in Kurnool, where cotton is grown as a cash crop. The study, published in the recent issue of the Asian Journal of Andrology, was initiated after the Hope clinic got an unusually high number of referrals for male infertility treatment from Kurnool. “In Jodhpur, there is high level of fluoride in groundwater, and exposure to high fluoride levels has a detrimental effect on the male reproductive system in animals and can also cause disruption of reproductive hormones in men,” the paper said.

As per WHO, our exposure to EDCs has increased in the last two-and-a-half decades owing to their increased presence in our environment, be it food, water, air or everyday products. “Most of the EDCs are lipophilic (they can dissolve in fats and oils) and accumulate in the adipose tissue (body fat); thus they have a very long half-life in the body,” said Alka Dubey, programme coordinator, chemical and health, Toxics Link, an NGO that specialises in research on toxic chemicals in India. “Many of these substances either do not decay or decay slowly, while others may be metabolised to compounds that are more toxic than the parent chemicals.”

POP GOES THE BUBBLE

Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are an example of such chemicals; the name says it all. POPs, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and organochlorinated pesticides (OCPs), are highly persistent, toxic, and accumulate in the body fat of humans and animals. Endocrine disruption is one of the recently considered consequences of POPs because of their hormone-altering capabilities. Studies have long established how DDT and PCBs (used in electrical equipment and coatings) can impact the growth and function of testicles, leading to abnormal sperm development and male infertility later in life. While the United States has banned DDT, it continues to be used in the fight against malaria and other diseases in India. However, following continuous use, insects have become resistant to it.

Trying hard: Sperm sample collection | Getty Images

It has left its footprints though; as early as 2001, Mumbai-based Bhabha Atomic Research Centre found residues of DDT and its metabolites in sediments and fish samples collected from the east and west coasts of India. Moreover, a 2018 report in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology said that POPs were found in human breast milk samples collected from Bhatinda and Ludhiana in Punjab.

DROWNING IN PLASTIC


According to the Endocrine Society, the annual global production of plastics—which is found in almost everything we use and which contains EDCs—has grown from 50 million tonnes to 300 million tonnes since the 1970s.

Bisphenols and phthalates are two of the most common EDCs found in plastics; they mimic or interfere with reproduction regulated by oestrogens and androgens. Exposure to bisphenols and phthalates can lead to reduced fertility, pregnancy loss and infertility. Most people are exposed to bisphenol A through food and beverages into which BPA has leached from the container. BPA and its metabolites have been found in urine, blood, saliva, umbilical cord, placenta and amniotic fluid.

In a 2018 study, Ruckmani A. from the department of pharmacology, Chettinad Hospital and Research Institute in Chennai, assessed BPA levels in urine samples. The levels were “very high” in the urine of those who consumed food and drink from plastic containers. “Maximum level was seen in those who reused plastics as well as worked with BPA containing materials (9.01ng/ml) and the average level found in this study was higher than the level reported earlier (1.71ng/ml) in the Indian population,” said Ruckmani. “This may be due to the change in food habits, like eating fast food that are served in plastic containers and changes in quality of life.”

Dr Neeta Singh

A clear evidence of BPA’s impact on fertility among Indian women was seen in a study carried out by Dr Firuza Parikh of FertilTree International Centre, Jaslok Hospital and Research Centre, Mumbai. Serum and follicular fluid samples were collected from 117 women in the median age of 34 who were seeking treatment for infertility and undergoing oocyte retrieval. The samples were collected during oocyte retrieval. “We found a clear correlation that was very disturbing. Given that in the past two decades, the number of couples coming to us for IVF has substantially increased, we can infer that EDCs have a definite role to play,” said Parikh.

