A report from the Living Wage Foundation puts the number of people in insecure work at 3.7 million. The Foundation shows that those most at risk from insecure work are, for example, the very youngest and the very oldest workers.

 It further highlights how unpredictable working hours can be and the impact job insecurity has on the family life, health and the ability of workers to do things most of us take for granted: planning our lives and suchlike.

Of those paid less than the living wage, the survey found 12 per cent received under 24 hours’ notice of working hours, shifts or work schedules, nearly half (49 per cent) received less than a week’s notice and more than two thirds (68 per cent) were given less than four weeks’ notice. Forty-two per cent had experienced unexpected cancellations of shifts and of those, 28 per cent received no payment. Nearly all lost some pay. Short notice periods that hit the ability to plan working and personal lives and threaten to tip shaky household finances off a cliff are a problem for hundreds of thousands of workers.

The Living Wage Foundation now has given birth to the Living Hours campaign.

Living Wage Foundation rails against insecure work as Labour belatedly wakes up | The Independent

Allegra Stratton, Boris Johnson’s former press secretary, who is now his spokesperson for the Cop26 climate summit,  told the Independent newspaper, responding to a question about what people should do if they believed government actions on the climate emergency were too unambitious.

“When people say to me, ‘what can they do?’, they can do many things, they can join Greenpeace, they can join the Green party, they can join the Tory party. So there’s lots of ways they can get involved in politics, but for those people who wouldn’t, how do you start to change your life in manageable, achievable, feasible, small ways?”

In the Telegraph she outlined possible “micro steps” people could take to reduce their personal environmental impact.Ideas included not rinsing plates before putting them in a dishwasher, buying shower gel as a cardboard-wrapped bar, and freezing rather than throwing out half-used loaves of bread. She said she was ‘“not pretending these steps will stop climate change” on their own, but that they could contribute.

PM’s spokesperson for Cop26 suggests joining Greens to solve climate crisis | Cop26: Glasgow climate change conference 2021 | The Guardian

 Questionable Climate

When the last levee is breached by the flood,

Who will bail out the drowning and the drowned?

When the last drop of rain falls on parched ground,

How many’ll become nostalgic for mud?

When the last house is whirlwinded away,

Where will refugees migrate for shelter?

When at last it snows on the equator,

What then might the scoffers and sceptics say?

When the last ice floes turn into steam,

Shall penguins and polar bears develop gills?

When the last heather burns black on the hills,

Will they still drill oil or hew a coal seam?

Better that minds, not climate, change; still time

Before the very last clock’s final chime.

D. A. 

In many parts of coal-rich Ramgarh district in Jharkhand state of India, mining of the polluting fossil fuel has sucked much of the water from once-plentiful sources.

As a child, Fagu Besra swam in gurgling streams and drank “sweet and cold water” from the wells in his village of Pundi.

“Water never dried up in our streams and canals even in the summer months. Our wells had water even though they were just 10 feet (3 metres) deep,” Besra, 50, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Today, none are left. “We now get water from borewells that are 700-800 ft deep,” added the political activist who campaigns against displacement of people by mining operations.

As in countless other villages in India’s coal mining hubs, Pundi’s residents must dig deeper, tap nearby rivers or buy water shipped in by tankers to tackle worsening water scarcity.

Himanshu Thakkar, of the nonprofit South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, said that when coal mines are dug, they fill up with groundwater, which then has to be pumped out.” This has led to depletion of groundwater in all mining areas, in addition to pollution,” he said. Loss of vegetation to make way for mines also hampers groundwater recharge, campaigners and researchers say.

As India pushes to expand its coal mining, environmentalists fear the problem will only worsen in the coming years. India is already the world’s second-largest coal producer after China, but it is not mining enough to meet the power needs of its domestic industries. That is why the government is ramping up coal production, setting a target for state-run Coal India Limited (CIL) – the world’s largest coal mining company – to produce 1 billion tonnes annually by 2024, up from about 800 million tonnes now. Its plans to boost coal production include supplying water to local people as part of efforts to protect communities and the environment. Researchers say those efforts fall far short of mitigating mining’s effects on natural resources.

“Groundwater is India’s water lifeline. The situation will keep getting worse. We need to protect natural recharge areas… (but) we haven’t even begun to do that yet,” said Thakkar.

