Boris Johnson, Seen as a Trump Ally, Signals Alignment With Biden - The New York Times - 0 views
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Prime Minister Boris Johnson rolled out ambitious, back-to-back initiatives on military spending and climate change this week, which have little in common except that both are likely to please a very important new person in Mr. Johnson’s life: President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
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The prime minister, whom President Trump has embraced as a like-minded populist, is eager to show he can work with the incoming president as well as he did with the outgoing one.
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That is important, analysts said, because Brexit will deprive Britain of what had historically been one of its greatest assets to the United States: serving as an Anglophone bridge to the leaders of continental Europe.
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Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah - study | Environmen... - 0 views
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Much of the Amazon could be on the verge of losing its distinct nature and switching from a closed canopy rainforest to an open savannah with far fewer trees as a result of the climate crisi
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As much as 40% of the existing Amazon rainforest is now at a point where it could exist as a savannah instead of as rainforest,
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Any shift from rainforest to savannah would still take decades to take full effect, but once under way the process is hard to reverse.
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'Hijacked by anxiety': how climate dread is hindering climate action | Environmental ac... - 0 views
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They call it climate anxiety – a sense of dread, gloom and almost paralysing helplessness that is rising as we come to terms with the greatest existential challenge of our generation, or any generation.
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an increasing number of psychologists believe the trauma that is a consequence of climate breakdown is also one of the biggest obstacles in the struggle to take action against rising greenhouse gas emissions
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There is a growing sense that this trauma needs a therapeutic response to help people beyond paralysis and into action.
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Opinion | The New World Order That President Biden Will Inherit - The New York Times - 0 views
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President-elect Joe Biden has signaled that he will move swiftly to restore dignity to the badly sullied image of the United States; respect for the professionals of America’s diplomatic, intelligence and military services; and a more predictable, nuanced and sympathetic approach to foreign relations.
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At the same time, he will seek ways to revive the nuclear deal with Iran, and agree with Russia to extend the New START treaty on limiting strategic nuclear arms. Hopefully, Mr. Biden will terminate American support for Saudi Arabia’s terrible war in Yemen.
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These are all welcome signs of America’s imminent return to a role in the world that better reflects our historical values.
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What Is Biden's 100-Day Plan? : NPR - 0 views
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Biden ran a heavily policy-focused campaign, releasing dozens of lengthy and ambitious plans ranging from large-scale economic and environmental initiatives to broad actions on racial justice, education and health care.
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Biden heads into office with strategies to address the COVID-19 crisis and the search for a vaccine as well.
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The sheer volume of Biden's plans could make it a challenge to execute them all. On immigration alone, he has proposed more than a dozen initiatives to complete within 100 days of taking office, a feat that could prove difficult to execute.
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How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views
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As the planet continues to warm, vast new stretches of Russia will become suitable for agriculture.
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A great transformation is underway in the eastern half of Russia. For centuries the vast majority of the land has been impossible to farm;
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Twenty years ago, Dima says, the spring thaw came in May, but now the ground is bare by April; rainstorms now come stronger and wetter.
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The mess Merkel leaves behind | The Economist - 0 views
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Mrs Merkel’s achievements are more modest. In her 16 years in the chancellery she has weathered a string of crises, from economic to pandemic. Her abilities as a consensus-forger have served her country and Europe well.
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But her government has neglected too much, nationally and internationally.
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when a new government forms after an election this weekend, admiration for her steady leadership should be mixed with frustration at the complacency she has bred.
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China pledge to stop funding coal projects 'buys time for emissions target' | China | T... - 0 views
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Xi Jinping’s announcement that China will stop funding overseas coal projects could buy the world about three more months in the race to keep global heating to a relatively safe level of 1.5C, experts say.
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Ending Chinese coal financing has long been near the top of climate activists’ wishlists. For more than a decade, China has been the lender of last resort for overseas governments seeking finance for thermal power plants. That role has accelerated since the 2013 start of the country’s belt and road initiative (BRI).
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Xi’s declaration is likely to affect at least 54 gigawatts of China-backed coal power projects,
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JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Says Big Risks Loom for the U.S. Economy - WSJ - 0 views
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Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said the U.S. economy is facing unprecedented risks that have him preparing for dramatic upheavals.
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Consumers and businesses are flush with cash, wages are rising and the economy is growing rapidly after its pandemic slowdown. While consumer confidence has declined, Mr. Dimon says the more important gauge is booming spending.
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Yet Mr. Dimon warned that the war in Ukraine could collide with rising inflation to slow the pandemic recovery and alter global alliances for decades to come.
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Climate Change Poses a Widening Threat to National Security - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Biden administration released several reports Thursday on climate change and national security, laying out in stark terms the ways in which the warming world is beginning to pose significant challenges to stability worldwide.
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the first such document to look exclusively at the issue of climate, said that risks to American national security will grow in the years to come. After 2030, key countries will face growing risks of instability and need for humanitarian assistance, the report said.
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The document makes three key judgments. Global tensions will rise as countries argue about how to accelerate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; climate change will exacerbate cross-border flash points and amplify strategic competition in the Arctic; and the effects of climate change will be felt most acutely in developing countries that are least equipped to adapt.
