Above Photo: Dia Al-Azzawi (Iraq), Sabra and Shatila Massacre, 1982–83. Two important reports were released last month, neither getting the kind of attention they deserve. On 4 April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group III report was published, evoking a strong reaction from the United Nations’ Secretary General António Guterres. The report, he said, ‘is a litany of broken climate promises. It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world’. At COP26, the developed countries pledged to spend a modest $100 billion for the Adaptation Fund to assist developing countries adapt to […]
Planet
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On April 10, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted in what is believed to be a US-backed soft coup. One of the likely reasons for the coup is that Khan was taking action to end excessive corporate power bestowed by bilateral trade agreements. Clearing the FOG speaks with Manuel Pérez-Rocha of the Institute for Policy Studies about Khan and how trade agreements function to force countries into allowing corporations to exploit their workers and devastate their environment. Pérez-Rocha explains why ending corporate abuse is essential to addressing the climate crisis and how trade could be structured to uphold human rights […]
Above Photo: The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report‘s illustration of the threat to small islands. On Earth Day, no doubt most major media will pay lip service to the extreme dangers of climate change. But what happens the next day? A major Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released at the end of February, could scarcely have been more clear—or more dire: Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all. The IPCC released a follow-up report on April 4 focused on how […]
Above Photo: Ever Fonseca (Cuba), Homenaje a la paz (‘Homage to Peace’), 1970. While the United States began its illegal war against Iraq in 2003, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro spoke in Buenos Aires, Argentina. ‘Our country does not drop bombs on other peoples’, he said, ‘nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities … Our country’s tens of thousands of scientists and doctors have been educated on the idea of saving lives’. Cuba had an army, yes, but not an army for war; Castro called it ‘an army of white coats’. Most recently, Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade of medical practitioners have […]
Above Photo: Example of commercial waste. Photo taken in Heiloo, The Netherlands. Fun4life.nl. We live in an era of mass overproduction. Offices, apartments, cars, ships, aeroplanes, mobile phones, laptops, batteries, televisions, furniture, air fryers, hot tubs, elevators and escalators. A countless multitude of objects that belong to the anthroposphere – a term for everything that people have made and how it all interacts with the planet. Many of these products end up as waste, buried in landfill, incinerated or dumped – with catastrophic environmental consequences. At the same time, mining companies continue to pollute the planet, exploit local communities and produce huge CO2 emissions […]
Martin’s Upcoming Movie, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” Exposes How The U.S. Military And America’s Endless Wars Are A Key Driver In Catastrophic Climate Change. “The U.S. military is the largest institutional polluter in the world. There is no corporation or industry that compares to the damage and devastation done by the U.S. war machine,” Abby Martin told Watchdog host Lowkey today. Abby Martin is a California-based artist, journalist and filmmaker who is host of The Empire Files, a series that analyzes the world through the framing of the United States as a global empire. Her upcoming movie, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” exposes how the […]
Above Photo: An oil platform in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2016 (Frédéric Soltan / Corbis via Getty Images) In Reconsidering Reparations, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò makes the case for a political project with a global scope. Booked is a series of interviews about new books. In this edition, William P. Jones talks to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, the author of Reconsidering Reparations (Oxford University Press). The idea of paying reparations for slavery and other forms of racial injustice remains deeply controversial. Yet it has gained renewed support in liberal publications, city councils and state legislatures, and even the House of Representatives, which recently held […]
Above Photo: “Escuchen a los trabajadores,” one sign reads at the Nov. 13, 2021, picket at Simi Winery. “Listen to the workers.” Brooke Anderson. Grape Harvesters Share Traditional Ecological Knowledge To Right Our Relationship With The Land—And Each Other. Anayeli Guzman was born into a Mixtec-speaking Indigenous community in San Miguel Chicahua in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her family raised chickens on their land, and as a child she would help plant corn, squash and radishes. They ate handmade tortillas with beans, eggs and salsa. Her grandparents taught her to care for the land and to revere the rain. Few people worked for wages. Rather, […]
