The Disaffected Lib Mk. II

In the early history of humanity there were a couple of instances where our species came close to disappearing.  Yet we hung on and tens of thousands of years later we reached  a staggering one billion in number. That's usually pegged at around 1814. Lo and behold, in barely two more centuries we've grown to 8 billion. We've accompanied growth in raw numbers with considerable increases in longevity and per capita consumption. We define profligacy. There are several ways to put this. Easy come, easy go. What goes up must come down. All good things must end. You get the idea. It looks like we've burned out planet Earth. There are those among us who study this sort of thing, especially paleontologists. One of these is Henry Gee, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and editor at the journal Nature.  He says we're on the way out , the express train to extinction, sooner rather than later. Mammal species tend to come and go rather rapidly, appearing, flourishing and di...

 It's really no biggie - if you weren't in the front seat. Two men died when the Chinese Tesla clone pushed through a wall and plunged three storeys to the street below. “After the incident we immediately began to work with the public security department to find the cause of the accident,” the company said in an initial statement, stressing that it was an accident and “not caused by the vehicle itself”. Not caused by the vehicle itself.  Of course not. It was caused by gravity. But there's something else that caught my eye. Look at the bottom right corner - the guy in the yellow helmet. It sure looks like he's standing behind a tripod-mounted machine gun. What does he have in mind? Comment Reaction -  I expect, NPoV, that it's a result of battery envy. Very Freudian.

  The black robed Mullahs of the Supreme Court of Evangelistan have ruled.  They cut their teeth on dismantling affirmative action and voter rights but yesterday they moved into the big leagues. Yesterday, a reliably rightwing court, did what it was expected of them. They struck down New York's somewhat restrictive concealed-carry gun law, ruling that Americans had a general, 2nd Amendment right to pack heat. Safely on a roll they moved, just one day later, to strip American women of reproductive rights and instead transfer the power over women's bodies to those who know better. After two seismic days of such a bold display of their manhood (sorry, Amy, but you're America's judicial Stepford wife) it's hard to imagine what could be next. Why not clean up the clutter of those awkward reconstruction laws  - the 13th (abolitition), 14th (due process and equal protection) and 15th (right to vote regardless of race, colour or previous servitude) Amendments. Some 13 state...

  Clarence Thomas wrote the majority judgment. No surprise there. The Supreme Court said Thursday that Americans generally have a right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense and that a New York law requiring special need for such a permit is too restrictive. The vote was 6 to 3, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the majority and the court’s three liberals in dissent. Comment Reply -  I asked you the other day how far the US was from rock bottom. It seems to be getting close. 

 It has been some time since Chris Hedges was a happy camper.  That said, he outdid himself in his latest column, The Triumph of Death , in which the opening paragraph neatly sums up our predicament:  It is hard to be sanguine about the future. The breakdown of the ecosystem is well documented. So is the refusal of the global ruling elite to pursue measures that might mitigate the devastation. We accelerate the extraction of fossil fuels, wallow in profligate consumption, including our consumption of livestock, and make new wars as if we are gripped by a Freudian death wish. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Conquest, War, Famine and Death – gallop into the 21rst century. Meanwhile, William Rivers Pitt   chimes in with this: “Suffice it to say,” climate reporter Dahr Jamail wrote  in July of 2019, “all of us now, if we live long enough, are likely to become climate refugees at some point … whether it be from lack of food and water, rising seas, wildfire...

  Elon Musk says he would support Ron DeSantis for president of the United States. Informed of this new and powerful follower, the radical rightwing governor expressed his deep gratitude. "I'm focused on 2022," DeSantis, a Republican, said at a press conference in Madeira Beach, Florida. "But with Elon Musk what I would say is: I welcome support from African Americans. What can I say?"

  Of all the regions reeling from global warming, few equal the Barents Sea . The Barents is a shallow sea, the territorial waters of both Norway and Russia. It is rich in both fish stocks and fossil fuels.  While the Arctic is no stranger to warming, the Barents is the miner's canary. New figures show annual average temperatures in the area are rising across the year by up to 2.7C a decade, with particularly high rises in the months of autumn of up to 4C a decade. This makes the North Barents Sea and its islands the fastest warming place known on Earth. Recent years have seen temperatures far above average recorded in the Arctic , with seasoned observers describing the situation as “crazy”, “weird”, and “simply shocking”. Some climate scientists have warned the unprecedented events could signal faster and more abrupt climate breakdown. It was already known that the climate crisis was driving heating across the Arctic three times faster than the global average, but the new r...

It had to be said.   We're all going through a rough spell - soaring fuel and food costs, a mutating virus, a new and less stable Cold War, a steadily worsening and erratic climate, a breakdown of social cohesion and the rise of populism. What next? We imagine there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Somehow, sometime we'll get back to normal. Our optimism is an article of faith. The Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk warns  don't count on it . The experts mostly blame the pandemic, unsettled supply chains and great surges in demand. Don’t worry, the authorities tell us, all of this is temporary and transient. At the same time political insurrectionists, who now proliferate like rodents in our whack-a-mole culture, have blamed everything from government deficits to carbon taxes for inflation. They do so even though inflation has appeared in jurisdictions with no deficits and no carbon taxes. Pierre Poilievre , for instance, has famously accused the Bank of Canada for Canada’s...

