The John James Newsletter 257

The John James Newsletter 257

3 November 2018

You want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can't get there obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate controllers, and Nature destroyers. We can't get there kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this Earth

Richard Grossman

Having said sorry we still refuse to say thanks

Bruce Pascoe

Outbreaks don't end well

Charles Mann

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends

Martin Luther King Jr.

Frankly I am deeply torn. ...20 million at risk for starvation according to UN. Thousands if not millions trying to escape dire circumstances in regions of Africa, parts of the Middle East, areas of South America and certain countries of Central America. Who is to pay for schools for their children, medical care, food, shelter and so on? ... Should the poor pay when the poor here already can barely tend themselves? ... I see a dichotomy and it it is not a pretty one. Serve all the people who want to come or salvage for the future?... The uneducated often hate the immigrants since they take away low paying jobs from the unskilled already here. ... Tensions are on the rise and, of course, Trump is not helpful. ... Who should take the millions into their countries year after year as human numbers keep growing year after year.? ...

Sally D

Pigheadedness is to be our demise. We have to totally transform our most cherished institutions, yet institutions are designed not to change. They have constitutions, created after much effort, even conflict, to define governments, charities, companies, the UN. Everything we do is encompassed by entities with constitutions that are not meant to change, or only slowly. Therefore, how can we expect to transform the untransformable without revolution – like the bloody and violent upheavals in the past? If that is the only way, why isn't it happening?

John James

Energy policy in Australia is a major failure. The electricity sector, which is responsible for 34% of our emissions, has no credible reduction policy. We need state-based legislation, independent of the federal government.

Tony Wood

We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last that can do anything about it.

Tanya Steele

Ecocide Is On The Horizon - extinction would then be automatic

The greenhouse gases around the planet trap heat radiation. The oceans, which cover about 75% of the planet, have enormous heat capacity and can soak up a lot of energy. Being very deep, they take a long time to heat up. As the oceans absorb the heat, it takes decades for the atmosphere to heat up. This “climate lag” delays the full impact of global warming. As temperatures rise, the feedback mechanisms come into play and the planet arrives at tipping points at which things spin out of control. Once that happens, it is too late to control carbon emissions. The release of methane and nitrous oxide, the acidification of the oceans, the destruction of rain forests—which turns them from their service as carbon sinks into net carbon sources—work together to destroy the oceans and as a source of food, to deplete water resources, and to raise temperatures beyond those at which life can exist. Read more

UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That.

Avoiding that scale of suffering requires such a thorough transformation of the world’s economy, agriculture, and culture that “there is no documented historical precedent.” The report showed a “strong risk” of climate crisis in the coming decades: civilisation is at stake. If you are alarmed by those sentences, you should be — they are horrifying. But it is, actually, worse than that — considerably worse. That is because the new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case. In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much worse than that it will get. Barring the arrival of dramatic new carbon-sucking technologies, which are so far from scalability at present that they are best described as fantasies of industrial absolution, it will not be possible to keep warming below two degrees Celsius — the level the UN report describes as a climate catastrophe. Read this

An indigenous Ch’orti’ Maya, Canan abandoned his lands this year after repeated crop failures – which he attributed to drought and changing weather patterns. “It didn’t rain this year. Last year it didn’t rain,” he said softly. “My maize field didn’t produce a thing. With my expenses, we didn’t have any earnings. There was no harvest.”Desperate, and dreaming of the United States, Canan hit the road in early October and joined the migrant caravan. He left behind a wife and three children – ages 16, 14 and 11 – who were forced to abandon school because Canan couldn’t afford to pay for supplies.“It wasn’t the same before. This is forcing us to emigrate. In past years, it rained on time. My plants produced, but there’s no longer any pattern to the weather.”This story of climate change

Within two years will China control the major part of Israel’s agro-food industry, its high technology and its international exchanges?

With these agreements the geopolitics of the whole region will be turned upside down. By massively exporting its production, China will take over the commercial place that the UK, and later with the US, has occupied since the industrial revolution. It was to maintain this supremacy that Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter and the US engaged in the Second World War. It is therefore probable that they will not hesitate to employ military force to hinder the Chinese project, just as they did in 1941 when faced with the German and Japanese projects. In 2013, the Pentagon published the Wright plan, which programmed the creation of a new state straddling Iraq and Syria in order to cut the Silk Road between Baghdad and Damascus. This mission was carried out by Daesh - China therefore modified the layout of its route and finally decided to build the route through Egypt, and invested in the doubling of the Suez Canal and the creation of a vast industrial zone 120 kilometres from Cairo. Simultaneously the Pentagon organised a "colour revolution" in Ukraine to cut the European route, and stirred up trouble in Nicaragua to prevent a new canal linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Read this analysis

China’s Xi tells military to prepare for war as US Navy warns of high seas encounters

Xi made the blunt remarks last week as he was meeting the Southern Theatre Command, the military officials responsible for one of China’s five strategic war zones. “It’s necessary to strengthen the mission… and concentrate preparations for fighting a war. We need to take all complex situations into consideration and make emergency plans accordingly." On the warpath

A brief video about the China-led Belt & Road Initiative

By far the biggest driver of environmental and societal change we are facing this century.

