From deluges of floods in Europe and now in China to conflagrations of forest wildfires climate change where a Siberian city is suffocating from the smoke are increasingly visible.

The world’s climate scientists hope it will be “a wake-up call” for governments. But growing evidence of climate risks is not necessarily driving swifter action to counter them, said Richard Black, a net-zero emissions expert at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute.

“We are now observing climate change with our own eyes in ways we did not broadly before,” said Corinne Le Quere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia. When it comes to acting on climate change, “the decisions today are political decisions”, Le Quere said.

A report due out next month is expected to confirm that the world is not on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. It will for the first time look at the growing possibility of “black swan” events. Those are low probability but high impact shifts, such as irreversible melting of major ice sheets that could lead to huge increases in global sea levels.

“The fact we’re starting to see some of the impacts of climate change… really ought to be a wake-up call for global governments that this isn’t something they can ignore,” said Emily Shuckburgh, a University of Cambridge climate scientist. “We’re seeing the impacts here and now today, and the impacts are going to get worse unless we take immediate action,” she explained.

Australia in 2019 saw devastating wildfires that affected many of its 25 million people, have so far done relatively little to spur the country’s lagging climate efforts.

Much of the technology needed to swiftly cut emissions and climate risks is now available and presents a huge opportunity, the scientists said – but the political will to make the changes is still missing, they added.

UN climate science report to examine ‘black swan’ events (trust.org)

Haiti was the world’s first black republic and the first country to be founded by former slaves, Haiti declared independence from France in 1804. The new nation faced blockades, isolation and protracted interference over two centuries from white-majority powers, including France, which imposed a century of impoverishing reparations for the loss of its slaves, only paid off in 1947, in exchange for recognition.

 A week before the assassination of Moise, Haiti’s president, on the night of 29 June, 15 Haitians died in targeted killings, including political activists and journalists. Yet the world’s media became indignant at the murder of the top politician.

This blog sheds no tears for Moise. We share the same sentiments as a Haiti protester once explained.

“We’re fighting against a system where we can’t eat and we don’t get paid. That’s why we’ve taken to the streets,” Drelien explained then. “The president [Moïse] isn’t working for us. He’s no friend of the people – only of the bourgeoisie and businessmen, while we live in poverty.”

Despite receiving $13bn (£9.5bn) in international aid since the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 220,000 people, the situation for Haitians, by most indicators, continued to worsen.

The previous very modest gains in poverty reduction in Haiti, according to the World Bank, has gone into reverse.

60% of the country live in poverty with the richest 20% of the population holding more than 64% of its income,  a wealthy elite, which barely governs. Recent governments have been largely divorced from Haitians’ lives of poverty, nominated from within the same tight circle of politically connected oligarchs with the blessing of foreign powers.

Haiti is hugely dependent on remittances from Haitians living abroad.

Foreign aid and foreign intervention, far from helping, has helped undermine an almost nonexistent administration. Few can fully comprehend the absence of services and institutions, planning or state direction. Three years ago, Joël Boutrue, then deputy special representative for the UN stabilisation mission in Haiti, was blunt.

 “Haiti would be better off without aid,” he said. “Or at least, without the bad kind of aid that allows the administration and the elites to continue without changing.”

US historian Robert Taber wrote in the Washington Post last week, that the Clinton administration destroyed the Haitian domestic rice market in the mid-1990s. Later a UN peacekeeping force reintroducing cholera in the mid-2000s.

Jake Johnston, a researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, who coined the term “aid state” to describe Haiti, explains, “Economic policies have been imposed by multilateral banks, like the IMF, which has seen agricultural subsidies slashed. The education and health systems have been turned over to private actors like NGOs. All of which has created a separation between the people and a government that is not governing.” That hollowed out Haiti’s institutions.

Johnston went on to point out, “Aid to Haiti has been used for political purposes going back years. It is transactional. It has gone up under certain leaders and it has gone down when someone isn’t liked, or it goes to an organisation that shares the interest of the donor country.”

