Half of world’s species in decline, study suggests

CBC News: The National May 23, 2023

A new study suggests half of the world’s species are in decline, amounting to what it warns is the widespread erosion of global biodiversity and another signal the planet is entering a mass extinction.

Eye wall of Super Typhoon Mawar nears Guam, Radar Update

WestPacWx – May 23, 2023

Climate change is personal

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health May 19, 2023

Activists from India and Kenya and a community health worker from western Massachusetts describe how climate change has damaged the health of family, friends, neighbors, and even pets in their communities. This panel was part of a May 8, 2023 symposium on Climate, Health & Equity at the Harvard Chan School. Speakers Carolina Reyes | Community health care worker Shweta Narayan | Global Climate Campaigner, Health Care Without Harm Passy Amayo Ogolla | Program Manager, Society for International Development Kari Nadeau | Chair, Department of Environmental Health and John Rock Professor of Climate and Population Studies, Harvard Chan School

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Thank you for your interest in our recent symposium. We’re delighted to share a series of videos from the event.

On this playlist, you’ll find a conversation with Melissa Hoffer, the first cabinet-level climate czar in any U.S. state, who is working to integrate sustainability into every policy decision in Massachusetts. You’ll hear about federal efforts to achieve environmental justice from EPA Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe. You’ll listen to moving stories of resilience from around the globe—and a stirring keynote from environmental activist Heather McTeer Toney.

You’ll also have an opportunity to drop in on robust discussions among our faculty experts about the toll climate change is taking on food security and infectious disease outbreaks.

You may also be interested in this article summarizing the symposium or this piece about a separate faculty panel on heat stress.

And if the focus on action and solutions appeals to you, please consider subscribing to The Climate Optimist, a monthly newsletter from the Harvard Chan School’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment.

LIVE: Shut down Shell – Outside the oil giant’s annual shareholder meeting in the Excel Centre, L…

Extinction Rebellion UK – May 23, 2023

#ExtinctionRebellion

#FossilFreeLondon

#Greenpeace

Breaking Live️ Fossil Free London & Extinction Rebellion activists disrupt Shell AGM as well as delivering theatrical actions at their main shareholders BlackRock and Vanguard

UN Estimates 843,000 People Internally Displaced in Sudan | VOANews

Voice of America – May 23, 2023

#sudan

#chad

#voanews

The United Nations estimates that more than 843,000 Sudanese have been displaced by the fighting inside Sudan, which has entered its sixth week. Those who have escaped the country and those still inside describe dire conditions, as aid groups say the number of internally displaced is likely to become much higher. Henry Wilkins reports from Koufroun, Chad. #sudan #chad #voanews

War Made Easy: Norman Solomon on How Mainstream Media Helped Pave Way for U.S. Invasion of Iraq

Democracy Now! – Mar 21. 2023

#DemocracyNow

As we continue to mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we look at how the corporate U.S. media helped pave the way for war by uncritically amplifying lies and misrepresentations from the Bush administration while silencing voices of dissent. Longtime media critic Norman Solomon says many of the same media personalities and news outlets that pushed aggressively for the invasion then are now helping to solidify an elite consensus around the Ukraine war. “In the mass media, being pro-war is portrayed as objective. Being antiwar is portrayed as being biased,” he says. Solomon is author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and the forthcoming _War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine_.

Design and Truth in Autobiography (Routledge Library Editions: Autobiography) | Roy Pascal

Originally published in 1960. Is there an art of autobiography? What are its origins and how has it come to acquire the form we know today? For what does the autobiographer seek, and why should it be so popular? This study suggests some of the answers to these questions. It takes the view that autobiography is one of the dominant and characteristic forms of literary self-expression and deserves examination for its own sake. This book outlines a definition of the form and traces its historical origins and development, analyses its ‘truth’ and talks about what sort of self-knowledge it investigates.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Routledge; 1st edition (July 11, 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 202 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1138942014
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1138942011
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.1 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.14 x 0.49 x 9.21 inches

See related:

• ‘Everyone has a story.’ Growing industry makes memoir-writing more accessible

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Time to pay the piper: Fossil fuel companies’ reparations for climate damages: One Earth

https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322%2823%2900198-7

The calls for climate reparations are rapidly growing in the scientific literature, among climate movements, and in the policy debate. This article proposes morally based reparations for oil, gas, and coal producers, presents a methodological approach for their implementation, and quantifies reparations for the top twenty-one fossil fuel companies.