Above Photo: Michael Christopher Brown / Conservation.org. Toronto, Canada – Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the deadly manifestations of the climate crisis, there were few places to hide for most of us in 2021. Ageing billionaires riding booming stock markets could take their first flights into space in their own rockets, but for the rest of Planet Earth’s 8 billion people with their feet on the ground it was a year of placing hope in the hands of scientists and our political leaders to turn the tide. Our review of 2021, as seen through the eyes of IPS reporters and contributors around […]
Above Photo: Preface (Sacha Llorenti) Four and a half million people died infected by COVID-19. This global tragedy is the prism through which we must analyse how and in whose interest the ruling system on the planet works. In the span of a few months, the pandemic compacted political, economic, and social phenomena, the consequences of which would take years to manifest in other circumstances. Some of the issues that were clearly magnified through the lens of the pandemic are job insecurity, deficits in health systems, inequality, North-South relations, the United Nations’ failure to coordinate a collective effort, the use of […]
Above Photo: No Coal No Gas activists blocking the entrance to Merrimack Station in Bow, New Hampshire on Oct. 3. Twitter/@collinrees. New Hampshire’s No Coal No Gas campaign deployed kayaktivists and a garden blockade as part of its latest day of mass action aimed at closing Merrimack Station. There’s one form of power that’s generated when hot water turns turbines to create electricity. There are other forms of power held by investors, property owners and regulatory agencies. And then there’s people power, which can be harnessed to affect decisions of investors, property owners and regulatory agencies — such that fossil fuel-burning […]
Above Photo: Chris Jordan (USA), Crushed Cars #2 Tacoma, 2004. It is perhaps fitting that United States President Joe Biden arrived in Glasgow for the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) on the climate catastrophe with eighty-five cars in tow months after declaring ‘I’m a car guy’ (for details on the climate catastrophe, see our Red Alert no. 11, ‘Only One Earth’). Only three countries in the world have more cars per person than the US, and these countries (Finland, Andorra, and Italy) have a much smaller population than the United States. Just before Biden left for the G20 summit, his meeting with Pope Francis, and COP26, […]
The COP 26 United Nations climate meeting is underway in Glasgow Scotland. Following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent “Code Red” report that proves urgent action is critical, the world is looking at the corporate-dominated COP 26 to do what is necessary. Clearing the FOG speaks with Anne Petermann, executive director of the Global Justice Ecology Project, who says COP 26 is focused on ‘false solutions’ promoted by large corporations to protect their profits instead of the planet. Petermann describes a new publication, “Hoodwinked in the Hothouse,” that explains what these false solutions are and what is necessary, the real […]
Food Sovereignty is a philosophy of life. It offers a vision for our collective future, and defines the principles around which we organize our daily living and co-exist with Mother Earth. It is a celebration of life and all the diversity around us. It embraces every element of our cosmos; the sky above our heads, the land beneath our feet, the air we breathe, the forests, the mountains, valleys, farms, oceans, rivers and ponds. It recognizes and protects the inter-dependency between eight million species that share this home with us. We inherited this collective wisdom from our ancestors, who ploughed the […]
Some 4.5 billion years ago, our planet was a drastically different place – an uninhabitable world with extremely hot temperatures, toxic air, and pounded with radiation coming from the Sun in the form of flares and coronal mass ejections. Scientists believe everything changed with the formation of the Moon. The Earth and the Moon once had a joint magnetic field that acted as a shield against solar wind particles, says a new study conducted by an international team of scientists led by NASA. For a long time, scientists believed that the Moon didn’t have a long-lasting magnetic field due to the […]
It’s bad enough that we have to deal with one Donald Trump here in the U.S. of A. What’s worse, Mehdi Hasan explains on the latest episode of The New Abnormal, is that Trump has become a template for a whole planet full of bad-faith actors and wannabe strongmen. Before he became the host of his own TV show in America, Hasan interviewed all sorts of international politicians. “What I noticed over the last few years is that they all now start talking like Trump. They all use the same verbal tics, the same ‘fake news,’ the same completely brazen lies,” […]
Stargazers perk up — Mars is getting big and bright the coming week, as the sun, Earth and Mars line up close to a new moon on the night of Oct. 13. The event that happens about every two years is called “opposition” in astronomy terms: the sun and Mars on opposite sides of Earth. From the earthling’s perspective, according to NASA, Mars rises in the east just as the sun sets in the west, and would stay up in the sky the whole night, setting in the west just as the sun rises. Because we’re seeing the whole dayside of […]
