In the United States, Black women make roughly 61 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men – translating to a loss of more than $23,000 a year, according to a 2019 analysis by the National Women’s Law Center.
Black women in Georgia are roughly twice as likely as white women to be living in poverty, according to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, a nonprofit, and nationally they are less likely to have bounced back from COVID-19 job losses.
Researchers from Climate Action Tracker released a new report [https://climateactiontracker.org/publications/global-reaction-to-energy-crisis-risks-zero-carbon-transition/] last week warning that this reaction threatens to lock in decades of heat-trapping emissions at a time when the window to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and avert the most catastrophic effects of the climate crisis is rapidly closing.
“So far, governments have largely failed to seize their chance to rearrange their energy supplies away from fossil fuels,” states the report. “Instead, we are witnessing a global ‘gold rush’ for new fossil gas production, pipelines, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities. This risks locking us into another high-carbon decade and keeping the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C limit out of reach.”
Key findings of the analysis include:
New planned LNG import facilities in the European Union —especially in Germany, Italy, Greece and the Netherlands — could supply a quarter more gas to the E.U. than before;Canada plans to fast-track new LNG projects to increase exports;The United States has signed a deal to export additional LNG to the E.U., Qatar and Egypt have signed similar deals with Germany and Italy, respectively. Algeria has signed a deal to export additional gas via pipeline to Italy;In Africa, old gas pipeline projects are being revived (e.g. Nigeria) and countries with previously no fossil gas exports (e.g. Senegal) are now encouraged to supply gas to Europe; andDomestic fossil fuel production has increased in the U.S., Canada, Norway, Italy, and Japan, and new long-term import contracts are closed or extended in the United Kingdom, E.U., Germany, Poland, and Italy.
“If all these plans materialize,” the report warns, “they will either end up as massive stranded assets or they’ll lock the world into irreversible warming.”
“Almost no government supports behavioral change,” the report explains. “Immediate and low-cost options to reduce energy demand and therefore the need for Russian fossil fuels would include shifts in behavior, such as encouraging slower driving by introducing/lowering speed limits, home office policies, restricting car access to cities, or turning down the heating in buildings.”
“These options still seem to be very unattractive to governments,” the authors note. “We have only found governments recommending their population to those behavioral shifts and few incentivizing it.
Study Finds Fossil Fuel Gold Rush After War in Ukraine – Consortium News
Covid-19 has killed more than one million people in the United States over the past two years, but more than 338,000 of those lives could have been saved if the country had a universal single-payer healthcare system such as Medicare for All, according to new peer-reviewed research published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Unnecessary costs and preventable deaths were already rampant in the U.S. before the coronavirus took hold, but the ongoing pandemic has further exposed and exacerbated the many preexisting inequalities that have contributed to exceptionally high mortality compared with other high-income countries.
Universal single-payer healthcare, which the study calls “fundamental to pandemic preparedness,” could have prevented 338,594 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. from the beginning of the public health emergency to mid-March 2022. Researchers estimate that if everyone in the country was provided with comprehensive care for free at the point of service, 131,438 people who died from Covid-19 could have been spared in 2020 alone, and roughly 80,000 people with other diseases could have been saved that year. More than 207,000 additional Covid-19 deaths could have been averted in 2021 and the first three months of this year.
the study’s lead author Alison Galvani, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at the Yale School of Public Health, told Scientific American. “Americans are needlessly losing lives …”
Medicare for All Could Have Prevented More Than 338,000 US Covid Deaths: Study (commondreams.org)
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), published a major report, warning of a new nuclear arms race.
It found that after decades of nuclear disarmament, all nuclear powers are currently spending a lot of money on new nuclear warheads and associated delivery systems, such as long-range missiles, ships, submarines, and aircraft.
SIPRI researcher Hans Kristensen and his colleagues have spent years estimating the nuclear weapon inventories of the world’s nuclear-armed states. The current total is understood to be 12,705, with over 90% owned by Russia and the United States.
“Nuclear states are super busy modernizing their arsenals”, Kristensen, who is also director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told DW. “Both to extend the versions they have, but also to introduce new kinds. Countries are beginning to adhere more importance to nuclear weapons.”
One country, in particular, stands out: China. “The Chinese increase is the most significant buildup in the world right now in terms of numbers,” said Kristensen. “It’s completely unprecedented by Chinese standards. We don’t know why China is doing this for the simple reason that China doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“Perhaps China fears that its existing arsenal would not survive a US nuclear strike,” Kristensen says. “Maybe it’s also a reaction to the fact that missile defense systems will be better in the future and China wants to be able to overcome such systems with more warheads.” In any case, he said, one thing is certain: President Xi Jinping wants a “world-class” army — and that apparently means one that is nuclear-armed.
In the past two years, Kristensen and his colleagues have identified some 300 newly built silos for ballistic missiles in Chinese deserts from satellite imagery.
A world free of nuclear weapons is therefore likely to be a very distant prospect.
