More than one in three middle-aged British adults are suffering from at least two chronic health conditions, including recurrent back problems, poor mental health, high blood pressure, diabetes and high-risk drinking.

The study of “generation X” adults born in 1970 found that those who grew up in poorer families were 43% more likely to have multiple long-term health conditions than their peers from wealthier households. Adults from poorer backgrounds had almost three and half times higher risk of suffering from mental ill-health and arthritis, and about three times the risk of having poor mental health and high blood pressure in their late 40s.

Those who had experienced physical and mental health problems as children, including lower birth weight, higher body mass index, lower cognitive ability at age 10 and worse emotional and behavioural issues at age 16 were also more likely to suffer from multiple chronic health problems.

Dawid Gondek, the UCL researcher who authored the paper, said: “This study … shows that a substantial proportion of the population are already suffering from multiple long-term physical and mental health problems in their late 40s, and also points to stark health inequalities, which appear to begin early in childhood.” He added, “Compared to previous generations, it appears that the health of British adults in midlife is on the decline.”

A third of middle-aged UK adults have at least two chronic health issues – study | Health | The Guardian

Twelve directors of children’s services in the north-east of England have warned that “shameful” levels of poverty in the region are driving dramatic rises in child protection intervention and the number of children in care.  They argue the “dysfunctional market” for children’s residential care must be dismantled or radically overhauled and profit-making eliminated or capped.

The north-east has the highest rate of referrals to children’s social care in the UK, significantly higher than the national average. Since 2009, the region has seen a 77% increase in its care population. Inner London has seen a 25% reduction over the same period. The region saw the steepest increase in relative child poverty (after housing costs) between 2014-15 and 2019-20 – rising from 26% to 37%. This is compared with a UK-wide increase from 29% to 31% and means that the north-east has gone from having a child poverty rate just below the UK average to the second highest of any region or nation in just five years.

The high level of deprivation in the north-east is a significant driver of demand for children’s social care services. “National measures to reduce poverty, focused on raising family incomes, are needed to break the cycle of deprivation which is driving concerns about child welfare,” they argue. 

One of the directors said in the report: “Poverty is stark, shameful and obvious. Life chances are blighted. I’ve worked in a number of local authorities all over the country, but I’ve never worked anywhere where poverty is as bad and life chances so poor.”

Levels of domestic abuse are also high, with one director of children’s services saying: “I worry that levels of violence and abuse are so endemic in some of our communities that it is not even recognised as a problem. We are dealing with a lot of violence in families – children-to-adult violence as well. This is learned acceptable behaviour.”

Demand for child mental health intervention outstrips supply.

The directors say: “The north-east is in a vicious cycle with levels of demand causing pressure across the system and spiralling costs. With a larger proportion of the budget being spent on statutory services, there is a squeeze on spending compromising the ability to provide the prevention and early help needed to manage risk outside the statutory system and reduce children coming into care.”

 In the three years to 2019-20 north-east councils saw an increase in net expenditure in children’s social care services of more than £77m (18.2%). Net expenditure on children looked after and safeguarding services increased by almost £83m (27%).

Dire poverty in north-east England ‘driving many more children into care’ | Child protection | The Guardian

 The results of a Swedish study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology found that men’s spending habits cause 16% more climate-heating emissions than women’s has gone viral on the internet. Climate change exacerbates increasing inequality and hits women harder than men. UN data suggests that 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. 

The biggest difference seems to be that men spend more money on petrol. Another big difference: the men surveyed bought more meat than women. Placing the burden of mitigating climate change on individuals, no matter their gender, feels futile as we watch corporations and the 1%, who are the main drivers of climate change, do whatever the hell they like. The problem isn’t that certain men are spending more on motoring and meat than their female counterparts – it’s the obsession with economic growth at any cost for capital accumulation and the profit motive.