Likewise, phthalates are a family of high-volume chemicals added to plastics to increase their flexibility, transparency, elasticity, durability and pliability. There are various forms of phthalates in use; however, DEHP and DnBP are the most commonly used in consumables, be it household items, cosmetics, personal care products, sanitary napkins or plastic toys for children. Toxicological and epidemiological studies have found that some phthalates, especially DnBP and DEHP, have oestrogenic and/or anti-androgenic properties that can lead to reproductive defects. Phthalates are estimated to have a half-life of about 12 hours in the air, 10 to 20 days in the soil and days to weeks in water. Also, as these have relatively high vapour pressure, it can easily get trapped in cloud masses. Thereafter, with rainfall, these phthalates reach and add to the pollutant levels of surface water.

In 2011, Ramakant Sahu of the Centre for Science and Environment and his team brought to the fore the chilling presence of phthalates in children’s toys in India. All toy samples showed the presence of one or more phthalates at a concentration ranging from 0.1 per cent to 16.2 per cent. Soft toys contain higher levels of phthalates compared to hard toys, as its primary function is to soften hard plastic. It was only in 2017 that the Bureau of Indian Standards restricted the use of certain phthalates in children’s toys and teethers. “Epidemiological studies have reported that exposure to phthalates leads to decline in male fertility, decreased anogenital distance and testicular dysgenesis (abnormal development) syndrome in male infants alongside other development- and behaviour-related issues,” stated a report by Toxics Link. Another report by the same NGO said that there was a high presence of phthalates in various samples of baby diapers, which, when dumped in garbage bins or landfills, can leach into the soil.

A 2014 study published by Mihir Tanay Das (Fakir Mohan University, Odisha), Pooja Ghosh (IIT Delhi) and Indu Shekhar Thakur (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi) measured the estimated exposure of South Delhi population to 15 different phthalates. It revealed high intake of DnBP and DEHP in the adult urban population in the JNU campus and Okhla.

But it is the Thanjavur study that takes the cake. Consider this: something as simple as having hot idli sambar in takeaway polythene bags can pose a risk to your hormonal balance. In a 2016 study, samples of hot sambar and hot tea packed in plastic bags were collected from three major food and drink business centres around Thanjavur, including a tea shop and restaurant. Phthalate leachates were found in sambar, proving that they are highly soluble in oily food; none were found in the tea.

Srinivasan K.

“DEHP, a plasticiser, can migrate from packaging into fatty food, and leaching of plasticisers into food from packaging is the potential danger of this era,” wrote Srinivasan K. of department of food safety and quality testing, along with Singaravadivel K., at the Indian Institute of Food Processing Technology, Thanjavur. Fatty food such as milk, butter and meat are most susceptible to such leachates. “Literature review reveals that there is a correlation between phthalate metabolite concentrations in maternal breast milk and sex hormone concentration in male offspring,” said the researchers.

The same year, another study by ICMR-National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health analysed the estimated levels of BPA and phthalates in the plasma of fertile and infertile, non-smoking and non-drinking, urban Indian women, aged 20 to 40 years. BPA was detected in 77 per cent of plasma samples of infertile women and 29 per cent of fertile women. An increasing number of epidemiological studies show a widespread exposure of these chemicals to the general population, including pregnant women, men, children as well as foetuses in India. “The presence of these contaminants in amniotic fluid and cord blood indicates that these may pass transplacentally to the foetus,” read the paper. ”The developing foetus is dependent on sex steroids and thyroid hormones for maturation. These chemicals not only affect the developing embryo, but also have been shown to alter adult ovarian function. Hence, these agents have the potential to disrupt reproductive cyclicity and may also cause trans-generational effects by targeting oocyte maturation and maternal sex chromosomes.”

In the ICMR-NIRRH research, the infertile women who showed high levels of EDCs had been diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) and endometriosis, two of the most widely reported causes of infertility among women in India. “Almost 30-35 per cent of my patients in the reproductive age group report PCOS, while 20 per cent suffer from the pain of living with endometriosis,” said Mumbai-based infertility specialist Dr Rishma Pai.

In his 2015 study, ‘Endometriosis: the clinical experience of 500 patients from India’, Dr Rahul Gajbhiye, head, Clinical Research Lab & Andrology Clinic at ICMR-NIRRH in Mumbai, stated that 2.6 crore women in India suffer from endometriosis. “In the cohort of women with endometriosis, 66 per cent women either had primary or secondary infertility and 33 per cent had history of miscarriage,” stated the study.

