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Benjamin McKeown

20 million starving to death: inside the worst famine since World War II - Vox - 1 views

www.vox.com/...uth-sudan-hunger-crisis-famine

food famine sudan agriculture agribusiness

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 24 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • region controlled by rebels from her same tribe
  • starvation
  • starved to death along the wa
  • ...77 more annotations...
  • South Sudan, which is facing mass hunger on a scale unimaginable in almost every other part of the world. In February, the United Nations estimated that 100,000 South Sudanese were starving, and that 5 million more — 42 percent of the country’s population — have such limited access to proper food that they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. More recent figures are not available yet, but aid agencies fear the situation could be much worse now.
  • South Sudan, the world’s newest country and one that came into existence largely because of enormous assistance from the US.
  • historic famine is also threatening Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen.
  • 20 million people in those four countries are at risk of dying due to a lack of food.
  • The UN has already officially declared a full-fledged famine in parts of South Sudan and warned that the other three countries will suffer mass death from food and water shortages if “prompt and sustained humanitarian intervention” doesn’t happen soon.
  • these famines weren’t caused by natural disasters like crop failures or droughts. They were man-made — the direct result of the bloody wars and insurgencies raging in all four countries.
  • Washington, which has been slow to act, seems to finally be taking steps to help fight the famine. The Trump administration proposed massive funding cuts to America’s humanitarian food aid, but Congress rejected those cuts and instead allocated close to $1 billion in new funding.
  • “It’s entirely a man-made construct right now, and that means we have it within our power to stop that,” he said. “Wars are hard to stop; famines are not.
  • intensive care unit of an International Medical Corps hospita
  • The building is a simple temporary structure made of cinderblocks and plywood.
  • Although children under 5 years old are the most vulnerable to malnutrition and the infections it can cause in small bodies, they are also incredibly resilient and almost always bounce back if fed high-calorie foods and given proper medicine.
  • The problem is that huge numbers of South Sudanese children aren’t getting that type of food. Many, in fact, aren’t getting food of any kind.
  • The crisis in the 1980s pales in comparison to the famine happening today. Because it isn’t just happening in one country; it’s happening in four.
  • Nigeria
  • Boko Haram
  • forced from their homes to escape the group’s campaign of suicide bombings
  • including huge numbers of farmers
  • With the agricultural systems of hard-hit areas in near collapse because of the fighting, the UN estimates that at least 4.8 million people are in need of urgent food assistance.
  • The problem is that the government of Somalia doesn’t control huge swaths of the country.
  • Islamist militant group al-Shabaab.
  • The Arab world’s poorest country, Yemen has suffered from food shortages for years, but a war between the Saudi-backed government in exile and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who control much of the north of the country has brought food shipments into Yemen to a grinding halt.
  • With US assistance, Saudi warplanes have destroyed bridges, roads, factories, farms, food trucks, animals, water infrastructure, and agricultural banks across the north, while imposing a blockade on the territory. For a country heavily dependent on foreign food aid, that means starving the people.
  • whatever food makes it in is so expensive that many people cannot afford to buy it. T
  • This is a gigantic failure of international diplomacy,”
  • After decades of civil war and neglect, the country finally gained its independence from the North in 2011, in large part due to the active assistance of the Obama administration and many of Washington’s key allies
  • Juba
  • There are just 200 kilometers of paved roads in a country the size of France, making it difficult for farmers to sell their crops and buy new seeds. Food shortages have haunted rural communities for some time, and cattle raiding — where armed men steal entire herds from nearby villages and towns — is a regular occurrence.
  • Even if a South Sudanese family owned cattle and had planted crops, all of that would soon disappear when war came to their doorstep. Plants would die because farmers fled and never returned. Animals would be stolen or left to starve or die from dehydration.
  • Javier Zarracina/Vox
  • Food shortages and acute hunger may have been almost inevitable for a country that had had trouble feeding itself even in the relative moments of calm before the current storm.
  • That storm erupted in 2013, when the country’s president, Salva Kiir, and his vice president, Riek Machar, went to war. Kiir accused Machar of a coup attempt, which Machar denied. In reality, the split was caused by a toxic mixture of decades of deep resentment over tribal differences heightened during the previous civil war, and a fear that the country’s oil resources would not be fairly divided.
  • Kiir, who is from the dominant Dinka tribe, controlled the country’s armed forces. Machar, from the minority Nuer group, controlled a loose network of tribal militias. Both sides have been accused of war crimes, and more than 50,000 are estimated to have died in the fighting.
  • government troops have been conducting “counterinsurgency” efforts in areas where the people are Nuer or from other tribes considered supportive of the rebels.
  • most of the world sees it as the collective punishment of civilians.
  • Without civilians, those fighters won’t have a place to stay, receive food, receive popular support,” Jonathan Pedneault of Human Rights Watch told me. “So the aim by targeting civilians is meant to cut the grass under the feet of those fighters.”
  • That includes chasing people away from the very thing their lives depend on — food.
  • Chol and Nuer escaped into the enormous marshes that flank the White Nile river, which provide places to hide from troops who are unable to access the area by truck or car.
  • But that safety can come at a huge cost: There is nothing to eat there, so people who survive attacks by gunmen end up perishing slowly from hunger.
  • is only accessible by traditional dugout canoes
  • Water lily roots are the only thing people in the marshes have to eat.
  • lacks enough food to feed all the refugees. Instead, she and her family are still trying to survive based on what they can scavenge in the marshes.
  • up lilies like weeds and ripped off their small, stumpy roots.
  • Western aid agencies are operating in the nearby village of Ganyiel.
  • he rebel-held town is a market place where stalls sell tea and some dried fish from the local rivers.
  • UN helicopters. Here, international aid agencies have some of their most crucial, and remote, outposts. It seems like only a matter of time until food shipments start arriving in Thoahnom Payam, just 30 minutes away by canoe.
  • Leer
  • things are much worse
  • occupied by government troops, is destroyed and abandoned.
  • The main street of shops and stalls has been razed to the ground, with sheets of steel scattered about in the grass and rusting vehicles lining the side of the main dirt road.
  • A few miles down that road is rebel-held land
  • A few hundred people — originally residents of Leer and the surrounding villages — had crept out of hiding as news spread of a food drop by an aid plane.
  • All of these people had left family members in the marshes, waiting anxiously for them to bring back the food. These thin, tired people were the strongest and most capable of making the journey.
  • sitting silently under trees as bags of maize, recently dropped from a plane circling above, were piled up by volunteers wearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) bibs
  • She had six children starving in the marshes, waiting for her to return with food.
  • waiting to be given seeds and tools to plant them with. The ICRC handed out hoes and axes as well as maize seeds to grow some crops in rebel-held land outside the swamps. If they planted before the rains came, then they could harvest in August. Many of the people sitting near me will die long before the crops are ready to eat.
  • Before the war, he said, the region was capable of feeding itself.
  • There were a lot of cattle and livestock in this area,” he told me, standing next to a crowd of people sitting in line on the ground. “They were farmers, there was commerce, there was a market here where I am standing right now. All of this is gone now.”
  • Government soldiers had burned down the small market when they had taken the area earlier in the conflict. Now villagers who once bought and sold food here are being kept alive with charitable handouts. The town wasn’t always starving. It got that way because of war.
  • For those fleeing war, hunger can seem like an affordable price to pay for safety
  • It would take truly horrific violence for South Sudanese parents to flee into the marshes given the very real — and in some ways likely — chances of watching their children starve to death there. But that kind of horrific violence, unfortunately, is part of daily life in many parts of the country.
  • Most of them had the deep horizontal scars of the Nuer tribe markings across their foreheads.
  • “I don’t know why the government is doing this,” he added. “We are their people.”
  • the most fortunate of South Sudan’s starving people are the ones who have reached camps run by the United Nations, where Western aid agencies are providing food, shelter, and medical facilities
  • The organizations are keeping hundreds of thousands of people alive; the problem is that millions more live in remote areas of this vast country that the aid groups simply can’t get to. The aid workers themselves are also increasingly at risk.
  • South Sudan is heavily dependent on foreign aid, but it has quickly become the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian workers. More than 80 aid workers — mostly South Sudanese — have been killed since the conflict began. Female foreign aid workers were gang-raped by rampaging government soldiers who stormed a hotel in Juba during last July’s violence in the capital.
  • three South Sudanese employees of the UN’s World Food Program were violently murdered in the western city of Wau. The WFP said they were trying to get to the warehouse during an outbreak of violence but were killed along the way. Two died of machete wounds, and another was shot.
  • Looting is a huge problem
  • Every time we have to pull out of an area, entire stocks of food and supplies are taken.”
  • Charities have been forced by the government to leave areas where their help is needed. In Leer, access has been granted again by the government, but it’s patchy. There used to be compounds and warehouses for some aid agencies there, but they were all burned down during the fighting.
  • International aid agencies in South Sudan are in a tough position. Caught between an increasingly belligerent and threatening government and the more than 5 million people on the brink of starvation, they are trying to keep people alive without openly condemning the government for their part in starving them in the first place. If they do, they risk being kicked out of the country.
  • On February 20, just days after the UN officially declared that South Sudan was in the midst of a famine, the government in Juba shocked the world by announcing a hike in visa prices for aid workers — from $100 to $10,000. That hasn’t been implemented, but it’s a stark reminder to aid agencies that their relationship with the government is increasingly shaky.
  • Journalists are also struggling to gain access to the country as the government hopes to control the image of the hunger crisis and steer the rhetoric away from it being war-driven.
  • Once inside, intimidation is rife. In nearly 10 years of reporting from conflict zones, I have never worked in an environment where government intimidation is so strong.
  • The government shut Al Jazeera English’s bureau in Juba on May 2 after objecting to a story where a reporter interviewed Machar’s rebels, and an American NPR reporter was detained for several days after being arrested at his hotel in the capital by security forces.
  • For South Sudanese journalists, it’s even worse: They’ve faced a violent campaign against them since the beginning of the war. In August 2015, President Kiir said publicly, “The freedom of press does not mean that you work against your country. And if anybody among them does not know this country has killed people, we will demonstrate it one day on them.” Three days later, a reporter working for the independent New Nation paper was shot dead in the street.
  • The government of South Sudan will not realistically be able to stop the news of its famine, nor the fact that it was entirely man-made, from being reported. But we’re rapidly approaching the point of no return: Without an immediate and sustained effort to end the violence ravaging South Sudan and the other three nations, the world will for the first time in living memory be faced with four simultaneous famines.
  • The worst humanitarian disaster since World War II will have been one that was caused by, and therefore could have been prevented by, humans.
Benjamin McKeown

