Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

To address hunger, many countries may have to increase carbon footprint

Achieving an adequate, healthy diet in most low- and middle-income countries will require a substantial increase in greenhouse gas emissions and water use due to food production, according to new research.

Private Equity Is Working Hard to Keep Surprise Medical Bills High

One of the most outrageous aspects of American health care is surprise out-of-network billing. Most people, if they go to a hospital that’s “in-network,” quite reasonably assume that this means “the hospital’s doctors are in-network.” But that’s not the case. Sometimes hospitals contract with doctors who aren’t part of your insurance network, and these doctors […]

New technology allows fleets to double fishing capacity -- and deplete fish stocks faster

Technological advances are allowing commercial fishing fleets to double their fishing power every 35 years and put even more pressure on dwindling fish stocks, new research has found.

Naomi Klein on How Climate Change Fuels the Rise of White Supremacy

This story originally appeared in theGuardian. It is republished here as part of In These Times' partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

Read an extract from Naomi Klein's new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, here.

Why are you publishing this book now?

I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the crisis of rising white supremacy, the various forms of nationalism and the fact that so many people are being forced from their homelands, and the war that is waged on our attention spans. These are intersecting and interconnecting crises and so the solutions have to be as well.

The book collects essays from the last decade, have you changed your mind about anything?

When I look back, I don’t think I placed enough emphasis on the challenge climate change poses to the left. It’s more obvious the way the climate crisis challenges a rightwing dominant worldview, and the cult of serious centrism that never wants to do anything big, that’s always looking to split the difference. But this is also a challenge to a left worldview that is essentially only interested in redistributing the spoils of extractivism [the process of extracting natural resources from the earth] and not reckoning with the limits of endless consumption.

What’s stopping the left doing this?

In a North American context, it’s the greatest taboo of all to actually admit that there are going to be limits. You see that in the way Fox News has gone after the Green New Deal – they are coming after your hamburgers! It cuts to the heart of the American dream – every generation gets more than the last, there is always a new frontier to expand to, the whole idea of settler colonial nations like ours. When somebody comes along and says, actually, there are limits, we’ve got some tough decisions, we need to figure out how to manage what’s left, we’ve got to share equitably – it is a psychic attack. And so the response [on the left] has been to avoid, and say no, no, we’re not coming to take away your stuff, there are going to be all kinds of benefits. And there are going to be benefits: we’ll have more livable cities, we’ll have less polluted air, we’ll spend less time stuck in traffic, we can design happier, richer lives in so many ways. But we are going to have to contract on the endless, disposable consumption side.

Do you feel encouraged by talk of the Green New Deal?

I feel a tremendous excitement and a sense of relief, that we are finally talking about solutions on the scale of the crisis we face. That we’re not talking about a little carbon tax or a cap and trade scheme as a silver bullet. We’re talking about transforming our economy. This system is failing the majority of people anyway, which is why we’re in this period of such profound political destabilisation – that is giving us the Trumps and the Brexits, and all of these strongman leaders – so why don’t we figure out how to change everything from bottom to top, and do it in a way that addresses all of these other crises at the same time? There is every chance we will miss the mark, but every fraction of a degree warming that we are able to hold off is a victory and every policy that we are able to win that makes our societies more humane, the more we will weather the inevitable shocks and storms to come without slipping into barbarism. Because what really terrifies me is what we are seeing at our borders in Europe and North America and Australia – I don’t think it’s coincidental that the settler colonial states and the countries that are the engines of that colonialism are at the forefront of this. We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism. We saw it in Christchurch, we saw it in El Paso, where you have this marrying of white supremacist violence with vicious anti-immigrant racism.

That is one of the most chilling sections of your book: I think that’s a link a lot of people haven’t made.

This pattern has been clear for a while. White supremacy emerged not just because people felt like thinking up ideas that were going to get a lot of people killed but because it was useful to protect barbaric but highly profitable actions. The age of scientific racism begins alongside the transatlantic slave trade, it is a rationale for that brutality. If we are going to respond to climate change by fortressing our borders, then of course the theories that would justify that, that create these hierarchies of humanity, will come surging back. There have been signs of that for years, but it is getting harder to deny because you have killers who are screaming it from the rooftops.

One criticism you hear about the environment movement is that it is dominated by white people. How do you address that?

