Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ Comparative Politics
Rss Feed
Sort By: Most Recent | Popular Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
2More

Where Abortion Access Would Decline if Roe v. Wade Were Overturned - The New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...tion-laws-roe-wade-states.html
shared by Kay Bradley on 02 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Kay Bradley on 02 Dec 21
     
    This is such an interesting map! Why are opinions on abortion divided in the regions they are? I mean, obviously, it indicates conservative and liberal areas, but why in the places that they are? What areas are surprising?
  • audreybandel on 02 Dec 21
     
    This is so interesting! It's always important to look at who is affected most and why when it comes to reproductive justice.
2More

Ten ways to confront the climate crisis without losing hope | Climate crisis | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...nit-reconstruction-after-covid
shared by Kay Bradley on 02 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Kay Bradley on 02 Dec 21
     
    By Rebecca Solnit
  • Kay Bradley on 02 Dec 21
     
    Following Cole's Lead on the Anthony Kwame Appiah article Bout the true cost of COVID in the Global South, I found the Guardian Series on Reconstruction from COVID, and this one is great. Rebecca Solnit is American, a geographer, observer, and generally very interesting person. I think she's from New York.
1More

3 dead, 8 injured in shooting at Michigan high school, undersheriff says - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by anonymous on 01 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Dec 21
     
    On Tuesday afternoon, there was a school shooting in Oxford Michigan, four are confirmed dead, and several are in critical condition.
49More

COP26: Key Outcomes From the UN Climate Talks in Glasgow  | World Resources I... - 0 views

www.wri.org/...comes-un-climate-talks-glasgow
shared by Kay Bradley on 01 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • The world still remains off track to beat back the climate crisis.  
  • ministers from all over the world agreed that countries should come back next year to submit stronger 2030 emissions reduction targets with the aim of closing the gap to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees
  • Ministers also agreed that developed countries should urgently deliver more resources to help climate-vulnerable countries adapt to the dangerous and costly consequences of climate change that they are feeling already —
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • curb methane emissions,
  • halt and reverse forest loss,
  • align the finance sector with net-zero by 2050
  • ditch the internal combustion engine
  • accelerate the phase-out of coal,
  • end international financing for fossil fuels,
  • “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)
  • To keep the goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C within reach, we need to cut global emissions in half by the end of this decade.
  • these plans, as they stand, put the world on track for 2.5 degrees C of warming by the end of the century.
  • If you take into account countries’ commitments to reach net-zero emissions by around mid-century, analysis shows temperature rise could be kept to around 1.8 or 1.9 degrees C.
  • some major emitters’ 2030 targets are so weak (particularly those from Australia, China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Russia) that they don’t offer credible pathways to achieve their net-zero targets.
  • a major “credibility gap”
  • To fix this problem, these countries’ must strengthen their 2030 emissions reduction targets to at least align with their net-zero commitments. 
  • as well as ramping up ambition
  • the pact asks nations to consider further actions to curb potent non-CO2 gases, such as methane, and includes language emphasizing the need to “phase down unabated coal” and “phase-out fossil fuel subsidies.”
  • This marked the first time negotiators have explicitly referenced shifting away from coal and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies in COP decision text.  
  • this COP finally recognized the importance of nature for both reducing emissions and building resilience to the impacts of climate change,
  • Did Developing Countries Get the Finance and Support They Need? 
  • In 2009, rich nations committed to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 and through 2025 to support climate efforts in developing countries
  • developed countries failed to meet that goal in 2020 (recent OECD estimates show that total climate finance reached $79.6 billion in 2019).
  • The Adaptation Fund reached unprecedented levels of contributions, with new pledges for $356 million that represent almost three times its mobilization target for 2022. The Least Developed Countries Fund, which supports climate change adaptation in the world’s least developed countries, also received a record $413 million in new contributions.
  • COP26 also took steps to help developing countries access good quality finance options.
  • 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. 
  • COP26 finally put the critical issue of loss and damage squarely on the main stage
  • 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.  
  • International Carbon Markets.
  • 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.
  • his is critical to make real progress on reducing emissions.
  • Common Time Frames. In Glasgow, countries were encouraged to use common timeframes for their national climate commitments. This means that new NDCs that countries put forward in 2025 should have an end-date of 2035, in 2030 they will put forward commitments with a 2040 end-date, and so on.
  • Transparency. In Glasgow, all countries agreed to submit information about their emissions and financial, technological and capacity-building support using a common and standardized set of formats and tables.
  • 100 high-level announcements during the “World Leaders Summit"
  • 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).  
  • Glasgow Breakthroughs, a set of global targets meant to dramatically accelerate the innovation and use of clean technologies in five emissions-heavy sectors:
  • power, road transport, steel, hydrogen and agriculture.
  • 46 countries, including the U.K., Canada, Poland and Vietnam made commitments to phase out domestic coal,
  • 29 countries including the U.K., Canada, Germany and Italy committed to end new direct international public support for unabated fossil fuels by the end of 2022
  • Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, led by Costa Rica and Denmark — with core members France, Greenland, Ireland, Quebec, Sweden and Wales — pledged to end new licensing rounds for oil and gas exploration and production and set an end date that is aligned with Paris Agreement objectives
  • Efforts were also made to scale up solar investment
  • new Solar Investment Action Agenda by WRI, the International Solar Alliance (ISA) and Bloomberg Philanthropies that identifies high-impact opportunities to speed up investment and reach ISA’s goal of mobilizing $1 trillion in solar investment by 2030.
  • Non-state actors including investors, businesses, cities and subnational regions also joined collective action initiatives aimed at driving economic transformation.
  • Over 400 financial firms which control over $130 trillion in assets committed to aligning their portfolios to net-zero by 2030
  • banks, asset managers and asset owners fully recognize the business case for climate action and the significant risks of investing in the high-carbon, polluting economy of that past.
  • 11 major automakers agreed to work toward selling only zero-emission vehicles globally by 2040, and by no later than 2035 in leading markets.  
  • In the year ahead, major emitters need to ramp up their 2030 emissions reduction targets to align with 1.5 degrees C, more robust approaches are needed to hold all actors accountable for the many commitments made in Glasgow, and much more attention is needed on how to meet the urgent needs of climate-vulnerable countries to help them deal with climate impacts and transition to net-zero economies.
1More

