CLIMATE CRISIS
From Logic Magazine: Despite the climate crisis, Big Oil is doubling down on fossil fuels. At over 30 billion barrels of crude oil a year, production has never been higher. Now, leading oil companies are forging a lucrative partnership with tech giants like Microsoft, building a new carbon cloud that just might kill us all….
Read More about Oil is the new data: How Big Tech and Big Oil collaborate
Education/Awareness
A tribute to Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, who faces the prospect of extradition and a jail sentence in the United States for publishing confidential official documents. Here, we present a 2006 essay by Assange outlining his vision, select Wikileaks releases of secret policies related to the environment, and Mediastan, a documentary film on Wikileaks….
Read More about Truth-telling in a ‘Post-Truth’ Age: A tribute to Julian Assange and Wikileaks
Bookshelf
From Global Research: Fundamentally, this book is a call to action. Author Robert J. Burrowes uncovers the critical role played by the global power elite in creating our present predicament. If we cannot persuade the global power elite to respond sensibly to that predicament, or nonviolently compel it to do so, humanity’s time on Earth is indeed limited….
Read More about Giants: The Global Power Elite
CLIMATE CRISIS
Luke Darby writes: A damning UN report says we have about 12 years to prevent climate change from wreaking havoc on the world. To do that, governments need to look seriously at the forces driving it. And an honest assessment of how we got here lays the blame squarely at the feet of the 1%….
Read More about Billionaires are the leading cause of climate change
CLIMATE CRISIS
From The New Republic: Climate scientists predict deadly tropical cyclones will become rainier; that they may move more slowly and venture further into the northern hemisphere; and the hurricane season may become longer. The developed world’s emissions will be responsible for these changes. But it is the developing world that may suffer the most from it….
Read More about The less you did to cause climate change, the more likely you are to pay its price
CLIMATE CRISIS
Oil. The 20th century was shaped by it. The 21st century is moving beyond it. But who gave birth to the oil industry? What have they done with the immense wealth and power it granted them? And what are they planning to do with that power in a post-carbon world? The Corbett Report finds out….
Read More about The incredible story of how (and why) Big Oil conquered the world
ALTERNATIVES
Daniel O’Neill writes: If everyone on Earth were to lead a good life within our planet’s sustainability limits, the level of resources used to meet basic needs would have to be reduced by a factor of two to six times. These are the sobering findings of our research, recently published in the journal Nature Sustainability….
Read More about Is it possible for everyone to live a good life within our planet’s limits?
ALTERNATIVES
Richard Heinberg writes: Many problems are converging at once because society is a complex system, and the challenges we have been discussing are aspects of a systemic crisis. A useful way to frame an integrated understanding of the 21st century survival challenge is this: we humans have overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for our species….
Read More about Why we can no longer shrink from the most urgent conversation on the planet
Development/Growth
India’s income inequality in 2017 may be worse than what it was during the British Raj. According to a new paper titled ‘Indian income inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?’ penned by renowned economists Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel, India witnessed a sharp rise in the incomes of top 1 per cent post 1980s….
Read More about British Raj to Billionaire Raj: India’s inequality is now worse than in 1922
Author’s view of the situation we are facing. World leaders look at their video screens and adjust their controllers to try to make the world economy fly at ever-higher levels.
Gail Tverberg
Conflict/Dispossession
Gail Tverberg writes: World leaders manipulate the world economy like a giant video game. The object is to keep it growing, but what do they do when the economy hits limits? They could take their foot off the throttle operated by low interest-rates and more debt. Or they could “take the wings off” the economy….
Read More about Understanding the world’s economy-energy conundrum as a video game
Development/Growth
From Down to Earth: GDP does not reveal the ground truth about progress in development. The top 10% of Indians control the wealth basket while the common people—more than one billion—slide down along ‘Hunger Index’. While the government flaunts a surging economy, prevalence of hunger in India is at the “high end of serious category”….
Read More about Incredible India? GDP is growing, yet hunger getting worse
Development/Growth
The world’s top 1 percent held 45.5 percent of all household wealth in 2000. Now, they hold 50.1 percent, according to research by Credit Suisse. The Mukesh Ambani family, the only Indian family in Asia’s top 10 families, is also the richest in the continent, as its net worth rose $19 billion to $44.8 billion….
Read More about Credit Suisse report: World’s richest 1% of own half of global wealthCLIMATE CRISIS
From The Wire: The recent hurricanes have made some raise an obvious question: to what extent does global warming have a role to play? To which I would add one voiced less frequently: why should those least responsible for global warming have to constantly face its effects? And what does it bode for the future?…
Read More about In the eye of Hurricane Irma lie the fingerprints of global warming – and inequalityEconomy
Huffington Post reports: India ranks 132nd out of 152 countries on a new index that measures the commitment by a country towards reducing inequality. The index is composed of 21 data points with varying weights; including health and education, share of tax revenue in the GDP, share of tax exemptions, minimum wage and maternity benefits….
Read More about New report ranks India near the bottom of the global heap on inequalityBookshelf
From Chronicle.com: In his new book, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Stanford University professor Walter Scheidel puts forth the following thesis: that historically, it took four kinds of violent ruptures –mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics– to reduce widespread inequality….
Read More about What tames inequality? Violence and mayhem, says new bookCLIMATE CRISIS
Carbon Brief reports: A startling 22% of global CO2 emissions stem from the production of goods that are consumed in a different country. However, traditional inventories do not include emissions associated with imports. While Western countries have reduced domestic emissions recently, some of this reduction has been offset by increasing imports from countries like China….
Read More about Mapped: How the West massively outsources carbon emissions to the restConserve/Resist
From AlterNet: Last year it was eight men, then down to six, and now almost five. The world’s richest five men now own over $400 billion in wealth. On average, each man owns nearly as much as 750 million people. The super-rich are absconding with our wealth, and the plague of inequality continues to grow….
Read More about Now five men own almost as much wealth as half the world’s population
H. G. Wells' 1895 novel 'The Time Machine' depicted a future where humans split into two species
Poverty/Inequality
Best-selling author and historian Yuval Noah Harari writes: As we enter the post-industrial world, the masses are becoming redundant. Biotechnology and the rise of Artificial Intelligence may split humankind into a small class of ‘superhumans’ and a huge underclass of ‘useless’ people. Once the masses lose their economic and political power, inequality could spiral alarmingly….
Read More about Are we about to witness the most unequal societies in history?
ALTERNATIVES
Karl Marx was possibly the founder of the most appealing secular religion in modern times. On his birth anniversary I hear a call from within; I feel like paying homage to the prophet of modern times. Though I’m not a Marxist, the oceanic currents in his thinking continue to fascinate students and wanderers like me….
Read More about Avijit Pathak: I’m not a Marxist, but I’m grateful for Marx
A child labourer cries as he is rescued in a joint operation by Labour dept. and an NGO in Delhi
Reuters/Adnan Abidi
Education/Awareness
IndiaSpend reports: Nearly 46 million people live under conditions of slavery across the world, with 18 million (39%) of those in India, home to the world’s largest number of slaves, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index. They have lost their freedom by way of bonded and domestic labour and sexual slavery, among other means….
Read More about ‘India has world’s best anti-slavery laws’ (and largest number of slaves)
