[✔️] March 26 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Mar 26 09:34:38 EDT 2022
/*March 26, 2022*/
/[ Ciao Roma, the size of LA, or as big as NYC ] /
*Satellite data shows entire Conger ice shelf has collapsed in Antarctica*
NASA scientist says complete collapse of ice shelf as big as Rome during
unusually high temperatures is ‘sign of what might be coming’
An ice shelf about the size of Rome has completely collapsed in East
Antarctica within days of record high temperatures, according to
satellite data.
The Conger ice shelf, which had an approximate surface area of 1,200 sq
km, collapsed around 15 March, scientists said on Friday.
East Antarctica saw unusually high temperatures last week, with
Concordia station hitting a record temperature of -11.8C on 18 March,
more than 40C warmer than seasonal norms. The record temperatures were
the result of an atmospheric river that trapped heat over the continent...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/25/satellite-data-shows-entire-conger-ice-shelf-has-collapsed-in-antarctica
/[ socialist politics video - 12 min - causes me to rethink much ]/
*Why Borders Make Climate Change Worse (ft. @Second Thought)*
Mar 25, 2022
Our Changing Climate
Borders make climate change worse, explained. Check out @Second
Thought's video on fascism and climate change here:
https://youtu.be/aA1T_0pZHXk
In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I look at how
climate change will create a massive refugee crisis and how militarized
borders are making the climate crisis worse. Specifically, I look at a
number of studies that project hundreds of millions of people will be
displaced from their homes due to climate change by the end of the
century. Unfortunately, imperial core countries like the United States
have started building walls to keep people out instead of building
bridges to help people escape the storm that the imperial core is
largely to blame for. Militarized borders will only make the climate
refugee crisis worse, so it's no wonder that the ties between private
border security contractors and fossil fuel companies are intimate. In a
time when the imperial core needs to be repaying their climate debt and
helping countries in the imperial periphery adapt and thrive in a
zero-carbon future, they are doing the exact opposite and strengthening
their borders and surveillance states.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI59G-Uup-0
- -
/[ climate politics - 18 min video - suggest zero-carbon plus open
borders ]/
*How Fascists Are Taking Advantage Of Climate Change*
Mar 25, 2022
Second Thought
We all understand that climate change is real, it's here, and that the
consequences of our inaction will be disastrous for our species and
countless other forms of life around the world. But what happens when
those in positions of power see climate change as a means to an end? A
way to make truly draconian policies seem rational? In this week's
episode, we're talking about two distinct forms of climate fascism:
Fossil Fascism and Ecofascism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA1T_0pZHXk
- -
/[ consider political power -- but physical reality of survival (ahem)
trumps all other political power ]/
*Why Liberalism Won't Solve Anything*
Mar 11, 2022
Second Thought
Get your first month of Audible completely free when you sign up at
https://audible.com/secondthought or text secondthought to 500-500
How many times have you heard "we need to vote for the lesser evil," or
"they're not perfect, but they're better than the alternative"? The
entire philosophy of harm reduction is based on "who is the least bad,"
and when that is your only criterion, things will get worse and worse
with every election. Let's talk about the insufficiency of liberalism
and the "harm reduction" strategy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb8bBWnHflk
[ scientist's brief rants ]
*Cross Section of Key Scientists on Climate Extremes and the Impact on
Infrastructure*
March 17, 2022
greenmanbucket
Clips from recent interviews, March 2022.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35JzjT2lTyM
/[ “The disinformation ecosystem is highly cooperative and coordinated
and their goal isn’t to convince someone of something, their goal is to
flood the zone with garbage.”////– Debra Lavoy ] /
*Instagram Ads Can Help Climate Facts Reach the ‘Super Online,’ Report
Suggests*
A new report highlights how paid ads on social media platforms might
help reach people who are often susceptible to disinformation.
By Sharon Kellyon - Mar 21, 2022
When it comes to online disinformation, does it make sense to fight fire
with fire using paid social media ads?
A new report by Reality Team, a nonprofit digital marketing group,
suggests that social media ads can help reach people who aren’t closely
watching topics like climate change or vaccine science and are often
targeted by disinformation campaigns.