  She's a Canadian-born Christian evangelist. She's married to an evangelist preacher. They live in Texas. Getting a picture in your mind? Katharine Hayhoe is also a leading and outspoken climate scientist. She can reconcile climate science with Christian dogma by arguing that neither her god nor yours (if you have one) is responsible for this climate crisis and the power that is destroying our environment is us. Hayhoe says we have to get past this, ' oh, they'll think of something ' mentality. The world cannot adapt its way out of the climate crisis, and counting on adaptation to limit damage is no substitute for urgently cutting greenhouse gases, a leading climate scientist has warned. Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in the US and professor at Texas Tech University, said the world was heading for dangers unseen in the 10,000 years of human civilisation, and efforts to make the world more resilient were needed but by themselves could ...

It's reached the point where it's hard work to ignore our perilous reality.  But our political leaders, bless their hearts, shun it as a vampire does the noonday sun. Jason "Dead Man Walking" Kenney went to Washington to pitch the beauty of Athabasca bitumen. Justin Trudeau, the national begging bowl in hand, is again (still) scouring the private sector for some outfit to take his personal national disaster, the Trans Mountain pipeline, off the federal books in a Potemkin village sort of way. What timing! The World Meteorological Organization just released its State of the Global Climate, 2021 .  For the humble laity it begins with an interactive look at the atmosphere, developments on land, changes in our oceans, the cryosphere (the cold bits), extreme events, risks and impacts and what we can do to preserve life on Earth. Some years ago I put together a list of the calamities facing mankind. The list included everything from the manifestations of global warming and ...

  I came across an article in The Atlantic about a highly infectious virus that has crossed the Pacific from the US to reach the writer's home, Australia. It has also reached Canada. This virus attacks the body, the body politic, democracy itself. In late 2021, as Australian cities were seeing anti-lockdown and anti-vaxxer protests against the country’s long-running pandemic restrictions and newly implemented vaccine mandates, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted “Don’t Australia my America.” As someone who has recently moved back to Sydney after covering the Trump presidency for the BBC, I have instead found myself thinking the opposite: Don’t America my Australia. The American variant of democracy is contaminating the body politic of my home. My family left the United States partly to escape its politics, so it was jolting to watch Trump banners that I was more used to seeing in Mississippi and rural Michigan being brandished on the streets of Melbourne. But the Trump paraphernalia, and cr...

  When it co mes to averting climate catastrophe there are many perilous challenges but one stands head and shoulders above the rest - the very people we elect to high office.  George Monbiot writes they're selling us and especially our young down the river. In seeking to prevent environmental breakdown, what counts above all is not the new things we do, but the old things we stop doing. Renewable power, for instance, is useful in preventing climate chaos only to the extent that it displaces fossil fuels. Unfortunately, new technologies do not always lead automatically to the destruction of old ones. Fossil fuel companies need spend just a fraction of their income on lobbying – funding politicians and their parties, buying the services of thinktanks and public relations agencies, using advertising to greenwash their credentials – to impede the energy transition and defend their investments. Fossil fuels will become  stranded assets  only when governments insist that...

  Whether you like it or not, they have you firmly in their crosshairs .  "They" are the fossil energy giants and they're planning to unleash " scores of 'carbon bomb' oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic global impacts ." ...data shows these firms are in effect placing multibillion-dollar bets against humanity halting global heating. Their huge investments in new fossil fuel production could pay off only if countries fail to rapidly slash carbon emissions, which scientists say is vital. The lure of colossal payouts in the years to come appears to be irresistible to the oil companies, despite the  world’s climate scientists stating  in February that further delay in cutting fossil fuel use would mean missing our last chance “to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”. Experts have been warning since  at least 2011  that  most of the world’s fossil fuel reserves coul...

A new report claims our oceans are losing their memory , something that may impair our ability to predict climate extremes and our ability to manage fisheries. The study is tough slogging but there's a decent summary here . The oceans that surround us are transforming. As our climate changes, the world's waters are shifting too, with abnormalities evident not only in the ocean's temperature , but also its structure , currents , and even its color . As these changes manifest, the usually stable environment of the ocean is becoming more unpredictable and erratic, and in some ways the phenomenon is akin to the ocean losing its memory, scientists suggest. "Ocean memory, the persistence of ocean conditions, is a major source of predictability in the climate system beyond weather time scales," researchers explain in a new paper led by first author and climate researcher Hui Shi from the Farallon Institute in Petaluma, California. "We show that ocean memory, as mea...

  Forget flat screen TVs and broken supply chains. How secure is the global food supply? Hint: it's not secure, not at all. If you haven't got enough to eat, biblical floods and drought and searing heat may not be your worst problems. Remember the Arab Spring a few years ago? That wasn't just about a yearning for democracy. Food shortages, soaring costs of flour and hunger were a huge factor. The House of Saud, fearing for their own future, implemented a six month supply of essential foodstuffs at no charge to the population.  In Syria, Assad favoured his own tribe, the Allowites, and left the majority Sunni population to their fate. Civil war ensued. Just two weeks ago the United Nations issued a warning that intensive, industrial agriculture was degrading global farmland at an increasing rate. Some 40 per cent of arable land is now significantly degraded resulting in steadily declining crop yields. It's unsustainable. Something has to give. Guardian enviro-scribe, Ge...