People have the right to be — and should be — concerned about the state of race relations and the way people of color, in particular, are being treated

people are showing their hatred openly, but it doesn't mean it wasn't there," Savitt said. "There is a coming realization in our country. We have to come to a reckoning about our past and the truth about our history from slavery to the lynching era to Jim Crow. Only with real honesty about our situation can we come to some reconciliation and move on to fulfill King's hope and dream of a real, peaceful multicultural democracy."

In 2018, there were more than 7,000 single-bias incidents reported by law enforcement, according to FBI hate crime statistics. More than 53% of the offenders were white, while 24% were black. Nearly 60% of the incidents involved race, ethnicity and ancestry.

"With Trump, he has pushed the American nationalist identity that I think tamps down the kind of conflicts we would have,"

we need to do more, for the simple reason that they may not pay off fast enough. Climate change is a timed test, one of the first that our civilization has faced, and with each scientific report the window narrows.

Political change usually involves slow compromise, and that’s in a working system, not a dysfunctional gridlock such as the one we now have in Washington.

I suspect that the key to disrupting the flow of carbon into the atmosphere may lie in disrupting the flow of money to coal and oil and gas.

And, if the world were to switch decisively to solar and wind power, Chase would lend to renewable-energy companies, too. Indeed, it already does, though on a much smaller scale.

The same is true of the asset-management and insurance industries: without them, the fossil-fuel companies would almost literally run out of gas, but BlackRock and Chubb could survive without their business.

The terminal will spit out the current league tables, which rank loan volume: showing, for example, which banks are lending the most money to railroad builders or to copper miners—or to fossil-fuel companies.

And the trend is remarkable: in the three years since the signing of the Paris climate accord, which was designed to help the world shift away from fossil fuels, the banks’ lending to the industry has increased every year, and much of the money goes toward the most extreme forms of energy development.

The biggest oil companies might still be able to self-finance their continuing operations, but “the pure-play frackers will find finance impossible,” Buckley said. “Coal-dependent rail carriers and port owners and coal-mine contracting firms will all be hit.”

“the impacts of that social signal would be significant immediately, while the economic impacts from transitioning off of fossil fuels would happen over time.”

But four-fifths of the world’s population lives in nations that currently pay to import fossil fuels, and their economies would benefit, as ample financing would allow them to transition relatively quickly to low-cost solar and wind power.

n some ways, the insurance industry resembles the banks and the asset managers: it controls a huge pool of money and routinely invests enormous sums in the fossil-fuel industry.

Insurance companies are the part of our economy that we ask to understand risk, the ones with the data to really see what is happening as the climate changes, and for decades they’ve been churning out high-quality research establishing just how bad the crisis really is.

The second thing that makes insurance companies unique is that they don’t just provide money; they provide insurance. If you want to build a tar-sands pipeline or a coal-fired power plant or a liquefied-natural-gas export terminal, you need to get an insurance company to underwrite the plan.

But it’s both simple and powerful to switch your bank account: local credit unions and small-town banks are unlikely to be invested in fossil fuels,

Financial institutions can help with that work, but their main usefulness lies in helping to break the power of the fossil-fuel companies.

BlackRock’s actual policy changes are modest compared with Fink’s rhetoric. At least at first, the main change will be to rid the firm’s actively managed portfolio (about $1.8 trillion in value) of coal stocks; but coal, though still a major contributor to climate change, is already on the wane, except in Asia.

So an investor swearing off coal is a bit like cutting cake out of your diet but clinging to a slice of pie and a box of doughnuts.

the science shows that fracking for natural gas releases large amounts of methane, the second-most significant contributor to climate change.

“As trillions of dollars shift to millennials over the next few decades, as they become C.E.O.s and C.I.O.s, as they become the policymakers and heads of state, they will further reshape the world’s approach to sustainability.”

The Trump Administration’s top two goals in Iran have also been undermined.

The nuclear deal, which Trump abandoned in May, 2018, on the ground that he wanted something broader, is now unravelling. Iran’s breakout time has begun to tick down again.

It has evolved into the world’s leading practitioner of “gray zone” activities—covert and unacknowledged military operations, proxy attacks and cyberwar—Michael Eisenstadt, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said last week. “The United States has struggled to respond effectively to this asymmetric way of war.”

Libya has been wracked by conflict since the 2011 uprising which ousted long-time strongman Muammar Gaddafi.

"The Women's March has had a history of marginalizing certain people. They want their version of smashing patriarchy to look a certain way,"

A different group of protesters also stopped in front of the White House to chant the words of Article 2, Section 4 of the Constitution in reference to President Trump's impeachment.

