5 October 2015, Climate Progress, Environmentalists: The Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement Is A Disaster For Climate Change. After years of meetings, months of Congressional debates, and days of around-the-clock negotiations, the United States and 11 other countries reached an agreement on the Trans-Pacific Trade agreement (TPP) on Monday. If adopted, the TPP will eliminate or reduce tariffs between Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. But while it specifically addresses some environmental concerns — such as trade of illegally harvested resources or wildlife trafficking — climate change activists saw Monday’s announcement as the culmination of a long-watched train wreck. “It’s still the same disaster for climate change it was three months ago,” 350.org’s Karthik Ganapathy told ThinkProgress. His organization, as well as many others, say the TPP protects multinational corporations that profit from fossil fuels. Some have argued that under the TPP — as with the North American Free Trade Agreement — companies will be able to sue countries that enact laws to limit fossil fuel extraction or carbon emissions, if it interferes with profits. The deal also will lead to the rubber-stamping of export facilities for natural gas from fracking and will prevent the U.S. Trade Representative from ever including climate change action in trade deals, Ganapathy said. But the White House has touted the deal’s potential for environmental conservation, calling it a “once-in-a-generation chance to protect our oceans, wildlife, and the environment.” Environmentalists aren’t buying it. Read More here
Tag Archives: consumption
27 September 2015, Truthdig, Big Tech May Be Getting Way Too Big—Here’s Why. Conservatives and liberals interminably debate the merits of “the free market” versus “the government.” Which one you trust more delineates the main ideological divide in America. In reality, they aren’t two separate things and there can’t be a market without government. Legislators, agency heads and judges decide the rules of the game. And, over time, they change the rules. The important question, too rarely discussed, is who has the most influence over these decisions and in that way wins the game. Two centuries ago slaves were among the nation’s most valuable assets, and a century ago, perhaps the most valuable asset was land. Then came another shift as factories, machines, railroads and oil transformed America. By the 1920s most Americans were employees, and the most contested property issue was their freedom to organize into unions. In more recent years, information and ideas have become the most valuable forms of property. This property can’t be concretely weighed or measured, and most of the cost of producing it goes into discovering it or making the first copy. After that, the additional production cost is often zero. Read more here
23 September 2015, The Conversation, Sustained economic growth: United Nations mistake the poison for the cure. On September 25 world leaders will meet in New York to formalise the new Sustainable Development Goals. These 17 goals will guide efforts to reduce poverty and increase well-being, without destroying the Earth. The Conversation is looking at how we got here, and how far we have to go. On the surface, the Sustainable Development Goals, soon to be confirmed by the United Nations, seem noble and progressive. They seek to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and hunger while creating sustainable and resilient societies. But look beneath the surface of this pleasant rhetoric and one comes face to face with a far more ominous vision of development: a vision that is fundamentally compromised by corporate interests and ultimately doomed to failure, if not catastrophe. The defining flaw in the United Nations’ agenda is the naïve assumption that “sustained economic growth” is the most direct path to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. This faith in the god of growth is fundamentally misplaced. It has been shown, for example, that for every $100 in global growth merely $0.60 is directed toward resolving global poverty. Not only is this an incredibly inefficient pathway to poverty alleviation, it is environmentally unsupportable. By championing economic growth, the Sustainable Development Goals are a barely disguised defence of the market fundamentalism that underpins business-as-usual. But in an age of planetary limits, sustained economic growth is not the solution to our social and environmental ills, but their cause. Read More here
4 September 2015, Climate News Network, Global tree census highlights need to restore forests. Mapping the density of forests reveals that there are far more trees on the planet than previously thought – but humans are destroying 15 billion a year. An international collaboration of scientists has just completed the ultimate green census – by calculating that the planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees. The latest estimate is far higher and almost certainly more accurate than any previous attempt. But the bad news is that humans are removing trees at the rate of 15 billion a year – and there are now about half as many as there were at the dawn of civilisation. For every person on Earth, there are 422 trees – in total, more than 3,000 billion deciduous or evergreen growths with woody trunks greater than 10 centimetres at breast height. The researchers based their study on close analysis of satellite imagery, and of data from 429,775 plots of trees as measured on the ground in 50 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Statistical techniques. They counted forests in 14 “biomes” − or different kinds of climate, soil and topography − and in places not normally associated with trees, such as deserts, savannah, swamps, tundra and high mountains. They then they used statistical techniques that could extend their sample density measurements to the whole terrestrial world. The scientists report in Nature journal that the tropical and subtropical forests are home to 1.39 trillion trees, while the boreal forests of the north contain 0.74 trillion, and the temperate zones hold 0.61 trillion. Read More here