Plans from major corporations to drastically reduce emissions have both “major flaws” and “major credibility gaps,” according to Net Zero Tracker’s annual report. Net Zero Tracker says many company promises to slash emissions are flawed and vague. The report also casts doubt on the use of carbon offsets, a key tactic for many companies’ climate goals.
Roughly half of the Forbes 2000 largest companies have yet to announce plans to reach net-zero — the point at which greenhouse gas emissions are negated by deep cuts in output as well as methods to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide. Of the 702 companies with a net-zero target, such as Amazon, Apple, and Volkswagen, two-thirds haven’t made it clear how they plan to achieve that goal, according to the report.
The report also highlights the “unacceptably low” targets among many of the companies to be carbon neutral by 2050. Such long-running plans would do little to halve emissions in the next eight years, something scientists believe is needed to stem climate change.
Net Zero Tracker, run in part by the UK-based Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) and the University of Oxford, assesses publicly available data for about 200 countries as well as large publicly traded companies.
“We see a lot of issues with credibility, and the quality and robustness of these targets,” said report co-author Frederic Hans, a climate policy analyst at NewClimate Institute, a German think tank.
The practice of carbon offsetting also featured heavily in the study. Buying credits for emissions reduced elsewhere is often a key tactic for corporations who say they are serious about their climate goals, despite the fact that experts have raised serious concerns about its efficacy and its lack of regulation.
Report reveals ′major flaws′ in corporate climate pledges | News | DW | 13.06.2022
British households are facing an intense squeeze on living standards as earnings growth fails to keep pace with soaring energy bills and the rising cost of a weekly shop, with inflation at the highest rate since the early 1980s.
Average wages in the UK are falling at the fastest rate for more than two decades as annual pay growth fails to keep pace with the rising cost of living despite record numbers of job vacancies and low unemployment.
The Office for National Statistics said annual growth in regular pay, excluding bonuses, fell by 4.5% in April after adjusting for inflation – the biggest fall since comparable records began in 2001.
Average total pay, including bonuses, fell by 3.7% in the month after taking into account of inflation as measured by the consumer price index, in a more modest decline thanks to a boom in payouts in the finance sector, highlighting the uneven impact of the cost of living crisis, amid the threat of strike action on the railways and other industries amid bitter pay disputes, average pay in the public sector rose by just 1.5%, compared with 8% in the private sector.
“This is really grim news on pay and is only likely to get worse,” said Tony Wilson, the director of the Institute for Employment Studies. “Despite the tightest labour market on record, nominal pay is broadly flat meaning that rocketing inflation is leading to the largest cuts in real pay in at least two decades.”
Average UK wages fall at fastest rate for more than two decades | Pay | The Guardian
A UN team, led by the Resident Coordinator in Colombo, Hanaa Singer-Hamdy has appealed to international donors for more than $47 million in “life-saving assistance” to 1.7 million people in a country with a population of over 22 million.
This stands in contrast to the staggering $5.0 billion the government is seeking for the island’s economic survival during the next six months—primarily for food, fuel and fertilizer.
Last month, the UN announced that with a $1.5 million donation from the Government of Japan, the UN’s children’s agency UNICEF will procure medicines for over 1.2 million people, among them 53,000 pregnant mothers and nearly 122,000 children with immediate medical needs. In addition, Australia has made available the equivalent of nearly $5 million for food security, essential medicines for women’s health.
Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange reserves have hit a low of $1.9 billion, equivalent to funds that could finance less than one month’s imports while its debt service repayments amount to about $6.9 billion. Last month, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt repayments for the first time in history. Once called the ‘Granary of the East’, Sri Lanka is also considering tapping the SAARC Food Bank – from the buffer stocks of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The country is not only financially bankrupt, it is facing a famine in a few months.
British ministers were keen to exploit oil around the Falkland Islands before and after the 1982 conflict, declassified British government documents show.
Declassified documents show that Britain has long been interested in oil around the Falkland Islands. In 1975, an energy department official wrote: “Our ministers are very interested in the possibility of exploiting offshore oil around the Falkland Islands.”
Before the Falklands war, Britain vigorously defended its claim to potential oil reserves around the islands. Britain formally protested when Argentina commissioned seismic surveys off the Argentine coast in early 1977. An energy department official wrote that the “worst thing would be to do nothing” as this could lead to “our giving up without so much as a whisper the title to any oil which might lie beneath the sea outside the 200-metres line”.
Britain protested again in 1981 when Argentina auctioned more exploration licences. A Foreign Office official wrote: “We must maintain that any oil in the Falkland Islands continental shelf is British, without specifying whether we mean HMG or Falkland Islands have the right to exploit it. The important point is that it is ours not Argentine.”
In July 1980, Margaret Thatcher’s government held secret talks with Argentina and proposed a “leaseback” deal, whereby the sovereignty of the islands would be transferred to Argentina but then leased back to Britain.