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Oil Prices Stay High as Output From OPEC and Others Falls Behind - The New York Times - 0 views
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The sharp pullback came with an implicit promise that as factories reopened and planes returned to the air, the oil industry would revive, too, gradually scaling up production to help economies return to prepandemic health.
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Members of the cartel OPEC Plus, which agreed to cut output by about 10 million barrels a day in early 2020, are routinely falling well short of their rising monthly production targets.
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Production in the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, has also been slow to recover from its one-million-barrel-a-day plummet in 2020, as companies and investors are wary of committing money amid climate change concerns and volatile prices.
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Associated Press News - 0 views
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President Joe Biden wrapped up his time at the Group of 20 summit on Sunday trying to convince Americans and the wider world that he’s got things under control — and taking Russia, China and Saudi Arabia to task for not doing enough to deal with the existential threat of climate change.
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But the policy issues also seemed to fade for Biden when asked about his time Friday with Pope Francis. The president became deeply emotional, his hands appearing to fiddle with the mask he wore as a precaution because of COVID-19.
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But he also acknowledged what he can’t yet achieve: bringing Russia, China and Saudi Arabia to the table with the broader international community to limit carbon emissions and move to renewable energy.
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A Slow-Motion Climate Disaster: The Spread of Barren Land - The New York Times - 0 views
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But on a recent day, with temperatures approaching 100 degrees, the river had run dry, the crops would not grow and the family’s 30 remaining cattle were quickly consuming the last pool of water.
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Scientists agree with her grandfather. Much of Brazil’s vast northeast is, in effect, turning into a desert — a process called desertification that is worsening across the planet.
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But local residents, faced with harsh economic realities, have also made short-term decisions to get by — like clearing trees for livestock and extracting clay for the region’s tile industry — that have carried long-term consequences.
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Putin's Challenge To The American Right - 0 views
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It’s not so much Putin’s trashing of international law, his unhinged rehashing of post-Soviet grievances, his next-level Covid paranoia, the foul murders of his opponents, or his brazen embrace of shelling hospitals that has so deepened the damage to the Putin brand among the West’s new Russophiles. These atrocities and madnesses they have long found ways to live with
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No, it’s Putin’s failure — thus far — to actually win the war he started that’s so damning. It’s one thing for a dictator to be deemed cruel; and quite another — and far more dangerous — thing for him to be seen as incompetent.
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“They’re gonna keep peace all right.” Think of the depth of the cynical callousness that has to lie behind such a smirk. Notice that for Trump, Putin is not just a thug but a smart one, and the possibility of his brutal incursion into a sovereign neighbor state was, in Trump’s mind, “wonderful.” And cheap: “He’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.”
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Climate Change Obsession Is a Real Mental Disorder - WSJ - 0 views
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If heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning. Yet here we are
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Humans have shown remarkable resilience and adaptation—at least until modern times, when half of society lost its cool over climate change.
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it’s alarmist stories about bad weather that are fueling mental derangements worthy of the DSM-5—not the warm summer air itself.
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Ocean Currents in the Atlantic Could Slow by Century's End, Research Shows - The New Yo... - 0 views
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The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.
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That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.
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A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.
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Opinion | The Economic Mistake Democrats Are Finally Confronting - The New York Times - 0 views
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This is the driving theory of most of the progressive policy agenda, most of the time: give people money or a moneylike voucher they can use to buy something they need or even just want.
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The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit.
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The first problem is explored in “Cost Disease Socialism,” a new paper by the center-right Niskanen Center. “We are in an era of spiraling costs for core social goods — health care, housing, education, child care — which has made proposals to socialize those costs enormously compelling for many on the progressive left,”
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Germany Gets Honest About What Net Zero Will Cost - WSJ - 0 views
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Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s administration is falling apart because it turns out someone will have to pay for decarbonizing the eurozone’s largest economy.
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This shocking and horrifying revelation is brought to you by Germany’s highest constitutional court, which ruled in mid-November that Berlin’s favorite budget gimmick violates the balanced-budget amendment. The amendment, known as the debt brake, limits the federal general-budget deficit to 0.35% of gross domestic product in any year unless Parliament declares an emergency.
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German governments devised a workaround even before the amendment forced them to. By establishing special funds—called Sondervermögen—with their own revenue streams and borrowing authority, the government could shift a portion of its expenditures off its balance sheet.
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The climate emergency really is a new type of crisis - consider the 'triple inequality'... - 0 views
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Stare at a climate map of the world that we expect to inhabit 50 years from now and you see a band of extreme heat encircling the planet’s midriff. Climate modelling from 2020 suggests that within half a century about 30% of the world’s projected population – unless they are forced to move – will live in places with an average temperature above 29C. This is unbearably hot. Currently, no more than 1% of Earth’s land surface is this hot, and those are mainly uninhabited parts of the Sahara.
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The scenario is as dramatic as it is because the regions of the world affected most severely by global heating – above all, sub-Saharan Africa – are those expected to experience the most rapid population growth in coming decades.
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But despite this population growth, they are also the regions that, on current trends, will contribute least to the emissions that drive the climate disaster.
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