Main text

Human-caused climate change has long been acknowledged as essentially an ethical issue that threatens humanity and ravages the planet. While the Global North’s historical carbon emissions have exceeded their fair share of the planetary boundary by an estimated 92%, the impacts of climate breakdown fall disproportionally on the Global South, which is responsible for a trivial share—Africa, Asia, and Latin America contribute only 8%—of excess emissions. 1
At the same time, the world’s richest 1% of the population contributed 15% of emissions between 1990 and 2015, more than twice as much as the poorest 50%, who contributed just 7% but who suffer the brunt of climate harm. 2
This inequity is exacerbated by poorer societies’ lack of resources to adapt to climate impacts and by the persistent reluctance of the Global North to provide them with the necessary funding and assistance as required by the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC) of article 3 of the UNFCCC.
The climate crisis and its rapidly increasing economic burdens bring to the forefront a question that has been poorly investigated, but bluntly recalled in the 2022 IPCC report on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability 3
: who should bear the cost of the harm caused by anthropogenic climate change? Is it states, or affected individuals, families, and businesses? Is it future generations, who had no role in creating the harm? Or should the burden fall on those agents that have contributed the most to global climate disruption, while in the meantime greatly profiting?
The costs of anthropogenic climate change are chiefly borne by states that compensate their own citizens harmed by climate impacts or contribute to international adaptation finance, by insurance companies with regard to their insureds, and by uncompensated victims of climate change. We argue that other agents bear substantial responsibility for the cost of redressing climate harm: the companies that engage in the exploration, production, refining, and distribution of oil, gas, and coal. The recent progress in climate attribution science makes it evident that these companies have played a major role in the accumulation and escalation of such costs by providing gigatonnes of carbon fuels to the global economy while willfully ignoring foreseeable climate harm. 4
All the while they successfully shaped the public narrative on climate change through disinformation, misleading “advertorials,” lobbying, and political donations to delay action directly or through trade associations and other surrogates. 5

Fossil fuel companies have a moral responsibility to affected parties for climate harm and have a duty to rectify such harm. 6
,7
Moral theory 6
,8
and common sense—as well as international environmental agreements through the polluter pays principle embodied in article 16 of the 1992 Rio Declaration, which calls for the “internalization of environmental costs”—demand that historical wrongdoing must be rectified. A direct way to do so is through payment of reparations to wronged parties, 8
which in the context of the climate crisis are a historically informed account of distributive justice. 9
In the case of the carbon fuel industry, reparations require that companies relinquish part of their tainted wealth to provide affected subjects with financial means for coping with climate harm, consistent with the climate justice movement’s core demand that fossil fuel companies repay their impacts debt. This is the moral rationale for reparations in the form of financial rectification by fossil fuel companies in the context of climate change. 10
Additionally, on a practical level the insufficiency of funding for adaptation under the UNFCCC Green Climate Fund and the lengthy process for the operationalization and the adequate financing of the Loss and Damage fund—so far the only tangible outcome of the 2013 Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM)—established at the 2022 Sharm El Sheikh COP 27 require other culpable agents—e.g., fossil fuel companies—to complement state-centric international governance to cope with the cost of climate damages.

Here, we reframe the debate on international funding to tackle climate impacts by focusing on the financial responsibility of fossil fuel companies for climate harm. We argue that fossil fuel producers contributed to climate harm through their operational and product emissions, have a documented history of climate denial 11
and of discourse and practices of delay, 12
disinformed the public and their shareholders on climate science and corporate risks, are complicit in slowing down or defeating climate legislation, and must be held accountable for climate harm by paying reparations. To this end, we present a morally grounded methodological approach for implementing reparations and quantify them for the top twenty-one fossil fuel producers based on their operational and product-related emissions from 1988 to 2022 and on the economic situation of the people in the countries where they are based.
The following analysis is a starting point for open discussion of shared responsibility for climate harm and in particular of the financial duty owed by the fossil fuel industry to climate victims. Our work aims to lay the groundwork for further investigation into the role of the fossil fuel industry in climate change and should not be understood as a fully fledged policy proposal. While crucial, for purposes of this analysis we ignore a thorough identification of climate victims, the mechanisms of compelling payment of reparation funds, the governance and distribution of collected reparations, as well as the political feasibility of the approach developed and its relationships with the UNFCCC. A global reparations scheme, as proposed here, complements and is neither a substitute for climate finance under the UNFCCC nor for climate-related litigation filed in numerous jurisdictions based on varying legal theories against major oil, gas, and coal companies.

…(read more).