Group items tagged

curb methane emissions,

ditch the internal combustion engine

“Not nearly enough” to the first question, “yes” to the second. 

151 countries had submitted new climate plans (known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs)

as well as ramping up ambition

developed countries failed to meet that goal in 2020 (recent OECD estimates show that total climate finance reached $79.6 billion in 2019).

For example, encouraging multilateral institutions to further consider the links between climate vulnerabilities and the need for concessional financial resources for developing countries — such as securing grants rather than loans to avoid increasing their debt burden. 

Climate change is already causing devastating losses of lives, land and livelihoods. Some damages are permanent — from communities that are wiped out, to islands disappearing beneath the waves, to water resources that are drying up.

Countries also agreed to operationalize and fund the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage, established at COP25 in Madrid, and to catalyze the technical assistance developing countries need to address loss and damage in a robust and effective manner.  

negotiators agreed to avoid double-counting, in which more than one country could claim the same emissions reductions as counting toward their own climate commitments.

including a bold commitment from India to reach net-zero emissions by 2070 that is backed up with near-term targets (including ambitious renewable energy targets for 2030), 109 countries signing up to the Global Methane Pledge to slash emissions by 30% by 2030, and a pledge by 141 countries (as of November 10) to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030 (backed by $18 billion in funding, including $1.7 billion dedicated to support indigenous peoples).  

slash rates of premature death from mental disorders by a third by 2030.

By one analysis, which includes Western countries and developing regions like West Africa, depression, drug abuse and schizophrenia are on track to be the three leading causes of lost economic output by 2030.

Among the successes have been group therapy for rape victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo, family and individual counseling for survivors of torture in Myanmar, and talk therapy and medication for people with depression in rural India.

But without reliable support, follow-up and medical supplies — particularly psychiatric drugs when needed — interventions can quickly lose traction, no matter how well trained and devoted the workers are.

One moment, she was dozing off during a rest period; the next, she felt the presence of strange men coming after her. She screamed at them to stop. “My shouting didn’t stop the men; they kept coming for me,” she said. “So, what did I do? I ripped off my school uniform and ran.”

The medical staff had little training in how to handle a psychotic break: the hallucinations and delusions characteristic of schizophrenia. They sent her home, where the sensation of being hunted seeped back into her thoughts.

Sometimes, she ran out onto the open savanna to escape the demons pursuing her.

Family members took turns keeping watch and exhausted traditional methods of healing. Precious animals were sacrificed to drive away the spirits disturbing her. Healers administered herbal powders, and one applied a pale dye to her face and body in an effort to purge demons.

One is known as task sharing.

The second is community self-help.

The third is raising awareness

The evidence that a combination of these services can lead to lasting improvement for people with severe mental illnesses is thin, but a foundation is being laid.

“The key thing is that it’s not simply home-based care for people with schizophrenia,” Laura Asher, who is running the study, said by email. “It also involves awareness raising and community mobilization.”

the cost of these programs is minute compared with the cost of standard psychiatry

$8 per client per month on average, according to Peter Yaro, its executive director. In the United States, it costs $200 to $700 for a single appointment with a psychiatrist, depending on the provider, the type of care and the location.

In global cost-benefit terms, economists typically rate health care programs by the amount of disability they reduce per dollar. Historically, mental health interventions have scored poorly compared with efforts that save young lives, like neonatal care or treatment of diarrhea. A new analysis of mental health strategies in Ethiopia, for instance, found that treating schizophrenia with generic medications was about as cost-effective as treating heart disease with a combination of drugs, like aspirin and a statin — and much less cost-effective than treating depression or epilepsy. The findings, though preliminary, suggest that treating psychosis is relatively costly.

the studies do not take into account the effect of chronic psychosis on an entire family. “The person with psychosis becomes a full-time job for someone else in the family, and depending on how aggressive the person is, maybe more than one person,” said Dr. Simliwa Kolou Valentin Dassa, a psychiatrist in neighboring Togo

15 civil liberties indicators

4 the greatest degree of freedom

For the discretionary question, a score of 1 to 4 may be subtracted, as applicable (the worse the situation, the more points may be subtracted).

ach rating of 1 to 7, with 1 representing the greatest degree of freedom and 7 the smallest degree of freedom, corresponds to a specific range of total scores (see tables 1 and 2).

