Climate Change

U.S. Dirty Energy Depends on Subsidies and Climate Denial

Janet Redman and D. Lascaris, Real News, October 5, 2017

D. LASCARIS: This is Dimitri Lascaris, for The Real News Network. A new report by Oil Change International reveals that US taxpayers continue to pay out more than 20 billion in fossil fuel subsidies each year. Are these subsidies propping up an industry to protect America's national security? Or, as critics say, are these taxpayer funded giveaways designed to serve the interests of billionaire oil barons, who bear ultimate responsibility for what is now a global climate emergency?

Catholic church to make record divestment from fossil fuels

Arthur Nelson, The Guardian, October 3, 2017

More than 40 Catholic institutions are to announce the largest ever faith-based divestment from fossil fuels, on the anniversary of the death of St Francis of Assisi.

The sum involved has not been disclosed but the volume of divesting groups is four times higher than a previous church record, and adds to a global divestment movement, led by investors worth $5.5tn.

Climate Change Brings Socialism and Science Together

By Eve Ottenberg, Truthout, September 29, 2017

Thanks to climate change, science and socialism have become entwined in ways previously unimaginable. Science brings the news that, unless we act swiftly to control climate change, we will inhabit a dying planet. Socialism traces the causes of this catastrophe to the destructive and chaotic growth model of capitalism and advocates for a different system. Meanwhile, sensing the source of danger to their profits, corporate and government reactionaries fuel disinformation campaigns to discredit science and confuse the public. This has been going on for years, with disastrous results.

Looking for answers to capitalism's disasters

Naomi Klein, socialistworker.org, September 29, 2017

SO READING the newspaper for you these days must be like seeing the subjects of your books running through the headlines: disaster capitalism, the shock doctrine, climate change, corporate brands...

I WAS actually just looking at the crawl on CNN, and there was something about Trump's UN speech where he plugged one of his buildings. I think his first sentence when he spoke at the UN was about one of the Trump Towers.

Bolivia’s Morales, at UN, says natural resources, basic necessities must be viewed as human rights

Evo Morales, UN News Centre, September 25, 2017

While some pledges made in the United Nations Charter have been met, “others have come to noting,” the President of Bolivia told the General Assembly today, that the planet’s precious resources and vulnerable people must be protected from greed and exploitation by political elites.

Beyond Harvey And Irma: Militarizing Homeland Security In The Climate-Change Era

Michael Klare, Countercurrents, September 25, 2017

Deployed to the Houston area to assist in Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, U.S. military forces hadn’t even completed their assignments when they were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to face Irma, the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.

Germany's Angela Merkel: The World's Eco-Villain?

George Monbiot, Real News, September 22, 2017

GREGORY WILPERT: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Gregory Wilpert, joining you from Quito, Ecuador. This coming Sunday, Germans will head to the polls to elect a new Bundestag, as its parliament is known. Chancellor Angela Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union, is leading in opinion polls with between 36% and 39% of the vote.

San Francisco, Oakland sue major oil companies over rising seas

Kurtis Alexander, SFGate, September 20, 2017

The cities of San Francisco and Oakland are suing some of the world’s largest oil companies over climate change, joining an emerging legal effort to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damages wrought by rising seas.

The suits, filed separately in Superior Court in San Francisco and Alameda County and announced Wednesday, claim that a slate of oil, gas and coal producers not only caused the heat-trapping gases that drove sea level rise but knowingly did so, a challenge akin to litigation against big tobacco companies in the 1990s.

Shooting Bullets at a Hurricane

Eugene Dardenne, Jacobin, September 21, 2017

For all the jokes from predictable corners about the Florida-man proposal to shoot down Hurricane Irma, the prize for most futile climate-change-deterrence strategy belongs to far more culpable parties. As we approach Hurricane Sandy’s five year anniversary, New York politicians deserve serious consideration for the title.

90 Companies Helped Cause the Climate Crisis—They Should Pay for It

Sarah van Gelder, Yes Magazine, September 16, 2017

Pacific Northwest forests are on fire. Several blazes are out of control, threatening rural towns, jumping rivers and highways, and covering Portland, Oregon, Seattle, and other cities in smoke and falling ash. Temperatures this summer are an average of 3.6 degrees higher than the last half of the 20th century, according to the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group analysis published in The Seattle Times.

Climate Change

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