Category: Uncategorized

Apologies, it's unlikely that I can bring you a COP26 news review tonight due to technical issues. I am extremely low-budget - I'm working on a shoestring and that string has broken tonight. I'm very glad that I have a very low impact on the climate as a consequence of being so poor. No private jets for me and I very rarely drive (a friend's car). I hope to continue the COP26 news reviews asap. In the meantime, I suggest you use some search enginess.

Love this world, lets do all we possibly can to protect her, all her people and all her diverse nature.

dizzy XXX

Fascism is about authoritarian rule and it is regarded as opposed to democracy.

So Fascism is about authoritarianiam, following a strong leader. I don’t think that Boris can do that but Priti is going for it.

5.40 But then Priti is Murdoch (Press baron old fart hopefully dying soon :)’s choice little.

I’ve got it – little Fascist tool. Hiya Ruppie, nice to have your attention. Have a good afterlife ;)

Hey Ruppie, I’ve said it before, but hope you die soon. Best wishes but you should know that you’ve always been a total cnut. I want you to know that when you die ;)

You can’t say that to family, can you? [ed: He might hear ;)

ed: Fascism is about people submitting to the authority of some twat with a loud mouth, uniforms, ribbons, banners and shiny buttons. [ed: They can do it without the shiny buttons and all that …]

[Fascism can do without the buttons. It is about submission to and an acceptance of a right-wing ideology where there is an acceptance and acquiesence of a corrupt right-wing ideology, an unquestioning acceptance of a corrupt, perverse authority]. There’s also the issue of a totally flaccid non-opposition.

or crap hair

I don’t think that crap hair does it actually

and Priti I think you need a proper Mesamorph body to be respected as a proper Fascist really sorry.

Oh dear :)

Bye PP, C’est la vie.

You know this, don’t you? Nobody except one policeman or excessive s***ers (suffering from !) are allowed to comment

So, if I was to do a serious piece about Climate ahead of COP26 – nobody would be allowed to comment on it.

ed: 21?

Listen please while I’ve got your attention. You don’t have to agree with me but …

Ciimate? Let me phrase this differently. Survival.

C’mon then Priti Fascist, comments are allowed. Please notice that I didn’t ask Fascist.

ed: new thread about what it means be a Fascist

20th anniversary of 911, insane politicians who should be serving long prison terms appearing in the corporate media, 3-character intelligence agencies promoting the official conspiracy-theory, fake-manufactured terrorism praised relentlessly, the last 20 years of Neo-Con dictated BS wars promoted.

It should be clear to any reasonably intelligent person that we were fed BS to pursue a pre-determined Neo-Con agenda … which means so many people willing to accept and promote tyranny over democracy.

Nick Bernards, University of Warwick

The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report underscored the dire state of the climate crisis, concluding that “immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” are needed to limit global warming even to 1.5°C or 2°C.

The report renewed calls for urgent action and an end to “dithering” by politicians. These echo longstanding arguments which bemoan the lack of “political will” to tackle climate change.

The world absolutely needs to reduce or eliminate emissions, and fast. But while many of the problems inhibiting effective climate action are political, they aren’t really about politicians failing to do anything. There has actually been plenty of climate action over the last couple of decades. So far, however, it’s largely failed.

Climate action for whom?

Different kinds of climate action have different costs and benefits for different people. Because of this, choices about what courses of action to pursue are profoundly shaped by relations of power.

We live in a world marked by severe disparities of wealth and power within and between countries, many of which are rooted in longer histories of colonialism and exploitation. These disparities have often allowed powerful companies in sectors like finance and energy to dictate the course of climate action. This has made it very difficult to pursue measures that might threaten their interests, but which would dramatically reduce emissions – like banning fossil fuel exploration.

Instead, we’ve had a slew of measures to address climate change which rely on making emissions reductions profitable. But the quickest ways to reduce emissions aren’t always the most profitable. And what is profitable for some can be harmful for less powerful people and communities.

Read more: IPCC report: how to make global emissions peak and fall – and what’s stopping us

One example is carbon credits – permits that allow firms and governments to meet emissions targets and offset their pollution by funding projects that reduce emissions elsewhere, mainly in developing countries. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) organised by the UN was meant to help reduce emissions this way. As agreed in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the CDM was supposed to mobilise investment to install renewable energy, retrofit factories and restore habitats.

While a large market developed for carbon offsets, it failed to substantially reduce emissions. A major reason for this was its reliance on profit-seeking private investors. Many of the projects funded through the CDM were probably profitable on their own – the distribution of CDM credits very closely mirrors patterns of private foreign investment in developing countries, with the vast majority funding projects in China and India.

Only a narrow range of possible emissions reduction projects, which either delivered their own revenue or provided cost savings for existing businesses, were financed as a result. But even these efforts were hampered by the push to create secondary markets for carbon credits, in which banks and financial institutions speculated on the price of credits. This was supposed to create more accurate prices, but instead, it made them more volatile, inhibiting new projects, as it became hard to predict how much the carbon credits they generated were worth.

Carbon trading also privileged the interests of private investors over those of communities near CDM-funded projects. Windfarms built in southern Mexico and financed through the CDM, for instance, privatised communal land, displacing indigenous communities.

Not-so-sustainable energy

Another major plank of climate action so far has been incentivising the adoption of new technologies with lower emissions. Governments in developed countries have offered subsidies for people to buy electric cars, or increased funding for research and development of clean energy technology.

It is tempting to think public and private investment in renewable energy might allow governments, businesses and civil society to pull together and fight climate change. But there remain significant obstacles. For one, many of the major energy firms investing in wind and solar power, like Shell and British Petroleum, also supply oil and gas. As long as producing fossil fuels remains profitable, these firms will resist efforts to stop selling them.

More importantly, shifting to fully renewable energy sources would require mineral extraction on a truly massive scale to supply the materials for batteries, wiring and other components of solar panels and wind turbines. Recent estimates suggest that meeting current global energy demand with 100% renewable energy would take more cobalt, lithium, and nickel than is known to exist on earth.

A scramble for these minerals is already underway. Demand for batteries in phones, laptops, and electric cars has triggered a rush to establish industrial mines in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the majority of the world’s known reserves of cobalt are found.

Foreign-owned industrial mines employ very few Congolese workers and the profits largely accumulate abroad. Some communities have been removed to make way for mining operations. Small-scale mining by local people, often operating without permits or formal mineral rights and using their own tools, has become the main means by which cobalt has benefited local livelihoods.

But according to media and activist reports, child labour is rife in these smaller mines. Meanwhile, the cobalt boom has been linked to landslides, river pollution, and deforestation, and locals have suffered widespread exposure to toxic mining dust in the air and in food and drinking water.

Some firms, including manufacturers of cars and electronics, as well as financial institutions involved in trading cobalt, have tried to minimise the negative effects of mining. Most of these programmes focus on tackling child labour, by certifying that cobalt was extracted from industrial mines rather than from the small-scale mines where most of the problem exists. But replacing smaller mines with industrial-scale ones wouldn’t necessarily benefit mining communities.

Climate action so far has failed to confront the interests of powerful businesses and governments, while passing costs on to vulnerable people and places which have contributed very little to the climate crisis. If we want results, we may need to go beyond simply demanding action and instead focus on changing the way the global economy is organised and governed.

Nick Bernards, Associate Professor of Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.