While ministers were considering the idea, the energy secretary, David Howell, wrote to the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, on 5 February 1980, saying: “I hope … you will not lose sight of retaining, if at all possible, access for the UK to any oil or gas which might be found in Falkland Island waters.”
He repeated this plea in a letter to Thatcher later that month. The cabinet’s defence and oversea policy committee, which included Thatcher, agreed on 7 November 1980 to seek the islanders’ approval of a leaseback deal.
Ministers noted: “It would be important to make satisfactory arrangements for any oil that might be discovered … Further thought should be given to ways in which the United Kingdom might be guaranteed entitlement to a substantial part of the revenues.”
In a previously unpublished letter, the former chancellor Norman Lamont said the revenues from Falklands oil should go to the British government, not the Falkland islanders.
“I have no doubt that in the event of a major oil find, tax revenues should accrue to the UK exchequer. That seems to me only equitable given the very substantial financial as well as other sacrifices that the UK has made … to secure the freedom of the Falkland Islands,” Lamont wrote to the then foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, on 21 October 1991.
Declassified files reveal British interest in Falkland Islands oil | Falkland Islands | The Guardian
Microscopic air pollution caused mostly by burning fossil fuels is reducing life expectancy by nearly 10 years in the India’s capital, New Delhi, one of the most polluted cities in the world, says a study.
The study by Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), released on Tuesday, said lung and heart disease caused by so-called PM2.5 pollution reduces life expectancy in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – home to 300 million people – by eight years.
Across South Asia, an average person would live five years longer if levels of fine particulate matter met World Health Organization standards, according to the Air Quality Life Index published by EPIC.
Worldwide, air pollution is shortening lives by more than two years, it said.
Pollution cuts life expectancy in India capital by 10 years: EPIC | Climate Crisis News | Al Jazeera
All fellow workers are our family and friends. Capitalism has brought us fratricidal conflicts. You, the most oppressed and exploited, may well be called upon to take part in a war which threatens to slaughter millions of men, women and children and bring ruin, misery and devastation on a scale undreamed of before. The time is now for workers of all lands must stretch the hand of solidarity across all the frontiers.
There was a time when so-called national jealousies were nothing more than personal jealousies between kings and princes. Nations were moved to war and thousands were massacred to avenge a personal offence, or to satisfy the ambition of an omnipotent ruler. But, things have changed now. Wars are no more fought, for personal reasons, still less are they occasioned by national idiosyncrasies: they are fought for markets.
The capitalist is our enemy. The only war worth fighting is the class war, the war of the workers against the robber class. The abolition of the profit and wages system is the only fight that will benefit us. The only enemy we know is the boss who exploits us, whether he be English, Russian, Chinese or American. Working men and women of all countries have no fight against each other. Their interests are common. Their only enemy is the capitalist who exploits them. He exploits you, makes you redundant, permits you to suffer regardless of your nationality. He only emphasises your nationality when he needs you to fight wars against other workers, who are also fighting for new markets for the employing class of the foreign land. He talks patriotism and waves the flag when he wants to use you to fight his battles against other capitalists. We object to having a single worker sacrificed to the interests of the capitalist class. War and the danger of war will exist as long as capitalism exists. The end of war will come with the end of insecurity, exploitation, and industrial conflicts when capitalism is abolished. Not the United Nations but industrial democracy is the way to permanent peace.
A brief study of the nature and causes of modern war proves that war is an essential part of capitalism. The inner conflicts of capitalism lead and must lead to war. All Marxists accept this conclusion. the only possible struggle AGAINST war is the struggle FOR the socialist revolution. War is war. Woe betide its instigator.
There is only one way to prevent war, namely, by the overthrow of capitalism, the real root from which war springs.
The work of our organisation is to tirelessly carrying out propaganda against war and its ultimate cause: capitalist thirst for profit. Our chief aim must be to warn the workers against allowing themselves to be misled by the lies of the media and the mutual recriminations of capitalist groups, and to remember that the worker in enemy countries is just as much a victim of capitalist oppression as they are —that even though they are compelled by circumstance to fight against each other, that it will not be long before they are again compelled to help each other against the common foe – Capitalism – whose machinations have brought them into rivalry.
Be not dumb, obedient slaves in a capitalist army of destruction. Be heroes in the world socialist movement of construction. We, who are socialists, must hope—we may even expect—that out of the horror of bloodshed and dire destruction will come far-reaching social changes—and a step forward towards our goal of peace among people.
Certainly, enlist to do battle in war. The class war. The war to end wage-slavery, to end capitalism with its evils of misery and environmental degradation. The war to end war. And until that war is ended we do not want peace—because such peace will be the peace of the beggar and the slave. The workers, united and determined, are strong enough by their own actions to banish the spectre of war and open the road toward a free socialist world. We will seek to build a new society, in which all men, irrespective of colour, will be able to work in security and peace, and with full enjoyment of the good things of life.
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