The Quinoa Quarrel - Food and Environment Reporting Network - 0 views

thefern.org/...quinoa-quarrel

quinoa food food security

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 17 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • But at same time, what’s happening to Bolivian potato farmers? They have cheap industrial potatoes dumped into their market, so they can’t compete. They can’t make a living. They have to work in mines or migrate to cities. ”
  • to import useful qualities from the wild varieties, such as heat tolerance and pest resistance.
  • Of course, seeds from Bolivia and other Andean nations would offer a more easily accessible source of genetic diversity—but they’re not available.
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  • Must the whole world “start paying the Iranians a premium for every bushel of wheat,” he asks, “because their Iranian ancestors were the ones that domesticated it?”
  • “If you ask for one crop that can save the world and address climate change, nutrition, all these things—the answer is quinoa. There’s no doubt about it.”
  • “When we’re talking about people who die every day because they don’t have enough to eat, then I think that sharing is a must.”
  • While the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a handful of governments around the world hold small, freely shared collections, most varities of quinoa are off-limits. Who is to blame? It’s not the usual suspect— some multinational corporation with a full portfolio of patents and evil intentions. This time, the germplasm is being withheld by the Andean nations themselves.
  • Jellen pictured quinoa granola bars “in every Walmart in America.” But there was no way to meet this demand as long as the Andean nations refused to facilitate production outside their borders while lacking the infrastructure to supply additional demand themselves.
  • she has finally adapted the plant well enough to be able to provide farmers with seed later this year.
  • “Quinoa has been in a nursery kind of environment,” he explains. “Now it’s about to go out into the urban jungle, so to speak. It’s about to land in Times Square, and it’s going to have to fend for itself.”
  • “To think we can take a couple of Chilean quinoa strains and grow them in Iowa—it just doesn’t work that way,” Jellen tells me. “There’s always a disease right around the corner, and the big game in plant breeding is to be one step ahead of that.”
  • which is why Jellen favors the “free and fair” exchange of germplasm. He will gladly share his genetic material with any interested parties—Americans, Moroccans, Bolivians. “I’d give that seed to Monsanto if they wanted to use it.”
  • For decades, Bolivia did share its quinoa germplasm.
  • To make a hybrid, one plant is used to fertilize another. In the case of corn, which naturally cross-pollinates with its neighbors, this is easy. But where corn is promiscuous, quinoa is practically abstinent, what plant breeders call a “selfer”: the female part of the plant is fertilized almost exclusively by the male part of the same plant. In order for the two plants to be mated, then, the “female” must first be emasculated by the removal of its male reproductive organs. Because quinoa flowers are tiny and numerous, this is extremely difficult work.
  • hybrid quinoa,
  • Farmers in Bolivia were furious. The researchers had found the cytoplasm in plants they were growing in Colorado, but their seed had originated on the Altiplano.
  • “all the countries of the world not to recognize this patent because the male sterile plant, the knowledge and maintenance of its genetic diversity, is the property of the indigenous peoples of the Andes.” Read: quinoa belongs to us.
  • If the cytoplasm identified by Ward and Johnson allowed the efficient creation of hybrids, wouldn’t that serve as an incentive for seed companies to invest in improving quinoa? And wouldn’t the primary beneficiaries of that investment be the quinoa farmers themselves?
  • This thinking reflects the modern mind-set of American plant breeding. Until the 1980s, improving crops was a mostly public endeavor; in the United States, it was underwritten by tax-payers. But as public involvement with agriculture waned and intellectual-property rights began to generate much greater profits for seed companies, plant breeding became largely privatized. Today it is ownership, in the form of patents and licensing agreements, that makes the wheels of progress turn.
  • hey see intellectual-property rights as reasonable arrangements that allow those in the plant-breeding industry to recoup the often enormous sums they invest in research and development.
  • General Mills has declined to support the crop’s development until there’s sufficient supply for a cereal line.
  • Maughan has approached his former employers at Monsanto, making personal appeals for research support, but they are not interested. Even with its star on the rise, quinoa is still too small to be a good investment.
  • For instance, they have identified crucial genes that make possible quinoa’s extraordinary tolerance of salt. If that mechanism could be engineered into corn, it could revolutionize food production around the world. The same goes for quinoa’s ability to withstand drought. These innovations could be invaluable to global food security. They could also be stupendously profitable— and almost certainly patentable.
  • cytoplasm had proved of no commercial value.
  • No one I spoke with in Bolivia denied that poor communities around the world could benefit from quinoa. But once the germplasm is shared, there’s no way to ensure that it won’t be made into something that’s patented.
  • he Bolivians needed to own quinoa so that somebody else couldn’t.
  • Even state ownership, meant to protect a crop like quinoa from corporate predation, tends to work against the larger goal of promoting genetic diversity. Take Bolivia’s genetic-conservation program. In a shift mandated by the 2009 constitution, the government nationalized the quinoa gene bank, which had been overseen by PROINPA for more than ten years. Government supporters argue that a public entity is more likely to be a democratic custodian of those resources than is a private organization—especially one that accepts foreign funding. But researchers in Bolivia and around the world question the government’s ability to safe-guard the seeds.
  • “Quinoa doesn’t belong to the Bolivian government or to corporations,” he told me. “Any food, any seeds, they are very sacred—they are for serving humanity. And if you don’t have their diversity stored in other places, you are in trouble. Be
Benjamin McKeown