Surrounded by an endless array of questionable information online, lots
of people aren’t quite sure what to think or how to sort truth from
falsehoods. “They feel like there’s a lifetime of this stream of
information that they haven’t caught up with,” Reality Team’s Debra
Lavoy told DeSmog. “I can’t cope with the news, I know people are out
there lying to me, so — I’m out.”
Reality Team ran Instagram ads aiming to put easy-to-digest information
about climate change and vaccines in front of those viewers as they
scrolled through social media feeds and ads. The group aimed to build
people’s confidence in facts, arm them against disinformation campaigns,
and help them sort what’s real from what isn’t.
The new report’s early findings seem promising, experts said, though
they emphasized the importance of accountability for social media
platforms and that more research could help show to what degree Reality
Team’s results can be replicated and whether their work produces
long-lasting change.
*Reaching the ‘Super Online’*
From the jump, Reality Team took a pragmatic path. Responding to
disinformation “needed an approach that could be put into play quickly,”
the new report says. “It had to be effective and couldn’t depend on help
from the platforms, exotic technology, celebrity, or large sums of cash.”
“We knew this approach was unlikely to de-radicalize those already lost
to delusional or extreme ideologies,” Reality Team wrote. “So we focused
on the group we thought was both vulnerable and reachable.”
They relied on social media’s algorithms to help them find those people,
folks who are already more likely to stumble on political issues in
memes, social media feeds, and TikTok videos than anywhere else.
“It’s people who are super online but don’t read news,” said Lavoy,
adding that depending how you measure, that can be about 20 percent of
adults — and up to 80 percent of Instagram users under 35. “They
casually run into news but they don’t seek it out.”
More than 1 in 20 viewers clicked on Reality Team’s Instagram ads,
according to the report, giving the campaign a cost-per-click of 18 cents.
“At the outset it wasn’t our intent to focus on paid ads but we quickly
realized that we got incredible levels of engagement on our paid ads at
very cost-effective rates,” Lavoy said, adding that it cost about $8 to
reach 1,000 viewers. “When I actually was in the marketing world, I
would have killed for those sorts of stats.”...
- -
*“The disinformation ecosystem is highly cooperative and coordinated
and their goal isn’t to convince someone of something, their goal is
to flood the zone with garbage.”**
**– Debra Lavoy*
Lavoy emphasized that Reality Team’s ads were built to be just one tool
in an anti-disinformation toolbox.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, for example, focuses on 12
people, dubbed “The Disinformation Dozen,” whose work is behind roughly
two-thirds of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media, Lavoy noted.
“There’s similar stuff for climate, they call them the ‘toxic ten’
pushers of climate disinformation. And the platforms absolutely tolerate
this,” Levoy said. “But while we wait for the platforms to take
responsibility, for regulators to force them to take responsibility, for
technology to help them and/or others solve the problem, we are trying
to engage in sort of hand-to-hand combat.”
That’s despite the fact that the odds, in many ways, are stacked in
favor of disinformation, which can be sensationalistic and isn’t
tethered to provable facts — which helps explain why it doesn’t take a
lot of it to make big waves.
“The disinformation ecosystem is highly cooperative and coordinated and
their goal isn’t to convince someone of something, their goal is to
flood the zone with garbage,” Levoy said. “Last year, we sort of
followed where the disinformation was. This year, we are trying to
predict where the disinformation will be by looking at where competitive
elections are and we’re going to focus on climate, vaccines, election
integrity, and something we call dirty disinfo tricks.”
“We can compete with them,” Levoy said. “At the very least we can put up
a fight.”
https://www.desmog.com/2022/03/21/instagram-ads-can-help-fight-climate-disinformation/
/[ "Looking at Carbon Inequality Differently" says Bloomberg news ] /
*How the World’s Richest People Are Driving Global Warming*
By Eric Roston, Leslie Kaufman and Hayley Warren
March 23, 2022
It’s the bedrock idea underpinning global climate politics: Countries
that got rich by spewing greenhouse gasses have a responsibility to cut
emissions faster than those that didn’t while putting up money to help
poor nations adapt.
This framework made sense at the dawn of climate diplomacy. Back in
1990, almost two-thirds of all disparities in emissions could be
explained by national rankings of pollution. But after more than three
decades of rising income inequality worldwide, what if gaps between
nation states are no longer the best way to understand the problem?