The focus on the gender-based spending habits of ordinary consumers is futile. The fact is that women in rich countries are responsible for far more emissions than men in poor countries. In Madagascar, more than a million people are facing desperate food shortages due to what has been called the first famine in modern history caused by global heating alone. “This is an area of the world that has contributed nothing to climate change, but now they’re the ones paying the highest price,” said the UN World Food Programme.

The climate crisis is not going to get fixed by shaming powerless individuals or getting men in the west to eat more veggie burgers; it can be fixed only through system change.

The adage “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” feels truer each new day. 

We plebs keep getting told we have to change our lifestyle habits while our masters have made it abundantly clear that they have no intention of changing theirs.  It is galling to be lectured on the evils of flying in planes while billionaires are shooting themselves into space. Billionaires and corporations seem intent on having us believe not only that their greed isn’t ruining the world, but that it will in fact be its salvation. “We have to go to space to save Earth,” Jeff Bezos has declared.

Don’t blame men for the climate crisis – we should point the finger at corporations | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian

 A new study has found that many of the key indicators of the global climate crisis are getting worse and either approaching or exceeding, key tipping points as the earth heats up. Overall, the study found some 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content and ice mass, set worrying new records.

“There is growing evidence we are getting close to or have already gone beyond tipping points associated with important parts of the Earth system,” said William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University who co-authored the new research. “The updated planetary vital signs we present largely reflect the consequences of unrelenting business as usual,” adding that “a major lesson from Covid-19 is that even colossally decreased transportation and consumption are not nearly enough and that, instead, transformational system changes are required.”

While the pandemic shut down economies and shifted the way people think about work, school and travel, it did little to reduce the overall global carbon emissions. Fossil fuel use dipped slightly in 2020, but the authors of a report published in the journal BioScience say that carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide “have all set new year-to-date records for atmospheric concentrations in both 2020 and 2021”.

In April 2021, carbon dioxide concentration reached 416 parts per million, the highest monthly global average concentration ever recorded. The five hottest years on record have all occurred since 2015, and 2020 was the second hottest year in history.

The study also found that ruminant livestock, a significant source of planet-warming gases, now number more than 4 billion, and their total mass is more than that of all humans and wild animals combined. 

The rate of forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon increased in both 2019 and 2020, reaching a 12-year high of 1.11 million hectares deforested in 2020.

Ocean acidification is near an all-time record, and when combined with warmer ocean temperatures, it threatens the coral reefs that more than half a billion people depend on for food, tourism and storm surge protection.

In order to change the course of the climate emergency, the authors write that profound alterations need to happen.

The authors also highlight the need for a phase-out and eventual ban of fossil fuels, and the development of global strategic climate reserves to protect and restore natural carbon sinks and biodiversity. 

Disappointingly, they suggest green capitalism has a role to play. They say the world needs to develop a global price for carbon that is linked to a socially just fund to finance climate mitigation and adaptation policies in the developing world.

But more importantly, the report concludes with this message:

“Policies to alleviate the climate crisis or any of the other threatened planetary boundary transgressions should not be focused on symptom relief but on addressing their root cause: the overexploitation of the Earth”.

Only by taking on this core issue, the authors write, will people be able to “ensure the long-term sustainability of human civilization and give future generations the opportunity to thrive”.

The SOYMB blog is optimistic that eventually and hopefully in time people will learn that the only way to a sustainable steady-state society is with socialism.

Critical measures of global heating reaching tipping point, study finds | Climate change | The Guardian

 Chevron’s has conducted an unprecedented legal campaign against environmental and human rights lawyer Steven Donziger over his role in 2013 by securing a $9.5 billion judgment in the case held in Ecuador—the largest human rights and environmental court judgment in history. In 2014, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan refused to enforce the judgment, saying it had been secured through bribery, fraud and extortion.

 A federal judge has found him guilty of six counts of criminal contempt of court after he refused to turn over his computer and cellphone. 

“It’s time to pay the piper,”  U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska wrote in a 241-page decision, following a five-day trial with no jury in May.

