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<font size="+2"><font face="Calibri"><i><b>September 2</b></i></font></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>, 2023</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font> <br>
<font face="Calibri">[ Reuters report ]</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>Exxon says world set to fail 2°C global
warming cap by 2050</b></font><br>
<font face="Calibri">By Sabrina Valle</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">August 28, 2023</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Summary</font><br>
<blockquote><font face="Calibri">- - Exxon projects oil, gas to be
54% of world’s needs in 2050</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">- - CO2 emissions in 2050 to double IPCC's
desired scenario</font><br>
</blockquote>
<font face="Calibri">HOUSTON, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Oil and natural gas
are still projected to meet more than half of the world’s energy
needs in 2050, or 54%, Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) said on Monday,
with the world failing to keep global temperature increases below
2 degrees Celsius.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">The largest U.S. oil producer projects the
world will reach 25 billion metric tons of energy related carbon
dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2050, according to its energy outlook
published on Monday.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">That is more than twice of the 11 billion
metric tons the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) say would be needed on average in its Lower 2°C
scenarios.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">"An energy transition is underway, but it is
not yet happening at the scale or on the timetable required to
achieve</font> <font face="Calibri">society’s net-zero
ambitions," the producer said.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">Exxon produces less than 3% of the world's
daily crude demand and in May its shareholders overwhelmingly
rejected calls for stronger measures to mitigate climate change...</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">- -</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Only two of the 55 technologies needed to reach
net-zero emissions by 2050 are “on track,” Exxon said citing the
IEA. Emissions will decline only by 25% by 2050 as lower-emission
options grow, the company said, below desired scenarios.<br>
</font><br>
Overall, Exxon projects energy-related CO2 emissions will peak at
more than 34 billion metric tons sometime this decade as economies
and energy demand grow, and then decline to 25 billion metric tons
in 2050.<br>
<br>
Exxon is investing $17 billion over a six-year span through 2027 in
lower carbon emissions technologies such as carbon capture and
sequestration and hydrogen. The company says these two technologies,
currently not commercial, are a significant promise for
hard-to-decarbonize sectors in IPCC Lower 2°C scenarios.<br>
<br>
Most of the capital is directed to reducing carbon emissions of its
operations and of third parties. Unlike its European peers, Exxon
has stayed away from consolidated renewable sources such as wind and
solar power. It expects wind and solar to provide 11% of the world’s
energy supply in 2050, five times today’s contribution.<br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-projects-oil-gas-be-54-worlds-energy-needs-2050-2023-08-28/">https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-projects-oil-gas-be-54-worlds-energy-needs-2050-2023-08-28/</a></font><br>
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<font face="Calibri"> </font> <font face="Calibri"><i>[ Baby
steps as Bill Gates discovers non-meat foods ] </i><br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b>Bill Gates: This is the major
contributor to climate change that people are ‘probably least
aware of’—It’s ‘a challenge’</b><br>
Updated Wed, Aug 30 2023<br>
Tom Huddleston Jr.<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Bill Gates has spent years, and billions of
dollars, working to combat climate change. <br>
<br>
The billionaire’s foundation has invested vast sums in various
climate tech solutions while regularly raising the alarm about the
leading contributors to climate change, like the greenhouse gas
emissions stemming from major energy and manufacturing companies
burning fossil fuels at prodigious rates. <br>
<br>
But, according to Gates, most people are still unaware of the role
played by one of the biggest contributors to climate change:
agriculture, specifically methane emissions from livestock and
fertilizers.<br>
<br>
“Of all the climate areas, the one that people are probably least
aware of is all the fertilizer and cows, and that’s a challenge,”
Gates recently said on the latest episode of his podcast,
“Unconfuse Me.”<br>
<br>
The topic came up because Gates was in conversation with musician
and director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who, like Gates, also
happens to be an early investor in several plant-based food
startups, such as Impossible and NotCo.<br>
<br>
Thompson, who is from Philadelphia, even recently partnered with
Impossible to create a plant-based cheesesteak that counts former
president Barack Obama as a fan, he told Gates.<br>
<br>