Is there a link between EDCs and endometriosis? In 2006, Dr B.S. Reddy, department of reproductive medicine, Bhagwan Mahavir Medical Research Centre in Hyderabad, evaluated the possible association between phthalate esters—EDCs used as plasticisers in nail polishes, hair sprays, solvents and perfumes—and the occurrence of endometriosis in Indian women. He collected blood samples from 49 infertile women with endometriosis and compared it with women free from the disease. The study clearly showed that “women with endometriosis showed significantly higher concentrations of phthalates, thereby suggesting that they may be causing endometriosis in Indian women”.

It is similar with PCOS, too. “In humans, cross-sectional data suggests that BPA concentrations are higher in women with PCOS than in reproductively healthy women,” said Dubey of Toxic Links. BPA, she added, also disrupts normal metabolic activity, making the body prone to obesity.

“In women undergoing IVF, those with the top 25 per cent body load of BPA levels were 211 per cent more likely to have implantation failure,” said Dr Pallavi Priyadarshini of Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani hospital, Mumbai.

KEEP CALM AND ‘CARRY’ ON

Long before EDCs gained attention, experts have been warning about the impact of a hectic lifestyle on libido and sex drive among young Indian couples. Chitramani Mukhopadhyay, a fashion designer from Kolkata, was frustrated at not being able to conceive after three years of marriage. All their tests were normal. It was the stress, they later figured. “But it is the chicken and egg situation. We are stressed, which is leading to infertility, which, in turn, is causing us more stress,” she said, almost laughing.

A study by the department of clinical psychology at Manipal University in 2016 found that 80 per cent of women had infertility-specific stress. The level of cortisol and alpha-amylase in saliva can be considered as a major biomarker of stress and anxiety. A 2018 research conducted by Barnali Ray Basu from the department of physiology, Surendranath College in Kolkata found that “increased salivary cortisol levels were seen in the PCOS population, suggesting a sustained stress scenario in their system. Men, too, suffer from a ‘dip in the mood’ resulting from hectic work routines”. A 2020 report by ADP India, a global payroll and compliance expertise company, based on a survey of 1,908 workers in India, stated that stress levels among the Indian workforce were significantly higher than the Asia-Pacific average of 60 per cent.

“I have clearly seen the change in the sperm count among our regular donors when they come to us after a vacation,” said Agatsya bank’s Choksi. “It is significantly higher and an indication of how everyday stress lowers the libido and sperm count in men. Curiously, most either do not believe it or simply brush it aside.” A case in point: Arnav Nawadh. Only after speaking to his andrologist did the 30-year-old realise that his sperm count and motility were dropping drastically because of regular hardcore gym workouts and sauna, along with holding up a stressful bank job.

Dr Aditi Dani

In the case of Simaira Vipuldas and her husband, stress was a major factor contributing to their inability to conceive naturally. So, Simaira quit her job as a customer relationship manager with a leading publishing company. “Throughout the years I worked, I gained close to 20kg due to the erratic lifestyle,” she said. “Work pressure and the accompanying exhaustion resulting from daily travel further added to the stress. I knew I had to prioritise having a child, else it won’t work out ever.” It took the couple six years to conceive after Simaira was diagnosed with PCOS.

As per a study by the PCOS Society in India, one in every 10 women has PCOS and resulting infertility. “PCOS is undeniably a lifestyle-related problem and it is the number one reason for infertility among women,” said Dr Shashank Joshi, vice president, PCOS Society of India.

In the past two-and-a-half decades, there has been a complete shift in the infertility picture in India, said Dani of Masina Hospital. “Back when I started my practice, India reported infertility cases that were direct, in the sense that they had a clear medical or biological cause,” she said. “But now, we are observing a very lifestyle-related infertility that stems from increasing age, late marriages due to career goals, putting family planning on the back burner and from the kind of chemicals and pollutants we are exposed to.” Women as young as 25 have very few good quality eggs left, she added. “The thing is that now in men and women, the ratio of hormones is itself being attacked. The ratios are being changed by the way the chemicals interact with the hormones in-utero,” said Dani.