Japan's Rural Aging Population - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...537375

pop density ageing japan

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 24 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • , young people have been fleeing this rural village, lured by the pull of Japan’s big cities like Tokyo and Osaka
  • Tochikubo’s school now has eight children, and more than half of the town’s 170 people are over the age of 50
  • Japan is slowly becoming something like one big city-state
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  • with the majority of the population centered in an urban belt that runs through the cluster of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya,
  • bullet train.
  • n 1950, 53 percent of Japan’s population lived in urban regions; by 2014, 93 percent did.
  • It is mostly young people who move to the cities
  • Bear attacks near settlements in Japan’s north are increasing as humans stop pruning back trees and maintaining their land. Wild boars have been ravaging farmland across the island of Honshu.
  • predicted that 896 cities, towns, and villages would be extinct by 2040. Dozens of towns will see the number of young people drop significantly, as the share of elderly people grows, he predicted. Overall, Japan’s population is expected to shrink from a peak of 128 million in 2010 to 97 million by 2050.
  • apanese towns are wrestling with dilemmas like how to run their governments with fewer tax dollars, and how to provide services for an increasingly needy population with fewer workers. To make this all the more challenging, governance is strained by the population decline as well: In Yamagata Prefecture, 45 percent of seats in the local assembly race in 2015 were uncontested because of a lack of candidates.
  • Other regions of the world will soon have to face these challenges, too. Just about every developed country is aging and urbanizing, though Japan is doing so the fastest
  • The reasons that Japan’s rural population is shrinking
  • Jobs are increasingly clustered in cities, and the jobs that remain in the countryside require fewer workers than they did half a century ago. “There are very few economic opportunities outside major cities,
  • Japan has few major learning centers located outside major cities, Mock said. That means as young people increasingly pursue college educations, they leave for the cities, and often don’t return.
  • “They graduate high school, they go to university in Tokyo, they start working in Tokyo, and they set up their lives in Tokyo and never come back,
  • Of the 500 or so teenagers who graduate high school in Minamiuonuma every year, only about 100 remain in the city after graduating. Everybody else goes off to college, and only 40 come back after graduating from college on average, the mayor, Shigeo Hayashi, told me.
  • the country’s falling fertility rate. Japan's fertility rate fell by a third between 1972 and 2015;
  • When a population is shrinking and most of that population lives in urban centers, that spells problems for rural areas like Tochikubo and Minamiuonuma, unless there is a lot of immigration.
  • The problem is not necessarily that Japan will run out of money t
  • someone needs to be around to provide these services.
  • Right now, the decline of these places is happening fast, within a generation or two. If it can be a more gradual process, perhaps then basic social services can at least survive for long enough to provide for the remaining residents.
  • One obvious solution to reversing, or at least slowing, rural Japan’s decline would be to open up the country to immigration
  • Just 1.8 percent of the country’s population is foreign-born, compared to 13 percent of the population in the United States.
  • But Japan is a country whose national identity is, in some ways, based upon racial homogeneity. Proposals to significantly increase immigration have gone nowhere, and polls consistently find that two-thirds of Japanese are against large-scale immigration.
  • And it’s unlikely that immigrants, even if they were allowed in, would move to rural areas where there are few jobs even for the people who want to stay.
  • In Minamiuonuma, for instance, city leaders talk about their newly-built global IT park, where start-ups can set up offices for low rent, and a business academy for people interested in creating their own business. They built a brand-new hospital and medical college to attract doctors and nurses, and are in the process of building a series of homes for active retired people in the hope that retirees will want to relocate to the city. Like almost every other shrinking city, Minamiuonuma sends brochures to young people from the region to try to get them to come home. But still, the population continues to shrink
  • Other areas are trying to grow the population they have by increasing the birth rate.
  • Niigata Prefecture, which is expected to be among the regions hardest-hit by population decline.
  • Niigata will lose 40 percent of its women aged 20 to 40 by 2040
  • Declining Birthrate Countermeasures Division
  • Niigata sponsors matchmaking events for its young people, and even invited a matchmaking company to come in and pair rural men with women living in cities like Tokyo. “For our division, one of the most important things is making couples,”
  • The fertility rate of women in Niigata has fallen from nearly four babies per woman in 1950 to 1.43 babies per woman in more recent years.
  • Niigata is focusing on making it easier for women to have babies and still work. The prefecture is giving certifications to companies that have good parental leave policies in the hope that doing so will motivate companies to be more flexible, but it has no real sway over what companies decide
  • reducing interest payments for families who borrow money to pay for their children’s education
  • But the prefecture hasn’t seen a significant uptick in marriages,
  • or in births.
  • When I asked them about supporting births outside of marriage, officials told me such a thing wouldn’t be acceptable in Japan. Even telling couples to get married doesn’t necessarily go over well. “We are the public sector. It’s difficult for us to say, ‘You should marry as soon as possible, you’re mature enough to have babies,’” she said.
  • Yubari, for instance, a town on the northern island of Hokkaido, which lost 90 percent of its population between 1960 and 2014, declared bankruptcy in 2007
  • Since then, it has drastically cut back on services such as public buses and snow removal, merged schools, laid off government employees, and cut funds for public parks. It relocated residents from public housing on the outskirts of town to apartments close to the city center.
  • In some places, adapting has meant that elderly people are working for longer
  • people who might have wanted to retire at 65 are still tilling the fields at 75.
  • “Sixty is the new 40. The question is, will 80 be the new 60?”
  • They’re most concerned about the disappearance of a way of life—that no young people will come to the village and learn how to farm rice without machines or how to weave cloth or make sake. “It’s difficult for us to give knowledge to the younger generation,” F
Benjamin McKeown

Japan panel: Fukushima nuclear disaster 'man-made' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-18718057

japan fukushima disaster hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 12 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • It said that the situation at the plant worsened in the aftermath of the earthquake because government agencies "did not function correctly", with key roles left ambiguous. It also highlighted communication failures between Tepco and the office of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan, whose visit to the site in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake "diverted" staff.
  • "Japan's regulators need to shed the insular attitude of ignoring international safety standards and transform themselves into a globally trusted entity," it said.
  • "could and should have been foreseen and prevented" and its effects "mitigated by a more effective human response",
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  • The report catalogued serious deficiencies in both the government and plant operator Tepco's response.
  • It also blamed cultural conventions and a reluctance to question authority. Analysis By Mariko OiBBC News, Tokyo While the report is highly critical of all the key parties, it digs even deeper. The panel called the disaster "Made in Japan", because the mindset that allowed the accident to happen can be found across the country. It flagged up the bureaucracy's role in both promoting and regulating the nuclear industry, and also cultural factors such as a traditional reluctance to question authority. The report was expected to use strong language, but not many thought it would be this harsh. The panel also found that there was a possibility that the plant was damaged by the earthquake, contradicting the official position that only the tsunami contributed to the disaster. It could put further pressure on the government, which recently authorised the restart of two nuclear reactors in western Japan. They were declared safe in April but the plant also sits on top of a fault line.
  • "Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster," it sai
Benjamin McKeown

Last of the Amazon - National Geographic Magazine - 0 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...wallace-text

