28 August 2017, Desmog, 12 Years After Katrina, Hurricane Harvey Pummels Gulf Coast and Its Climate Science-Denying Politicians. As the remnants of Hurricane Harvey (now a tropical storm) continue to flood Houston — just days before the 12th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina — I visited Shannon Rainey, whose house was built on top of a Superfund site in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Rainey is worried about family members in Houston. She knows all too well how long it can take to get back what is lost in a storm. “I still live with Katrina every day,” she told me. New Orleans remains threatened by bands of rain extending from Harvey, causing many residents with fierce memories of Katrina to remain on edge. Earlier this month, the city proved it was ill-prepared for hurricane season nearly a year after Baton Rouge’s 1,000-year flood. Rain inundated New Orleans, with more than nine inches falling in only three hours, exposing that the city’s pump system could not operate at full capacity. The city is still scrambling to make the needed repairs and clean the sewer system’s catch basins, which remain clogged in many places. Read More here
Category Archives: Equity & Social justice
9 August 2017 By Dr Haydn Washington for Dick Smith Fair Go,The Insanity of Endless Growth, . The world is faced with a predicament of grave enormity – yet one rarely spoken of. The United Nations (UN), almost all governments, business, and media and both the political Left and the Right are busy extolling (even praising) ‘endless growth’. Yet we live on a finite planet, so clearly endless physical growth is impossible, unsustainable and, in fact, insane. I often give public talks on sustainability and ask the audience: ‘On a finite planet who thinks we can keep growing physically forever?’ Nobody raises their hands. So why then is our economy and society based on what many individually know is impossible? An excellent question – but one hardly ever asked in mainstream economics (Daly, 2014). Even the UN forgets to ask the question – and to answer it. Read More here
21 July 2017, Climate Home, Indian farmers mourn dead after debt crisis turns violent. Six protesters were killed in the Mandsaur district of Madhya Pradesh in June. Meet the bereaved families driven to despair by erratic weather and a tough market. Abhishek Patidar was 17 years old when he died. A farmer’s son, he had planned on becoming a doctor. “Abhishek studied in the 11th grade,” said his mother Alka Patidar, proudly. Her eldest son had only finished 8th grade before he started working the family farm. Abhishek, the youngest of four children, looks like his mother. His eyes follow the same curvature; his skin is the same shade of tan. Abhishek was killed at a protest on 6 June, 2017, when Indian police opened fire on the crowd. India’s farmers are in crisis. Their frustrations, simmering quietly after the harvest, became palpable in a 10-day long protest in June. Thousands of farmers in the Mandsaur district of central India’s Madhya Pradesh had turned up in the towns of Piplia Mandi and Bahi Phanta to demand fair prices for a season’s worth of work. Abhishek went along with several other young men from his village. The protests started out peacefully, but turned ugly a few days in, when a scuffle broke out between better-off business owners in the area and debt-ridden farmers. On the sixth day, the violence climaxed when police, trying to control the crowd, fired their weapons. Five protesters were killed on the spot and a sixth man later died of injuries sustained in the clash. Read More here
15 June 2017, New York Times, The Dutch Have Solutions to Rising Seas. The World Is Watching. In the waterlogged Netherlands, climate change is considered neither a hypothetical nor a drag on the economy. Instead, it’s an opportunity……No place in Europe is under greater threat than this waterlogged country on the edge of the Continent. Much of the nation sits below sea level and is gradually sinking. Now climate change brings the prospect of rising tides and fiercer storms. From a Dutch mind-set, climate change is not a hypothetical or a drag on the economy, but an opportunity. While the Trump administration withdraws from the Paris accord, the Dutch are pioneering a singular way forward. It is, in essence, to let water in, where possible, not hope to subdue Mother Nature: to live with the water, rather than struggle to defeat it. The Dutch devise lakes, garages, parks and plazas that are a boon to daily life but also double as enormous reservoirs for when the seas and rivers spill over. You may wish to pretend that rising seas are a hoax perpetrated by scientists and a gullible news media. Or you can build barriers galore. But in the end, neither will provide adequate defense, the Dutch say. And what holds true for managing climate change applies to the social fabric, too. Environmental and social resilience should go hand in hand, officials here believe, improving neighborhoods, spreading equity and taming water during catastrophes. Climate adaptation, if addressed head-on and properly, ought to yield a stronger, richer state. This is the message the Dutch have been taking out into the world. Dutch consultants advising the Bangladeshi authorities about emergency shelters and evacuation routes recently helped reduce the numbers of deaths suffered in recent floods to “hundreds instead of thousands,” according to Mr. Ovink. Read More here