Thompson told Gates he was won over by plant-based foods’ ability
to mimic the taste of real meat, among other products: “Something
told me plant-based is going to be the future … and I want to be
the person that plants the seed,” he said.<br>
<br>
While plant-based foods have won support from those looking for
alternatives to products made from animals, Gates said that he
started backing plant-based food ventures because of their
potential to combat climate change. <br>
<br>
“I came to it more from that climate angle,” he said.<br>
<br>
Gates has pointed out in the past that the agricultural industry
contributes roughly 24% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions,
with much of that stemming from methane emissions from livestock
and fertilizer used to cultivate crops, according to data from the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.<br>
<br>
In fact, if cattle “were a country,” Gates wrote in 2018, “they
would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases [in the
world].” <br>
<br>
In his 2021 book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” Gates wrote
that effectively combating climate change will take people being
willing to commit to new ideas, like switching to electric cars
and synthetic meats.<br>
<br>
That same year, Gates argued that wealthy countries that have the
resources to do so “should move to 100% synthetic beef” in order
to meaningfully reduce global emissions from livestock, he told
the MIT Technology Review.<br>
<br>
“You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is
they’re going to make it taste even better over time,” he said at
the time. “Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that
you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation
to totally shift the demand.”<br>
<br>
Plant-based meat sales still represent just a small percentage of
the total meat market, and even Gates admits it will be difficult
to convince enough people to stop eating real meat to make a
significant difference.<br>
<br>
One issue is that the still relatively new products are currently
more expensive than real meats. Still, Gates has a positive
outlook that plant-based meat companies will continue to improve
their products, and reduce their costs, helping them to eventually
become more popular.<br>
<br>
That’s why Gates and his foundation have financially backed
plant-based and lab-grown meat startups such as Impossible, Beyond
Meat and Upside Foods. He’s also backed Neutral, a carbon-neutral
food startup. Speaking to Thompson about the plant-based meat
startups, like Impossible, Gates said that “they’re doing well,
but a lot of people want him to make [the product] even slightly
better.” <br>
<br>
“They have a good roadmap, so I’m optimistic,” he said.<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/29/bill-gates-climate-change-cause-people-are-least-aware-of.html">https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/29/bill-gates-climate-change-cause-people-are-least-aware-of.html</a><br>
</font>
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<font face="Calibri"><i> [ Childbirth should be carefully
considered, while parenting is greatly encouraged </i></font><font
face="Calibri"><i>at any time</i></font><font face="Calibri"><i> ]</i></font><br>
<b>Having a Kid at the End of the World</b><br>
By Amil Niazi, columnist on intersection of work and motherhood. <br>
AUG. 31, 2023<br>
From the moment I had a sense of the world, I had a sense that it
was finite and we were destroying it. I learned about acid rain
sometime during third grade. The idea of flesh-burning
precipitation, coupled with a hole in the ozone layer that was going
to destroy the planet and all of my favorite animals, used to make
me itchy with stress. I remember begging my parents, who had very
little disposable income, to become paying members of the World
Wildlife Fund to save the whales. I talked about chlorofluorocarbons
like I was a paid expert, afraid of stepping out into a storm for
fear of melting. I was convinced the world was ending, and none of
us, my friends and I, would live to see adulthood because of it.<br>
<br>
Yet when I first started trying to have a kid eight years ago, I
didn’t think about climate or the planet; I thought only about the
desire for a baby, about what it would mean to me and my husband to
bring that person into our world. But, in the years since and now
expecting my third, it’s become harder not to look at my kids
without being acutely aware of how smoky and scary and fucked
everything is.<br>
There are always intangibles in future family-planning that you
can’t fully account for — Will I be mature enough? Will I make
enough money? What about my career? — so instead require the kind of
personal leaps of faith most of us are capable of imagining and
making. But if you’re 40 years old or younger, you’ve been told your
whole life that the environment is collapsing and nobody who has the
power to stop the collapse has done a damn thing about it. Most of
us have no reason to believe the future we were promised has ever
existed, so for anyone thinking about their first or another kid
now, imagining a future for them at all makes that leap harder and
harder to make.<br>
And now as we close out a summer plagued by wildfires that have
devastated huge swaths of Hawaii, Greece, and Canada’s north and