A country or territory is assigned two ratings

The average of a country or territory’s political rights and civil liberties ratings is called the Freedom Rating

A trend arrow must be linked to a specific change or changes in score, and cannot be assigned if the country had no net change in score

Electoral Democracy

designation “electoral democracy” to countries that have met certain minimum standards for political rights and civil liberties;

Countries and territories with a rating of 6 have very restricted political rights. They are ruled by authoritarian regimes, often with leaders or parties that originally took power by force and have been in office for decades.

hey may hold tightly controlled elections and grant a few political rights, such as some representation or autonomy for minority groups.

few or no political rights because of severe government oppression

limits on media independence

estrictions on trade union activities

discrimination against minority groups and women.

strongly limit the rights of expression

frequently hold political prisoners

virtually no freedom of expression or association, do not protect the rights of detainees and prisoners, and often control most economic activity.

Garza: In 2018 and 2019, my organization, Black Futures Lab, did what we believe is the largest survey of black communities in America. It’s called the Black Census Project. We asked more than 30,000 black people across America what we experience, what we want to see happen instead and what we long for, for our futures.

There has been such a massive disinvestment in the social safety net that should exist to give black communities an opportunity to thrive, whether it’s access to health care or housing or education or jobs.

In many cities, the police spend a lot of time “on traffic and motor-vehicle issues, on false burglar alarms, on noise complaints and on problems with animals,”

A tiny percentage of people are the ones destabilizing communities

There are a host of things that the police are currently responding to that they have no business responding to.

Similarly, if you have a homeless man panhandling at a red light and you say to a cop, “Go fix it,” he’ll arrest the man. And now he has a $250 ticket. And how does he pay that? And what does any of this accomplish?

domestic disputes. They’re the subject of 15 to more than 50 percent of calls to the police

The women were deeply wary of the police in general, but 33 of them had called them at least once, often for help with a teenager. “Calling the police on family members deepens the reach of penal control,” Bell wrote. But the mothers in her study have scant options.

what you’ve been saying. “What we need to fix this thing is rational hope.” How do you instill rational hope? And I mean, how do you do that, right, when you’re out there?

Nobody in Texas knows that we have the biggest army base by land area, in the U.S., Fort Hood, that is 43 percent powered by clean energy.

Texas, if Texas were its own country, it would be the seventh-most prolific emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, it’s the number one emitter in the U.S. — and Texas leads the nation in wind generation, for example.

Dr. Aaron Shirley, a physician who has worked for better health care for blacks in Mississippi, said that the history of segregation and violence against blacks still informs the way people see one another, particularly in the South, making some whites reluctant to support programs that they believe benefit blacks. That is compounded by the country’s rapidly changing demographics, Dr. Geiger said, in which minorities will eventually become a majority, a pattern that has produced a profound cultural unease, particularly when it has collided with economic insecurity. Dr. Shirley said: “If you look at the history of Mississippi, politicians have used race to oppose minimum wage, Head Start, all these social programs. It’s a tactic that appeals to people who would rather suffer themselves than see a black person benefit.” Opponents of the expansion bristled at the suggestion that race had anything to do with their position. State Senator Giles Ward of Mississippi, a Republican, called the idea that race was a factor “preposterous,” and said that with the demographics of the South — large shares of poor people and, in particular, poor blacks — “you can argue pretty much any way you want.”

Once again we see no indication that public insurance generosity has had a damaging effect

Note also that the employment rate increased in nearly all of the countries during this period. On average, it rose by nine percentage points between 1979 and 2013. That’s not what we would expect to see if generous public insurance programs were inducing large numbers of able adults to withdraw from the labor market

What we see in the chart is that countries with more generous public insurance programs tend to have less material deprivation.

With globalization, the advance of computers and robots, increased pressure from shareholders for short-run profit maximization, union weakening, and other shifts, wages have been under pressure. Couple this with the fact that many people at the low end of the income ladder have labor market disadvantages — disability, family constraint, geographic vulnerability to structural unemployment — and we have a recipe for stagnation in the market incomes of the poor.

here’s a good reason for these shifts: government provision offers economies of scale and scope, which reduces the cost of a good or service and thereby makes it available to many people who couldn’t or wouldn’t get it on their own.