There’s growing evidence that the inequality between rich and poor
people’s emissions within countries now overwhelms the
country-to-country disparities. In other words: High emitters have more
in common across international boundaries, no matter where they call home.
Analysts from the World Inequality Lab, which is led by the Paris School
of Economics and University of California at Berkeley recently put
forward an alternative assessment focusing more on varying measures of
consumer income than gross domestic product. After a generation of
poorly distributed gains from globalization, it turns out that personal
wealth does more than national wealth to explain the sources of
emissions. Climate progress means first curbing the carbon output of the
wealthier among us...
- -
Researchers at WIL drew on a range of data, from diet to car ownership,
stock market investments and global trade to estimate individual carbon
output. The top 10% of polluters – about 770 million people, roughly the
population of Europe – are the climate equivalent of the world’s
wealthiest decile who earn more than $38,000 a year, according to Oxfam.
The trend is clear: Emissions generally rise with wealth.
The richest 1%— the more than 60 million people earning $109,000 a
year—are by far the fastest-growing source of emissions. They live all
over the world, with about 37% in the U.S. and more than 4.5% each in
Brazil and China...
- -
*The rich and poor pollute differently*
As people get richer, diets tend to diversify and meat consumption
rises. We’d need a second Earth if everyone had the diet of an
Australian or Brit. The average American in 2019 ate 53 pounds of
beef—the most carbon intensive meat—according to USDA. But families in
Argentina and Uruguay—where a lot of cattle are farmed—consumed even
more than that, according to an industry website. Growing middle classes
in developing countries from China to South Africa are eating more meat
than ever.
Far higher up the income distribution, the emissions increase
exponentially. The single-most polluting asset, a superyacht, saw a 77%
surge in sales last year. An 11-minute ride to space, like the one taken
by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is responsible for more carbon per
passenger than the lifetime emissions of any one of the world’s poorest
billion people, according to WIL.
One-tenth of all flights departing from France in 2019 were on private
aircraft. In just four hours, those individually-owned planes generate
as much carbon dioxide as an average person in the European Union emits
all year. Four-fifths of the people on the planet never get on an
airplane in their entire lifetime, according to market analysis by Boeing...
- -
Owning a car, meanwhile, is one of fastest ways to enlarge an
individual’s carbon footprint. SUVs were the largest contributor, after
power, to the increase in global carbon emissions from 2010 to 2018,
according to the International Energy Agency. In the U.S. there are
about 84 cars on the road for every 100 people, compared with just 24
vehicles in India. But there’s often a huge divide within countries as
well. In São Paulo, more than two-thirds of men in the poorest 10% will
walk or cycle to work, emitting no carbon. That car-free lifestyle holds
true of only about 10% among the Brazilian city’s richest 10%, according
to a 2016 study.
When it comes to energy consumption, the difference can be even more
stark. An average person in Nigeria uses about half as much electricity
in a year as a U.S. high-definition television...
- -
*The world has changed, and so should the discussion of emissions*
The huge gap between high and low emitters suggests the current
nation-centered approach to cutting carbon needs to be rethought.
Lucas Chancel, a researcher at the Paris School of Economics who
co-directs WIL, points to carbon taxes as an example. That policy has
been deployed in many places as a regressive measure, meaning poorer
people pay more as a proportion of their income. The further you look
down the wealth distribution, the higher a percentage people pay for energy.
/We should put a little more effort on the top of the distribution, who
concentrate a lot of the emissions, and who have not really been the
focus of policies of the past decades — World Inequality Lab’s Lucas
Chancel/
As more of the global poor become able to afford sport-utility vehicles,
air travel, meat and other elements of the high-carbon lifestyle,
political impediments to reducing these new emissions will likely rise.
“There is a window of opportunity of a few years before things can
completely go crazy,” Chancel says. “If we miss this window, it will be
more socially complicated, because carbon policy will not be as
concentrated on a small elite anymore. It will be widespread and it will
impact the entire population.”
Addressing emissions inequality within countries is just as important as
reducing pollution on a national level. WIL’s research shows that, for
example, to even out carbon footprints in the U.S., its top emitters
would have to cut pollution by 87% by 2030 while the bottom half could
actually increase theirs by 3%...