Please take a minute to watch this

China's trillion dollar plan to dominate global trade

NASA Has Discovered Arctic Lakes Bubbling With Methane

A little known phenomenon called “abrupt thawing” occurs when the permafrost thaws faster than expected. Scientists have long known that the thawing permafrost has the potential to release large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. As the organic matter that has been locked up in the ground defrosts it decomposes, releasing carbon and methane (a hydrocarbon) in the process. If all this was released into the atmosphere, the impact on climate change would be huge. There is about 1,500 billion tons of carbon locked up in the permafrost—almost double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere right now. Read more

Startling new research finds large buildup of heat in the oceans

This tells us we face a faster rate of global warming. “We thought that we got away with less warming in both the ocean and the atmosphere for the amount of CO2 that we emitted. But we were wrong. The planet warmed more than we thought. It was hidden from us just because we didn’t sample it right. But it was there. It was in the ocean already. Over the past quarter-century, Earth’s oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year than scientists previously had thought.” Read more

The bone hunters

What archaeologists find in a cave deep in the heart of Borneo’s rainforest could shed light on one of the biggest mysteries in human history: that modern humans first arrived in South-East Asia between about 60,000 and 70,000 years ago. Seems almost contemporary with the first arrival of Aboriginal people in Australia.That would place modern humans in the region soon after one of the most catastrophic events in Earth’s history. “Just before the time that modern humans get into South-East Asia, we have the largest volcanic eruption that’s happened on the planet in the last two million years.” A massive crater lake on the Indonesian island of Sumatra — around 1,700 kilometres west of Trader’s Cave — marks what is left of the Mt Toba super-volcano. Around 74,000 years ago, the cataclysmic explosion showered the region in ash and plunged the planet into a volcanic winter, which some scientists believe wiped out most humans on Earth. Read more

India is choking.

It’s pollution season in India, when the air can become so toxic that experts say it could lead to permanent brain damage in children. And data show that air pollution continues to rise in major cities, many of which are among the world’s most polluted, according to recent rankings. Some progress is being made: The government, for the first time, is spending more than $150 million to dissuade farmers from burning their fields — a major polluter. But the country is still struggling to balance economic growth against environmental damage. Read this

The world’s 10 most polluted cities – 9 are in India

Whittled down from the WHO's study of over 4,000 cities in 100 countries, CNBC takes a look at the 10 most polluted cities in the world based on a comparison of the amount of PM2.5 — a particle considered so small that it can enter the lungs and cause serious health problems. Read more

Threats to soil biodiversity across the globe

Eight potential stressors to soil organisms: loss of above-ground diversity, pollution and nutrient overloading, overgrazing, intensive agriculture, fire, soil erosion, desertification and climate change. The figure shows the distribution of scores to assess the distribution of threats to soil organisms at global scale. The areas with the lowest level of risk are mainly concentrated in the northern part of the northern hemisphere. These regions are generally less subjected to direct anthropogenic effects of agriculture although indirect effects such as climate change may become more significant in the future. Not surprisingly, the areas with highest risk are those that reflect the greatest exposure to human activities, such as intensive agriculture, increased urbanisation and pollution. Read more

Australia's east coast named as 'deforestation front'

Australia’s east coast has been compared to the Amazon as a “deforestation front” in a new global report by the World Wide Fund for Nature. The Living Planet report says clearing for livestock is the primary cause of deforestation on the east coast, also unsustainable logging. “It is time we realised that a healthy, sustainable future for all is only possible on a planet where nature thrives and forests, oceans and rivers are teeming with biodiversity and life,” Read more

Queensland passes land-clearing laws after gruelling three-day debate

The state parliament has passed a new land-clearing laws, a move welcomed by environmental groups as a step towards curbing the state’s soaring deforestation rates. The laws were passed late on Thursday night after an exhausting three-day debate and fierce protests outside parliament from farmers who say the new restrictions will harm Queensland’s agricultural industry. Read more

American Muslim groups express solidarity with the Jewish community

American Muslim civil advocacy groups have strongly denounced the killing of worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. In solidarity with the Jewish community two Muslim organisations have raised around $200,000 to help victims and their families of the synagogue shooting. Read more

A sustainable global population - and why we cannot achieve it

During last 45 years world population increased by 30%. The global average daily food supply per person has risen only 20%. Consequently, over 800 million people are undernourished. Read more

Our ecological footprint

Notice that in spite of the growing population, the impact from food production and forest products have not increased to the same proportion as carbon emissions. This has increased four-fold since 1960 whereas population has increased just 55%. Roughly, for every 1% increase in our numbers there has been a 2% increase in carbon cost. In the last 50 years economic development has driven a phenomenal increase in the demand for energy that is fundamentally changing Earth’s operating system. In other words, our woes come mainly from fossil fuels to create that energy, itself driven by the profits stolen from the commons. WWF Living Planet Report 2018