Best content in Comparative Politics

anonymous on 14 Nov 21

Much of this tribal land in Minnesota has been damaged beyond repair due to chemical waste, and many Native Americans have a hard time fighting against it.

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Much of this tribal land in Minnesota has been damaged beyond repair due to chemical waste, and many Native Americans have a hard time fighting against it.</div>

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kylany on 15 Nov 21

It is totally unfair the way the Native Americans have repeatedly been ignored even with their health and lives on the line. The nuclear power plant and the dangers it causes reminds me of critical theory from APES. This dangerous power plant is built in a community of disadvantaged people and harms them while serving other people.

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">It is totally unfair the way the Native Americans have repeatedly been ignored even with their health and lives on the line. The nuclear power plant and the dangers it causes reminds me of critical theory from APES. This dangerous power plant is built in a community of disadvantaged people and harms them while serving other people.</div>

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Katharine Hayhoe - "Our future is still in our hands" | The On Being Project - The On B... - 0 views

onbeing.org/...r-future-is-still-in-our-hands climate climate change environment faith action

shared by Kay Bradley on 15 Nov 21 - No Cached

I was talking with a pastor just recently, and he asked me very genuinely, he said, “How do I talk to people about climate change, when the only solutions that we are told that there are to climate change is to stop eating meat” — which is a very big deal in Texas, with those barbecues, it really is. It’s an identity issue. I’m not saying this facetiously; it is literally an identity issue — “and stop driving trucks, also an identity issue, stop traveling, stop having children, which is also an identity issue — basically, stop all these things that actually we often see as defining who we are?” And he said, “How am I supposed to tell people that we’re supposed to do this, when it’s as if I’m telling them, you know, we have to just” — and I think these were my words — “return to the Stone Age, unplug everything, and all the solutions are bad”?
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And sadly, the way our human psychology is built, psychologists have shown that we, as humans, are much more averse to losing what we have than gaining something new.
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I think there are some very smart people who have put those pieces together and deliberately communicated a message to us that we’re going to lose all we hold dear, instead of messaging the truth, which is, don’t you want to be more energy independent, rather than less? Don’t you want to have a car that is faster, that you never have to go to the gas station again — especially in the days of COVID — than the one that you have today, and that doesn’t produce air pollution that’s responsible for almost 9 million deaths a year? Don’t you want to grow food in a way that is healthy and good for the soil and for people and for the animals, too? Don’t you want to invest in nature, so it can protect us by purifying our air and our water and protecting our coastlines and providing habitat for animals and preventing zoonosis? When we actually start talking about real solutions  — and that’s the Yale survey that you referred to that I talk about in the book — when we ask people about real solutions, everybody’s on board. Everybody says, heck yes, I would love to do that. And so that is where we can directly address the fear, head-on.
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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?
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And then the second thing is recognizing that we are already moving towards a better future. Now, it might not seem like that, because all the headlines are full of doom and gloom and bad news. But when we start to look for hopeful news — and sadly, we have to go out and look for it, because if you just go — I did an experiment the other day, where I went to the website of a major news organization, and I just paged down through 35 headlines. And about seven or eight were very neutral; like, they didn’t evoke any emotion in me. They were just neutral, factual headlines. And every single other headline was negative — every one. So when we go and we look, though, for the hopeful stories of people who are making a difference, that imbues us with a sense of efficacy, that, wow, there’s somebody over there who’s doing something.
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And you’re talking about what I refer to as a muscular hope.
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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.
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Nobody knows that the Dallas Fort Worth airport was the first large carbon-neutral airport in North America.
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Nobody knows that the city of Houston, which is home to, of course, most of the headquarters of many large, multinational oil and gas corporations, that the city of Houston has — is going to be meeting its Paris targets, in terms of reducing its carbon emissions.
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we think of climate action as a giant boulder sitting at the bottom of an incredibly steep hill, and it’s only got a few hands on it. It’s got, you know, Al Gore’s hands are on it, and maybe Jane Goodall, and maybe a couple other hands, but nobody else. And so there’s just no way we’re going to make it up that hill. Like, just forget it. Why even waste my time? That’s sort of mentally how we think.
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But the reality is, when we start to look around and see that 90 percent of new energy installed last year, during COVID, was clean energy, and we start to see that cities all over the world are taking action on climate change, and big businesses, like Microsoft and Apple and AT&T — you know, they’re building the biggest solar farm in the U.S., outside of Dallas, to supply major corporations with clean energy. So really, that giant boulder, it is already at the top of the hill, and it’s already rolling down the hill in the right direction, and it already has millions of hands on it. It just doesn’t have enough to get it going faster. And when we think, well, maybe I could add my hand to that, because I could get it going just a little bit faster, that’s totally different than if we think it’s at the bottom of the hill, not budging even an inch. So I find tremendous hope from that.
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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.
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that, honestly, and here’s the crazy thing. When you look at how the world has changed before — and it has changed. I mean, you know, 200 years ago it was somehow completely socially acceptable to have other human beings in slavery. And 150 years ago, it was entirely acceptable to say that women’s brains were too small and too fragile to be educated, because they would overheat.
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It is the verse in Timothy where it talks about fear, where it says, “God has not given you a spirit of fear.”
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that verse goes on to say, is a spirit of power, which is kind of an old-fashioned word, but in modern parlance it means to be empowered; to be able to act.
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Or “agency.”
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Yes, agency. Exactly — a spirit of agency. I like that.
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And that’s the opposite of being paralyzed by fear. And we also have a spirit of love, which means we can be thinking of and considering others, not just ourselves and our own needs
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So caring about this issue and acting on it is not only consistent with who we are, but it enables us to more genuinely express what we truly care about
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It’s about acknowledging that, to care about climate change, you only have to be one thing, and that one thing is a human, living on planet Earth.
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But talk about why it matters to you. Talk about how you both ski, or you’re both parents and you’re worried about your kids and the playground being too hot for them, or the fact that you fish and you’ve noticed that the fish populations are changing, or the fact that your basement got flooded last time it rained. Talk about something that matters to you and to the person that you’re talking with, and then do your research, to learn about what real climate solutions look like, and share that information with people.
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do you know what our city is doing? Find out what your city’s doing. Tell people. Do you know what your state’s doing? Do you know what your church is doing? And if you don’t know, ask, and then if they’re not doing anything, say, hey, here are some things that you could be doing. And I even have a list on my website, because people often ask me that. So I’ve got a list of, you know, what could your church do, what can you do at school — all of these different things you can do.
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hope begins with fear or despair or anxiety, it begins, as the bible says in the Book of Romans, it begins with suffering. And that suffering produces perseverance, and that perseverance produces character, and the character produces hope
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in the middle of the century, it was somehow acceptable to say that, depending on the color of your skin, you could or couldn’t enter certain buildings or sit in a place on the bus. So the world has absolutely changed before, and how did it change? It was when ordinary people of no particular wealth or fame decided that the world could and should be different, and they decided to not only take personal action, but to use their voices to talk about why it mattered, what could be done, and to advocate for change in every sphere in which they were.
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Kay Bradley on 15 Nov 21