Jonathan M Katz, analysed how $3.5bn of foreign aid failed to improve Haiti in his book The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster.

“The thing is that I don’t think a lot people realise how aid has been used intentionally to weaken the Haitian state. There’s a long, if little-known, paper trail, going back to the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, particularly involving the US,” he said. “There are documents that very specifically talk about using private, voluntary organisations – now known as NGOs – to funnel money away from the Haitian government to recreate its functions elsewhere.” He goes on to say, “It happened again explicitly during the period of the Aristide government [the leftwing president who fell victim to a coup and was reinstated by a US military intervention] and there are public documents from USAid and other government agencies saying we were withholding money and giving it to private organisations to weaken the policies of Aristide.”

The $3.2bn PetroCaribe scheme was an alternative model to improve the Haitian situation, in which funds freed up by a deferred payment credit scheme for Venezuelan energy were then to be dispensed by Haiti’s government for large-scale development projects.  it was supposed to be the thing that the post-earthquake reconstruction was not. Venezuela was going to free up all this money for Haiti to spend on itself. About $2bn was stolen during the presidency of Michel Martelly.

Guns, gangs and foreign meddling: how life in Haiti went from bad to worse | Global development | The Guardian

 Bosses refuse to raise wages to attract employees. Some employers in the USA are responding to worker shortages by pursuing cheap sources of labor. Employers and industry groups say labor shortages are stifling recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, though economists have noted the available jobs recovery data shows there is no economy-wide labor shortage.

The US Chamber of Commerce and Republican governors are blaming unemployment benefits. Some 26 states have cancelled federal extended unemployment benefits early.

A Waste Management Services executive discussed hiring immigrants to fill commercial driver’s license positions, and other executives suggested using prison or work release programs to address perceived labor shortages in the sanitation, waste and recycling industry.

“The talk about immigrant labor, prison labor, it’s all about exploitation, nothing else,” said Chuck Stiles, director of the Teamsters solid waste and recycling division, which represents about 32,000 workers in the private waste industry. “There is no driver shortage. There is a huge wage and benefits shortage that these waste companies refuse to give up anything on the bottom line.” Stiles said several prison work release programs targeted by the waste industry fail to provide decent wages and benefits in an industry where workers face significant safety risks, poor weather conditions, long hours and scarce time off for holidays.

Employers and business groups are using perceived labor shortages as a pretext to seek out cheap labor sources; employers are hiring teenagers to fill open jobs, automating some job roles to avoid raising wages, lobbying Congress to double the cap on work immigration visas and expanding the use of prison labor. In Michigan, Texas, Ohio and Delaware recently announced a prison work release program for the food service and hospitality industry.

In April, Russell Stover candy production facilities in Iola and Abilene, Kansas, began using prison labor through the Topeka correctional facility in response to staffing issues. 150 prisoners work at the plant, making $14 an hour with no benefits or paid time off, while other workers start at higher wages with benefits and paid time off. Kansas also deducts 25% of prisoners’ pay for room and board, and another 5% goes toward a victim’s fund. The prisoners also must pay for gas for the nearly two-hour bus ride to and from the plant.

Brandilynn Parks, president of the Kansas Coalition for Sentence and Prison Reform, said these programs are a way for employers and the prison system to take advantage of a vulnerable population while driving down wages and taking jobs from other workers in the community. She noted many private companies that hire prison workers will not employ them after they are released and will not hire job applicants with criminal records. She added that these programs perpetuate mass incarceration.

“Whenever we have private industries coming into the Kansas department of corrections, they sign a contract guaranteeing a certain number of people will be working there,” said Parks. “That means there has to be a certain number of people incarcerated, so we’re not working to lower the prison population, but instead building the prison industrial complex as a working machine where people become numbers – and we need a certain amount of numbers to keep them employed to uphold the contracts.”