This has led to the coinage of ‘unexplained infertility’, an oft-used term these days. This happens when all other biological and medical parameters are normal, yet a couple cannot conceive even after a full year of trying. “In over 25 per cent of infertility cases, no detectable cause can be traced after routine tests, which leaves the case as unexplained infertility,” said Dr Naina Kumar, department of obstetrics and gynaecology, Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha, Maharashtra, in her research on trends in male factor infertility.

After four miscarriages, Abha Devdutta was thrilled when her next pregnancy progressed easily to 12 weeks. She was 35 then. But when she went to get herself checked for any chromosomal abnormalities in the foetus, it was found that she had once again lost the baby. Devastated, the couple has since given up on parenthood. “It is bewildering, because each of our tests has come out normal and we have no medical or biological problems at all,” she said. She has now switched to a simple and healthy lifestyle—no more junk food, late night bingeing on food and flicks, no hoarding of plastics at home. “At present, we are taking each day as it comes,” she said. “Until we think of trying once again, we are enjoying the love of our nephews and nieces.”

In India, about 10-20 per cent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. “Yes, we are observing more miscarriages now than a decade or so ago,” said Parikh. “But it is not just related to women. Even if female fertility, as is common knowledge, has a best before date of 35, while the fertility shelf life for men extends to 45-50 years, we are now learning that as the semen quality is going down, the risk of miscarriages is going up because of bad sperm.”

A lot of that has to do with smoking, said Dr Kshitiz Murdia, cofounder and CEO of Indira IVF. “Several studies have shown that in comparison to non-smokers, active smokers have 14 per cent more chances of suffering from infertility and 30 per cent more chances of early menopause,” he said.

Puffs aside, another addiction that may impact our reproductive health is our device dependence. Radiations from cell phones, laptops, Wi-Fi or microwave ovens may affect sperm development and quality. “Studies reveal that exposure to cell phones, microwave ovens, laptops or Wi-Fi produces deleterious effects on the testes, which may affect sperm count, morphology, motility, an increased DNA damage…,” wrote Dr Ashok Agarwal, director of research at the American Centre for Reproductive Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, in his research on effects of non-ionising radiations that come from cell phones, laptops and microwaves.

The next time someone chides you for propping the laptop on your lap, just heed their advice. For, Agarwal and his team have found that the exposure of sperms to a wireless internet-connected laptop decreased motility. “To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate the direct impact of laptop use on human spermatozoa,” he said. “Keeping a laptop connected wirelessly to the internet on the lap near the testes may result in decreased male fertility.” He rued the fact that there is limited research on protective measures.

THE WAR WITHIN


T. Velpandiyan, professor at AIIMS, is currently concluding a study where he and his team are trying to figure out which type of EDCs are present in excess in water resources in NCR and its impact on citizens, as when water gets contaminated, it can easily get into the food cycle. He revealed that soya milk contributes to infertility, too, as it contains a compound called genistein, which is a mimic of actual oestrogen hormone, and hence is also called as phytoestrogen. “If any male takes it then he will slowly have a lesser sperm count and reduced libido,” he said.

Until a point, the chemicals, including bisphenols, get metabolised in the body as the body has a detoxifying mechanism. Beyond that, when the concentration of these chemicals exceeds the prescribed limits, problems come up. But these limits are set by European and WHO standards; India has no such prescribed limits.

Velpandiyan and his team are trying to rectify that. But the problem is that many of these EDCs in India are non-degradable. With our tropical climate, any toxin is expected to degrade, said Pandiyan. “But shockingly, many get accumulated in groundwater and borewells and thereby enter the food chain,” he said. “While in China, they know the levels of each and every chemical and the contamination it causes, in India, we have not done such research. We do know that there is a large presence of EDCs but not exactly in what measurements do they contribute to human health damage. One reason for this is whenever we apply for such research, the funding agency seems uninterested.”