In 2018, the government policy think-tank NITI Aayog warned nearly 600 million people faced “high to extreme water stress”, describing India’s water crisis as the worst in its history. According to data submitted in parliament last year, more than 60% of monitored wells had registered a decline in groundwater levels. Indian cities rely on tanker services in hot summer months, but those living in mining hubs have a much bigger struggle.

Ilyas Ansari, 35, of Chepa Khurd village about 50 km from Pundi, has campaigned against coal mining in his area for years. Its soot-covered homes and declining harvests tell of the damage done by coal mining, villagers say. 

“We grew wheat and sugarcane. Now we don’t even have drinking water,” Ansari said.

This year, Chepa Khurd villagers dug two borewells, about 275 metres deep, and split the cost between themselves.

“We get water tankers but that is not potable water and we can only use it for washing clothes and bathing,” Ansari said.

In Payali Bhatali village, a major coal mining hub in western Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district in central India, tap water comes from the nearby Erai river, the only water source since local wells ran dry about two decades ago. The government dug a well next to the river and set up pumps to send it to households through a pipeline via a water treatment plant. While the system ensures a supply of clean water, it is far less reliable than the former wells. Unscheduled power cuts interrupt pumping and limit supply.

 “We have power bills of about 400,000 Indian rupees ($5,360) pending… and this power consumption is entirely for the water treatment plant operation,” said Subhash Tukaram Gaurkar, a senior member of the Payali Bhatali village council.

Pumping water from rivers is a method being used more frequently in coal-mining areas, despite its shortcomings. In Jharkhand’s Ramgarh district, officials are racing to get 150,000 rural households supplied with taps by 2024, a target set by the federal government in a water plan for rural India. Rajesh Ranjan, an executive engineer with Jharkhand’s drinking water and sanitation department, said about 54,000 households were reached by July, piping in water from rivers. But Suresh Chopane, president of the Chandrapur-based nonprofit Green Planet Society, warned the rivers were dying.

“They are feeding industries and cities. This is not sustainable,” he said.

Water scarcity in coal-rich areas is usually resolved once mining activity ends.

“The water begins to store in the (former) mining area, surrounding groundwater regimes are recharged again and the mining area is full of water,” said Jayant Bhattacharya, professor of mining engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.

Parched villages in India’s coal-mining hubs hunt for water (trust.org)

IT NEEDS WORLD SOCIALISM

 Researchers said in an article published in the journal BioScience on Wednesday that governments had consistently failed to address “the overexploitation of the Earth”, which they described as the root cause of the crisis.

They noted an “unprecedented surge” in climate-related disasters, including flooding in South America and Southeast Asia, record-shattering heatwaves and wildfires in Australia and the US, and devastating cyclones in Africa and South Asia.

 To measure the health of the planet, scientists relied on “vital signs” including deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, glacier thickness and sea-ice extent and deforestation. Out of 31 signs, they found that 18 hit record highs or lows. For example, despite a dip in pollution linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, levels of atmospheric CO2 and methane hit all-time highs in 2021. Greenland and Antarctica recently showed all-time low levels of ice mass and glaciers are melting 31-percent faster than they did just 15 years ago, the authors said. Ocean heat and global sea levels set new records since 2019, and the annual loss rate of the Brazilian Amazon reached a 12-year high in 2020.

The authors repeated previous calls for transformative change in six areas: eliminating fossil fuels, slashing pollutants, restoring ecosystems, switching to plant-based diets, moving away from indefinite growth models and stabilising the human population.

While science may be correct that global warming is a result of over-exploitation of the planet’s resources, they lack the socialist insight of what causes it. They are either ignorant or ignore the economic foundation of capitalism which is capital accumulation driven by the profit motive which requires constant growth and market expansion and the commodification of anything outwith the exchange economy. 

This is the root cause that climate scientists shy away from.

Thousands of scientists warn climate tipping points ‘imminent’ | Climate News | Al Jazeera

Scientists have repeatedly warned of worse extreme weather if global temperatures rise and politicians fail to curb carbon emissions. The UK is already undergoing climate change with increased rainfall, sunshine and temperatures, according to scientists.

 Tobacco giant Philip Morris, makers of Marlboro,  has said it could stop selling cigarettes in the UK in 10 years’ time as it focuses on alternatives, such as heated tobacco. The firm also indicated it would welcome a government ban on cigarettes.

 The International Monetary Fund has warned the world economy risks losing $4.5tn (£3.3tn) from highly infectious variants of Covid-19 spreading through poor countries where vaccination rates are lower. It is calling on rich countries to take urgent action to share at least 1bn doses with developing nations, or risk severe economic consequences. The IMF has joined the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization in urging the wider deployment of vaccines across the developing world.