HL uncontacted amazon

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 22 Mar 16 - Cached
  • Brazil’s dilemma: Allow widespread—and profitable—destruction of the rain forest to continue, or intensify conservation efforts.
  • The market forces of globalization are invading the Amazon, hastening the demise of the forest and thwarting its most committed stewards.
  • n the past three decades, hundreds of people have died in land wars; countless others endure fear and uncertainty, their lives threatened by those who profit from the theft of timber and land. In this Wild West frontier of guns, chain saws, and bulldozers, government agents are often corrupt and ineffective—or ill-equipped and outmatched. Now, industrial-scale soybean producers are joining loggers and cattle ranchers in the land grab, speeding up destruction and further fragmenting the great Brazilian wilderness.
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  • All of it starts with a road. Except
  • nearly every road in the Amazon is unauthorized. There are more than 105,000 miles of these roads, most made illegally by loggers to reach mahogany and other hardwoods for the lucrative export market.
  • In Brazil, the events set in motion by logging are almost always more destructive than the logging itself.
  • squatters, speculators, ranchers, farmers, and, invariably, hired gunmen.
  • . Land thievery is committed through corruption, strong-arm tactics, and fraudulent titles and is so widespread that Brazilians have a name for it: grilagem,
  • landless squatters moved in from adjacent lots, working plots whose ownership the government failed to resolve. That has fueled a bloody showdown pitting the powerful absentee elites who raze forest for agribusiness against family farmers who clear small patches for crops but still depend on intact forest around them for survival.
  • The first model was implanted during the military dictatorship, based on timber extraction and cattle. It’s predatory because it causes death, it’s not renewable, and it devastates the forest.” The alternative model, preached by Stang, is what Pontes calls social environmentalism. The first concentrates wealth, the second calls for its dispersion in small-scale agroforestry collectives.
  • Stang saw human rights and environmental conservation in the Amazon as inextricably intertwined
  • To Maggi, deforestation is an overblown issue, a “phobia” that plagues people who can’t grasp the enormity of the Amazon. “All of Europe could fit inside the Amazon,” he says, “and we’d still have room for two Englands.”
  • “Look around,” he said, “you won’t find a single scrap of plastic here.” Motioning to a barnlike structure that stored herbicides and pesticides, he said, “We keep all our agrotoxins properly ventilated until use.” In a steady rain, our vehicle fishtailing in the mud, we approached a denuded gully straddling a narrow stream; a closer look revealed hundreds of saplings. “When we bought this property,” Maggi said, “this riverbank was totally stripped. Now we’re regenerating the area.”
  • The land here is very poor. If you don’t take the right corrective measures, you couldn’t produce anything. It’s not true that soy degrades the soil. On the contrary, it puts into the soil what naturally isn’t there. Afterward, you can grow anything you want.” R
  • searchers agree that proper management of soy fields can increase soil productivity. But in reality, no one knows for sure how long the thin, highly acidic Amazon soils can be propped up, raising the possibility of an eventual two-headed catastrophe:
  • shiny new silos belonging to ADM, Bunge, and Cargill—all American multinationals.
  • azilians are not the only people profiting from soybeans. Along the 500-mile paved stretch of BR-16
  • between Cuiabá and Guarantã do Norte, there are no fewer than five John Deere dealerships. And at harvest time, fleets of the trademark green-and-yellow combines rumble across the fields flanking the highway, pouring rivers of golden soy into open-bed trucks bound f
  • The new district adds to an expanded mosaic of parks, reserves, and conservation units that, together with indigenous territories, forms the bulwark of defense against the expansion of the frontier in the central Amazon. These measures may be paying off. Deforestation rates fell more than 30 percent in 2005, and preliminary numbers for 2006 are also down. Indian lands in the Xingu watershed are proving an especially effective barrier. There, militant Kayapó and Panará warriors armed with clubs and shotguns patrol their borders using satellite images furnished by international NGOs to pinpoint illegal clearing. As Stephan Schwartzman puts it: “Where Indian land begins is where deforestation ends.” But Brazil’s measures to protect the Amazon must be weighed ag
  • These include plans to build seven dams on the environmentally sensitive Xingu and Madeira Rivers,
  • he dams will power aluminum smelters, and shipping channels will facilitate river transport of exports to Chinese markets.
  • s well as roads, power lines, oil and gas pipelines, and large-scale mining and industrial projects.
  • The dams will also flood millions of acres of forest, releasing methane and other greenhouse gases, destroying biodiversity, and forcing indigenous communities to flee ancestral lands.
  • Water cycling
  • carbon sequestering
  • maintenance of an unmatched panoply of life.
  • It’s far more profitable to cut it down for grazing and farming than to leave it standing. “Tropical deforestation is a classic example of market failure,”
  • “It’s urgent to find mechanisms to compensate forest peoples, and their governments, for the ecosystem services their forests provide.”
  • Last summer, Cargill and Brazil’s other big soy traders agreed to a two-year moratorium on buying soy grown on newly deforested land in the Amazon. The agreement is sending a signal to soy producers that the environmental impact of their operations is increasingly important in the world marketplace.
Benjamin McKeown

The most important thing about the new NAFTA deal is that it exists - 0 views

slate.com/...ta-deal-is-that-it-exists.html

NAFTA HL Globalization free trade

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • da has agreed to give United States farmers more access to its heavily regulated dairy market—thus assuaging Trump’s single most frequent complaint about Canada’s trade policies. Canada also signed on to stronger intellectual property protections sought by U.S. industries, and increased the dollar limit on the amount of merchandise Canadians can buy across the border before duties kick in (alas, we won’t be hearing about shoe smuggling any longer). However, the Trump administration gave Canada a win by dropping its demand to scrap a dispute-resolution system in which countries can challenge each others’ anti-dumping tariffs outside of each others’ courts. Overall, the changes are more than cosmetic, but perhaps a bit less than Trump promised when he vowed to renegotiate what he’s often called “the worst trade deal in history.” The deal is designed to benefit U.S. auto-workers by requiring that more of each vehicle be produced within North America to qualify for tariff-free treatment, and that a certain percentage of each car be built by employees making $16 an hour. It curtails the use of controversial investor-state dispute settlement panels. The IP protections are a boost—perhaps unfortunately—to copyright-holders and prescription drug companies. But progressive groups are already complaining that the agreement still lacks mechanisms to enforce labor standards in Mexico, among other issues. But more than the details, the most important thing about this deal is that it exists at all. One of the major questions about Trump’s approach to economic policy and globalization was whether he would simply light trade deals on fire, or use his sometimes unhinged rhetoric as a means to obtain some reforms. In the case of NAFTA, we have a solid answer. Whether you like it or not, it’s spelled USMCA. One more thing If you think Slate’s work matters, become a Slate Plus member. You’ll get exclusive members-only content and a suite of great benefits—and you’ll help secure Slate’s future. Join Slate Plus Join Slate Plus Tweet Share Comment Canada Donald Trump Mexico Trade
Benjamin McKeown

Admit it: we can't measure our ecological footprint | New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...asure-our-ecological-footprint

ecological footprint

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • “when humanity exhausted nature’s budget for the year” and began “drawing down local resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere”. This year it was on 20 August, the earliest date yet.
  • “so misleading as to preclude their use in any serious science or policy context,” it says in a paper in PLoS Biology.
  • The footprint analysis does not really measure our overuse of the planet’s resources at all. If anything, it underestimates it.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • It does this by measuring the productive land and sea area available – cropland and pasture, forests and fishing grounds – and matching that against the demands placed on them. This biological accountancy system concludes that planet Earth has a biocapacity of 12 billion hectares, and a human demand equivalent to 18 billion hectares. Hence the 1.5 Earths figure. Our footprint is 50 per cent too big.
  • I had assumed that the analysis assessed the damaging environmental consequences of how we use the land – things like soil erosion and the overuse of water reserves. But no. It only measures land area.
  • “Local ecosystem abuse is a significant problem [but] to make reliable adjustments would require data sets that do not exist,” he writes. Or, as he told me: “Our current accounts cannot include soil erosion. Hence cropland use equals cropland availability.”
  • It uses UN statistics to compare the timber we harvest against annual growth. The conclusion is that, while we are deforesting some areas, growth elsewhere more than makes up for the loss. This is reflected in a surplus in the accounts.
  • If the calculation is to be believed, while some fish stocks are being over-exploited, a greater number are under-exploited and overall fish biomass is increasing. That’s another surplus
Benjamin McKeown

Kayapo Courage - 0 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...brown-text