Pacific Northwest, the future I’ve feared since I was a child is
indisputably here and it’s terrifying. As I write this, I’m visiting
my dad back home in Vancouver, and smoke from wildfires to the east
has made even the air down by the coast where he lives difficult to
breathe.<br>
<br>
So, should I have a baby even though the world is burning? My
knee-jerk response to the question has always been defensive. I know
the perception is that it’s selfish to even think about it. But,
like the whales and the ozone layer, how did something somebody else
broke become my problem to fix?<br>
<br>
When I put this question out to people on Twitter and Instagram, the
response was overwhelming. I got long emails from over 50 strangers,
men and women who are scared, anxious, hopeful, optimistic, who have
kids and fear for their future, who won’t have kids so they don’t
have to, and who don’t know how they can possibly make a decision
like this at a time like this.<br>
On days when Emily Cosbey, who lives in Buffalo and has a 1-year old
son, thinks about the state of the world, she “shuts down.” “I cry,
uncontrollably, thinking about the future that he belongs to,” she
writes. “The future that I am setting him up for, but all I can see
is the ugliness.” Meg Z., a 28-year-old living in New York City,
knows that she wants kids one day and she has “a partner who is
supportive and silly and kind and would love to see him be a father
to our children,” but deciding whether or not to actually have one
is paralyzing. “I am racked with such gnarly anxiety that I don’t
know how I, personally, could bear bringing someone into this
world,” she writes. Nadia Mike, an Inuk mother from Nunavut in the
north of Canada, has three kids who have already confronted the
destructive change that haunts their futures. “I have a 16-, 11-,
and 5 year-old, and it’s so sad to see the world deteriorating right
before our eyes and to try to explain that it’s fucked up, but also
try to hold promise for them,” she says. Her own brother had to flee
Yellowknife earlier this month after fires forced thousands from
their homes.<br>
<br>
Since the start of summer, the anxieties and concerns raised in the
letters that Emily, Meg, Nadia, and so many others wrote to me have
been in my mind, too. In May, I found out I was pregnant again. In
June, the air in Toronto where I live was considered some of the
worst in the world because of wildfires 336 miles away in Montreal.
Maybe I could pretend even six years ago with my first that the
climate in Toronto wasn’t so vulnerable, telling myself we were safe
or that something would come along to fix it. Now, suddenly faced
with Canada’s first 104-degree summer day in history and air so
thick with smoke I could barely breathe no matter where I went,
well, I can’t exactly ignore the state of the world for this new
one. My entire pregnancy has been punctuated and defined by whether
or not it was safe enough for me to even be outside, let alone allow
my kids to play out there. Where would I find my hope?<br>
<br>
Reporter Gina Rushton has a book coming out on this subject, <u>The
Parenthood Dilemma: Procreation in the Age of Uncertainty.</u> She
started writing the book in the aftermath of Australia’s massive
bushfires in late 2019–early 2020. Those fires burned through 60
million acres, decimating forests and animal populations. Months
later, Rushton spoke to a doctor in a region razed by fires who
described the placentas of her pregnant patients as “gray and grainy
like a pack-a-day smoker.” She found hope speaking with climate
scientists who had chosen to have kids. “Documenting the truth,
showing up, making noise, taking on politicians — that consistent
fight for their children’s futures seemed to make parenthood more
not less tenable,” she told me over email.<br>
<br>
I started thinking a lot about my own parents this summer — refugees
who fled poverty, violence, and discrimination to dream of something
bigger and better for themselves in Canada. They had no money, no
tangible vision of a future when they had my two sisters and I, and
yet they built their optimism around us. People like them have had
children in the face of far greater hardships and shakier futures
than I could ever imagine. Jade Sasser, the host of the podcast <u>Climate
Anxiety and the Kid Question</u> and author of an upcoming book
with the same title, says “women of color are significantly more
likely to feel traumatized by climate impacts and for those
traumatized feelings to have a direct impact on the number of
children they plan to have.”<br>
So how do I square all this with the decision to bring another life
into this world? Having kids has shown me that parenting itself is
an act of optimism, a willingness to believe that the world, your
kids, and you, will be better tomorrow than you are today. People
have had kids in the midst of wars and plagues, doing it all on
sheer hope.<br>
<br>
Is it not my responsibility to leave this world in a better place
than I found it? For me, the best way to do that is to raise people
who will shepherd it in a way that’s more thoughtful, empathetic,
and careful than the ones who came before them. I teach my kids
about the fragile nature of this planet, of how much responsibility
we have living here, to protect it and nurture it, not just for
them, but for all of us. That feels tangible and real and possible.