Alka Dubey

Also, India has been dragging its feet on regulating the EDCs. It did so with regulations regarding pesticides in carbonated water. That was despite the Centre for Science and Environment twice finding high levels of pesticides and insecticides—high enough to cause birth defects, damage to reproductive systems and severe disruption of the immune system—in soft drinks sold in India, including market leaders Pepsi and Coca Cola. It was only three years after the second study in 2006 that the health ministry notified standards for pesticide levels in carbonated water. “In the past, we had found pesticides in bottled water and soft drinks, which meant that companies were not taking adequate measures to avoid their presence,” said Amit Khurana of CSE. “It also told us that pesticides are present in groundwater. We had also found pesticides in the blood of farmers, which means that pesticides can accumulate in our bodies.” He added that while it was clear that pesticide misuse is common in Indian agriculture, “even those pesticides that are considered hazardous are not regulated the way they should be”.

The same is the case with phthalates. “As awareness regarding these among people grows, some cosmetic and children toy brands, for instance, are proactively mentioning their products as paraben- and phthalate-free,” said Das of Fakir Mohan University. “But there is no regulation mandating that products be phthalate-free or within certain limits.”

But India is taking baby steps. Take, for instance, the perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs), yet another group of EDCs that are used widely in industrial applications in India, from fire-fighting foams to non-stick pans and textile coatings. A 2008 study found significant PFAS levels in breast milk of women from Chidambaram, Kolkata and Chennai. Last September, BIS announced that it was developing a framework for regulating PFAS by adopting international standards.


“We are controlling the use of EDCs by prescribing the limits specified in the relevant Indian standards that are referred to in various regulations,” said Nagamani T., head, petroleum, coal and related products department, BIS. “Toys (Quality Control) Order, 2020, is one of the best examples in this regard.”

But do these regulations make real impact? Take, for instance, the Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016, which was passed the same year as the sambar study publication, increasing the minimum thickness of plastic bags from 40 to 50 microns. However, as Srinivasan said, “Only thing is that the possibility of leaching of phthalates will be less if the plastic bags are above 50 microns. But most of the plastic covers in which we get food, as per my observations, are well below this limit.”

Infertility issues have always been there, but they were never this grave or alarming. While the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the stress we take and our sleep patterns all contribute to infertility, the most crucial factor is the one that has penetrated every aspect of our lives—endocrine disrupting chemicals. Time for a pregnant pause?

Some names have been changed.





SEE
by M Bookchin · Cited by 247 — Our Synthetic Environment. Murray Bookchin. 1962. Table of contents. Chapter 1: THE PROBLEM. Chapter 2: AGRICULTURE AND HEALTH. Chapter 3: ...

There is a whole sexual substratum of the historical dialectic that Engels at times dimly perceives, but because he can see sexuality only through an economic filter ...
CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
GFG Alliance faces fraud investigation as financing crisis deepens

EUROPE / 14-05-21 / BY JOHN BASQUILL



The UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has an­n­ounced it is investigating potential fraudulent trading and money laundering at GFG Alliance, dealing another serious blow to the group’s efforts to find emergency funding after the collapse of Greensill.

The SFO announced on May 14 it would probe “suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering in relation to the financing and conduct of the business of companies within the Gupta Family Group Alliance (GFG), including its financing arrangements with Greensill Capital”.

It is the first time enforcement authorities have announced an investigation into the alliance, which is headed by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta. Members include several UK-based steel industry companies, as well as trading house Liberty Commodities.


The SFO says it cannot comment further as its investigation is ongoing. A GFG spokesperson says the group notes the announcement and “will co-operate fully with the investigation”.

“GFG Alliance continues to serve its customers around the world and is making progress in the refinancing of its operations which are benefitting from the operational improvements it has made and the very strong steel, aluminium and iron ore markets,” the spokesperson adds.

The investigation stems from the insolvency of Greensill, which until its collapse in March was a major source of funding to GFG Alliance companies.