For the Planet, There Is No “Lesser Evil” By Nathaniel Flakin, Left Voice. September 19, 2020 For the Planet, There Is No “Lesser Evil”2020-09-192020-09-19https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/09/fires-e1600559661973.jpg200px200px Above photo: Josh Edelson/ AFP via Getty Images. As fires rage on the West Coast, Donald Trump and the Republican Party continue to deny the basic science of climate change. Many people hope that voting for Joe Biden will save the planet. But the Democrats’ record on the environment shows they offer nothing to stave off a climate catastrophe. By now, most people in the United States recognize that the climate crisis poses the greatest threat to humanity and […]
YouTube The people behind the Guinness World Records used to make money by, well, selling books. But with the rise of the Internet came a decline in book sales, and so they had to create a new business model — selling publicity. This is the story of how Guinness (yeah, like the brewery) got into the business of record-breaking, and how one Planet Money intern broke a world record involving the president of Georgia, the former Soviet republic. Listen to the original Planet Money podcast episode here! And while you’re at it, follow us on TikTok, and subscribe to our video […]
A potential planet… where no planet should be. An international team of astronomers utilizing NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and data obtained from the now-retired Spitzer space telescope have reported an astounding potential discovery of a surviving planet closely orbiting a white dwarf. So what’s the big deal? Scientists have found many exoplanets in close orbits of their parent stars. Here’s the confusing part: The way a white dwarf is created destroys nearby objects either by incineration or gravitational destruction. White dwarfs form when stars like the Sun near the end of their life cycles. They swell up, expand to hundreds […]
‘Green’ Billionaires Behind Suppression Of ‘Planet Of The Humans’ By Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone. September 10, 2020 ‘Green’ Billionaires Behind Suppression Of ‘Planet Of The Humans’2020-09-102020-09-10https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/09/planet-of-the-humans-e1599744530871.jpg200px200px The Michael Moore-produced ‘Planet of the Humans’ faced a coordinated suppression campaign led by professional climate activists backed by the same ‘green’ billionaires, Wall Street investors, industry insiders and family foundations skewered in the film. “We must take control of our environmental movement and our future from billionaires and their permanent war on Planet Earth. They are not our friends.” -Jeff Gibbs, director of “Planet of the Humans” It is hard to think of an […]
https://cdn1.img.sputniknews.com/img/106428/23/1064282303_0:114:3236:1934_1200x675_80_0_0_a2b3ae378b4813070a6638472833c073.jpg Sputnik International https://cdn2.img.sputniknews.com/i/logo.png Sputnik https://cdn2.img.sputniknews.com/i/logo.png https://sputniknews.com/military/202008221080242820-watch-russian-mig-31-jet-ascending-to-stratosphere-and-showing-off-astounding-view-of-our-planet/ The Mikoyan MiG-31 is a supersonic interceptor considered to be one of the fastest planes in the world. And this video by the Russian Air Force shows the aircraft can also reach maximum heights, moving on the fringes of the atmosphere like it is no big deal. The TV channel of the Russian Defence Ministry Zvezda has released a video of a MiG-31 fighter jet performing military drills in the stratosphere. The footage shows the aircraft rising into the sky, depicting the drills from the pilot’s POV, as the interceptor flies on the edge […]
An attempt by Twitter to promote Thursday’s mission to Mars liftoff from Florida didn’t exactly go as planned, as people either showed they had no idea about the upcoming event or were only interested in trolling. “Who wants to be transported off this planet?” the official Twitter account published on Wednesday. While the background of their avatar, featuring the famous bird, has been changed to resemble the surface of Mars and their profile banner now shows an image of a NASA rocket launching in space, the generic tweet went over most people’s heads. It likely didn’t help that in a year […]
China has successfully launched its first Mars exploration mission. The probe carries a rover which will monitor the weather conditions on the planet and look for ice under its surface. The launch took place on Hainan Island in southern China. The probe, which was carried into space by the Long March-5 Y4 rocket, is expected to reach Mars around February 2021. In video: China on Thursday launched a Mars probe on a Long March-5 rocket from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the coast of southern China’s island province of Hainan. pic.twitter.com/1kT0Uhgf7N — People’s Daily, China (@PDChina) July 23, 2020 The […]