Kaiser Permanente Reaches Tentative Deal With Unions, Averting Strike - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-permanente-unions-strike.html Strike
shared by anonymous on 30 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 30 Nov 21
     
    Interesting to see the amount of strikes that have arose towards the end of the pandemic.
7More

How Redlining's Racist Effects Lasted for Decades - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ffects-lasted-for-decades.html race real estate discrimination
shared by Kay Bradley on 16 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • “We now have evidence that is very systematic and nationwide that has detailed that these borders did matter,” said Leah Boustan, an economic historian at Princeton
  • As of 1930, there were already clear differences along some of the borders in racial demographics and homeownership rates. Blacks were already more likely to be living in “D” neighborhoods than “C” neighborhoods, for example.
  • This process can be invisible to people who might look at these communities, Mr. Sugrue said, and place blame for their disrepair on residents who don’t value their homes.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Commercial investors, meanwhile, would have stayed away.
  • And any existing homeowners would have struggled to obtain credit for maintenance and repairs
  • Because those homes could be frequently repossessed by predatory lenders, these neighborhoods would experience more population instability.
  • Richard Rothstein, a researcher with the Economic Policy Institute who has written a new book, “The Color of Law,” on how official policies like redlining fostered segregation. These maps — and their lingering effects — derive from a time when the American government, he writes, believed that “inharmonious racial groups” should be separated.
1More

The Debate Over Critical Race Theory - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...itical-race-theory-debate.html race critical race theory inequality structural inequality
shared by Kay Bradley on 16 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • In a culture-war brawl that has spilled into the country’s education system, Republicans at the local, state and national levels are trying to block curriculums that emphasize systemic racism.More than 20 states have introduced legislation restricting lessons on racism and other so-called divisive concepts.
9More