The IMF has come up with two downside scenarios: one in which emerging countries are hit by a new wave of the virus this year and advanced countries rapidly reverse stimulus policies in the face of rising inflation; and a second in which rising infections affect rich countries as well as poor. In the first scenario, global growth would be 0.75% lower this year and 1.5% lower next than the IMF is currently forecasting. In the second, 0.8 percentage points are shaved off growth in both years. In both cases, the global economy ends up $4.5tn (£3.3tn) smaller than expected by 2025.

 The IMF said the gap between rich and poor economies had widened during the pandemic and risked worsening further next year.  Rich countries have the financial power to support their economies through the crisis while poor countries do not. A new north-south divide is opening up. Better-off countries can look forward to life returning to something like normal by the end of the year, but the less fortunate nations still face rising infection rates and death tolls.

Vaccines have improved the economic outlook in wealthier countries, including the UK, while a lack of resources to improve vaccination rates and support the reopening of their economies has depressed growth rates across low-income countries. The IMF said financial markets could be thrown into panic if the virus was believed to be spreading out of control, restricting lending and investment, and lowering the potential for growth over many years.

The report said that close to 40% of the population in advanced economies had been fully vaccinated, compared with 11% in emerging market economies and an even lower small fraction in low-income developing countries. High-income countries account for 7m doses a day. By contrast, fewer than 100,000 doses a day are being administered in low-income countries.

IMF’s chief economist, Gita Gopinath, said: “A worsening pandemic and tightening financial conditions would inflict a double hit on emerging market and developing economies and severely set back their recoveries.” Gopinath said: “Multilateral action is needed to ensure rapid, worldwide access to vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics. This would save countless lives, prevent new variants from emerging, and add trillions of dollars to global economic growth.”

Global GDP fell from a peak of $87.6tn in 2019 to $84.7tn last year, meaning that a $4.5tn loss over four years would knock 1.3 percentage points off the world’s annual GDP growth. The IMF’s most recent proposal to end the pandemic sets a goal of vaccinating at least 40% of the population in every country by the end of 2021 and at least 60% by mid-2022 at a cost of $50bn. Vaccine supplies and deliveries to low- and lower-middle-income countries must increase sharply to meet the proposal’s targets. Close to half of countries recent daily vaccination rates fell below the rate needed to meet the 40% target by the end of 2021.

Failure to help poor countries fight Covid ‘could cost global economy $4.5tn’, says IMF | International Monetary Fund (IMF) | The Guardian

The IMF is right: global economic recovery from Covid could go wrong | Larry Elliott | The Guardian

 Jeff Bezos has offered to cover $2bn (£1.4bn) of Nasa costs in order to be reconsidered for a key contract to build a Moon landing vehicle.

 More than three million people across the globe have died of Covid-19 in the roughly nine months since India and South Africa first proposed a temporary patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines, a popular measure that Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other rich countries have blocked.

More than 100 WTO member countries—including the United States—have backed the patent waiver. But because the WTO operates by consensus, several powerful rich countries have been able to thwart the patent waiver push.

It has left pharmaceutical companies in control of vaccine manufacturing even as it has become abundantly clear that current production levels are not sufficient to meet global needs.

Nick Dearden, the director of Global Justice Now explained that “Every one of those deaths is a mark of shame for the governments of countries like the U.K. and Germany who have protected patents over human lives…The virus is ravaging the world’s poorest while rich governments buy booster shots and vaccinate low-risk groups. Extreme vaccine inequality will be never-ending unless we remove the corporate monopolies which are preventing the world from ramping up production…Many of the deaths we mourn today could have been prevented if not for the shameful intransigence of governments like our own.”

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, said,  “The Delta variant is burning a murderous path through a world where most people are literally dying for a vaccine but there simply is no supply. Until the WTO intellectual property barriers are waived, and governments force technology transfer and fund major new manufacturing capacity so the needed vaccines are made to inoculate the world, it will be one variant after another getting hatched.”

Mozambique, Kenya, Indonesia, Namibia, and other nations struggling to gain access to vaccine doses as the highly transmissible Delta strain tears through their populations. Namibia, which has one of the highest Covid-19 death rates in the world, has thus far been able to provide a single vaccine dose to just 1% of its population.

3 Million People Have Died of Covid Since Rich Nations Began Obstructing Vaccine Patent Waiver | Common Dreams News