HL remote society environment

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 14 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • five officially demarcated tracts of contiguous land that in sum make up an area about the size of Kentucky. T
  • 9,000 indigenous people, most of whom can’t read or write and who still follow a largely subsistence way of life in 44 villages linked only by rivers and all-but-invisible trails.
  • Kendjam,
  • ...89 more annotations...
  • Xingu,
  • itself a major tributary of the Amazon.
  • shorts
  • kids wearing only
  • ears of the youngest among them were pierced with conical wooden plugs
  • Kayapo pierce their infants’ earlobes
  • ifts for our hosts: fishhooks, tobacco, 22 pounds of high-quality beads made in the Czech Republic.
  • Barbara Zimmerman, the director of the Kayapo Project for the International Conservation Fund of Canada and the United States–based Environmental Defense Fund,
  • chief, Pukatire,
  • wearing glasses, shorts, and flip-flops.
  • English he’d picked up on a trip to North America
  • dispute about logging.
  • Fissioning,” as anthropologists call it, is often the way Kayapo resolve disagreements or relieve the strain on resources in a particular area.
  • a generator in a government-built nurses’ station; a solar panel array enclosed in a barbed wire fence; satellite dishes mounted on truncated palm trees. A few families have TVs in their thatch houses and enjoy watching videos of their own ceremonies, along with Brazilian soap operas. Pukatire showed us to a two-room schoolhouse built a few years ago by the Brazilian government—a pistachio-colored concrete structure with a tile roof and shutters and the luxe marvel of a flush toilet fed by well water.
  • ngobe, or men’s house
  • shelling nuts and cooking fish wrapped in leaves and buried in coals.
  • crops of manioc, bananas, and sweet potatoes. A tortoise hunter
  • loudly singing in the Kayapo custom to announce his successful quest for the land turtles that are a vital part of the village diet.
  • soccer ball
  • swallows; o
  • kingbird
  • evening baths,
  • caimans
  • persecution and disease that have ravaged nearly every indigenous tribe in North and South America.
  • In 1900, 11 years after the founding of the Brazilian Republic, the Kayapo population was about 4,000. As miners, loggers, rubber tappers, and ranchers poured into the Brazilian frontier, missionary organizations and government agencies launched efforts to “pacify” aboriginal tribes, wooing them with trade goods such as cloth, metal pots, machetes, and axes. Contact often had the unintended effect of introducing measles and other diseases to people who had no natural immunity. By the late 1970s, following the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway, the population had dwindled to about 1,300.
  • 1980s and ’90s the Kayapo rallied, led by a legendary generation of chiefs
  • Ropni and Mekaron-Ti
  • organized protests with military precision, began to apply pressure
  • even kill people caught trespassing on their land.
  • ar parties evicted illegal ranchers and gold miners, sometimes offering them the choice of leaving Indian land in two hours or being killed on the spot. Warriors took control of strategic river crossings and patrolled borders; they seized hostages; they sent captured trespassers back to town without their clothes.
  • the chiefs of that era learned Portuguese
  • enlist the help of conservation organizations and celebrities such as the rock star Sting,
  • 1988 the Kayapo helped get indigenous rights written into the new Brazilian Constitution, and eventually they secured legal recognition of their territory.
  • Kararaô Dam
  • Xingu River, which would have flooded parts of their land.
  • the Altamira Gathering.
  • Kayapo leaders made a brilliant translation of the Kayapo warrior tradition to the tradition of the 20th-century media spectacle,”
  • e Kayapo population is now rapidly growing.
  • shotguns and motorized aluminum boats to Facebook pages, they have shown a canny ability to adopt technologies and practices of the cash-based society at their borders without compromising the essence of their culture.
  • hey have embraced video cameras to record their ceremonies and dances and to log interactions with government officials.
  • based on the logo of the Bank of Brazil.
  • 1980s and in the 1990s sold mahogany logging concessions—alliances they came to regret and now have largely ended.
  • Kayapo learned to organize and to put aside their sometimes fractious relations to cultivate unity of purpose among themselves
  • the richest and most powerful of around 240 indigenous tribes remaining in Brazil. Their ceremonies, their kinship systems, their Gê language, and their knowledge of the forest and conception of the continuum between humans and the natural world are intact. What may be the most crucial of all, they have their land. “The Kayapo aren’t entering the 21st century as a defeated people. They aren’t degrading themselves,” Zimmerman told me. “They haven’t lost a sense of who they are.”
  • At least for the moment. It’s one thing to teach the skills and ceremonies of traditional culture; it’s another to inspire a sense of why knowledge of how to make arrow-tip poison (from herbs and snake venom with beeswax as an adhesive) or stack tortoises or stun fish using oxygen-depriving timbo vines might be valuable to a generation beguiled by iPhones and the convenience of store-bought food. Interest in traditional dress, beadwork, and ancestral practices is still strong in Kendjam, but it’s not uniform, and even if it were, the threats from outside are daunting.
  • 400 Kayapo chiefs avowed their opposition to a raft of decrees, ordinances, and proposed laws and constitutional amendments that would gut their ability to control their land and prevent them, and any other indigenous group, from adding to their territory.
  • a campaign to enable mining, logging, and agricultural interests to circumvent indigenous rights, now inconveniently guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution. A
  • . The Kararaô project is back under a new name: the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex.
  • n Kayapo villages the division of labor falls along traditional lines. The men hunt and fish; the women cook, garden, and gather fruits and nuts.)
  • two aluminum skiffs powered by Rabeta motors
  • a bow and arrows over his shoulder
  • Okêt a shotgun.
  • It was as obvious to Meikâre as the meat department of a Stop & Shop would be to me. He and Okêt darted ahead. Fifteen minutes later a shot rang out, then two more.
  • plugged the escape holes of a mole cricket nest in a sandbank and then had dug up and captured a batch of mole crickets, which they used to bait fishhooks and catch piranha.
  • peacock bass and piabanha.
  • Bic lighters a
  • freshly whittled skewers.
  • flashlight.
  • he only things we need from the white culture are flip-flops, flashlights, and glasses,”
  • his children had died of malaria not long after the founding of Kendjam.
  • Portuguese from missionaries
  • the program of pacification by the Indian Protection Service, a forerunner of the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI,
  • “Before contact we were clubbing each other to death, and everybody lived in fear,” he said. “Without a doubt things are much better today because people aren’t hitting each other over the head with war clubs.”
  • “I am worried about our young people who are imitating whites, cutting their hair and wearing stupid little earrings like you see in town. None of the young people know how to make poison for arrows.
  • You can’t use the white man’s stuff. Let the white people have their culture, we have ours.’ If we start copying white people too much, they won’t be afraid of us, and they will come and take everything we have. But as long as we maintain our traditions, we will be different, and as long as we are different, they will be a little afraid of us.”
  • construction finally began in 2011 on the $14 billion Belo Monte.
  • he complex of canals, reservoirs, dikes, and two dams is located some 300 miles north of Kendjam
  • on the Xingu
  • Its supporters defend it as a way of delivering needed electricity, while environmentalists have condemned it as a social, environmental, and financial disaster.
  • the region’s indigenous people were not adequately consulted, Brazil’s federal Public Prosecutor’s Office filed a series of lawsuits to stop the complex, essentially pitting one branch of the government against another. The cases went to the country’s Supreme Court, but judgments have been deferred, and construction of Belo Monte has been allowed to proceed.
  • nflux of an estimated 100,000 workers and migrants. The dams will flood an area the size of Chicago. Official estimates project that 20,000 people will be displaced; independent estimates suggest the number may be twice as high. The dams will generate methane from inundated vegetation in quantities that rival the greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants. The diversion of some 80 percent of the water along a 62-mile stretch of the Xingu will dry up areas that depend on seasonal floodwaters and are home to endangered species.
  • ho still wear the lip disk
  • carried a wooden war club,
  • woman approached, held his hand, and began to sob. In a different culture bodyguards might have hustled her away, but Ropni seemed unfazed and in fact began sobbing as well. The anguished weeping was not the result of some fresh catastrophe but a form of ritual Kayapo mourning for departed mutual friends.
  • “I don’t like Kayapo imitating white culture. I don’t like gold miners. I don’t like loggers. I don’t like the dam!”
  • the chiefs of the eastern part of the territory had been accepting money from Eletrobras. Boxes of brand-new 25-horsepower boat motors were stacked on the porch of the Protected Forest Association headquarters.
  • money that activists said was an attempt to dampen indigenous opposition to Belo Monte.
  • he consortium building the dam was investing in wells, clinics, and roads in the area and was paying a dozen villages nearby an allowance of 30,000 reais a month (roughly $15,000) for food and supplies, which Schwartzman describes as “hush money.”
  • More and more sad leaves were a part of Kayapo life,
  • specially in villages close to towns on the Brazilian frontier.
  • pollution from clear-cutting and cattle ranching had wrecked the fishing grounds, and it was not uncommon to see Kayapo shopping in supermarkets for soap and frozen chicken.
  • In the old days men were men,” Ropni said. “They were raised to be warriors; they weren’t afraid to die. They weren’t afraid to back up their words with action. They met guns with bows and arrows. A lot of Indians died, but a lot of whites died too. That’s what formed me: the warrior tradition. I have never been afraid to say what I believed. I have never felt humiliated in front of the whites. They need to respect us, but we need to respect them too. I still think that warrior tradition survives. The Kayapo will fight again if threatened, but I have counseled my people not to go looking for fights.”
  • FUNAI paperwork authorizing various matters they had discussed. Mekaron-Ti, who was fluent in the Western world as well as the forest world, signed his name quickly like someone who had written a thousand letters. But Ropni held the pen awkwardly. It was striking to see him struggle with the letters of his name, knowing what esoteric expertise was otherwise in his hands, how deftly he could fasten a palm nut belt, or insert a lip plate, or whittle a stingray tail into an arrowhead, or underscore the oratory that had helped secure a future for his people. In the Xingu Valley there had hardly ever been a more able pair of hands. But in the realm that required penmanship, the great chief was like a child.
  • , 26 eastern Kayapo leaders met in Tucumã and signed a letter rejecting further money from the dambuilding consortium: “We, the Mebengôkre Kayapo people, have decided that we do not want a single penny of your dirty money. We do not accept Belo Monte or any other dam on the Xingu. Our river does not have a price, our fish that we eat does not have a price, and the happiness of our grandchildren does not have a price. We will never stop fighting... The Xingu is our home and you are not welcome here.”
  • painted faces carrying water in old soda bottles,
  • chopped off seedpods of the wild inga fruit.
  • Can you be a Kayapo and not live in the forest?” Djyti thought for a while, then shook his head and said no. Then, as if contemplating something unthinkable, he added: “You are still a Kayapo, but you don’t have your culture.”
  • In the past some anthropologists have fetishized cultural purity, fretting over the introduction of modern technology. But cultures evolve opportunistically like species—the Plains Indians of North America picked up their iconic horses from the Spanish—and strong traditional cultures will privilege themselves, making the accommodations they think will ensure their futures. We can question whether a man dressed in a parrot feather headdress and penis sheath is more valuable than one in a Batman T-shirt and gym shorts. But who can be blind to their knowledge of forest plants and animals or to the preeminent values of clean water, untainted air, and the genetic and cultural treasure of diversity itself?
  • now turning to those first inhabitants to save ecosystems recognized as critical to the health of the planet—to defend essential tracts of undeveloped land from the developed world’s insatiable appetites.
Benjamin McKeown