The Financial Times revealed that as part of Greensill’s insolvency proceedings, administrators Grant Thornton approached several firms with outstanding invoices from Liberty Commodities – only to be told they had never done business with the company.

Gupta has since said outstanding invoices are part of future receivables programmes, whereby Greensill would provide funding against invoices that it expected to generate in future.

In some cases, he says, those were from companies merely “identified as a potential customer” rather than those already trading with Liberty.

US-based mining company Bluestone Resources has made the same claims in a lawsuit against Greensill, alleging that Greensill executives helped draw up a list of potential customers as the basis for providing finance.

But Greensill has attempted to distance itself from that practice. Founder and chief executive Lex Greensill insisted to a UK parliamentary inquiry this week that the company only funded future receivables programmes where there was a history of real trading activity.

David Cameron, former UK prime minister and a Greensill advisor until its collapse, added at a second hearing that the allegations against GFG “are very disturbing, if true”, but that he had no knowledge of those arrangements.


“It seems concerning and I’m sure it needs to be got to the bottom of,” he said.

Accusations of questionable activity linked to GFG Alliance have emerged several times in recent years, however.

The group has struggled to attract bank financing after several institutions terminated relationships between 2016 and 2018, citing concerns of questionable activity. Several industry representatives told GTR in April that the appetite for lending to GFG was already close to zero.

There had been some glimmers of hope for Gupta, with his steelmaking business in the UK reaching an agreement for a £200mn loan from US asset manager White Oak in May, according to Bloomberg.

White Oak has since confirmed it has terminated the agreement with GFG, however. “As with any regulated financial institution, we are not in a position to continue discussions with any company that is under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office for money laundering,” the company says.

Trade finance experts say that view would likely be shared across the sector.

“It would be highly unlikely if not impossible to get any level of financing for your business while being investigated for serious fraud,” says Oliver Chapman, group chief executive at supply chain procurement firm OCI, speaking to GTR.


“One must question any financier who would want to go near a business in that situation. And with the high levels of due diligence within the industry now, I don’t think a financier could be seen to be working with a company being investigated, from a perception point of view – even if there was a sound business case.”

Sean Edwards, chairman of the International Trade and Forfaiting Association (ITFA), adds: “Our members would be very careful about dealing with a company that’s under an investigation like this.”

Public sector lending has also been refused, with UK ministers citing concerns over the group’s opaque structure.

UK business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said in April that the wider group “has financial problems that we have not really got to the bottom of” and so approving its request for a £170mn bridge loan would be “very irresponsible”.
Google leads effort to support work authorisation for spouses of H-1B visa holders

Joined by 30 other companies to support the H-4 EAD programme

By PTI May 15, 2021 11:18 IST





Google is leading a determined effort by US tech giants to support a programme that gives work authorisation for spouses of those possessing H-1B foreign work visas, the most sought after among Indian IT professionals. Goggle is joined by 30 other companies to support the H-4 EAD ((Employment Authorisation Document) programme.

An H-4 visa is issued by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to immediate family members (spouse and children under 21 years of age) of the H-1B visa holders.

The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. Technology companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.

"Google is proud to support our nation''s immigrants. We joined 30 other companies to protect the H-4 EAD programme which spurs innovation, creates jobs and opportunities, and helps families," Google CEO Sundar Pichai tweeted.

Google on Friday filed a legal brief in a lawsuit called Save Jobs USA vs US Department of Homeland Security.

Tech companies that signed onto the amicus brief include Adobe, Amazon, Apple, eBay, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, PayPal and Twitter.

"To support this important programme, we are leading an amicus brief with over 40 companies and organisations to preserve and protect the H-4 EAD programme," Catherine Lacavera, Vice President, Legal, Google, said in a blog post.

"This builds on an amicus brief we recently joined in support of a lawsuit filed by the American Immigration Lawyers Association to expedite the delayed processing time of H-4 work authorisations," she said.

Kent Walker, Senior Vice President, Global Affairs, Google, said H-4 EAD authorisations for the spouses of high-skilled workers help American companies recruit and retain the world''s best talent.