Parks argued employers refusing to pay living wages is the primary factor driving perceived labor shortages, and that the expansion of prison workforce programs are not good faith efforts to solve the problem.

Hiring people “who are at their lowest in life and then throwing them crumbs is despicable,” Parks said. “The contract guaranteeing this amount of people makes it difficult to release people because they’re making the department of corrections money. So the DOC and private industry wins and they try to make it appear as though the incarcerated win, when really they’re being taken advantage of.”

The construction industry targeted prison labor sources amid what employers have claimed is a severe construction labor shortage that has only worsened under Covid-19. Construction is also one of the industries where significant numbers of formerly incarcerated people find work.

In New York City, construction industry employers recruit recently released prisoners who must seek and maintain employment as a condition of their release from prison. Thousands of workers in New York City are siphoned from prison into low-paying construction jobs with no benefits, no health insurance and unsafe working conditions. These job sites, known as “body shops”, use subcontractors so that employers can offload risk insurance liability. The practice has been spreading, but the New York city council is considering legislation to regulate these employers.

“Throughout the pandemic, body shop laborers left their homes and took trains and buses to crowded job sites, building the NYC skyline. They did this without health insurance, without an economic safety net and with the constant threat of re-imprisonment if they refused to continue to work,’’ said Chaz Rynkiewicz, vice-president and director of organizing for Construction and General Building Laborers Local 79. “While other workers were called heroes for working during the pandemic, body shop workers are told that their criminal justice history sentences them to a lifetime of hard labor with negligible reward.”

Companies claim there’s a labor shortage. Their solution? Prisoners | US prisons | The Guardian

 Wisconsin is called “America’s Dairyland”. The state has the most dairy farms in the country. 

It lost 826 dairy farms in 2019, or 10% of its dairy herds – the most dramatic loss in the state’s history, a  part of a downward trend which saw the state lose 44% of its dairy farms over the last decade. 

Last year, for the first time in state history, the number of dairy farms dipped below 7,000.

At the same time, milk production in the state has increased every year since 2004, and sets a new annual record each year since 2009.

 In the last decade alone, Wisconsin has increased milk production by 25%. The number of operations declines, just as the number of cows per operation goes up – 3% of Wisconsin farms now produce roughly 40% of the state’s milk. Milk produced on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO), or farms with more than about 700 cows but often housing thousands, is increasingly making up the state’s overall milk production. The number of large farms like this in Wisconsin has increased by 55% in less than a decade.

Despite having five farms with 500 or more cows, Green county still has many of Wisconsin’s small dairy farms, about 200, with between 50 and 100 cows, milked by the family. The county went from being a highly competitive marketplace for generations to an area like so many others in the state where too much milk is being produced. When the price of milk is down, farmers milk more cows to compensate; if the milk price is up, they milk more to capitalize. The excess of milk matches up with a plummet in consumption as milk alternatives and water are chosen over milk. And the glut is worldwide, driving down prices for farmers to the point they are barely breaking even or are losing money to produce it. On top of that, a Green county co-op of 25 local farms that accept 3.5m pounds (1.6m kg) of milk to create 400,000 pounds (182,000 kg) of cheese a month unexpectedly shut down last fall after 110 years due to pandemic-specific industry volatility. A shutdown like this is very rare, and left farmers scrambling for new processors to offload their milk.

Milk prices were at a record high in 2014, then from 2015 on, went down. When prices are good, small dairy farmers, able to finally turn a profit, make longstanding crucial repairs on the smaller scale, and do some significant expansions on the large level. In early 2015 in Green county farmers were so confident in expanding that if you wanted to put up a building, you were lucky if you could find an available contractor. But the good times never last.

Last year, tankers were loading up milk and driving it straight to the farm’s manure pit, opening the valve, and letting it go – milk dumping like this is quite extreme. Yet even in a year that started with unprecedented dumping, cows being culled, and milk sold at very distressed prices, then continuing with a milk price of $13 per 100 pounds (£9.32 per 45 kg) of milk in the spring and summer – which is less than the cost of production for most farmers – 2020 ended with a high demand for cheese. This was thanks in part to the government’s pandemic food assistance programs. By the end of the year the state’s dairy farms again increased total production to 30.7bn pounds (13.9bn kg) of milk. And on it goes.