 The charges against him were brought not by the public court system, but by private prosecutors—a first for the American judiciary – led by Rita Glavin, who at the time of her appointment was a partner at the law firm Seward & Kissel. In April 2020, Seward & Kissel admitted that it had represented Chevron as a client as recently as 2018—a major conflict of interest.

Judge Preska, who convicted Donziger and also placed him on house arrest back in 2019, wasn’t randomly assigned to oversee the case as is typical. Instead, she was handpicked for the role by Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over a 2012 RICO case against Donziger in an unprecedented and highly suspect process. Preska serves as an advisor to the pro-business Federalist Society, to which Chevron has donated massive sums.

Donziger led a case against the energy giant Chevron on behalf of 30,000 Indigenous residents and peasant farmers in the Amazon. The firm’s pollution, which leached into local soil and drinking water and has been linked to increased rates of cancer and birth defects, left a legacy so toxic that it’s been compared with Chernobyl. 

Steven Donziger, Lawyer Who Beat Chevron, Found Guilty of Contempt (gizmodo.com)

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He is the author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution

“We have zero years before climate and ecological breakdown, because it’s already here. We have zero years left to procrastinate. The longer we wait to act, the worse the floods, fires, droughts, famines and heatwaves will get… If we fail, the planet will continue to heat up, creeping past 1.5C, then 2C, then 3C of global heating as we keep squandering precious time. With every fraction of a degree, the floods and fires and heat will get worse. Coastal cities will be abandoned. Ocean currents will shift. Crops will fail. Ecosystems will collapse. Hundreds of millions will flee regions with humid heat too high for the human body. Geopolitics will break down. No place will be safe…”

Jennifer Francis is senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center

“If we do not succeed in changing our destructive behavior, the increasing trends in extreme weather, sea levels, government destabilization and human misery will continue and worsen. Extreme heatwaves, drought, wildfires and flooding events like those we’ve seen in recent summers will become commonplace. Many coastal cities and communities around the globe will be increasingly inundated by high tides and storm surges. Longer, more intense droughts will destroy cropland and force agricultural communities to uproot their families in search of a better life. The devastation of coral reefs around the world will worsen, wiping out fisheries that provide staple protein for millions of people. All of these impacts are happening now.”

Michael E Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He is author of the recent book, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back our Planet

“How many years do we have to act? Strictly speaking, zero – which is to say, that we must act, in earnest, now. We have a decade within which we must halve global carbon emissions…We must now choose between two paths as we face our future. One leads to massive suffering and collapse of our civilizational infrastructure. The other leads to a prosperous future for us, our children and grandchildren. But it requires that we leave fossil fuels behind. The choice is ours.”

Holly Jean Buck is a postdoctoral research fellow at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She is the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration

 “…If we don’t succeed in transitioning away from fossil fuels globally, we could face an uneven world where a few rich countries congratulate themselves for going green, and a few oil producer nations are supplying the rest of the world with dirty fuel, which they use because they don’t have alternatives…”

All these experts overlook one important point. Our economic system must be changed to sustainable socialism. What do we do when the scientific community cannot see the solution?

How many years until we must act on climate? Zero, say these climate thinkers | Jennifer Francis , Michael Mann , Holly Jean Buck and Peter Kalmus | The Guardian

 More news of how the capitalist sector is benefiting from the misfortune of the rest of us.

Tech corporations reported soaring profits as consumers upgraded their devices.

Climate change is the challenge of our time. It poses grave threats to agriculture and is already affecting the food security and livelihoods of small-scale farming households across the developing world.

Back-to-back droughts have pushed over a million people in southern Madagascar to the brink of starvation in the worst famine in half a century.  Villagers have sold their possessions and are eating the locusts, raw cactus fruits, and wild leaves to survive. Climate change bringing warmer temperatures is believed to be exacerbating this latest tragedy. Instead of bringing relief, this year’s rains were accompanied by warm temperatures that created the ideal conditions for infestations of fall armyworm, which destroys mainly maize, one of the main food crops.

Up to 40% of global food output is lost each year through pests and diseases, according to FAO estimates, while up to 811 million people suffer from hunger. 