Government provides more insurance now than it used to. All of us, not just some, are dependent on it. And life for almost everyone is better because of it

hese expenditures are encouraged by government tax advantages.22 But they do little to help people on the bottom of the ladder, who often work for employers that don’t provide retirement or health benefits.

To make them more affordable, the government claws back some of the benefit by taxing it as though it were regular income. All countries do this, including the United States, but the Nordic countries do it more extensively. Does that hurt their poor? Not much. The tax rates increase with household income, so much of the tax clawback hits middle- and upper-income households.

Another difference is that public services such as schooling, childcare, medical care, housing, and transportation are more plentiful and of better quality for the poor in the Nordic countries. Public services reduce deprivation and free up income to be spent on other needs. It’s difficult to measure the impact of services on living standards, but one indirect way is to look at indicators of material deprivation,

Targeted transfers are directed (sometimes disproportionately, sometimes exclusively) to those with low incomes and assets, whereas universal transfers are provided to most or all citizens.

Targeted programs are more efficient at reducing poverty; each dollar or euro or kroner transferred is more likely to go to the least well-off. Increased targeting therefore could be an effective way to maintain or enhance public insurance in the face of diminished resources.

“the more we target benefits to the poor … the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality.”

Korpi and Palme found that the pattern across eleven affluent nations supported the hypothesis that greater use of targeting in transfers yields less redistribution

The hypothesis that targeting in social policy reduces political support and thereby lessens redistributive effort is a sensible one. Yet the experience of the rich countries in recent decades suggests reason to question it. Targeting has drawbacks relative to universalism: more stigma for recipients, lower take-up rates, and possibly less social trust.44 But targeting is less expensive. As pressures to contain government expenditures mount, policy makers may therefore turn to greater use of targeting. That may not be a bad thing.

Public insurance programs boost the incomes of the least well-off and improve their material well-being. If such programs are too generous, this benefit could be offset by reduced employment or economic growth, but the comparative evidence suggests that the world’s rich nations haven’t reached or exceeded the tipping point.

Spending lots of money on social protection is not in and of itself helpful to the poor. Total social expenditures in the United States are greater than in Denmark and Sweden, because the US has a large private welfare state. But relatively little of America’s private social spending reaches the poor.

Public services are an important antipoverty tool. Their benefit doesn’t show up in income data, but they appear to play a key role in reducing material hardship. Services expand the sphere of consumption for which the cost is zero or minimal. And they help to boost the earnings and capabilities of the poor by enhancing human capital, assisting with job search and placement, and facilitating work-family balance.

Some wealthy Damascenes say that though they are keen to see the back of Mr Assad, they would rather America not strike because they fear the potential consequences. Syrians living in rebel-held areas, who have less to lose, seem more supportive of intervention.

many criticise America for not asking them which targets to hit

many are annoyed that the conversation about strikes revolves around America’s credibility and deterring other regimes, rather than putting an end to Syria’s war or Mr Assad’s rule.

Some Arab states, like Saudi Arabia, urge action in private, but keep quiet publicly, lest they be seen to be seeking Western help

One thing many Syrians do agree on, however, is their contempt for Mr Obama's indecisiveness: "Obama, you ass, are you going to hit us or not?" asks a young Damascene on Facebook.

Bolivars in cash in Venezuela are rarely used for routine purchases

Witness the recent debate over “sanctuary cities,” or state-federal conflicts over immigration enforcement.

the desire for real national control over immigration policy may be as dangerous to the E.U. project in the long run as the already-evident folly of expanding the common currency to Greece.

“Brexit” from the European Union.

It’s behind the rise of the National Front in France, and Euroskeptical parties the continent over.

Europe’s already-significant north-south divisions

the scale of the migration that may be coming to Europe over the next fifty years.

300 million people in the United States and just under 600 million in all the countries to our south

In 2050, according to the latest U.N. projections, Europe’s population will have dipped to (an aging) 707 million, while Africa’s population will be 2.4 billion

Desperation might drive it, but so might rising expectations, the connections forged by growth and globalization.