The Political Economy of Venezuela and PDVSA - Georgetown Journal of International Affairs - 1 views

gjia.georgetown.edu/...economy-of-venezuela-and-pdvsa Venezuela hyperinflation inflation Latin America petrostate petroleum economy international Less Developed World:
shared by Kay Bradley on 16 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Under the direction of Luis Giusti in the 1994-1998 period, PDVSA’s production soared. This trend changed in 1999, when Hugo Chavez became Venezuela’s president and introduced Chavismo as the guiding economic doctrine.
  • Chavez responded by purging PDVSA of its professionals en masse, replacing them with “reliable” hands—those loyal to Chavez’s socialist regime.
  • This trend has left Venezuela’s output drastically lower than when Chavez took power in 1999.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • with capital expenditures far below the value of equipment that is being consumed each year by depreciation and amortization.
  • On top of PDVSA’s reduced capital stock and its deteriorating quality, there has also been a drop in the stock and quality of its human capital.
  • It is important to note that PDVSA’s decreased output is not due to dwindling oil reserves,
  • Venezuela’s reserves—which are the world’s largest, at 9.26 billion barrels
  • At the end of 2018, Exxon’s depletion rate was 6.74 percent per year—a rate comparable to that realized by most major oil companies. That rate implies that it would take 9.9 years for Exxon’s oil reserves to be halfway depleted. That is 370.5 years earlier than when PDVSA would deplete half of its reserves
  • The country with the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela is plagued by a mismanaged, state-owned oil company in a death spiral—PDVSA.
9More

UPRISING IN VENEZUELA: THE GOVERNMENT; VENEZUELA'S CHIEF FORCED TO RESIGN; CIVILIAN INS... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...resign-civilian-installed.html Venezuela coup Latin America new york times economy Less Developed World:
shared by Kay Bradley on 16 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Officials portrayed the ouster as a victory for democracy, even though Mr. Chávez was a legitimately elected president.
  • However, Latin American leaders at a summit meeting in Costa Rica criticized Mr. Chávez's ouster as an ''interruption of the constitutional order.''
  • Mr. Chávez presided over a stormy era when he seized control of the legislature, confronted the old-line political elite and steered the country into an alliance with Cuba.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Mr. Chávez had ''presented his resignation.'' He spoke flanked by military officers who had rebelled against Mr. Chávez on Thursday night, the third day of a general strike called by his opponents.
  • opponents of the government took to the streets in the early morning hours, honking horns and waving the gold, blue and red of the Venezuelan flag. El Universal, a leading newspaper here, hailed the end with these words, ''It's over!''The interim government quickly moved to undo Mr. Chavez's policies, dissolving the National Assembly controlled by his supporters, firing members of the Supreme Court and changing the country's official name back to the Republic of Venezuela.
  • the huge state-owned oil company, which exports most of its oil to the United States.
  • Cuba called the change-over a coup and urged other countries to distance themselves from the new government. President Fidel Castro and Mr. Chávez had formed a close friendship.
  • American officials praised the Venezuelan military and the police for defying Mr. Chávez,
  • ''The goal for his successors is to effectively tackle the pressing socio-economic issues that brought Chávez to power with so much popular support,'' said Russell Crandall, a Latin America specialist at Davidson College in North Carolina. ''Chávez was right about the problems he saw in Venezuela. He was wrong about the solutions and the Venezuelan people made that very clear.''
25More

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”?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Nobody knows that the Dallas Fort Worth airport was the first large carbon-neutral airport in North America.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • And you’re talking about what I refer to as a muscular hope.
  • 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
  • It is the verse in Timothy where it talks about fear, where it says, “God has not given you a spirit of fear.”
  • 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.
  • Or “agency.”
  • Yes, agency. Exactly — a spirit of agency. I like that.
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
2More

Flooding and Nuclear Waste Eat Away at a Tribe's Ancestral Home - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ds-flooding-nuclear-waste.html Native Minnesota
shared by anonymous on 14 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
1More

Glasgow Climate Change Conference - October-November 2021 | UNFCCC - 0 views

unfccc.int/...nference-october-november-2021
shared by Kay Bradley on 11 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Kay Bradley on 11 Nov 21
     
    Landing Page for Conference docs and news
1More

Opinion | Liberal Hypocrisy Is Fueling Inequality - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-blue-states-legislation.html economics political economy inequality systemic
shared by Kay Bradley on 09 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Kay Bradley on 09 Nov 21
     
    Very provocative 14 minute watch about political economy in Blue states in the US. Let's discuss!
1More

Yuval Noah Harari Believes This Simple Story Can Save the Planet - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...val-noah-harari-interview.html culture systemic economics climate change
shared by Kay Bradley on 08 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Kay Bradley on 08 Nov 21
     
    " scale. The broad sweep of Harari's writing, which encompasses the prehistoric past and a dark far-off future, has turned him into a bit"
« First ‹ Previous 161 - 180 of 863 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page