When you have a movement that is overwhelmingly representative of the most privileged sector of society then the approach is going to be much more fearful of change, because people who have a lot to lose tend to be more fearful of change, whereas people who have a lot to gain will tend to fight harder for it. That’s the big benefit of having an approach to climate change that links it to those so called bread and butter issues: how are we going to get better paid jobs, affordable housing, a way for people to take care of their families? I have had many conversations with environmentalists over the years where they seem really to believe that by linking fighting climate change with fighting poverty, or fighting for racial justice, it’s going to make the fight harder. We have to get out of this “my crisis is bigger than your crisis: first we save the planet and then we fight poverty and racism, and violence against women”. That doesn’t work. That alienates the people who would fight hardest for change. This debate has shifted a huge amount in the US because of the leadership of the climate justice movement and because it is congresswomen of colour who are championing the Green New Deal. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaibcome from communities that have gotten such a raw deal under the years of neoliberalism and longer, and are determined to represent, truly represent, the interests of those communities. They’re not afraid of deep change because their communities desperately need it.

In the book, you write: “The hard truth is that the answer to the question ‘What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?’ is: nothing.” Do you still believe that?

In terms of the carbon, the individual decisions that we make are not going to add up to anything like the kind of scale of change that we need. And I do believe that the fact that for so many people it’s so much more comfortable to talk about our own personal consumption, than to talk about systemic change, is a product of neoliberalism, that we have been trained to see ourselves as consumers first. To me that’s the benefit of bringing up these historical analogies, like the New Deal or the Marshall Plan – it brings our minds back to a time when we were able to think of change on that scale. Because we’ve been trained to think very small. It is incredibly significant that Greta Thunberg has turned her life into a living emergency.

Yes, she set sail for the UN climate summit in New York on a zero carbon yacht ...

Exactly. But this isn’t about what Greta is doing as an individual. It’s about what Greta is broadcasting in the choices that she makes as an activist, and I absolutely respect that. I think it’s magnificent. She is using the power that she has to broadcast that this is an emergency, and trying to inspire politicians to treat it as an emergency. I don’t think anybody is exempt from scrutinising their own decisions and behaviours but I think it is possible to overemphasise the individual choices. I have made a choice – and this has been true since I wrote No Logo, and I started getting these “what should I buy, where should I shop, what are the ethical clothes?” questions. My answer continues to be that I am not a lifestyle adviser, I am not anyone’s shopping guru, and I make these decisions in my own life but I’m under no illusion that these decisions are going to make the difference.

Some people are choosing to go on birth strikes. What do you think about that?

I’m happy these discussions are coming into the public domain as opposed to being furtive issues we’re afraid to talk about. It’s been very isolating for people. It certainly was for me. One of the reasons I waited as long as I did to try and get pregnant, and I would say this to my partner all the time – what, you want to have a Mad Max water warrior fighting with their friends for food and water? It wasn’t until I was part of the climate justice movement and I could see a path forward that I could even imagine having a kid. But I would never tell anybody how to answer this most intimate of questions. As a feminist who knows the brutal history of forced sterilisation and the ways in which women’s bodies become battle zones when policymakers decide that they are going to try and control population, I think that the idea that there are regulatory solutions when it comes to whether or not to have kids is catastrophically ahistorical. We need to be struggling with our climate grief together and our climate fears together, through whatever decision we decide to make, but the discussion we need to have is how do we build a world so that those kids can have thriving, zero-carbon lives?

Over the summer, you encouraged people to read Richard Powers’s novel, The Overstory. Why?

It’s been incredibly important to me and I’m happy that so many people have written to me since. What Powers is writing about trees: that trees live in communities and are in communication, and plan and react together, and we’ve been completely wrong in the way we conceptualise them. It’s the same conversation we’re having about whether we are going to solve this as individuals or whether we are going to save the collective organism. It’s also rare, in good fiction, to valorise activism, to treat it with real respect, failures and all, to acknowledge the heroism of the people who put their bodies on the line. I thought Powers did that in a really extraordinary way.

What are you views on what Extinction Rebellion has achieved?

One thing they have done so well is break us out of this classic campaign model we have been in for a long time, where you tell someone something scary, you ask them to click on something to do something about it, you skip out the whole phase where we need to grieve together and feel together and process what it is that we just saw. Because what I hear a lot from people is, ok, maybe those people back in the 1930s or 40s could organise neighbourhood by neighbourhood or workplace by workplace but we can’t. We believe we’ve been so downgraded as a species that we are incapable of that. The only thing that is going to change that belief is getting face to face, in community, having experiences, off our screens, with one another on the streets and in nature, and winning some things and feeling that power.

You talk about stamina in the book. How do you keep going? Do you feel hopeful?

I have complicated feelings about the hope question. Not a day goes by that I don’t have a moment of sheer panic, raw terror, complete conviction that we are doomed, and then I do pull myself out of it. I’m renewed by this new generation that is so determined, so forceful. I’m inspired by the willingness to engage in electoral politics, because my generation, when we were in our 20s and 30s, there was so much suspicion around getting our hands dirty with electoral politics that we lost a lot of opportunities. What gives me the most hope right now is that we’ve finally got the vision for what we want instead, or at least the first rough draft of it. This is the first time this has happened in my lifetime. And also, I did decide to have kids. I have a seven year old who is so completely obsessed and in love with the natural world. When I think about him, after we’ve spent an entire summer talking about the role of salmon in feeding the forests where he was born in British Columbia, and how they are linked to the health of the trees and the soil and the bears and the orcas and this entire magnificent ecosystem, and I think about what it would be like to have to tell him that there are no more salmon, it kills me. So that motivates me. And slays me.