"Well, we live, today, in a country, the United States, that is more politically polarized than it's been in either of our lifetimes, ever. And that just seems to be getting worse by the day." What Hayhoe and others are pointing to is another way of communicating about climate change.

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">"Well, we live, today, in a country, the United States, that is more politically polarized than it's been in either of our lifetimes, ever. And that just seems to be getting worse by the day." What Hayhoe and others are pointing to is another way of communicating about climate change.</div>

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Katharine Hayhoe: The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk abo... - 0 views

www.ted.com/...t_climate_change_talk_about_it Climate stories optimism

shared by Kay Bradley on 15 Nov 21 - No Cached

Per Espen Stoknes: How to transform apocalypse fatigue into action on global warming | ... - 0 views

www.ted.com/..._into_action_on_global_warming climate change change

shared by Kay Bradley on 15 Nov 21 - No Cached

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Venezuela: The Rise and Fall of a Petrostate | Council on Foreign Relations - 0 views

www.cfr.org/...venezuela-crisis petroleum petrostate Latin America

shared by Kay Bradley on 15 Nov 21 - No Cached

Punto Fijo pact, which guaranteed that state jobs and, notably, oil rents would be parceled out to the three parties in proportion to voting results. While the pact sought to guard against dictatorship and usher in democratic stability, it ensured that oil profits would be concentrated in the state.
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OPEC. V
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OPEC embargo on countries backing Israel in the Yom Kippur War quadrupled oil prices and made Venezuela the country with the highest per-capita income in Latin America.
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mismanagement. Analysts estimate that as much as $100 billion was embezzled between 1972 and 1997 alone.
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A country that discovers a resource after it has formed robust democratic institutions is usually better able to avoid the resource curse, analysts say. For example, strong institutions in Norway have helped the country enjoy steady economic growth since the 1960s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the North Sea,
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Strong democracies with an independent press and judiciary help curtail classic petrostate problems.
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Many countries with vast resource wealth, such as Norway and Saudi Arabia, have established sovereign wealth funds (SWF) to manage their investments
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climate change.  
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Analysts anticipate that a global shift from fossil fuel energy to renewables such as solar and wind will force petrostates to diversify their economies. Nearly two hundred countries, including Venezuela, have joined the Paris Agreement, a binding treaty that requires states to make specific commitments to mitigate
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Summary Venezuela is an example of a decaying petrostate, where the government is highly dependent on income from fossil fuels, power is concentrated in an elite minority, and corruption is widespread.  Petrostates are vulnerable to what economists call Dutch disease, a dynamic in which a government develops an unhealthy dependence on natural resource exports, and other important industrial sectors are deprived of investment. Venezuela has descended into economic and political turmoil under President Nicolas Maduro, as its once-substantial oil outflows have slowed to a trickle. Absent a power transition, analysts say the country’s prospects are grim.
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Jeffrey Sachs,
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