- -
*The inequality shift means policies should shift*
Over the last two decades policy researchers have left a substantial
library of strategies, options and tactics to put national
greenhouse-gas pollution on a glide path to zero. The same isn’t true
for wealthy individuals.
That’s started to change. A small group of researchers published a paper
in Nature Energy in September that put forward five ways in which the
global rich can leverage change much larger than themselves.
As consumers and investors, the choices of the wealthy can have outsize
impact, especially on transport and housing. Just 1% of the world’s
population is responsible for half the aviation emissions. Cars are the
biggest source of per-capita emissions in the U.S. and the second
biggest in Europe. Changing that, and much else, requires changing
social norms. But creating demand for low-emission products such as
electric vehicles and heat pumps can help subsidize a carbon-free path
for others around the world to enter the middle class.
And just as companies generally decline to fully use their lobbying
power, social capital and brand identities to press governments to take
stronger climate action, rich people tend not to use the full extent of
their influence: as role models, as corporate executives or board
members, as citizens. Financing and supporting political campaigns,
advocating for change within companies and lobbying governments directly
all represent untapped levers for the carbon elite.
“If you’re in the top 10% you have the most power and possibility to
help make those systemic changes happen,” says Kimberly Nicholas, a
sustainability science professor at University of Lund and an author of
the Nature Energy paper.
WIL’s data shows runaway emissions from a class of individuals—the top
0.001%—whose responsibility is so great that their decisions can have
the same climate impact as nationwide policy interventions. Together,
the top 10% of emitters generate more than four times as much carbon as
the global average. They remain a significant source of warming even
though many of those people saw a surprising decline in emissions
between 1990 and 2019. That’s because the group largely consists of
lower and middle classes in rich countries, who have often been left out
of economic booms that have benefited their wealthier peers at home.
And while the 65% of the people who pollute the least have seen steady
income gains—and consequently rising emissions—over the last three
decades, they still contribute a relatively tiny share to global
warming. A February study found that lifting hundreds of millions of
people out of extreme poverty will only raise global emissions by less
than 1%.
*
**Runaway Emissions*
The top 1% of emitters are responsible for 21% of emissions growth since
1990
- -
“Many people do not see themselves being part of either the problem or
the solution but look for governments, technology and/or businesses to
solve the problem,” wrote the authors of a 2020 Nature Communications
journal article called “Scientists’ Warning on Affluence.” But that
paper concluded people, not institutions, need to solve the problem. The
organizations engaged in climate debates—governments, companies,
NGOs—are ultimately legal or social structures made up by people. And if
people don’t change, the institutions won’t either.
Carbon inequality math is so new, and so intimidating, that researchers
assessing it are left mostly with questions. Perhaps the biggest one
comes in the “Affluence” paper: “Can a transition to reduced and changed
consumption be achieved while at the same time keeping economic and
social stability?” As consumption and emissions continue rising, that
remains very much an open question.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-wealth-carbon-emissions-inequality-powers-world-climate/
/[ Waking up to global warming only about 4 decades late - recall the
story of the 3 Little Pigs ] /
*Climate change is spurring a movement to build stormproof homes*
By Michele Lerner
Today at 7:30 a.m. EDT
- -
“If you buy a house in California or another wildfire-prone area, you
can do simple things like buy ember-excluding screens for your soffit
and ridge vents,” Wilson says. “Put in a patio instead of a raised deck,
because decks are more flammable and debris tends to accumulate
underneath them.” Landscaping can also be important to protect your home
depending on the hazards you face. Adding trees for shade can add
protection from extreme heat and reducing density or choosing less
flammable plants can be helpful in a fire zone.
“Every project to improve the resilience of a home depends on the local
conditions,” Wallis says. “For example, in Florida our issues are wind
and water, especially from hurricanes. So homeowners would be wise to
invest in storm shutters.”...
Resilient home tips
· Assess the location for all current and future hazards.
· Check the code for the year the home was built and any subsequent
renovations.
· Have a home inspector look for signs of previous damage.
· Do an energy audit to find potential air leaks.
· Evaluate the landscaping in the context of storms and shade.