Climate change expected to accelerate spread of sometimes-fatal fungal infection

Valley fever is endemic to hot and dry regions like the southwestern United States and California's San Joaquin Valley, but a new study predicts climate change will cause the fungal infection's range to more than double in size this century, reaching previously unaffected areas across the western U.S.

New York prosecutors subpoena eight years of #Trump's #tax #returns | #US news | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/16/trump-tax-returns-new-york-subpoena

Today I've realized that Instagram doesn't sort posts by timestamp, but instead by some weird-ass "importance" algorithm.

That finally explains why I keep missing posts from my friends, thinking there's no new content, because some "influencer's" photo keeps blocking the top of my feed for hours or even days.

You literally had one job Instagram...

Don't Let Congress Hand Patent Abusers Their Ultimate Wishlist

Congress is considering a bill that would throw out the best defenses against bad patents. The Senate IP Subcommittee recently had a hearing about the Stronger Patents Act, a batch of recurring terrible ideas that has been introduced by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) for the third time in three years.

The Stronger Patents Act would tear apart inter partes review (IPR), an critical tool for challenging bad patents. People who are charged with patent violations shouldn’t have to have millions of dollars in the bank to defend themselves. IPR provides a more cost-effective way of evaluating patents than expensive federal court litigation.

TAKE ACTION

PRESERVE OUR DEFENSES AGAINST PATENT ABUSE

Patent trolls, drug companies, and IP lawyer groups have been attacking IPR for years now, and they’re all big supporters of this bill. Big patent owners have grown so used to gaming the patent system that they’re willing to throw out IPRs, despite the fact that these reviews are clearly in the public interest.

IPR allows companies to fight back against patent accusations for a fraction of the cost of district court. It also allows organizations like EFF to challenge bogus patents like we did when we busted the podcasting patent. If the Stronger Patents Act passes, EFF and our supporters won’t be allowed to file challenges anymore.

Taking a second look at patents is in the public interest. In the seven years IPRs have been active, the specialized judges at the Patent Office have thrown out more than 1,500 patents that never should have been issued in the first place. Many of those are, unsurprisingly, software patents.

The U.S. Patent Office often issues patents it shouldn’t have, particularly in areas like software, where examiners don’t always have access to the most relevant prior art. The office is funded by the fees paid by patent applicants. PTO examiners spend an average of about 18 hours per application, and that leads to wrongly issued patents.

Too often, weak patents get used to threaten small businesses—patents that claim things like picture menus, or crowdfunding, or online contests. The IPR process is the best process, so far, for dealing with those improperly issued patents.

When IPR was challenged in court, the Supreme Court upheld the process. The public has an important interest in ensuring that patents stay within their proper bounds.

The Stronger Patents Act has another bad provision that will give huge amounts of leverage directly to patent trolls. Under rules laid out by the Supreme Court in 2007, it’s very hard for patent trolls to get court-ordered injunctions that can knock products off the market. The Stronger Patents Act would undo that rule, giving patent trolls leverage to scare massive cash settlements out of companies. In 2006, Blackberry (then called RIM) paid out a $612 million settlement to a patent-assertion entity when it was threatened with an injunction. That money went straight into the hands of some bad actors in the patent world, who used the capital to invest in—what else—more lawsuits against tech firms.

The Stronger Patents Act will wreak havoc on a system that’s already balanced in favor of patent holders. Tell Congress to reject this proposal.

TAKE ACTION

PRESERVE OUR DEFENSES AGAINST PATENT ABUSE

Related Cases:  Abstract Patent Litigation

Combination of wood fibers and spider silk could rival plastic

The unique material outperforms most of today's synthetic and natural materials by providing high strength and stiffness, combined with increased toughness.

A modelling tool to rapidly predict weed spread risk

A new statistical modelling tool will enable land management authorities to predict where invasive weed species are most likely to grow so they can find and eliminate plants before they have time to spread widely.

6 Greenwashing Schemes That Show Corporations Will Never Lead on Climate

This article is published as part of In These Time's partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. 

Forget the youth activists capturing the country’s imagination with calls for a Green New Deal and the progressive politicians pushing for it: The clearest signal that climate change demands action comes from the planet’s corporations.