Nestlé admits slavery in Thailand while fighting child labour lawsuit in Ivor... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ild-labour-lawsuit-ivory-coast

HL slavery TNC

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Yet last November Nestlé, the world’s largest foodmaker and one of the most recognisable household brands, went public with the news it had found forced labour in its supply chains in Thailand and that its customers were buying products tainted with the blood and sweat of poor, unpaid and abused migrant workers.
  • NGO the Freedom Fund, which has invested heavily in anti-trafficking initiatives in Thailand, believes Nestlé’s admission could be a considerable force in shifting the parameters of what can be expected of businesses when it comes to supply chain accountability.
  • Patagonia, which announced that it had discovered several points in its supply chain in Taiwan where forced labour and unethical recruitment practices were flourishing.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • US corporate accountability business Verité,
  • which works closely with organisations trying to help improve their supply chain transparency.
  • In the last six months Verité has been involved in two high-profile disclosures from major brands and one of the most important lessons for us to recognise is that in neither case did the companies suffer greatly in terms of being associated with these labour conditions. Instead, they received some credit [for] being bold enough to be associated with this.”
  • onsumers or workers using the legislation to launch legal actions against companies they accuse of making misleading public statements on their anti-slavery efforts.
  • Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, failed in its bid to get the US Supreme Court to throw out a lawsuit seeking to hold them liable for the alleged use of child slaves in cocoa farming in the Ivory Coast.
  • By the time Nestlé owned up to slavery in the Thai seafood industry it was accepted knowledge. It’ll be a brave new world when companies are actually doing the real investigation to probe into part of their supply chains that have remained outside the public domain.
Benjamin McKeown

Frozen conflict | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ims-north-pole-frozen-conflict

arctic coasts

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 21 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • IN 2007 a Russian-led polar expedition, descending through the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean in a Mir submarine, planted a titanium Russian tricolour on the sea bed 4km (2.5 miles) beneath the North Pole. “The Arctic has always been Russian,
  • Denmark has staked a claim to the North Pole, too. On December 15th it said that, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), some 900,000 square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland belongs to it (Greenland is a self-governing part of Denmark).
  • Canada, which plans to assert sovereignty over part of the polar continental shelf (
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • he prize for these countries is the mineral wealth of the Arctic, which global warming may make more accessible.
  • an eighth of the world’s untapped oil
  • perhaps a quarter of its gas.
  • Drilling for oil and gas there is extremely expensive, and falling oil prices have made the economics of Arctic energy even less favourable. This gives would-be prospectors an interest in co-operating, not in adding to the risks and costs.
  • The melting of the summer sea ice has also opened up trade routes between Asia and Europe via the top of the world; 71 cargo ships plied the north-east passage last summer, up from 46 in 2012
  • Russia
  • carried out extensive combat exercises in the Arctic for the first time since the end of the cold war
  • re-equipping old Soviet bases there and in July tested the first of its new-generation rockets,
  • Sweden spent part of the summer searching for a Russian submarine that it suspected of slipping into its territorial waters.
  • countries may control an area of seabed if they can show it is an extension of their continental shelf.
Benjamin McKeown

Why Ebola is terrifying and dangerous: It preys on family, caregiving, and human bonds. - 0 views

www.slate.com/..._on_family_caregiving_and.html

health disease

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 22 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • 75 percent of Ebola victims are women, people who do much of the care work throughout Africa and the rest of the world. In short, Ebola parasitizes our humanity.
  • Its kill rate: In this particular outbreak, a running tabulation suggests that 54 percent of the infected die, though adjusted numbers suggest that the rate is much higher. Its exponential growth: At this point, the number of people infected is doubling approximately every three weeks, leading some epidemiologists to project between 77,000 and 277,000 cases by the end of 2014. The gruesomeness with which it kills: by hijacking cells and migrating throughout the body to affect all organs, causing victims to bleed profusely. The ease with which it is transmitted: through contact with bodily fluids, including sweat, tears, saliva, blood, urine, semen, etc., including objects that have come in contact with bodily fluids (such as bed sheets, clothing, and needles) and corpses. The threat of mutation: Prominent figures have expressed serious concerns that this disease will go airborne, and there are many other mechanisms through which mutation might make it much more transmissible.
Benjamin McKeown

THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE EXPLAINED - Lawrence Anthony Earth Organization - 0 views

www.earthorganization.org/cs-of-climate-change-explained

climate change kyoto

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 08 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • More than 150 nations signed it back in December 1997 at a meeting in Kyoto.
  • eorge W. Bush was installed as President soon afterwards, and announced that he was pulling the US out of the deal altogether. Since the US is the source of a quarter of emissions of greenhouse gases that was a big blow, but the other nations decided to carry on and they finally reached agreement in Marrakech in November 2001.
  • ndustrialised nations have committed themselves to a range of targets to reduce emissions between 1990
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • he base year, and 2010.
  • an average 8 per cent cut for most of Europe to a maximum 10 per cent increase for Iceland and an 8 per cent increase for Australia.
  • European Union have agreed to share out their entitlement
  • atification of the treaty in national legislatures.
  • “flexibility mechanisms”
  • meet some targets by encouraging the natural environment to soak up more CO2 rather than by cutting emissions.
  • carbon sinks”
  • qualify for carbon credits by planting forests that soaked up CO2.
  • It was finally agreed that countries will be able to claim some carbon credits for planting forests in developing countries. And they will also be able to allow countries to claim credit for activities such as soil conservation, which will allow more carbon to be soaked up in soils.
  • carbon trading
  • But the fear is that some countries may find themselves with spare credits to sell just because their economies have slowed down, which would undermine the whole purpose of the protocol.
  • hot air”. Japan, Canada and perhaps others would like to buy up Russia’s spare permits.
  • But sceptics still see hot-air trading as a Trojan Horse for undermining the protocol.
  • lean Development Mechanism. This allows industrialised countries to claim credit for various activities in developing countries. It could become a major engine for getting clean energy technologies into poorer countries, so heading them off the dirty path to industrialisation that the rich nations took.
  • And the rules are biased towards small energy projects – solar cell systems, for exampl
  • he protocol allows industrialised countries to plant “carbon sink” forests in the tropics, for instance, where they will grow faster. They can also invest in clean energy technologies in the developing world, and claim carbon credits for doing so.
  • The US has demanded, both before and after Kyoto, that developing countries should accept their own specific emissions targets
  • it was intended to cut emissions by industrialised countries by an average of slightly over 5 per cent by the year 2010
  • hard to police, particularly the clauses on carbon sinks.
  • at perhaps 1.5 per cen
  • Will the Kyoto measures solve the problem of global warming? They will hardly scratch the surface. T
  • say it will buy us 10 years at most
  • . A reasonable target might be twice pre-industrial levels, which works out at 50 per cent above today’s levels.
  • Cutting emissions by 60 per cent is a suggested figure.
  • The Kyoto Protocol was drawn up with the long term as the primary focus. In essence, the protocol assumes that what we really need to worry about is the climate in a century’s time, not today.
  • CO2 sticks around for about a century. Methane, the second most important greenhouse gas, generally lasts in the atmosphere for about a decade. But while it’s there it is many times more potent.
  • This “hundred-year rule” has the effect of downgrading the importance of methane, and giving only small credit to countries that try to cut methane emissions.
  • the protocol gives a country that reduces its methane emissions by a tonne 20 times as much credit as for reducing CO2 emissions by a tonne.
  • Cows can be given less gas-inducing feed. Leaks in gas pipelines can be plugged. And so on.
  • Technically, we are going to have to find many more ways of producing energy without burning fossil fuels – the so-called carbon-free economy. Politically, we are going to have to find a way of doing so which doesn’t affect the growing economies of the developing nations, whose responsibility for the build-up of greenhouse gases so far has been minimal. Some people think this will require moving towards equal pollution rights for every citizen on the planet, a policy endorsed by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution earlier this year.
Benjamin McKeown