· Review your homeowner’s insurance policy for adequate coverage.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/25/resistant-homes-natural-disasters/
/[Disinformation and misinformation battles]/
How broadcast TV networks covered climate change in 2021
Special PROGRAMS
CLIMATE & ENERGY -- 3/24/22
WRITTEN BY TED MACDONALD
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALLISON FISHER & EVLONDO COOPER
2021 was a stand-out year for climate coverage on corporate broadcast TV
networks. In our annual analysis of climate coverage, Media Matters
found that approximately 1,316 minutes — nearly 22 hours — were spent
discussing climate change on morning, evening, and Sunday morning news
shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox Broadcasting Co., more than a threefold
increase from 2020. However, all those hours of climate coverage on
corporate broadcast TV networks represented roughly 1% of overall news
programming in 2021, a figure that is still far too small in the face of
a worsening climate crisis.
The increase in coverage was largely driven by various Biden
administration climate initiatives; another year of deadly
climate-fueled extreme weather events across the globe; and the pivotal
2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), which was held in
Glasgow, Scotland, over a two-week period in November. This rise in the
quantity of coverage — after years of advocacy by climate journalists,
activists and researchers pushing for more and better climate coverage
by TV news — was supported by new and renewed commitments from corporate
broadcast networks to cover climate through collaborative initiatives
like Covering Climate Now and dedicated reporting during key climate events.
However, some problematic trends continued to materialize in the quality
of corporate broadcast news coverage of climate change, including, for
at least the fifth year in a row, an overwhelming proportion of white
men featured as guests in climate coverage, even though people of color
are most impacted by the crisis. And while broadcast networks did a
decent job of covering key moments and events in 2021 overall, their
climate coverage throughout the year was uneven.
Top trends from broadcast TV news climate coverage in 2021
*Key Findings:*
Total broadcast news climate coverage in 2021 tripled from 2020: Morning
news shows, evening news shows, and Sunday morning shows on corporate
broadcast TV networks aired nearly 22 hours of combined climate coverage
in 2021 — a total of 1,316 minutes across 604 segments. This is more
than triple the amount of climate coverage in 2020, when these networks
aired just 380 minutes across 221 segments.
Every network significantly increased its 2021 climate coverage from
2020: CBS led, with the most total coverage across its morning news,
evening news, and Sunday political shows, airing a combined 569 minutes
(nearly nine and a half hours) across 220 segments in 2021, compared to
just 125 minutes and 73 segments in 2020. NBC aired 383 minutes (nearly
six and a half hours) of climate coverage across 196 segments in 2021,
compared to just 159 minutes and 94 segments the previous year. ABC
aired 323 minutes (nearly five and a half hours) of climate coverage
across 175 segments in 2021, compared to 90 minutes and 50 segments the
year before.
Nightly news had its highest volume of climate coverage since Media
Matters began tracking this information in 2011: Nightly news shows on
ABC, CBS, and NBC aired nearly six hours of climate coverage (344
minutes) across 181 segments in 2021, which is more airtime than in the
previous three years combined.
PBS NewsHour’s climate coverage increased 160% from 2020 to 2021. The
program aired 151 climate segments in 2021 — compared to 60 segments in
2020 — which represents nearly as many as the corporate networks'
combined coverage. PBS NewsHour, however, is not included in the full
dataset as it is publicly funded and the format of the program is
different than that of its corporate counterparts.
Morning news shows tripled the amount of time spent on climate change
from 2020: For the second year in a row, Media Matters analyzed the
morning news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC, which aired nearly 14 hours of
climate coverage (821 minutes) across 363 segments in 2021. This is over
double the number of segments that they ran in 2020 (158), and nearly
triple the amount of total climate coverage (267 minutes).
Sunday political shows aired three times more climate segments in 2021
than the previous three years combined: There were 60 combined Sunday
morning show climate segments across ABC, CBS, Fox Broadcasting Co., and
NBC in 2021. This is over four times the amount of segments aired in
2020 (14) and is nearly triple the amount of combined segments that ran
from 2018 to 2020.
A summer of global extreme weather, President Joe Biden’s climate
agenda, and the COP26 climate conference were major drivers of climate
coverage in 2021:
Thirty-three percent of nightly news segments — 60 out of 181 — included
discussion of summer extreme weather events. In addition, 13% of
segments (24) discussed COP26, while 9% of segments (16) included
discussion of the climate components of Biden’s “Build Back Better”
infrastructure plan.