Corporations worldwide are announcing new plans to eliminate climate impact from their operations, and would have you believe they are well on their way to building the green economy voluntarily, no need for major economic reform. It would seem the dirtier the industry, the bigger the ambition. HeidelbergCement, for example, the world’s second-largest cement producer, pledged to produce carbon-neutral concrete by 2050, a goal in line with the Paris Agreement. It was a first for an industry that is the world’s third-largest industrial energy consumer, according to the International Energy Agency. Xcel Energy, meanwhile, one of the biggest utilities in the United States, is closing coal-fired power plants and moving aggressively into wind and solar renewables, claiming it will be “carbon-free” by 2050.

Corporate sustainability programs today extend to suppliers and subcontractors, as well, and some big banks are beginning to factor climate change risk assessments into their lending decisions. Even ExxonMobil, arguably the most environmentally unfriendly corporation of all time, claims, “We believe that climate change risks warrant action and it’s going to take all of us—business, governments and consumers—to make meaningful progress.”

It’s little wonder that executives are worried: A 2019 survey of 215 large companies from the nonprofit CDP found they expect to lose as much as $1 trillion from climate impacts in years to come. Clean energy would save money in the long run while winning reputational currency with consumers. Yet few of these corporations have put their heft behind robust government climate policies. In fact, polluting corporations have poured millions of dollars into lobbying efforts against new environmental regulations, suggesting they only want climate action if they set the terms.

But could voluntary corporate environmental cleanups and self-policing solve the problem? To answer, In These Times looked back at some of the most ambitious corporate environmental promises of recent decades. It’s not very encouraging.

1

The transportation sector is the biggest pollutor in the U.S., accounting for 29% of total emissions in 2017, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks (for cargo, firefighting and other services) contribute 23% of transportation emissions; these emissions increased by 90% between 1990 and 2017. Commercial ground shipping is poised to remain a major polluter for the foreseeable future.

The picture once seemed rosier. In 2000, FedEx teamed with the Environmental Defense Fund to develop a “revolutionary” hybrid truck design to bring down greenhouse gas emissions by 30% while reducing air pollution. FedEx planned to start replacing its dirtier-burning diesel trucks in 2003 with the potential of rolling out 30,000 new vehicles in a decade. “I can’t envision any reason why we wouldn’t roll this out over the whole fleet,” one executive said.

“By making this commitment, they are taking a giant step forward for the environment in the United States,” Geroge W. Bush’s EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, told the New York Times.

The revolution never took hold. By 2010, FedEx had added only a few hundred electric and hybrid vehicles, citing the “daunting” costs of purchasing or converting vehicles.

Today, the company has fewer than 4,000 “alternative energy vehicles” on the road—about 2% of its ground fleet of 180,000+ vehicles worldwide, lagging behind UPS (with more than 10,000 alternative fuel vehicles in its total fleet of 123,000).

After balking at the cost of a new green fleet, FedEx (like much of the ground shipping industry) has refocused its “sustainability” work on relatively low-hanging fruit such as making improvements to its existing fleet’s fuel efficiency (which can save money without major new investments). FedEx has made strides, improving fuel efficiency 39.6% from a 2005 baseline, and claims to still be “revolutioniz[ing]” the industry. But none of this moves to transition corporate ground fleets to renewable fuel.

2

Maritime shipping, one of the more difficult sectors to decarbonize due to the lack of viable alternative fuels at the ready, accounts for 2.2% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, according to the United Nations International Maritime Organization.

In 2011, the international commodities trader Cargill captured imaginations by installing a giant kite on the dry bulk cargo ship Aghia Marina, making it the world’s largest kiteassisted cargo ship. The system works by harnessing powerful high-altitude winds to propel cargo ships, reducing fuel consumption by up to 35% (depending on weather conditions) according to SkySails, the German engineering company that pioneered the concept.

Fuel is one of this industry’s biggest costs, so adding sail technology seemed like a win-win. The pilot ship grabbed international headlines and appeared poised to scale up to become a new industry standard.

Even the online environmental site TreeHugger praised Cargill, saying, in 2011, that the project was “worth recognizing” (even as they remained critical of some of Cargill’s other practices).

But by 2015, Cargill was saying that it had “encountered obstacles that demonstrate the challenge of making windpowered vessels a reality,” and the project was ended. The Aghia Marina was sold in 2017, around which time the SkySails system was removed, according to SkySails founder Stephan Wrage.

“I think [the sail system] should have been installed on a new vessel,” Wrage says. But that never happened. Cargo ship owners, Wrage says, have generally resisted adopting new technology such as kite sails, despite the proven cost savings. The reason is that cargo ship owners aren’t the ones paying for fuel. Fuel costs are passed onto charter customers (like Cargill), so the ship owners generally don’t make expensive energy efficiency upgrades, no matter the climate-saving potential.