As the climate scientists above told Gina Rushton, these kids make
fighting for something better seem necessary and inevitable.<br>
<br>
I don’t blame anyone for being scared; I’m scared too. There are a
million ways for the world to end, but also just as many ways to
save it.<br>
<br>
If that’s all I believe in for now, that’s enough.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.thecut.com/2023/08/having-a-baby-question-climate-change-crisis.html">https://www.thecut.com/2023/08/having-a-baby-question-climate-change-crisis.html</a><br>
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<i><font face="Calibri">[ And extreme heat at Texas Prisons makes it
difficult to hire guards ]<br>
</font></i><font face="Calibri"><b>As the death toll in stifling
Texas prisons climbs, congressional Democrats ask for
investigation</b><br>
Most Texas prisons lack air conditioning. At least 41 prisoners
have died of heart-related or undetermined causes since the
unrelenting heat wave began.<br>
BY JOLIE MCCULLOUGH<br>
AUG. 21, 2023</font><i><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></i><font face="Calibri">At least 41 people have died in
stifling, uncooled prisons of either heart-related or unknown
causes during Texas’ relentless and record-breaking heat wave this
summer, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.<br>
<br>
Relatives of those who died and prison rights advocates insist at
least some of those deaths were caused by the heat. More than a
dozen of the prisoners were in their 20s or 30s, with at least
four people 35 and under reportedly dying of cardiac arrest or
heart failure. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice says no
prisoner has died from the brutal heat in its facilities since
2012, around the time the agency began being bombarded with
wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits over the heat...<br>
</font><font face="Calibri">- -</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">More than two-thirds of Texas’ 100 prisons
don’t have air conditioning in most living areas inside the
concrete and steel buildings where officers and prisoners work and
live. With little to no ventilation and temperatures routinely
soaring into the triple digits outside, the thermometer reading
often rises even higher inside the prisons.<br>
<br>
Since June, at least a dozen prisoners have died from reported
cardiac arrest or heart failure in uncooled prisons on days when
the regions’ outdoor heat indices were above 100 degrees,
according to a Texas Tribune analysis of prison death reports and
weather data. At least another 29 have died of what are still
unknown causes pending autopsy results.<br>
<br>
The death count is likely higher, as prisons have 30 days to
report a prisoner’s death to the state...<br>
- -<br>
TDCJ has been chronically understaffed for years, and officer
unions often point to the debilitating heat as a major reason
employees leave.<br>
<br>
In the congressional letter, the Democrats noted that the Texas
Legislature has rejected attempts to put money directly toward air
conditioning its prisons, despite increasingly hot summers and a
surplus in the state budget this year...</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">- -</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">“State legislators prevail with the mindset
that allowing inmates to suffer from excessive heat is
appropriately ‘tough on crime,’” the representatives said,
concluding “the problem of prison conditions demands serious
attention by Congress, and we hope that you will join us in this
critical endeavor.”<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/21/texas-prison-heat-deaths/">https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/21/texas-prison-heat-deaths/</a><br>
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<i><font face="Calibri">[ Big money innovation and </font></i><i><font
face="Calibri">Techno-Fides </font></i><i><font face="Calibri">
( faith in technology) ]<br>
</font></i><font face="Calibri"><b>The Big Myth About “Free”
Markets That Justified History’s Greatest Heist</b><br>
A recent book details how the top 10 percent stole $47 trillion
via intellectual warfare.</font><i><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></i> Jon Schwarz<br>
August 4 2023,<br>
THE BANK ROBBER John Dillinger is one of history’s most famous
thieves, absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million.
You’d think that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7
million separate crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right?