Twenty-three percent of morning news segments — 84 out of 363 — included
discussion of summer extreme weather events. COP26 was discussed in 11%
of segments (39), while the climate components of Biden’s infrastructure
plan were discussed in 7% of segments (24).
Despite the increase in coverage from 2020, networks failed to cover
climate change consistently throughout the year — 66% of climate
segments aired in the last six months of 2021, with 42% of all climate
segments on broadcast news in 2021 airing in the months of September,
October, and November.
For at least the fifth year in a row, white men dominated guests
featured in climate segments. A whopping 59% of guests on morning news,
evening news, and Sunday morning shows — 314 out of 534 guests — were
white men. Only 7% of guests – 40 total – were women of color.
2021’s increase in appearances by those most impacted by climate change,
who accounted for 20% of guests across morning news, evening news, and
Sunday morning shows, suggests that broadcast TV news is beginning to
cover the climate crisis as a current rather than a future event.
*The overall volume of climate coverage on broadcast TV tripled from
2020 to 2021*
Combined climate change coverage on corporate broadcast morning news,
evening news, and Sunday morning shows saw a threefold increase from
2020 to 2021, going from nearly six and a half hours (380 minutes) to
almost 22 hours (1,316 minutes). This constitutes a major expansion in
climate coverage across all networks and programs from the previous year.
In fact, CBS aired more minutes of climate coverage in 2021 than all of
broadcast news aired in 2020 combined. The network accounted for 43% of
all climate coverage across corporate broadcast news, airing nine and a
half hours (569 minutes) across its morning, nightly, and Sunday morning
news shows in 2021.
NBC aired slightly more coverage — nearly six and a half hours (383
minutes) — than the combined amount of coverage in 2020. Finally, ABC
aired nearly five and a half hours (323 minutes) of climate coverage in
2021.
- -
Weeknight episodes of PBS NewsHour were also analyzed for a comparison
point with the nightly news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC, but they are
not included in the full data set. PBS NewsHour has traditionally
outperformed its corporate broadcast counterparts in both the quantity
and quality of its climate change coverage, and 2021 was no different.
PBS NewsHour aired a record 151 climate segments in 2021, which is a
huge increase from 2020, when the program aired just 60 climate
segments. Its next best-performing year in quantity of climate segments
aired was 2019, when it aired 121 segments. Like its corporate broadcast
counterparts, PBS NewsHour ran most of its climate segments toward the
end of the year, airing 68 such segments from September to December,
accounting for 45% of its overall climate coverage. And again similar to
its corporate broadcast counterparts, PBS NewHour’s climate coverage
dropped off significantly after November, going from 22 segments to just
four aired in December.
Morning news shows tripled the amount of time spent on climate change
from 2020 to 2021...
- -
Despite the increase of climate coverage on Sunday shows in 2021, Meet
the Press’ 54 minutes of climate coverage in 2018 remains the most
amount of coverage by a single Sunday show program in Media Matters’
yearly analysis. This is essentially due to one 46-minute episode Meet
the Press aired on December 30, 2018, which was entirely focused on
climate change...
- -
https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/how-broadcast-tv-networks-covered-climate-change-2021
/
/
/[ "UnKoch" -- thrilling to see such a worthy campus initiative ] /
*Just Two Funders, Koch and BP, Have Spent Nearly $1,000,000,000 To Buy
Credibility Through Universities- UnKoch My Campus Helps You Stop Them.*
Yesterday when talking about the $50 million going to climate denial
organizations, we mentioned it was just a drop in the bucket compared to
things like fossil fuel advertising budgets. But it’s also just a tenth
of what the Koch network alone has spent on supporting climate and
economic disinformation at Colleges and Universities.
Today, that’s our focus, thanks to the work of UnKoch My Campus, which
works to expose and oppose the undue influence of Koch spending on
colleges. And there’s plenty to cover. For example, they have a petition
calling on Koch-funded schools and politicians to divest, and another
calling on George Mason University to rename Buchanan Hall.
UnKoch is also doing plenty of real-world activism, for example, an
April 4th event in DC to call on President Biden to cancel student debt,
and as it turns out, Koch has long fought against public schools and was
an early champion for the concept of student debt.