Small farms vanish every day in America’s dairyland: ‘There ain’t no future in dairy’ | Food | The Guardian

 First, it was   Richard Branson plus friends, then it was Jeff Bezos with his cronies taking expensive joy rides into space to experience a few minutes of a high. 

“We’ve now reached stratospheric inequality,” Oxfam’s Deepak Xavier said in a statement Monday. “Billionaires burning into space, away from a world of pandemic, climate change, and starvation.”

Xavier pointed to a recent Oxfam report showing that 11 people on Earth are dying of hunger every minute, just one example of the needless hardship that billions are experiencing while billionaires take a rocketship trip.

“The ultra-rich are being propped up by unfair tax systems and pitiful labor protections,” said Xavier. “Bezos pays next to no U.S. income tax but can spend $7.5 billion on his own aerospace adventure. Bezos’ fortune has almost doubled during the Covid-19 pandemic. He could afford to pay for everyone on Earth to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and still be richer than he was when the pandemic began.”

“Class warfare is Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson becoming $250 billion richer during the pandemic, paying a lower tax rate than a nurse, and racing to outer space while the planet burns and millions go without healthcare, housing, and food,” tweeted Warren Gunnels, staff director for Sen. Bernie Sanders 

Soon it will be Elon Musk and his Space X.

 Virgin Group hopes will be the start of a series of commercial space flights—for those who can cover the high cost of a ticket.

“About two million people can afford to go to space, according to equity analysts at Vertical Research Partners, with that high-net-wealth population growing at around 6% each year,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week. “It estimates that Virgin needs to transport around 1,700, or about 0.08% of those individuals, to space each year for its model to work.” 

Virgin Galactic says it has collected around $80 million in sales and deposits by selling tickets at roughly $250,000.

Bezos with Blue Origin is reportedly planning to charge upwards of $300,000 per seat for future 11-minute flights, which will feature several minutes of weightlessness just past the edge of space.

‘Human Folly, Not Human Achievement’: Oxfam Slams Bezos Space Trip as Billions Suffer on Earth | Common Dreams News

 In June 2020, roughly one in five people in the U.S. had medical debt in collections—meaning their debt had been sold to a third-party tasked with retrieving the money, often by harassing low-income people who are unable to pay.  The latest study necessarily understates the level of U.S. medical debt because it only analyzes debt in collections—not all unpaid bills owed to healthcare providers such as hospitals, which often hit uninsured patients with exorbitant prices. “The increasing number of lawsuits that hospitals file against patients to collect debt, which can lead to legal fees or wage garnishments, are not included in the [$140 billion] figure,” Times reporters Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz noted Tuesday. “Nor are the medical bills that patients pay with credit cards or have on long-term payment plans.”

“This is not a sign of a broken system,” tweeted Charles Idelson, a spokesperson for National Nurses United. “It’s a profiteering healthcare system working just the way the corporate price gougers want it to—and the collateral damage of those whose lives are harmed by unpayable, outrageously inflated debt is irrelevant to them.”

The Journal of the American Medical Association shows that people in the United States now owe collection agencies a staggering $140 billion due to unpaid medical bills—making healthcare the nation’s largest source of debt in collections.  medical debt was highest among people who live in the South, particularly in “lower-income communities in states that did not expand Medicaid.” A dozen states, all controlled by Republicans, have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, depriving millions of poor and vulnerable people of life-saving health coverage.

A new national survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund found that more than a third of insured U.S. adults and half of uninsured adults had difficulties affording medical bills or paying off medical debt in the past year.

“They suffered ruined credit ratings. They were unable to afford basic life necessities like food, heat, or their rent,” Dr. Sara Collins, the Commonwealth Fund’s vice president for healthcare coverage, access, and tracking, told USA Today.