But you would be wrong.<br>
<br>
In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica,
California, released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in
Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of
America’s establishment. In the decades following its founding after
World War II, it was largely funded by and served the needs of the
military-industrial complex. Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND
when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which he had access to because
RAND possessed several copies.<br>
<br>
Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might
be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It
examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained
at its 1975 level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom
90 percent of Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another
way, how much additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during
this time, thanks to increased income equality?<br>
<br>
If you have a butt, you should hold onto it, because the answer is
47 TRILLION DOLLARS.<br>
<br>
This is a number so large that it surpasses human understanding.
There are only a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way; $47
trillion is about twice the size of the annual U.S. gross domestic
product.<br>
<br>
This raises an obvious question. Traditionally, this kind of upward
concentration of wealth has required mass slaughter. How did
America’s elites pull this off without needing to mow thousands of
us down in the streets?<br>
<br>
The answer can be found in the new book<u> “The Big Myth: How
American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free
Market.”</u> It was written by Naomi Oreskes, a history of science
professor at Harvard, and Erik M. Conway, a historian at Caltech’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who previously collaborated on “Merchants
of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues
From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”<br>
<br>
As Oreskes and Conway explain, “The Big Myth” grew out of their
previous book. While writing “<u>Merchants of Doubt</u>,” they
discovered that the groundwork of global warming denialism had been
laid in the 1980s by prominent scientists who understood the reality
of the situation quite well. However, these scientists were
convinced believers in what Oreskes and Conway call “market
fundamentalism” (borrowing from George Soros, one of market
fundamentalism’s loudest critics). This is a system of belief that
holds that political and economic freedom are indivisible. They
quote the physicist Fred Singer, who wrote that “if we do not
carefully delineate the government’s role in regulating … dangers
there is essentially no limit to how much government can ultimately
control our lives.” <br>
<br>
In other words, government interventions in the economy — such as
laws removing lead from gas, carbon taxes, or mandated cooling-off
breaks for people working in 100-degree heat — not only make us all
poorer, but also put us on the road to Stalinist tyranny. Hence it’s
crucial to head them all off at the pass, even if that requires a
vast misrepresentation of observable fact.<br>
This worldview is such incoherent drivel that it’s hard to believe
anyone with a functioning brain stem can buy into it. Meanwhile,
market fundamentalists are oddly unconcerned with government
intervention that’s profitable for large corporations. If you’re an
entrepreneur who boldly tries to manufacture and sell any of the
pharmaceutical industry’s patented products in a free market, you
will quickly encounter the suffocating hand of the administrative
state. Yet there are no Wall Street Journal op-eds decrying this
injustice. (This doesn’t mean there’s no justifiable rationale for
patents, but that there are rationales for other government
regulations too.)<br>
<br>
There’s also the reality that markets are a human creation, not a
phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever
came along. And since markets are created by us, it is legitimate
and within our power to alter them to better serve our needs.<br>
<br>
Finally, there’s the historical fact that no country has ever gone
communist gradually, starting with minimum wage laws and ending up
with gulags. Rather, it happened in various fell swoops in places
with glaring injustices and vicious capitalistic inequality, and
even then generally has required contemporary wars. As the renowned
Soviet expert George Kennan put it in 1946, “communism is like
malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.” Therefore,
Kennan believed, “every courageous and incisive measure to solve
internal problems of our own society” was a victory over communism.<br>
This equanimity about using democratic power for the common good was
common among U.S. potentates in the decades following World War II.
Averell Harriman, the son of a 19th-century robber baron who later
became secretary of commerce and governor of New York, believed that
“Our social and economic system is working perhaps toward Swedish
socialist concepts but not toward Soviet Communism. The government
in Sweden has overcome poverty, achieved decent housing and medical
services for all, but Sweden has in no way compromised the principle
of representative government and concern for civil liberties.”<br>
<br>
The story of how we got from there to here is shocking even if you
consider yourself a wised-up malcontent, and “The Big Myth” tells it
in granular detail. It’s a sweeping tale of what must be one of the
most successful propaganda campaigns ever, one that transformed the
intuitive common sense — what everyone “knows” without thinking
about it — of both American elites and regular people. <br>
<br>
You know the drill. Lowering taxes on billionaires will unleash
their wondrous creativity and make us all richer in the long run.
