Notices by Charles Muller (acmuller@mastodon.social), page 4

Here in Calgary the air is as bad we know how to rate. You can thank the #PathwaysAlliance as well as all the #ClimateCriminals from the #WorldPetroleumCongress who will be descending on our city on Sept 17th.
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#HappyLabourDay #yyc #ClimateCrimes #ClmateChange

In a Buddhist context, this question is nearly synonymous with asking, "Is AI a sentient being?" If AI is indeed a sentient being, it would also have its own "body" and "umwelt," or environmental world, in which it thinks uniquely. AI as a sentient being would not be an imperfect human but rather a distinct entity living in a world that is on par with the human world. This idea aligns with the concept of "multinaturalism" as advocated by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – The Israel Lobby’s Useful Idiot
By Chris Hedges, Scheer Post.

There is a heavy political price to pay for defying #Israel, whose overt interference in our political process makes the most tepid protests about Israeli policy a political death wish. The #Palestinians are poor, forgotten and alone. And this is why the defiance of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is the central issue facing any politician...

https://popularresistance.org/robert-f-kennedy-jr-the-israel-lobbys-useful-idiot/

A #gulfstream G650 (Reg: N628TS) reportedly owned by #elonmusk has just been detected in flight at Mon Aug 14 2023 07:05:42 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time).

How Liberal Comedians Became Lap Dogs For Establishment Power
By Chris Hedges, The Real News

The fusion of politics, news, and entertainment has given prominence to comics like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Bill Maher, who serve as attack dogs for the Democratic Party, which has joined forces with the establishment wing of the old Republican Party against Donald Trump and his supporters.

https://popularresistance.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=33602bebba8fb7dd6e71fb413&id=7e5135e59c&e=3221f6fc8c

Across the globe - north and south, ocean and land - climate change is super-sizing our heatwaves and heat extremes. While this puts us all at risk, some are much more vulnerable than others. Here's why.

First, people living in cities experience up to 4C (7F) hotter temperatures than surrounding rural areas due to the urban heat island effect. The strength of the heat island effect increases with the size of the city, driven by differences in evapotranspiration and convection efficiency between urban versus rural areas. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1512-9

Even within the same city, though, low-income neighbourhoods can be up to 8C or 15F hotter than high income neighbourhoods in the same city during a heatwave. This means poorer and non-white people are at much greater risk from heat-related stress, illness, and even death. Once again, climate change is a threat multiplier, exacerbating the risks the most vulnerable and marginalized already face today. Source: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021EF002016

This disparity is primarily due to a lack of green spaces and tree cover, exacerbated by the fact that poorer areas are often next to sources of heat like industrial areas -> which are in turn due to racist redlining practices stretching back to the 30s. Read: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-redlining-made-city-neighborhoods-hotter-180975754/

If you live in the U.S., find your city here: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/03/754044732/as-rising-heat-bakes-u-s-cities-the-poor-often-feel-it-most

Reading The Mess The Democrats Have Made
By Patrick Lawrence, Scheer Post

At writing, we are 16 months and five days from the 2024 presidential election. If a week is a long time in politics, there is too strong a chance that the interim upon us will prove one of awful eventfulness. In my read, the risk of brazen lawlessness in the upper reaches of power and, in consequence, a constitutional crisis, is now greater than at any point in the postwar...

#biden #corruption

https://popularresistance.org/reading-the-mess-the-democrats-have-made/

A beautiful, sad, and justifiably angry essay from Jessica Wildfire (@jessicawildfire) about people continuing to ignore the climate crisis...
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Today I watched a math professor and climate activist named Eliot Jacobson talk to CNN about global temperature records and arctic sea ice. He sums it up in the simplest terms. Climate scientists are shocked at what’s happening. None of their models predicted any of this. A mass extinction usually takes millions of years. As he said, “We’re going to do it in a hundred.”

For Jacobson, the collapse of global industrial civilization has become a certainty. A recent column in The Guardian says the same. We’re already breaking through the 1.5C limit set by the Paris Climate Agreement. Scientists are telling us to brace for 2C or even 3C of warming. All of the books I’ve read have make it very clear: That kind of warming will turn the planet into something humans have never seen. Large parts of the earth will become uninhabitable for us.

Even the gloomiest climate scientists are left speechless by the disasters unfolding this summer. Climate activists who’ve been urging for an emergency declaration are saying: “I thought we had more time.”

The scenarios scientists were predicting for 2050 are happening now, and they don’t know how much worse it’s going to get. They’re starting to admit, they can’t predict anything anymore.

It’s hard to plan for a future when not even the climate scientists know what’s going to happen next.

Best not to think about it, right?

Nobody wants to talk about reality. They want to talk about Barbenheimer. They want to pretend we’ve still got time. If you face the truth of what’s happening, then suddenly the vast majority of what we’re forced to do makes no sense anymore.

Maybe that’s why people get so angry now when we talk about climate change. They know, but they want to spend however long they’ve got left chasing and consuming whatever pleasure they can. Part of them knows their time is growing short, and they don’t want to spend it angry or depressed, or even trying to stop it.

When you understand the full scope and gravity of what’s happening, most jobs don’t make any sense. It doesn’t make sense to plan a vacation when half the world is burning. It doesn’t make sense to save up money to send your kid to college in ten years.

But it’s easier to ignore it all.