"Today we led a business coalition filing on behalf of 30 companies to preserve and protect the programme," Walker said.

"H-4 EADs provide work authorisation to more than 90,000 H-4 visa-holders--more than 90 per cent women. COVID has disproportionately affected women. Ending this programme would make things worse, disrupting careers and reducing wages," he said.

"It doesn’t make sense to welcome a person to the US to work but to make it harder for their spouse to work. That hurts their family and hurts our economy now and in the future," he added.

The plaintiff is Save Jobs USA, a group of computer workers formerly employed by Southern California Edison and “replaced by foreign workers imported on H-1B guest worker visas.

Save Jobs USA filed the lawsuit in 2015. It was delayed as former president Donald Trump''s administration considered rescinding the H-4 work rule.

A week after his inauguration on January 20, US President Joe Biden withdrew a Trump-era rule rescinding work authorisation for H-4 visa holders. Now, both the plaintiffs and the Biden administration are seeking summary judgment.

In the amicus brief, Google said: "The regulation at issue here—the H-4 Rule, US Department of Homeland Security, Employment Authorization for Certain H-4 Dependent Spouses, 80 Fed. Reg. 10,284 (Feb. 25, 2015)—provides work authorization to more than 90,000 H-4 visa holders (spouses of certain H-1B visa holders), more than 90 per cent of whom are women.

"Invalidation of this rule would result in these talented individuals being barred from the workplace, forcibly severing tens of thousands of employment relationships across the country," it said.

The results would be utterly destructive for the families impacted; by just one measure, about 87 per cent of these families have made crucial life decisions on the promise of H-4 employment, including whether to have a child and whether to buy a house, it said.




Workers Inquiry Network, Struggle in a Pandemic: A Collection of Contributions on the COVID-19 Crisis



Robert Ovetz, Ph.D.

Published 2020

The Working Class Pandemic: Wildcat Strikes and Working Class Self-Organizing in the USA

by Robert OvetzIn

In Lizard Talk , historian Peter Linebaugh provided a history of ten plagues stretching back to the biblical era, as close as anyone has gotten to an epidemiology of class struggle. Linebaugh names this little book after Zora Neale Hurston’s notion of how folk knowledge of tactics and strategy is passed along from worker to worker. Plagues, pandemics, and outbreaks have been the mechanism for reimposing control of an unruly working class, what he describes as the “utility of the plague to the maintenance of class discipline.” But they have also been the openings for expanding and circulating the tactics and strategies of worker struggle which we are seeing around the US today.
During the 1793 plague in Philadelphia, Linebaugh reminded us, servants deserted their masters, demanded huge wage increases, freed prisoners, and self-organized care for the stricken. The1831-2 cholera plague attacked multi-racial working class neighborhoods like Five Points in Manhattan, which also happened to supply the critical longshore workers for a key choke point in the international supply chain. Likewise, the 1918 flu pandemic corresponded not only with a WWI strike wave but a revolutionary circulation of struggles and general strikes from Russia, Mexico, Germany, and the US that lasted until the early 1920s.

If capital established a “pathology of the class relation (workers are sick, rulers are healthy),” the working class responded in ways that recognized that “pestilence, in its social dynamics, contains a possibility of liberation.” According to Linebaugh, struggle was the workers’ own vaccine during deadly pandemics and even foreshadowed them. “The struggle for justice became the therapeutic treatment of choice upon the part of the slaves, the poor, the afflicted.” With the explosive spread of wildcat strikes across the US, we are seeing another class struggle over the use of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s become increasingly clear how capital’s dependence on the “essential labor” of now unruly health care, food service, transport, cleaning, and logistics workers in key sectors of the economy has made it extremely vulnerable to disruption. How vulnerable is marked by the once “unorganizable” Amazon/Whole Foods tracking worker organizing at every store. While these strikes are mostly defensive, for the time being, the US
working class has shown some signs that is relearning how to “walk the talk of the lizard,” whispering its warnings of global insurrection. This is especially amplified by the nationwide protests