Minimum wage laws make regular people worse off and must stop going
up. (Incredibly enough, the federal minimum wage has not increased
in real terms since 1968 and, adjusted for inflation, is now worth
less than in 1950.) Stultifying environmental regulations are the
reason your boss can’t give you a raise. Social Security was a
mistake and is destined for extinction. <br>
The funniest part is that this indoctrination into the glories of
the “free” market could never have happened via free markets.
Rather, as Oreskes and Conway illustrate, it required enormous
subsidies from corporate America, much of it going to tenured
professors working at nonprofit universities. <br>
<br>
The book is an incredible work of scholarship, and every page has at
least one sparkling, fascinating fact. Adam Smith’s 1776 book “<u>The
Wealth of Nation</u>” is now seen as the key text proving the
virtues (economic and political) of unregulated capitalism. This is
not true at all: Smith argues that bank regulation is crucial; that
workers should unionize; that businesspeople have often “deceived
and oppressed” the public; and that any political proposal they make
should be viewed with the utmost suspicion. George Stigler, a
prominent economist at the University of Chicago and colleague of
Milton Friedman, produced an edition of “The Wealth of Nations” that
dealt with Smith’s inconvenient views by quietly excising many of
them.<br>
<br>
Also striking: Corporate funders realized that another book central
to their cause, <u>“The Road to Serfdom”</u> by Friedrich von
Hayek, was just too long and complicated for most people to get
through it. So they paid for a simplified version that appeared in
Reader’s Digest in the 1950s, where it found a devoted reader in
Ronald Reagan.<br>
And there is just so, so much more. It’s all enough to make you
paranoid about what other thoughts were put in your head on purpose
by people without your best interests at heart. The most important
lesson of “The Big Myth” is a meta one. They write convincingly,
“Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and
promoted by people and institutions. [This] is the history of the
construction of a myth.”<br>
<br>
Speaking of, the RAND study was funded by the Fair Work Center in
Seattle, which in turn is largely funded by the foundation of Nick
Hanauer. Indeed, the question the paper answers was itself thought
up partly by Hanauer, who’s a venture capitalist and early investor
in Amazon — but one has with views much more in tune with the views
of 1950s U.S. elites. Preposterous myths can be successfully
promulgated with huge gobs of cash, but even getting the truth out
there takes a lot of money.<br>
Update: August 7, 2023<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://theintercept.com/2023/08/04/big-myth-book-free-market-oreskes-conway/">https://theintercept.com/2023/08/04/big-myth-book-free-market-oreskes-conway/</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[ reminding us that we live on a globe shaped planet ]<br>
<b>Africa's Fragile States Are Greatest Climate Change Casualties </b><br>
International partners must support the continent’s most vulnerable
countries to adapt to extreme weather—or spillovers could become
more disruptive<br>
Jihad Azour, Abebe Aemro Selassie<br>
August 30, 2023<br>
Climate change poses grave threats to countries across Africa—but
especially fragile and conflict-affected states. As the continent’s
leaders converge on Kenya for next week’s African Climate Action
Summit, it is vital that they come up with solutions to support
these vulnerable countries.<br>
<br>
From the Central African Republic to Somalia and Sudan, fragile
states suffer more from floods, droughts, storms and other
climate-related shocks than other countries, when they have
contributed the least to climate change. Each year, three times more
people are affected by natural disasters in fragile states than in
other countries. Disasters in fragile states displace more than
twice the share of the population in other countries.<br>
<br>
And temperatures in fragile states are already higher than in other
countries because of their geographical location. By 2040, fragile
states could face 61 days a year of temperatures above 35 degrees
Celsius on average—four times more than other countries. Extreme
heat, along with the more frequent extreme weather events that come
with it, will endanger human health and hurt productivity and jobs
in key sectors such as agriculture and construction.<br>
A new IMF paper finds evidence that climate change indeed inflicts
more lasting macroeconomic costs in fragile countries. Cumulative
losses in gross domestic product reach about 4 percent in fragile
states three years after extreme weather events. That compares with
around 1 percent in other countries. Droughts in fragile states are
expected to cut about 0.2 percentage points from their per-capita