Cargill, apparently, was unwilling or unable to leverage its international stature and business scale to push for a sea change in the shipping industry. Nevertheless, today it still wants full credit for its short-lived sail experiment, insisting that its aborted pilot project “does underscore Cargill’s commitment to investing in innovative shipping solutions that aim to transform the industry.”

3

Aviation makes up roughly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, one of the fastest-growing sources. Since the mid-2000s, some airlines have offered passengers a chance to assuage their own carbon guilt by purchasing carbon offsets: For an extra fee, flyers buy into forest management and other environmentally friendly projects to balance out the carbon they’re using. Virgin Atlantic Airways helped lead the charge—on the public relations front, at least.

Promising its carbon offsets are tested against “strict criteria about what counts as a carbon reduction,” Virgin assures customers that carbon credits support environmental conservation and improve “people’s lives by delivering household savings, health benefits and improving water resources.”

But at least one offset project advertised by Virgin has proved to be a sham. The environmental and social justice organization Fern issued a failing grade, in 2017, to Virgin’s offset credits for forest conservation in Oddar Meanchey, Cambodia. An investigation found that nearly half of the forest that was supposed to be protected had been clear-cut. Fern’s Julia Christian told the Phnom Penh Post those carbon credits “are bogus—they are based on emissions savings that never happened, because the forest was destroyed, not protected.”

A few months after Fern’s report made international headlines, Virgin stopped selling the Oddar Meanchey offsets.

A Virgin spokesperson said the company had acted “in good faith” when selecting the project, though critics had publicly raised concerns years prior.

It’s not that preserving forests isn’t an effective decarbonization method, but that forest offset programs too often fail to prevent deforestation. In May 2019, ProPublica issued an investigative report that examined two decades of offsets and concluded that forest carbon credits “may be worse than nothing,” giving “polluters a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO2” with little to no climate benefit. The programs are also controversial with social justice and indigenous rights groups who see local communities losing their age-old ways of life after conservationists cut off their access to hunting, fishing and foraging.

Despite these problems, the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) is still relying on offsets for its industry-wide goal of carbon-neutral growth by 2020. 

4

Thomas Mooney, senior vice president for sustainable growth at Fiji Water, claimed in a 2008 press release, “Consumers who choose Fiji Water will actually be helping the environment by taking carbon out of the atmosphere with every purchase.” Labels reading “every drop is green” appeared on Fiji bottles in supermarkets and hotel rooms, along with a “carbon neutral” claim. But very few things in life are truly carbon-free.

Producing plastic bottles and shipping water from Fiji to the rest of the world comes with a heavy environmental cost, and Fiji’s promise to neutralize “120%” of its carbon emissions was based on so-called forward crediting, a scheme that allowed the company to tout its carbon-negative status in 2008 even though its emissions wouldn’t (theoretically) achieve that status until 2037, according to calculations by the international nature group, Conservation International (CI), that partnered with Fiji on the project. The idea was to rely on conservation projects in Fiji—which, we know, is no guarantee of forest preservation. Billionaire Stewart Resnick, who co-owns Fiji Water, happened to be a longtime CI board member, and CI worked for Fiji Water in exchange for conservation funding. (Full disclosure: This author briefly worked for Conservation International in 2006, which led to her whistleblowing book, Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad.)

In 2011, a California woman launched a class-action lawsuit arguing Fiji was “claim[ing] credit for carbon removal that may or may not take place—up to several decades in the future.” The case was dismissed, but the company has stopped using the carbon-neutral label.

5

Remember "Beyond Petroleum"? In 2001, the oil company BP (formerly known as British Petroleum) rebranded as an environmental champion, adopting its “Beyond” slogan.

Its solar subsidiary, BP Solar, was a big part of the Beyond Petroleum efforts. In its mid-2000s heyday, solar panel manufacturer BP Solar enjoyed a brief era of profitability. In 2004, the company reported, “The solar business grew sales by 38% and delivered a full-year operating profit for the first time.”

Shortly after that record year, however, Chinese solar panel manufacturers introduced cheap new products to the market. By 2008, Chinese solar panels were selling for 80% less than others in the industry, driving out competition and allowing China to seize a leadership position in solar that it still maintains.

By 2010, BP’s solar subsidiary was already feeling the heat of Chinese competition when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill left 11 workers dead and allowed 4 million barrels of oil to flow into the Gulf of Mexico, a serious crack in the company’s green image. BP Solar closed in 2011, succumbing to Chinese competition, and the Beyond Petroleum slogan soon faded away.

BP did not buy its way back into solar until December 2017, with a $200 million investment in Europe’s largest solar developer, Lightsource. But the company has never been close to going beyond petroleum—then or now.