How COVID 19 has ignited new struggles over workers’ health and safety -
RLS Geneva

Mark Bergfeld

2021, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung - Geneva
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Mental Health,
Occupational Health & Safety,
Work and Labour,
Occupational Psychology,
Trade unions
...more ▾
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The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted how governments’ approaches to workers’ health and safety have fallen short in preventing the spread of the virus and protecting its citizens in the world of work. Instead of protecting so-called ‘essential’ workers, governments and businesses left low-paid workers such as care workers, supermarket staff, warehouse, agricultural workers, and cleaners defenceless in the face of the rapidly spreading virus. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and World Health Organisation (WHO), up to 20-30 per cent of COVID-19 cases may be attributed to exposure at work[1]. Business opposition to mandatory testing, inadequate remote working policies and above all the lack of provision of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) have only exacerbated the public health crisis. Thus, the on-going COVID-19 pandemic has created new challenges as well as opportunities for trade unions, social movements and progressive forces who want to put public health above private profits.


https://www.academia.edu/48898735/How_COVID_19_has_ignited_new_struggles_over_workers_health_and_safety_RLS_Geneva?email_work_card=title
Peer to Peer:
The Commons Manifesto
Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, and Alex Pazaitis

PDF

Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 What is P2P and How is it Related to the Commons? 21.
2 Are P2P technologies Good or Bad? 31.
3 How Does P2P Relate to Capitalism? 41.
4 How is P2P to be Implemented in Practice? 61.
5 towards a Commons-centric Society? 72

 P2P and a New Ecosystem of Value Creation 11

2.1 Diverse Skills and Motivations 11
2.2 Transparent Heterarchy 12
2.3 A New Ecosystem of Value Creation 12
2.4 Four Short Case Studies 19
2.5 From Contradictions to an Integrated Economic Reality 27

3 P2P and New Socio-technological Frameworks 33
3.1 two Generic Models 34
3.2 The Extractive Model of Cognitive Capitalism 36
3.3 The Generative Model of Commons-based Peer Production 39

4 P2P and the Structure of World History 47
4.1 Four Modes of Exchange 47
4.2 towards Associationism 50

5 A Commons transition Strategy 55
5.1 Pooling and Mutualizing Resources Wherever Possible 56
5.2 Introducing Reciprocity 56
5.3 From Redistribution to Empowerment and Predistribution 58
5.4 Subordinating the Capitalist Market 64
5.5 Organizing at the Local and Global Level 65
5.6 Summary of our Proposals 67
5.7 A Last Word 68

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Peer to Peer
Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as theblueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a more profound trans-formation of the fundamentals of our social life. As capitalism faces a series ofstructural crises, a new social, political and economic dynamic is emerging:peer to peer.What is peer to peer (P2P)? Why is it essential for building a commons-centricfuture? How could this happen? Tese are the questions we try to answer, bytying together four of its aspects:1. P2P is a type ofsocial relations in human networks, where participants have maximum freedom to connect.2. P2P is also a technological infrastructure that makes the generalization and scaling up of such relations possible.3. P2P thus enables a new mode of production and property .4. P2P creates the potential for a transition to an economy that can begenerative towards people and nature.We believe that these four aspects will profoundly change human society. P2Pideally describes systems in which any human being can contribute to the creation and maintenance of a shared resource while benefiting from it. There is an enormous variety of such systems: from the free encyclopedia Wikipedia to free and open-source software projects, to open design and hardware communities, to relocalization initiatives and community currencies. Our narrative is structured as follows. This chapter explains what this book is about by introducing some basic concepts. Chapter 2 describes how a new ecosystem of value creation is developed by implementing P2P technologies and practices. Chapter 3 sheds light on how different interests can use P2Pdynamics.Chapter 4 places P2P into the broader context of the world history.

How to cite this book chapter:
Bauwens, M., Kostakis, V. and Pazaitis, A. 2019.
Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto
Pp. 1–10. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI:https://doi.org/10.16997/book33.a. License: CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0