The timing for the launch of unmanned spacecraft to the Red planet is linked to the opening of a one-month window, when Mars and Earth are in alignment on the same side of the sun so as to minimise both travel time and fuel required. In an ambitious effort to probe the mysteries of the Red Planet, three countries, the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates, are sending unmanned spacecraft to Mars this week, reports AP. The series of successive launches target a one-month window when Mars and Earth line up on the same side of the sun, allowing for reduced […]
On Contact: Planet Of The Humans June 21, 2020 On Contact: Planet Of The Humans2020-06-212020-06-21https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/06/maxresdefault-3-e1592763372527.jpg200px200px In this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses the criticism and censorship of Michael Moore’s film Planet of the Humans with the director, Jeff Gibbs. “Perhaps it’s a form of denial to actually instead of understanding the – this civilization, the industrial civilization, the human species – we’re hitting limits and we’re gonna crash. We’re instead hoping that this fantasy will save us. And as I discovered, and I’m not saying that all environmental leaders are on the take, but one of the things […]
As SpaceX continues to roll through its 2020 launch campaign, the company is preparing to launch another batch of Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit, along with 3 small satellites provided by Planet Labs Inc. The mission is currently set to launch on a flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Saturday morning at 5:21 am Eastern time (09:21 UTC). Saturday’s mission, known as Starlink V1.0 L8, will be the ninth orbital launch of the year for SpaceX to date, and the 87th flight of the two-stage Falcon 9 […]
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money‘s newsletter. You can sign up here. In summer of 1967, African Americans protested, marched, and rioted in cities across the country. The unrest convinced President Lyndon Johnson to set up the Kerner Commission, which spent about six months doing research, visiting slums, and holding hearings. In 1968, they published a provocative report that civil rights leader Jesse Jackson recently called “the last attempt to address honestly and seriously the structural inequalities that plague African Americans.” “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white […]
India 13:38 GMT 05.06.2020Get short URL New Delhi (Sputnik): This year, World Environment Day on 5 June comes at a time when humans are battling the deadly COVID-19 pandemic which has caused the deaths of over 391,000 people globally. India is currently battling several natural and man-made disasters including cyclones, earthquakes and gruesome cases of animal brutality. Therefore, in a bid to make people more thoughtful about nature, leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Ram Nath Kovind have urged Indians to pledge to preserve Earth’s rich biodiversity. On #WorldEnvironmentDay, we reiterate our pledge to preserve our planet’s rich biodiversity. […]
Planet Labs Inc. has announced they will launch six SkySat satellites, SkySat 16-21, on Falcon 9 rockets as rideshare missions on two Starlink launches. These six satellites will help provide Planet with more imaging coverage to complement the 15 other SkySat satellites, SkySat 1-15, in Sun-Synchronous Orbits (SSO). (Lead Image: Julia Bergeron, NSF) Over the spring and summer, Planet will launch SkySat 16-21 on two Falcon 9 rockets. The first three satellites, SkySat 16-18 will launch on the ninth Starlink (L8) mission which is targeted for some time in June. SkySat 19-21 will launch on another mission later in the summer. […]
the Senior Editor They decided to kill the cow. Moooo A reminder, whenever you see Zuckstein or the Google boys addressing a room full of uniformed types, you are getting a peek at the enemy. Are we being subjected to a population reduction program joined with eugenics and wrapped in regime change, rigged elections and color revolutions? Yup. Is it Bill Gates? (Not fucking hardly) When children began dying in New York of a new CV syndrome, this became terrorism and not a pandemic. You know who kills the children, who always kills the children, this is and has been the […]
With the coronavirus pandemic spreading and most of the United States under some kind of shelter-in-place order, a lot of us are feeling pretty alone right now. So it’s the perfect time for science-writer Wade Roush to remind us that, in the cosmic sense, we might have a lot of company. On other planets and their moons. On asteroids hurtling through space. On meteorites that occasionally plummet to Earth’s surface. “The more places we look, the more evidence we find that Earth doesn’t have a unique claim on the building blocks for life or the conditions needed to support life,” Roush […]
the Senior Editor They decided to kill the cow. Moooo A reminder, whenever you see Zuckstein or the Google boys addressing a room full of uniformed types, you are getting a peek at the enemy. Are we being subjected to a population reduction program joined with eugenics and wrapped in regime change, rigged elections and color revolutions? Yup. Is it Bill Gates? (Not fucking hardly) When children began dying in New York of a new CV syndrome, this became terrorism and not a pandemic. You know who kills the children, who always kills the children, this is and has been the […]