Even in 2004, 96% of BP’s net profits came from dirty old fossil fuels, with just 4% coming from solar and other renewables. In 2018, meanwhile, the company reported $12.7 billion in underlying replacement cost profit (effectively net income), which highlights the tiny nature of its $200 million Lightsource solar investment. As Valentina Kretzschmar, the director of research at oil analysis firm Wood Mackenzie, put it in 2018, “the amount of money spent is still peanuts compared to their core business.”

6

U.S.-headquartered commodities traders Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge and Cargill, which supply world markets with a vast array of raw materials, have long stood accused of encouraging farmers to cut deeper into the Amazon and other forests, bulldozing biodiverse ecosystems to make way for fields of soybeans, African palm and other cash crops.

Various corporate sustainability programs have committed to stop purchasing commodity crops grown on recently deforested land and all three of the aforementioned big traders have turned to “traceability” systems to account for every grain, seed and fruit in a supply chain and link them back to where they grew. Bunge says it has achieved more than 90% traceability for farms it sources from directly in “high-priority areas” around the world and is monitoring more than 6,700 farms and 200 independent grain elevators. Cargill has pledged “to transform our agricultural supply chains to be deforestation-free.”

However, “The Ultimate Mystery Meat,” a 2017 investigation by the activist organization Mighty Earth, charged Bunge and Cargill with driving deforestation in Brazil and Bolivia.

“Bunge has adopted a strong policy on paper to prohibit deforestation in its supply chain, but hasn’t widely communicated the policy to its suppliers,” the report reads. And “Cargill has given itself until 2030 to eliminate deforestation from its supply chains, giving soy growers and others almost 15 years to race to clear as much forest as possible.”

The problem is industrywide. Geospatial analyst Philip Curtis, a researcher with the Sustainability Consortium, found that forest clearing for commodities crops remained steady between 2001 and 2015, with an area the size of Costa Rica lost every year to industrial agriculture. “The scale of the loss was staggering,” he told Science.

Corporations clearly have robust information about climate impacts, and the significant resources needed to address the problem. And despite rampant greenwashing (revealing a commitment to public relations rather than real sustainability), corporate leaders have undeniably elevated the public conversation about climate change while politicians have too often remained silent. Arguably, however, they do so only as far (and as often) as public opinion requires.

As we’ve seen from FedEx, Cargill and others, some of today’s most successful and ruthlessly competitive corporations—despite claiming to be transforming an industry—have exhibited a surprising lack of grit, quietly folding at the first obstacle to their boldest green ambitions.

This apparent inconsistency often seems deliberate, with companies demanding climate action while supporting trade associations and politicians who deny that climate change is even happening. Many continue protecting old business models, while hedging their bets with new clean tech products and services. Some of today’s biggest polluters—oil and gas companies and big utilities—are planning for big profits from the renewable energy transition, even while continuing business as usual for as long as possible.

History shows that individual corporations have failed to follow through on promised change without government regulatory action. “I don’t think [the transportation] industry would [decarbonize] if they are not highly incentivized to do it, or required in some aspects,” says Lewis Fulton, director of the Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways program at the University of California, Davis.

The failure of corporate sustainability efforts also bodes poorly for the kind of laissez-faire policies that corporations hold up as the answer to climate change. These include market-based pricing mechanisms, such as cap and trade, which not only rely heavily on offsets but implicitly trust corporations to set their own path toward sustainability with limited state intervention. “Making tweaks to a market mechanism and hoping that industry will respond correctly” will likely be insufficient, says Brian Nowicki at the Center for Biological Diversity. What’s needed are “bold actions where we actually redirect where our resources are and what we are investing in as a state and as a country.”

The renowned late environmentalist David Brower is credited with saying that all environmental victories are temporary, while each defeat is a permanent loss. The opposite could be said of corporate sustainability claims: Corporations want everlasting credit for their investments in nature, but for their failures to be instantly forgotten.

$1m a minute: the #farming #subsidies destroying the world | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/16/1m-a-minute-the-farming-subsidies-destroying-the-world

#Agriculture #Pollution #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange

Blown Up

The US-backed coalition in Yemen can’t agree on WHY they’re bombing it.

Director of National Intelligence Tells Congress to Fuck Off

A few days ago the inspector general for the intelligence community notified Congress of a whistleblower complaint that was both credible and a matter of “urgent concern.” Rep. Adam Schiff, the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, naturally asked the Director of National Intelligence to provide a copy of the complaint, as […]

This is the PineTime. A companion for your Linux smartphone, and new side-project of ours. More news coming in the future...

(If you have experience with FreeRTOS or mbed, and are interested, please get in touch!)

Gig Work Is Work—And One State Is Finally Poised to Treat It That Way

The rideshare industry seems to have been on an unstoppable tear, running roughshod over regulations, filling the streets with cars, and making astronomical sums of Wall Street capital. But California just tripped up Uber and Lyft’s business model with pioneering legislation to rein in the freewheeling “gig economy.”