‘Profiteering Healthcare System’ Blamed as US Medical Debt Surges to $140 Billion | Common Dreams News

 England’s chief medical officer says, Chris Whitty,  says a new national strategy is needed to tackle poor health and lower life expectancy in seaside towns. These places suffer from high rates of serious illnesses and have been “overlooked by governments” and had their “ill-health hidden”, said Prof Whitty.  They need their own dedicated health improvement policy because the challenges facing towns such as Blackpool, Skegness and Hastings have more in common with each other than their inland neighbouring towns. There are deep-rooted social problems interwoven with poor health in coastal areas, the report highlights – such as low-paid seasonal jobs, underachievement in education, poor transport and overcrowded “houses of multiple occupation,” which might be converted from former guest houses. Recruitment problems for health staff is a “common issue” in coastal areas, says the report. Heart disease, stroke, mental health problems, diabetes and higher rates of smoking are all more prevalent in seaside populations, the report warns, associated in turn with higher levels of coastal deprivation.

Blackpool: Most deprived local authority in England, lowest life expectancy for both males and females; highest rates of hospital admissions for alcohol‑related harm and drug‑related deathsTorbay: High rates of heart disease, respiratory problems and diabetes; high density of low-quality private rented accommodation and reliance on caravan parksHull: A high economic impact and loss of jobs from Covid on an already “fragile” local economy, forecast to have a long-term detrimental impact on health.Seaside poor health overlooked, warns Whitty – BBC News

 Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana, studies beetles near Glacier national park in Montana. Her observations and conclusion are a stark reminder of what we are losing.

” I don’t think people realize that climate change is not just a loss of ice. It’s all the stuff that’s dependent on it. The ice is really just the canary in the coalmine. To have 97, 98 degrees in Glacier national park for days on end is insane. This is not just some fluke…We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched…We’re coming at things all wrong, trying to save a species by putting it in a zoo or replanting trees. But if you aren’t going to the root cause of the problem it’s still going to happen. That’s not to say that if we didn’t just get our act together and make some major changes, we couldn’t save some of this. We just can’t do it one species at a time.”

The global meat industry is “borrowing tactics from tobacco companies” to downplay its role in driving the climate crisis and to “confuse and delay regulation” of their planet-harming activities, a major investigation the environmental investigations outlet Desmog has claimed.

Such tactics include routinely downplaying their own greenhouse gas emissions, attacking established science on how livestock farming is driving the climate crisis and casting doubt over the benefits of plant-based alternatives to meat, the investigation said.

“Tobacco didn’t challenge the existence of lung cancer, but they kept denying and deflecting the causal link [with smoking] – and that’s what we’re seeing with beef and dairy,” Dr Jennifer Jacquet, an associate professor of environmental studies at New York University, explained, “Beef and dairy don’t deny that climate change exists, but they are carrying out actions to try to convince us that the causal chain isn’t there.”

The production of meat and dairy accounts for around 14.5 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock farming is particularly polluting because cattle belch out methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In addition, large areas of forest are razed to make space for grazing cattle and animal feed. The world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon, is particularly threatened by large-scale cattle ranching and animal feed production. The world’s leading scientists say diets must change if the world is to meet its target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. This message was reiterated in England’s recent National Food Strategy, which called for the country to cut its meat consumption by 30 per cent in the next 10 years. 

The investigation examines the “climate washing” tactics used by 10 of the world’s largest meat companies and their representative industry groups. Brazilian meat giant JBS was one of 10 companies and industry groups included in the investigation – controls UK companies that supply to many major British supermarkets and fast food outlets. JBS’s two UK subsidiaries alone account for 30 per cent of the UK market for chicken and pork.

Desmog claimed that four of the meat companies analysed underreported their annual emissions when compared to estimates from sustainable farming NGOs. These companies include the US-based Tyson Foods, pork and beef company Danish Crown, Vion and JBS.