Pests and pathogens have threatened food supplies since agriculture began. The Irish potato famine of the late 1840s, caused by late blight disease, killed about one million people. The ancient Greeks and Romans were well familiar with wheat stem rust, which continues to destroy harvests in developing countries. But recent research on the impact of temperature increases in the tropics caused by climate change has documented an expansion of some crop pests and diseases into more northern and southern latitudes at an average of about 2.7 km a year.

Understanding the relationship between climate change and plant health is key to conserving biodiversity and boosting food production today and for future generations.  Extreme weather events menace the livelihoods of 144 million smallholder rice farmers. Yet traditional cultivation methods such as flooded paddies contribute approximately 10% of global man-made methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Growing healthy crops needs to include environmental considerations. What is known as a One Health Approach starts from the recognition that life is not segmented. All is connected. Rooted in concerns over threats of zoonotic diseases spreading from animals, especially livestock, to humans, the concept has been broadened to encompass agriculture and the environment. This ecosystem approach combines different strategies and practices, such as minimizing pesticide use. This helps protect pollinators, animals that eat crop pests, and other beneficial organisms. The challenge is to produce food without increasing agriculture’s negative impacts on the environment, particularly through greenhouse gas emissions and unsustainable farming practices that degrade vital soil and water resources, and threaten biodiversity.

Protecting Plants Will Protect People and the Planet | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

The Democrats and the Republicans cannot agree on bi-partisan support for welfare programs but for the military there is a consensus and agreement between them.

It adds $2 billion to the Navy‘s shipbuilding budget — funding that would double the number of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers requested by the service.  The bill also includes funding for an expeditionary fast transport, two Virginia-class fast-attack submarines, an FFG(X) guided missile frigate and other support ships requested by the Navy.

“Just the proposed $25 billion increase to the Pentagon budget alone could end homelessness in the United States, making clear that senators are more interested in increasing the profits of military contractors than meeting the needs of everyday working people,” said Carley Towne, co-director of the anti-war group CodePink.

The $25 billion spending increase also matches the cost to scale up Covid-19 vaccine production to meet global demand.

The UK, the USA and the EU are turning back desperate, unfortunate peoples and transforming their countries into fortresses to keep them out. Yet another boat has capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, the latest of many disasters involving migrants heading to Europe. 

Mexico is dealing with a migration phenomenon on four fronts. On one hand, 12 million Mexicans live in the United States. And on the other, every year hundreds of thousands of migrants make their way through the country, mainly Central Americans and in recent years also people from the Caribbean, Venezuelans and even Africans.

The United States sends back to Mexico hundreds of thousands of people who cross its southern border without the required documents. Mexico is home to more than one million migrants and refugees who have chosen to make their home in that country.

Major recipients of refugees and asylum seekers in other regions are Turkey, in the eastern Mediterranean, hosting 3.7 million (92 percent Syrians), and, with 1.4 million displaced persons each, Pakistan (which has received a massive influx of people from Afghanistan) and Uganda (refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo and other neighbouring countries).

In Sudan, there are one million refugees, Bangladesh, Iran and Lebanon host 900,000 each, while in the industrialised North the cases of Germany, which received 1.2 million refugees from the Middle East, and the United States, which has 300,000 refugees and one million asylum seekers in its territory, stand out.

In the last six years, 5,650,000 Venezuelans have fled to Venezuela’s neighbouring nations. 

In this region “there is a living laboratory, where insertion and absorption efforts are working. The new arrivals are turning what was seen as a burden into a contribution to the host communities and nations,” Eduardo Stein, head of the largest assistance programme for displaced Venezuelans, explained,  setting an example in welcoming and integrating displaced populations, with shared benefits for the new arrivals and the nations that receive them. “This is the largest migration crisis in the history of Latin America,” Stein said.