Warming can make wildfires worse, for example — it makes vegetation drier and more combustible — but forest management practices, as well as decisions about where to build, also affect the degree of devastation.

At the root of the changes is the basic process of global warming. As carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere, they trap more of the heat that radiates from Earth’s surface as it absorbs sunlight.

But the United States under President Trump is leaving the agreement, and a United Nations report last month suggested that even if countries meet their pledges to cut emissions, and many are far off track, warming would be more than twice the 1.5-degree target.

By some estimates, Arctic permafrost contains about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere.

When it thaws, the organic matter begins to decompose, and the carbon enters the atmosphere as methane or carbon dioxide, adding to warming

Cultural imperialism is the “economic, technological, and cultural hegemony of the industrialized nations, which determines the direction of both economic and social progress, defines cultural values, and standardizes the civilization and cultural environment throughout the world.”

western culture dominates indigenous culture by stealing information through a process of cultural imperialism

India developed its own legislative policy and administrative techniques in order to protect its traditional knowledge.

Through use of cultural imperialism and economic power, the United States warranted the biopiracy of traditional knowledge in India through patent laws. Through the economic power of large pharmaceutical corporations and their desire for more consolidation of economic power, India was forced to change their own patent law at the expense of their citizen’s health.

What changed the fate not only of Hawaii but of the United States and, indeed, the world? The Spanish-American War. Before our 1898 intervention in the Cuban war for independence from Spain, we were a republic. After the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war and brought some Spanish territories under US control, we were an empire. Before, we were a single people whose values and institutions were applicable mainly to ourselves. After, we were a collection of diverse unwilling peoples on whose histories and aspirations those values and institutions would have to be imposed. In addition to Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam were now also “ours.”

The movement succeeded because “anti-Imperialism is only another name for old-fashioned Americanism,” the editorial maintains. Unwilling to “distinguish between the flag and the principles which first set the flag flying,” the anti-imperialist American has reasserted the fundamental ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and in the end his cause has triumphed.

When The Nation’s editors defined “anti-imperialism” as synonymous with “Americanism,” they neglected to notice that not only “Americanism” but America itself had already forever changed.

Patriotism is a form of nationalism. They are ideological brothers, not distant cousins.

members of the nation, understood as a group of equal citizens with a shared history and future political destiny, should rule the state, and second, that they should do so in the interests of the nation.

Nationalism is thus opposed to foreign rule by members of other nations, as in colonial empires and many dynastic kingdoms, as well as to rulers who disregard the perspectives and needs of the majority.

The British government will issue green (literally, the color green) license plates to EVs. This is to encourage drivers to buy zero-emissions cars in order to combat the climate crisis.

European parliament has vetoed legislation that would weaken the protection of bee colonies from harmful pesticides.

A new report from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University asserts that 9,700 additional premature deaths occurred in the US between 2016 and 2018 as a result of pollution.

PM2.5 comes from human industry such as coal, oil, and gas, and construction dust. It also comes from forest fires.

PM2.5 kills people by causing respiratory and cardiac problems.

the election of climate-change denier Donald Trump in 2016 coincides with this unfortunate turnaround after years of declining particulate matter during the Obama administration from 2009-2016.

The ECB revived its stimulus programme last month after a decline in inflation and GDP growth suggested the eurozone was heading for a period of contraction.

Democratic presidential candidates favour expanding the social safety net, beginning with healthcare.

Democrats also plan to introduce expensive subsidies, tax breaks, direct spending, loan forgiveness, and other giveaways, insisting that these proposals can be funded largely by increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

There is one area where Trump and the Democrats both want to spend more: infrastructure. Repairing and maintaining roads, ports, and airports is partly the federal government’s responsibility, but state, local, and private finance should be expanded.

opponents diverge much more sharply on government regulation.

consider the proposed changes to energy-efficiency building codes, which get updated every three years. This round, the homebuilders have opposed changes that include requiring better insulation in attics and air ducts, as well as a proposal requiring new houses to be equipped with the circuitry required to install a plug for an electric vehicle — potentially making it easier for homeowners to switch to electric cars in the future.

The homebuilding industry says it opposes proposals that would make houses more expensive, pricing people out of the market.

Advocates for tougher building codes say the effects of decisions like these will be felt for generations as global warming leads to more powerful storms and higher risk of damage to property.

“Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humans have been increasingly affecting global climate, to the point where we are now the primary cause of recent and projected future change. The majority of the warming at the global scale over the past 50 years can only be explained by the effects of human influences, especially the emissions from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) and from deforestation.”

The U.S. mission shift to protecting oil fields could also raise issues in Congress.

Turkey’s agreement with Russia to jointly send in troops to the region to fill the vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal has also caused heartburn at NATO.