The law, Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), passed overwhelmingly in the California Senate this week and is expected to be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom soon. It lays out a clear standard, the so-called “ABC test,” to ensure employers are properly categorizing workers as independent contractors, taking into account how much control the company exerts over their working conditions. Under the law, an independent contractor is defined as a worker with real autonomy: a person who (a) is not directly controlled by the company, (b) does work in the same trade or field independent of that company, and (c) is “independently established” as a proprietor of a separate business in the same sector. Under AB5, if you’re a rideshare driver whose entire livelihood depends on the rides your app funnels into our smartphone every hour, you’re likely an employee under California law.

The ABC test will codify the decision made in a landmark California Supreme Court case last year, Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles. The Court ruled in favor of delivery service workers who argued they deserved to be classified as employees because they were forced to wear the company’s uniform and display its logo despite being legally deemed “independent.” A major goal of the AB5 legislation is to stop employers' widespread abusive misclassification of workers as independent contractors, in order to deny them regular employment rights and protections, often by insisting that their workers are merely app users.

Once classified as employees under state law, gig workers—not just platform-based workers, but also nail technicians, home-repair workers and dog walkers—would have access to California’s minimum wage, overtime pay, paid rest break, parental leave and workers’ compensation. 

Yet Uber and Lyft both continue toresist AB5, and Uber has even indicated that it does not plan to follow the law once it goes into effect at the start of 2020. The company argues that neither the companies, nor many of their drivers, want to be bound by state labor laws and prefer to drive Uber as a casual side hustle. 

But thousands of drivers are already organizing in California for more power over their working conditions. According to Brian Dolber, an organizer with the California-based Rideshare Drivers United, a fledgling union of 5,000 drivers, AB5 paves the way to formal unionization. But Rideshare Drivers United has not yet decided on what form the union will take. For now, he said, "We're really putting drivers' voices first." Dolber added, "We want to continue organizing drivers and have drivers decide how they want their union to be structured.’ 

Critics of AB5 point to the potential loss of “flexibility” once gig workers are regarded as  employees. However, labor advocates dismiss the flexibility question as concern trolling by the bill’s corporate foes. Nayantara Mehta of the National Employment Law Project argues that current labor laws do not automatically exclude jobs with irregular hours, such as union nurses and construction workers, from being employees. Besides, AB5 deals with the degree of control a company exerts over a worker, not how the schedule is set. “Courts have found that just because a worker has a flexible schedule doesn’t mean she is somehow transformed into the operator of her own business—the true benchmark of independent contractor status,” writes Mehta.

Moreover, the fixation on flexibility elides the reality of many gig jobs. Workers’ schedules may be unstable, but not by choice: Often workers are glued to their phones so they can scramble for whatever rides pop up on their phone, or get paid for each manicure they do or each burger they deliver. Their pay could be so dismal that workers “flex” themselves into exhaustion.

“We drive and we drive and we drive,” said Nicole Moore of Rideshare Drivers United, who helped coordinate a rideshare strike in May. “We don't have dinner with our kids, we don't do all the things that we're supposed to be doing in life. Yet we're expected to pay the rent, we're expected to put food on the table, and try to make a better life for our kids."

This is not the first time Uber’s independent contractor system has been challenged. Various lawsuits in recent months have sought to establish workers' formal employment rights, with mixed results. Uber managed to wriggle out of two lawsuits in March, which together settled for $20 million with 13,600 drivers—but did not address their status as non-employees. Meanwhile, growing efforts to organize rideshare drivers, particularly the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, have helped win increased labor protections at the state and local level, including a minimum wage for drivers in New York City.

Facing the prospect of their payrolls becoming saddled with thousands of brand new workers, gig-company executives are panicking. Uber and Lyft spent a total of about $750,000 lobbying the California legislature, alongside other professional and industry associations that sought exemptions from the law. In the end, Uber and Lyft were not granted the carve-out they were hoping for in the bill, but other trades—including real estate and insurance agents, doctors, engineers, architects and lawyers—were exempted. 

Now Uber, Lyft and DoorDash are reportedly joining forces to fight AB5 using a time-honored California political strategy: investing $90 million on a ballot initiative asking voters to overturn the law and erect a different legal regime for gig workers, which might include some weaker benefits and pay standards.

So the gig economy's leading lights are bent on fighting the law until the bitter end. But in this next round of legal battles, California’s new law, which is based on a Supreme Court ruling and reflects growing public disillusionment with the gig economy titans, might finally put the brakes on the platform economy’s regulatory rollbacks.