Louisiana five years after BP oil spill: 'It's not going back to normal no time soon' |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...years-not-going-back-to-normal

BP oil hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 20 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • the restaurants are still empty, FOR SALE signs are increasing in store windows, people are still moving away, and this marina on Pointe a la Hache – once packed most afternoons with oystermen bringing in their catch on their small boats, high school kids earning a few bucks unloading the sacks, and 18-wheelers backed up by the dozen to carry them away – is completely devoid of life, save one man, 69-year-old Clarence Duplessis, who cleans his boat to pass the time.
  • While some phenomena in the Gulf – people getting sick, fishing nets coming back empty – are hard to definitively pin on BP – experts say the signs of ecological and economic loss that followed the spill are deeply concerning for the future of the Gulf. Meanwhile, BP has pushed back hard on the notion that the effects of its disaster are much to worry about, spending millions on PR and commercials to convince Gulf residents everything will be OK.
  • the Gulf is recovering faster than expected,” Geoff Morrell, a BP senior vice-president for communications, said in an email.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • depleted oyster beds could be due to a variety of factors other than the spill – including the divergence of fresh water from the Mississippi into coastal marshes.
  • Anxiety seems to be the most prevalent emotion in this part of the state. Every cough and every cancer screening, every paltry catch and shrimp missing an eye raises the question – is it BP?
  • oystermen say their catches plummeted after the spill, and have only been getting worse.
  • In total, BP has so far spent $27bn in economic claims, its disaster response efforts, fines to various governments, and cleanup and restoration programs.
  • The company has been sued by dozens of entities since the Deepwater Horizon spill, including state, local and federal governments, and individuals claiming economic loss. It has so far agreed to pay $4.5 billion in fines and plead guilty to a host of criminal charges, including felony manslaughter.
  • total just under $10 billion to businesses suffering because of the spill, but has fought the interpretation of that agreement at every step, claiming it it too easy for businesses without any proof of the spill directly causing damage to their bottom lines to win claims. The Supreme Court recently rejected BP’s bid to hear their challenge to that case.
  • the average claim for his association’s members ranged from a couple thousand to about $25,000. That, he says, is paltry when compared to the years-long recovery he sees ahead of him.
  • “My Facebook feed is filled with my friends’ pictures of crabs with no eyes, shrimp and crawfish with one eye or things missing,” Misty Fisher, 24, said.
  • Southern Louisiana’s economy hasn’t only been ravaged by the spill, but by multiple hurricanes and the ever-encroaching coastline: Louisiana is losing a football field worth of wetlands every 48 minutes thanks to a combination of global warming and a history of oil companies failing to remediate the canals they dredge for pipelines and oil and gas production.
  • Fisher and her fellow waitresses say they all know people who are sick – respiratory infections, breast cancers, constant headaches – which they blame on the spill.
Benjamin McKeown

This Is China's Plan to Overtake America as the Next Superpower | The National Interest - 0 views

nationalinterest.org/...-america-next-superpower-28502

china superpowers

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 18 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • the “balance, dimension and expansion of our strategic goal will be strengthened.” The result will be to "more effectively create a situation, manage a crisis, contain a conflict, win a war, defend the expansion of our country’s strategic interests in an all-round fashion and realize the goals set by the party and Chairman Xi.”
  • U.S., Russia, Japan and other nations became strong nations because they had a strong military.
  • “The lessons of history teach us that strong military might is important for a country to grow from being big to being strong,”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • ‘Thucydides Trap’ and escape the obsession that war is unavoidable between an emerging power and a ruling hegemony.”
  • suggesting that the United States is in its decline.
  • one chapter said that it is important to control the military in a bid to ensure the Chinese Communist Party’s long-term ruling status,"
  • he party keeps a tight grip on the military, it can withstand rigorous challenges both at home and abroad, it said."
  • In other words, China's government is so worried about losing its grip on power that it must emphasize that the military is the servant of the Communist Party. Perhaps it's fear that the population can't be controlled without the backing of the military. Perhaps it's fear that the military itself could take over.
Benjamin McKeown

Shell abandons Alaska Arctic drilling | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...atory-well-oil-gas-disappoints

oil arctic

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 07 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Oil giant’s US president says hugely controversial drilling operations off Alaska will stop for ‘foreseeable future’ as drilling finds little oil and gas
  • Shell has abandoned its controversial drilling operations in the Alaskan Arctic in the face of mounting opposition in what jubilant environmentalists described as “an unmitigated defeat” for big oil.
  • urprised by the popular opposition it faced
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • marginal discovery of oil and gas with its summer exploration in the Chukchi Sea but not enough to continue to the search for the “foreseeable” future.
  • Shell has spent over $7bn (£4.6bn) on its failed hunt for oil
  • t appears that Shell’s chief executive, Ben van Beurden, was also worried that the row over the Arctic was undermining his attempts to influence the debate around how to tackle climate change.
Benjamin McKeown

Tropical Cyclones - 0 views

www.tulane.edu/...tropical_cyclones.htm

hurricanes hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 17 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • In the western Pacific they are called typhoons, and in the southern hemisphere they are called cyclones.  But, no matter where they occur they represent the same process.
  • Tropical cyclones are dangerous because of their high winds, the storm surge produced as they approach a coast, and the severe thunderstorms associated with them. Although death due to hurricanes has decreased in recent years due to better methods of forecasting and establishment of early warning systems, the economic damage from hurricanes has increased as more and more development takes place along coastlines.
  • Warm ocean waters (of at least 26.5°C [80°F]) throughout about the upper 50 m of the tropical ocean must be present.  The heat in these warm waters is necessary to fuel the tropical cyclone. The atmosphere must cool fast enough with height, such that it is potentially unstable to moist convection. It is the thunderstorm activity which allows the heat stored in the ocean waters to be liberated and used for tropical cyclone development. The mid-troposphere (5 km [3 mi] altitude), must contain enough moisture to sustain the thunderstorms. Dry mid levels are not conducive to the continuing development of widespread thunderstorm activity. The disturbance must occur at a minimum distance of at least 500 km [300 mi] from the equator. For tropical cyclonic storms to occur, there is a requirement that the Coriolis force must be present.  Remember that the Coriolis effect is zero near the equator and increases to the north and south of the equator.  Without the Coriolis force, the low pressure of the disturbance cannot be maintained.
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  • There must be a pre-existing near-surface disturbance that shows convergence of moist air and is beginning to rotate. Tropical cyclones cannot be generated spontaneously. They require a weakly organized system that begins to spin and has low level inflow of moist air. There must be low values (less than about 10 m/s [20 mph]) of vertical wind shear between the surface and the upper troposphere. Vertical wind shear is the rate of change of wind velocity with altitude.  Large values of vertical wind shear disrupt the incipient tropical cyclone by removing the rising moist air too quickly, preventing the development of the tropical cyclone. Or, if a tropical cyclone has already formed, large vertical shear can weaken or destroy it by interfering with the organization around the cyclone center.
  • unstable atmosphere
  • his instability increases the likelihood of convection, which leads to strong updrafts that lift the air and moisture upwards, creating an environment favorable for the development of high, towering clouds.
  • Surface convergence (indicated by the small horizontal arrows in the diagram below) causes rising motion around a surface cyclone (labeled as "L"). The air cools as it rises (vertical arrows) and condensation occurs.  The condensation of water vapor to liquid water releases the latent heat of condensation into the atmosphere. This heating causes the air to expand, forcing the air to diverge at the upper levels (horizontal arrows at cloud tops).
  • Since pressure is a measure of the weight of the air above an area, removal of air at the upper levels subsequently reduces pressure at the surface. A further reduction in surface pressure leads to increasing convergence (due to an higher pressure gradient), which further intensifies the rising motion, latent heat release, and so on. As long as favorable conditions exist, this process continues to build upon itself
  • When cyclonic circulation begins around the central low pressure area, and wind speeds reach 62 km/hr (39 mi/hr) the disturbance is considered a tropical storm and is given a name.  When wind speeds reach 119 km/hr (74 mi/hr) it becomes a hurricane.
Benjamin McKeown