Colombia stands out for receiving daily flows of hundreds and even thousands of Venezuelans, who already number almost 1.8 million in the country, and for providing them with Temporary Protection Status that grants them documentation and access to jobs, services and other rights. Iván Briscoe, regional head of the Brussels-based conflict observatory International Crisis Group, commented in the case of Colombia, “it has been impressive to receive almost two million Venezuelans, in a country of 50 million inhabitants, 40 percent of whom live in poverty.”

Colombia’s Fundación Renacer, which has assisted thousands of child and adolescent survivors of commercial sexual exploitation and other types of sexual and gender-based violence, is a model for how to welcome and help displaced persons. Renacer, staffed by activists such as Mayerlin Vergara, 2020 winner of the UNHCR’s annual Nansen Refugee Award for outstanding aid workers who help refugees, displaced and stateless people, rescues girls and young women from places like brothels and bars where they are forced into sexual or labour exploitation, often by trafficking networks that capture the most vulnerable migrants.

“In Colombian society as a whole there has been a process of understanding, after the phenomenon was the other way around for several decades in the 20th century, of people displaced by the violence and crisis in Colombia being welcomed in Venezuela,” Camilo González, president of the Colombian Institute for Development and Peace Studies, told IPS. When the great migratory wave began in 2014-2015, “many Venezuelans were taken on as half-price cheap labour by businesses, such as coffee harvesters and others in the big cities, but that situation has improved, even despite the slowdown of the pandemic,” said González.

 Eduardo Stein, the head of the Interagency Coordination Platform for Venezuelan Refugees and Migrants (R4V), created by the UNHCR and IOM in partnership with 159 other diverse entities working throughout the region noted that in the first phase, the receiving countries appreciated the arrival of “highly prepared Venezuelans, very well trained professionals.”

“One example would be the thousands of Venezuelan engineers who arrived in Argentina and were integrated into productive activities in a matter of weeks,” he said.

But, Stein pointed out, “the following wave of Venezuelans leaving their country was not made up of professionals; the profile changed to people with huge unsatisfied basic needs, without a great deal of training but with basic skills, and nevertheless the borders remained open, and they received very generous responses.” Stein mentioned the positive example set by Colombia’s flower exporters, which employed many Venezuelan women in cutting and packaging, a task that did not require extensive training.

“Not everything has been rosy,” Stein admitted, “as there are still very complex problems, such as the risks that, between expressions of xenophobia and the danger of trafficking, the most vulnerable migrant girls and young women face.”

There have been expressions of xenophobia, as various media outlets interpreted statements by Bogotá Mayor Claudia López, who after a crime committed by a Venezuelan, suggested the deportation of “undesirable” nationals from that country. There were also demonstrations against the influx of Venezuelans in Ecuador and Panama, as well as Peru, where the policy of President-elect Pedro Castillo towards the one million Venezuelan immigrants is still unclear, as well as deportations from Chile and Trinidad and Tobago, and new obstacles to their arrival in the neighbouring Dutch islands.

However, throughout the region “there are places that have seen that immigrants represent an attraction for investment and labour and productive opportunities for the host communities themselves.” Stein pointed out.

Another promising example is provided by Brazil, with its Operação Acolhida (Operation Welcome), which includes a programme to disperse throughout its vast territory Venezuelans who came in through the northern border and first settled, precariously, in cities in the state of Amazonas.

More than 260,000 Venezuelans have arrived in Brazil – among them some 5,000 indigenous Waraos, from the Orinoco delta, and a similar number of Pemon Indians, close to the border – and some 50,000 have been recognised as refugees by the Brazilian government. Brazil has the seventh largest Venezuelan community, after Colombia, Peru, the United States, Chile, Ecuador and Spain. It is followed by Argentina, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Mexico.

Throughout the region, organisations have mushroomed, not only to provide relief but also to actively seek the insertion of Venezuelans, in some cases headed by Venezuelans themselves, as in the case of the Fundacolven foundation in Bogota.

According to Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, they have benefited from the fact that the countries of the region “are an example, and the rest of the world can learn a lot about the inclusion and integration of refugees in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Latin America Sets an Example in Welcoming Displaced Venezuelans | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)