GDP growth every year. This means that incomes in fragile states
will be falling further behind those in other countries.<br>
<br>
The more harmful effect of climate events in fragile states is not
only because of their geographical location in hotter parts of the
planet, but also because of conflict, dependence on rainfed
agriculture, and lower capacity to manage risks.<br>
<br>
Conflict undermines the capacity of fragile states to manage climate
risks. For example, in Somalia, the areas most severely affected by
food insecurity and hunger due to the prolonged drought in 2021-22
were under the control of terrorist groups that thwarted delivery of
humanitarian assistance.<br>
<br>
<b>Conflict and hunger</b><br>
Climate shocks also worsen underlying fragilities, such as conflict
and hunger, further exacerbating the effect they have on the economy
and people’s wellbeing. Our estimates indicate that in a high
emissions scenario, and all else equal, deaths from conflict as a
share of the population could increase by close to 10 percent in
fragile countries by 2060. Climate change would also push an
additional 50 million people in fragile states into hunger by 2060.<br>
<br>
The higher losses from climate events also reflect the dependence of
fragile states on rainfed agriculture. Agriculture represents close
to one-quarter of economic output in fragile states, but only 3
percent of cultivated areas are irrigated with canals, reservoirs,
and the like. Rainfed farms are especially vulnerable to droughts
and floods. Where irrigation infrastructure does exist, it is often
poorly designed, left to crumble, or damaged by conflict.<br>
<br>
In central Mali, for example, floods along the Niger river are
partly caused by farmers fleeing fighting and drainage ditches
falling into disrepair. Sudan’s Gezira irrigation scheme once
covered 8,000 square kilometers of fecund farmland but has shrunk to
less than half that area owing to poor maintenance.<br>
<br>
Finally, the higher losses from climate shocks are also because of
the lack of financial means. With the financing needed for climate
adaptation well beyond what fragile and conflict-affected countries
can afford on their own, sizable and sustained support from
international development partners—both concessional financing and
capacity development—is urgent to avoid worsening hunger and
conflict that can fuel forced displacement and migration.<br>
<br>
<b>Policy considerations</b><br>
For policymakers in these countries, critical interventions include
policies to facilitate immediate response to climate shocks, such as
building buffers through more domestic revenues, lower public debt
and deficits, and higher international reserves. The paper indeed
finds that fragile countries with such buffers see a faster recovery
from extreme weather events. Strengthening social safety nets and
leveraging insurance schemes are also key to financing recovery in
the case of catastrophic events. In addition, fragile countries need
to implement policies to build climate resilience over time,
including scaling up climate-resilient infrastructure investments.<br>
<br>
The IMF is stepping up support to fragile states dealing with
climate challenges through carefully designed policy advice,
financial assistance, and capacity development. Our strategy
promotes a deeper understanding of the drivers of fragility,
tailoring of programs, scaling up capacity development, and
synergies with other partners that work in these countries. We are
also providing financial support through standard facilities,
emergency financing and, more recently, our new Resilience and
Sustainability Facility.<br>
<br>
These efforts by the IMF and other ongoing initiatives by
international partners are still a drop in the big effort needed
across the entire international community to protect the most
vulnerable. The Africa Climate Summit could be a step forward
towards generating effective solutions for mitigating the
devastating impact of natural disasters and droughts on the
continent’s people and economies.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/30/africas-fragile-states-are-greatest-climate-change-casualties">https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/30/africas-fragile-states-are-greatest-climate-change-casualties</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><font face="Calibri"> </font></p>
<font face="Calibri"> <i>[ The news archive - We knew about
hurricanes from the late, great climate scientist Stephen
Schneider - video is 5 mins and is timelessly entertaining ]</i><br>
<font size="+2"><i><b>September 2, 2005 </b></i></font> <br>
September 2, 2005: Climate scientist Stephen Schneider appears on
"Real Time with Bill Maher" to discuss climate change's role in
Hurricane Katrina.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/H9mWZZ2U6EQ">http://youtu.be/H9mWZZ2U6EQ</a><br>
<br>
<br>
</font>
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