BP's 'gross negligence' caused Gulf oil spill, federal judge rules - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html

BP oil hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 20 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” had caused the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and that the company’s “reckless” behavior made it subject to fines of as much as $4,300 a barrel under the Clean Water Act.
  • Barbier said that drilling rig owner and operator Transocean and oil services giant Halliburton were also “negligent” in the events that led to the blowout of BP’s Macondo well that set fire to Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig, killed 11 workers and triggered the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Barbier apportioned 67 percent of the fault to BP, 30 percent to Transocean and 3 percent to Halliburton.
  • “was aware that its crews lacked training about the proper use of diverters” that should have directed dangerous hydrocarbons away from the rig. He also said that Transocean had not lined up the diverter properly.
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  • Halliburton has vigorously denied that its cement job designed to seal the well shut was a reason for the blowout and the government has not sought to impose Clean Water Act fines on the company. But Barbier said that “the cementing program at Macondo clearly did not prevent the direct or indirect release of fluids from a stratum, through the wellbore, and into offshore waters, and this failure was, in fact, a proximate cause of the incident.”
  • At the same time, the company has increased its drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico. At the end of 2013, the company was operating 10 deepwater rigs there. It has brought several new wells online.
Benjamin McKeown

BP's 'gross negligence' caused Gulf oil spill, federal judge rules - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html

BP response hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • A federal judge in New Orleans on Thursday ruled that BP’s “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” had caused the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and that the company’s “reckless” behavior made it subject to fines of as much as $4,300 a barrel under the Clean Water Act.
  • The ruling by District Court Judge Carl Barbier means that the government can impose penalties nearly four times as large as it could if BP were not found guilty of gross negligence.
  • arbier said that drilling rig owner and operator Transocean and oil services giant Halliburton were also “negligent” in the events that led to the blowout of BP’s Macondo well that set fire to Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig, killed 11 workers and triggered the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Barbier apportioned 67 percent of the fault to BP, 30 percent to Transocean and 3 percent to Halliburton.
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  • Halliburton has vigorously denied that its cement job designed to seal the well shut was a reason for the blowout and the government has not sought to impose Clean Water Act fines on the company.
  • At the same time, the company has increased its drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico. At the end of 2013, the company was operating 10 deepwater rigs there. It has brought several new wells online.
Benjamin McKeown

Does it really take 20,000L of water to produce 1kg of beef? - Beef Central - 0 views

www.beefcentral.com/...f-water-to-produce-1kg-of-beef

water food energy Nexus water water footprint

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 13 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • These were his calculations: “Say a two year old grassfed steer dresses 300kg and Lean Meat Yield is 60 percent. Therefore 180kg of beef is produced. Say the animal drinks 40 litres /day (generous) for 730 days. That equals 29,200 litres divided by 180kg = 162 litres per kilogram.
  • However, while that statement was referenced in the report, the specific reference was missing from the list of references at the end of the report.
  • In the article Professor Hoekstra actually wrote that producing one kilogram of boneless beef required about 155 litres of water, taking into account only the water used for drinking and servicing that animal. However, when you added in 1300kg of grain, 7200kg of roughages (pasture, dry hay, silage and other roughages), and the water required to grow those feed sources, he said the water footprint of 1 kg of beef would add up to 15,500 litres of water.
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  • Professor Hoekstra, from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, is the inventor of the Water Footprint concept, a method used to account for the total amount of water used to produce something.
  • Dr Perry said calculation procedures adopted in most estimates of water footprints are flawed, and that water footprints are incorrectly assessed on an absolute rather than a relative bas
  • A key concern was that ‘Water Footprints’ made no allowance for whether a producing area is water- plentiful or water-short.
  • “One must consider the scarcity or abundance of water and land, as well as downstream water uses to evaluate the significance of any environmental impact when compared to the status of these variables in the absence of grain or meat production. Simply comparing the water footprints of grain and meat does not provide helpful environmental information.
  • “It is overly simplistic and misleading to suggest that water footprints should be reduced without considering the context and purpose of water use.” “…Generalised water footprints are neither accurate nor helpful indicators for gaining a better understanding of water resource management.”
  • Previous media articles have reported claims that it takes between 50,000 and 100,000 litres to produce a kilogram of red meat. But these reported measures count every single drop of water that falls on an area of land grazed by cattle over the space of a year. And they do not take into account the fact that most of the water ends up in waterways, is used by trees and plants and in pastures, not grazed by cattle. “These calculations therefore attribute all rain that falls on a property to beef production, whereby the water is clearly being used for other purposes, such as supporting ecosystems” MLA explains in its Target 100 page.
Benjamin McKeown

Japan's population problem | The Japan Times - 1 views

www.japantimes.co.jp/...japans-population-problem

population ageing japan

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 19 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has urged business firms to employ more women and promote them to more senior positions, but he has had only limited success so far. The basic problem lies in the traditional attitudes of a male-dominated society that developed in a land where fighting was venerated and regarded as heroic. Confucian ethics emphasized the dominance of the male. That the mythological founder of Japan, Amaterasu, was a goddess was conveniently overlooked.
  • “Womenomics,” as the policy of employing more women has come to be called, requires the provision of more day care centers, but the provision of facilities will not solve the problem posed by the adherence of mothers-in-law in Japan to the concept that looking after one’s own children is the sine qua non of motherhood.
  • decline in Japanese fertility
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  • disapproval of children born to unmarried mothers
  • the decline in the number of young Japanese people has implications for high schools and universities as well as for industry and commerce. It also means that it will become more and more difficult to fund pensions for old people and to find carers for them.
  • One way of coping with the declining number of young workers is to increase imports of finished goods from countries where wages are relatively low. Japan’s balance of payments is likely to allow this for some time to come.Another way to deal with the likely shortage of labor is by increased use of robots. This is already happening and will certainly lead to a phasing out of certain white- and blue-collar jobs although the prognostications of SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son on this score seem overblown.
  • Ultimately, Japan will only survive and prosper if it alters its deep-seated prejudice against immigration
  • he Korean and Chinese minorities have been painted over, as have regional cultures such as those of the Ryukyu Islands and Hokkaido. It also ignores the existence of the Japanese diaspora in North and South America.
  • Does any Japanese leader have the courage to start arguing publicly and loudly for a relaxation of Japan’s at best illiberal immigration policies that are damaging to the nation’s economic and ultimately national interests? Some nurses have been admitted from the Philippines, but the stringent language tests have been a deterrent and Japan’s welcome mat for such necessary workers is restricted.
  • Japan has shamefully taken very few refugees despite the huge numbers living on a pittance in refugee camps throughout the world.
  • For Japan the immediate requirement is to confront vigorously Japanese male and ethnic chauvinism and traditional prejudices.
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