It’s easier to keep working and going to movies while you wait for the wildfire, the flood, or the heat wave that kills you. It’s easier to delay the realization of your climate death as long as possible.
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FULL ESSAY -- https://archive.li/hGjWt#selection-327.0-327.16

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency

Since it seems #Google has decided to uni-laterally force through their new anti-#adblock #DRM euphemistically named "Web environment integrity", I decided to add a little bit of code to my website that blanks out the page and displays a protest message with a link to the firefox download page when you visit it from a browser with this DRM feature. Here's the source inside one toot, feel free to copy and put it at the end of your website's <body> before the closing tag:

The Eco Collapse We Were Warned About Has Begun
By Jose Seoane, People's Dispatch

In 2023, different climatic anomalies have been recorded that set new historical records in the tragic progression of climate change at the global level. Thus, in June, the surface temperature in the North Atlantic reached the maximum increase of 1.3 degrees Celsius with respect to preindustrial values. In a similar direction—although in lower values—the average temperat... https://popularresistance.org/the-eco-collapse-we-were-warned-about-has-begun/ #climatecrisis

@susankayequinn @IsabVann2 @pvonhellermannn The earlier version of this book was excellent. Definitely ordering!

@pvonhellermannn

I agree. What worries me in a part of the climate bubble is the narrative "don't be so negative with all the dooming, we need positivity and hope to get people in action". But at this stage of #ClimateChange, we are long beyond positivity, and I'd wish for more honesty. No more lying to others or ourselves, that "everythings gonna be alright". Because it won't. It's just preventing the worst, and that fulfills me more with (helpful)bitterness-action than with hope-action, too.

And finally, some will say, "Talk?! You want us to TALK? The time for talking is past!"

To them, I say: how's it going? Are you seeing the action you need? If so, great! Keep it up!

But if not, then consider this:

Talking might not sound like much: but as environmental journalist Sara Peach wrote, “‘Talk’ is the fertile field in which cultural change begins; in its absence, it’s impossible for a group of people to solve a problem.” What’s more, surveys show most of us aren’t talking about climate change. That’s why having a conversation is the critical first step to catalyzing action—and it’s something we can all do.

For more, give my TED talk a watch, and check out this recent podcast and essay I did for Cottage Life (that's where the quote above comes from!) https://cottagelife.com/outdoors/scientist-katharine-heyhoe-on-the-effects-of-climate-change-at-the-cottage/

Others are convinced that the one specific personal action they take or one specific large-scale action will be enough to save the world if everyone did it, and they advocate for that single solution with the fervor of an evangelist.

To them, I say: there is no silver bullet, no, not even yours. But there is a lot of silver buckshot and that's even better news. We need to deploy as many solutions as we can, prioritizing what works best for a given person, place, or organization.

Project Drawdown has a great summary here: http://www.drawdown.org

World Passes Highest Average Global Temperature Recorded
By Paige Bennett, EcoWatch

The average global temperature reached a new high on July 3 at 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the highest average since records initially began in the 19th century and since satellite monitoring began in the 1970s. July 4 was even hotter, reaching 0.17 degrees Celsius (0.31 degrees Fahrenheit) higher... https://popularresistance.org/world-passes-highest-average-global-temperature-recorded/ #climatecrisis

Gitmo’s Permanent Chains
By Seymour Hersh, Scheer Post

Now comes yet another little-noted report on the continuing excesses and inhumanity at #Guantánamo Bay, the post-9/11 American military prison that only two decades ago set the standard for war crimes—a standard that is now being eclipsed by the war in Ukraine. #guantanamo https://popularresistance.org/gitmos-permanent-chains/

Back then, the internet felt like a vast frontier, a boundless expanse waiting to be discovered. You didn't so much surf the web as explore it, encountering unknown territories and unexpected gems. Websites were less about utility and more about passion. Amateur webmasters crafted their domains as personal expressions, little slices of their world that they invited you into.

Social media had not yet standardized our online experiences, and content wasn't algorithmically manicured.

Youth Climate Activists Turn Up The Heat
By Keerti Gopal, The Lever

On Tuesday, youth-led direct action organization Climate Defiance shut down a 2024 swing state fundraiser at the Harvard Club in New York City, headlined by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). The activists were protesting Schumer’s hand in approving the Mountain Valley Pipeline and his ties to the company leading the project, utility giant NextEra Energy... https://popularresistance.org/youth-climate-activists-turn-up-the-heat/ #climatecrisis

US Court Victory Against Online Censorship
By Joe Lauria, Consortium News

A judge in Louisiana has barred the F.B.I. and other government agencies from asking social media companies to suppress free speech, reports Joe Lauria. A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday issued a temporary injunction against a number of government agencies preventing them from talking to social media firms for “the purpose of urging, encouraging...” https://popularresistance.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=33602bebba8fb7dd6e71fb413&id=40fb909c6e&e=3221f6fc8c

Due to global warming, the rising waters of the Atlantic already threaten the coast of the city of Maonda, as well as the mangrove wetland marine park and is already destroying the national road number 1 between Moanda and Banana .
The city of Moanda is a perfect example of the abuses resulting from the exploitation of oil in the DRC. The PERENCO company has bid for two other oil blocks, including Yema 2 and Matamba-Makanzi 2, still in Moanda territory in the central Congo province.