“JBS’s environmental and social destruction became a global scandal in 2009 following our own investigation, and yet the company continues to get away with large-scale deforestation and face little or no consequences.” Anna Jones, head of food and forests at Greenpeace UK, said. “This important investigation brings to the fore a dangerous and systematic approach by the meat industry to cover up its role in the climate and nature crisis.” She went on to say, “But to end the climate crisis, protect forests and restore nature, we must transition to a more sustainable diet by reducing meat consumption – the science on that is clear. The age of big meat is over.”

Jonathan Elmer, a Green Party spokesperson, said the investigation should bring about “urgent action” from the government.

“This investigation throws a welcome spotlight on the environmental impact of the meat industry and offers more evidence that we must now see the end of factory farming for good. It’s a black hole of food waste, a huge threat to public health, and a key engine of the climate emergency,” he told The Independent. “What we are seeing here is akin to the historic efforts made by the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries to obfuscate the science and undermine a vital message, which in this case is that people need to eat much less meat.”

Dutch food giant Vion – one of the companies analysed by Desmog – publicly claims that “eating less meat will not necessarily contribute to more sustainability”. Meanwhile, two top meat industry groups – the US-based Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA) and France-based the International Meat Secretariat (IMS) – have publicly attacked leading scientific research on how eating less meat could benefit the planet and human health. A landmark report on how diet change could boost planetary and human health led by a top nutritionist at Harvard University was branded “elitist”, “biased” and “not scientifically well-founded” by the secretary-general of the IMS and “drastic” by the AAA. Hsin Huang, secretary-general of the IMS, told The Independent that he believed that “the health benefits of eating red meat are often ignored” and that “the livestock sector is too often unfairly represented” as a driver of the climate crisis.

 The meat industry also routinely attempting to paint itself as a solution to the climate crisis, the investigation finds. For example, the UK’s Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) – a levy board representing British farmers – is one of many groups promoting the idea that grazing cattle could help to tackle the climate crisis by stimulating soil to take up more carbon from the atmosphere. However, the idea that grass-fed beef can be a climate solution has been challenged by scientists. A report by researchers at the University of Oxford found that grass-fed cows release more greenhouse gas emissions through belching and manure than they are able to offset through boosting soil carbon levels. This means that grass-fed beef is still a net contributor to the climate crisis.

Global meat industry ‘using tobacco company tactics’ to downplay role in driving the climate crisis, investigation claims | The Independent

Fed by hot, dry winds, America’s biggest wildfire burned through more acreage in a southern Oregon forest with more than 2,100 residents near the California border ordered from their homes. The fire named Bootleg grew by an additional 4,000 acres overnight to nearly 304,000 acres (123,020 hectares.) 2,200 fire-fighting personnel battling the fire. The Bootleg fire is the largest of 80 active wildfires that have burned nearly 1.2 million acres in 13 states and are being battled by more than 19,600 firefighters and support personnel.

“This fire is large and moving so fast, every day it progresses 4 to 5 miles,” said Oregon Department of Forestry Incident Commander Joe Hassel. 

In California, the Dixie fire has burned more than over 30,000 acres (12,140 hectares) as more than 1,900 fire-fighters attempted to contain it. The Dixie fire, the biggest in the state, prompted some evacuation orders for Plumas and Butte counties.

Meanwhile, in Russia’s Siberian region,  planes seeded clouds to bring rain to dampen huge wildfires. Amid a heatwave, forest fires have burned through over 1.5 million hectares of land in Yakutia, the worst-hit region. Around 123 fires raged on Monday over an area of more than 885,000 hectares, In less than two months, fires in the region have spewed out around 150 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – close to the 2017 annual fossil fuel emissions of Venezuela, according to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), part of a European Union observation programme.

Meantime, in Europe,  water-carrying planes battled to control a wildfire in Spain’s Costa Brava region that has forced 350 people to be evacuated from their homes.