And for the students out there, UnKoch has a fellowship you can apply
for and some great resources to help you become your own anti-Koch
activist. Specifically, they recently published a Model Policy report,
and it’s basically everything you need to find out if Koch’s on your
campus, and if so, kick them out.
Because as UnKoch head Jasmine Banks wrote in a recent op-ed, “College
students have been some of Charles Koch’s fiercest opponents,” and with
the success of the divestment movement, “it’s student activists who are
scaring the fossil fuel industry. And it should stay scared.”
What should they be scared about? As the report describes, “Charles
Koch’s foundations have overseen over $458 million in grants to over 550
universities and higher ed adjacent non-profits from 2005-2019.”
And he’s not doing it out of the goodness of his heart. It’s part of
their strategy. The report describes how “in 2014 the Charles Koch
Foundation described the motivations of its university investments to
other wealthy donors as a means to ‘building state-based capabilities
and election capabilities’ by developing an ‘integrated’ ‘talent
pipeline’ to achieve widespread support for, and adoption of, favorable
policies at the state and federal levels. To this end, Koch has advised
businessmen to support ‘only those programs, departments or schools that
contribute in some way to [their] individual companies or to the general
welfare of [the] free enterprise system.’”
And as you would be foolish not to expect, there are serious strings
attached to Koch funding to universities. Once exposed, as UnKoch does,
these relationships are self-evidently corrupt and often change once
people realize, as the report details, that funders are getting say over
hiring, curriculum, research targets, and other serious conflicts of
interest.
It’s not just Koch, either. BP’s $500 million spend on UC Berkeley
Energy Biosciences Institute “gave BP the power to determine which
research proposals deserved funding” while Big Tobacco’s Phillip Morris
had a “ $1.3 million contract with Virginia Commonwealth University”
that “barred researchers from discussing or publishing research results
without first consulting Philip Morris.”
If you’re a worried student (or parent), then fortunately, there are
some steps you can take. First off, if it’s a public school, you can
submit a Freedom of Information Act request for documents about who’s
funding what at the school. The report then has various suggestions,
based on what you find.
For example, if funding is referred to as gifts, not grants, UnKoch has
a model policy for that. If you do find a Koch grant, then you might
want to consult the guide for “Disaffiliation with the Charles Koch
Foundation Model Motion” to see how you might get your school to divest.
And if it’s more than just Koch, you might need the more comprehensive
“Institutional Conflicts of Interest Model Motions.”
These model policies are based on ones that have been adopted, so
they’re essentially built for you to drop your school’s name in and then
run with!
- -
/[ Campus Koch Sackers ]/
*WE’VE RELAUNCHED OUR UPDATED MODEL FUNDING POLICIES FOR HIGHER ED*
The Charles Koch Foundation has an insidious history of using its
“philanthropy” to colleges and universities to shape local, state, and
federal policies in ways that serve his free-market agenda while
stripping power from the people. With growing awareness of the ways in
which CKF buys influence over hiring, research, and curriculum in higher
education to achieve these goals, a call to protect against such donor
interference in academia is growing.
Through research and organizing, UnKoch My Campus has identified
widespread gaps in university gift acceptance policies that allow
inappropriate donor influence and fail to hold institutions accountable
to the common good. This document seeks to empower activists with the
resources necessary to close those gaps via university policy change.
We hope this document will serve as an advocacy tool for campuses that
already have an overreaching donor and those that want to proactively
protect their institution from potential donor interference. We also
hope this resource will facilitate even more robust cross-campus
relationships and strategizing amongst students and faculty, as well as
create intentional space for community activists outside of academia to
lead us towards solutions on campus that prioritize the larger
communities and systems in which academia exists and participates.
https://www.unkochmycampus.org/
- -
[ Classic video -- understanding propaganda - fundamentals ]
*Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine*
Al Jazeera English
According to American linguist and political activist, Noam Chomsky,
media operate through 5 filters: ownership, advertising, the media
elite, flak and the common enemy.
Follow #MediaTheorised, an online project by Al Jazeera English’s media
analysis show The Listening Post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M
/[The news archive - looking back at information efforts]/
*March 26, 2006*
March 26, 2006: TIME Magazine releases its April 3, 2006 cover-dated
issue, with the cover story: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried."
http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20060403,00.html
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1176980,00.html
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