Moore is hopeful that the law can help narrow the gulf between Uber executives and drivers. “There's no difference between my humanity and their humanity, sha says, adding: "The basic American agreement is that yes, be innovative, become a millionaire, build your own business, but the American compromise is that you will need to share some of those millions with the people who do the work in your company, so that they can also afford to take a Lyft."

Joe Biden’s Stunningly Racist Answer on the Legacy of Slavery Has Been Overlooked

When asked about the legacy of slavery, Joe Biden lectured black people on their parenting abilities.

The post Joe Biden’s Stunningly Racist Answer on the Legacy of Slavery Has Been Overlooked appeared first on The Intercept.

Joe Biden Lied His Face Off About the Iraq War Last Night

Thursday night’s Democratic debate featured another attempt by Joe Biden to rewrite his record on the Iraq War.

Biden rolled out a familiar rationalization for voting to authorize the war in Iraq—what would become the most disastrous foreign policy venture of the 21st Century. “I should have never voted to give Bush the authority to go in and do what he said he was going to do,” Biden admitted, before stressing that he had believed Bush’s claim that the president needed the war authorization to have the leverage to send weapons inspectors into Iraq.

Biden then attempted to deal with controversy stemming from comments he made to NPR in early September, in which he claimed: “that moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment.” As I documented for In These Times in July, Biden, in fact, remained a supporter of the war effort long after it began.

At Thursday’s debate, Biden attempted to clarify:

“I said—from that point on—what I was argued against in the beginning, once he started to put the troops in, was that in fact we were doing it the wrong way; there was no plan; we should not be engaged; we didn't have the people with us; we didn't have our—we didn't have allies with us, et cetera.”

All of these statements are misleading in different ways. And while Bernie Sanders did use the opportunity to draw a contrast between himself and Biden, pointing out that he’d voted against the war because he had “never believed what Cheney and Bush said about Iraq,” Sanders’ criticism continued to let Biden off the hook when it comes to the full history of his record.

For one, Biden continues to wrongly boil down his role in the Iraq War to his 2002 vote for the war authorization. As I reported for In These Times, Biden was a central figure in leading the march to war.

As chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden was an influential Democratic voice largely backing President George W. Bush’s calls for regime change in Iraq. As early as February 2002, Biden was telling crowds that “if Saddam Hussein is still there five years from now, we are in big trouble,” that “it would be unrealistic … to believe we can claim victory in the war on terrorism if Saddam is still in power,” and that “dialogue with Saddam is useless.”

That July, Biden told “Fox News Sunday” that if the administration could prove Saddam and al-Qaeda were in cahoots, it would justify a pre-emptive war. While a link between the two was fiction, this claim formed a key element of the Bush administration’s case for war.

That month, Biden held congressional hearings on the subject of invading Iraq. Despite reports that top military brass was uneasy about Bush’s push for war, Biden stacked the hearings with pro-war voices, and opened proceedings by warning that weapons of mass destruction “must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.” Former UN chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who, along with other experts critical of the administration’s war narrative, wasn’t invited to testify, warned that “Biden's open embrace of regime removal in Baghdad” could turn the hearings into “political cover” for war.

“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat,” Biden later told “Meet the Press” of Saddam Hussein, citing the pro-war testimony he had arranged.

These snapshots illustrate Biden’s leading role in selling the war to the U.S. public. But they also demonstrate he was well aware the Bush administration wasn’t simply planning to send inspectors into Iraq, but rather was set on invading.

If Biden truly believed that his vote in October 2002 wasn’t meant to pave the way for war, he likely wouldn’t have embarked on a world tour two months later that involved meeting an Iraqi resistance leader in Germany, talking to the King of Jordan, and making pit stops in Israel and Qatar. Nor would he have spoken to the Kurd Parliament in Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq, telling Saddam’s bitter enemies that the United States would “stand with you in your effort to build a united Iraq.”

Nor does Biden’s description of his actions after the war began tell the full story. It’s true that Biden frequently criticized Bush for the way the war was conducted. But Biden was also one of the increasingly lonely Democratic voices insisting that war had been the right decision all along, despite Bush’s bungling of its prosecution.

In June 2003, Biden told “Fox News Sunday” host Tony Snow that “it was a just war.” The next month he said he’d “vote to do it again” and gave remarks to the Brookings Institution in which he charged that “anyone who can't acknowledge that the world is better off without [Saddam] is out of touch.” In August, he called for sending 20,000-50,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq. And in a September speech to the National Press Club, he criticized “the knee-jerk multilateralists in my own party who have not yet faced the reality of the post-9/11 world.” The list goes on.

The U.S. public must make sure the person they select to be president not only demonstrates wisdom, but also won’t be swept away in a tidal wave of pro-war fervor. By allowing Biden to mislead voters on his Iraq War record, his rivals (and the debate moderators) are doing a disservice to the American public. 

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