Like many cities across the US, the rapidly expanding and gentrifying Texas city of Austin is looking to shrink its climate footprint. So its initial plan was to virtually eliminate gas use in new buildings by 2030 and existing ones by 2040. Homes and businesses would have to run on electricity and stop using gas for heat, hot water and stoves. The gas burned in buildings causes about 12% of US climate pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Cities are trying to shrink those heat-trapping emissions with building codes and mandates to switch from gas to electric appliances.

The proposal, an existential threat to the Texas Gas Service. The company drafted line-by-line revisions to weaken the plan, asked customers to oppose it and escalated its concerns to top city officials. The company struck out references to “electrification”, and replaced them with “decarbonization”– a policy that wouldn’t rule out gas. It replaced “electric vehicles” with “alternative fuel vehicles”, which could run on compressed natural gas. It offered to help the city to plant more trees to absorb climate pollution and to explore technologies to pull carbon dioxide out of the air – both of which might help it to keep burning gas.

 The most recently published draft of the climate plan gives the company much more time to sell gas to existing customers, and it allows it to offset climate emissions instead of eliminating them.

The lobbying in Austin is not unique. 

Similar happened scaling back with San Antonio’s climate ambitions where the fossil fuel industry managed to install  its preferred consultants and write its own “Flexible Path” that would let it keep polluting.

The gas industry is battling climate change reforms in cities around the USA. In Texas, lawmakers have introduced two bills that would prohibit local governments from banning gas connections. Four other state legislatures passed similar laws last year, and 12 more have seen proposals for them in 2021.

The gas lobby, the American Gas Association’s president, Karen Harbert, said, “Over the course of the year, legislation preserving energy choice for customers passed in Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee,” Harbert said.

A Texas city had a bold new climate plan – until a gas company got involved | US news | The Guardian

 Despite the billions the British armament industry is making from supplying Saudi Arabia with weaponry to fight the Houthi and despite the UN’s warnings that Yemen faces imminent famine if aid is not increased, the UK government has reduced its humanitarian help to Yemen. Last year it provided £214m but for this year it will be about £87m. 

“Millions of Yemeni children, women and men desperately need aid to live. Cutting aid is a death sentence,” António Guterres said in a statement.

 20 million people – two-thirds of the Yemeni population – depend on humanitarian assistance. Some two million children are acutely malnourished.

Laurie Lee, the chief executive of Care International, said: “In the worst humanitarian disaster in the world, [Britain’s reduced pledge] will take lifesaving aid away from a quarter of a million people on the brink of famine. A famine caused by war. A war enabled by UK arms sales.”

Kevin Watkins, the chief executive of Save the Children UK, said: “This is one of the first illustrations of the devastating real-life consequences of the UK’s decision to abandon its commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI [gross national income] on aid, and we hope the government will urgently rethink this move in time to avoid tragic consequences for the world’s most vulnerable children.”

Yemen condemns international donor funding shortfall as UK cuts aid | Yemen | The Guardian

 A report in The Times – 26/2/21- stated The BBC wanted to end the dominance of American cartoons on television because they prevent British children from absorbing their own culture, a senior executive said.

Children are part of families which come from many different countries with their own cultures. Is it that they mean or is for them to adhere to “British Culture”  (whatever that means)  ?

The broadcaster is hoping to create Britain’s answer to The Simpsons as it pours extra funds into animation to win back viewers from Disney and Netflix.

The Director Of Children’s Programmes & Education at The BBC, Patricia Hidalgo, said too many cartoons watched in this country are made overseas. She is telling producers to insert more identifiably British moments, such as roast dinners, into family shows.

Hidalgo cited “The Amazing World Of Gumball” as an animated series created in the UK but set in a fictional Californian town. 

Maybe The BBC could consider a cartoon about Socialism. An animated series about a world without leaders, a world without money, a world where everything that is produced is available freely to everyone in the world.

As we know the dominant view in the world is the one of the Capitalist class.

Socialism is a big idea, it’s a story that has to be told, which needs a platform.

 A report in The Times – 26/2/21- stated The BBC wanted to end the dominance of American cartoons on television because they prevent British children from absorbing their own culture, a senior executive said.

Children are part of families which come from many different countries with their own cultures. Is it that they mean or is for them to adhere to “British Culture”  (whatever that means)  ?

The broadcaster is hoping to create Britain’s answer to The Simpsons as it pours extra funds into animation to win back viewers from Disney and Netflix.

The Director Of Children’s Programmes & Education at The BBC, Patricia Hidalgo, said too many cartoons watched in this country are made overseas. She is telling producers to insert more identifiably British moments, such as roast dinners, into family shows.

Hidalgo cited “The Amazing World Of Gumball” as an animated series created in the UK but set in a fictional Californian town. 

Maybe The BBC could consider a cartoon about Socialism. An animated series about a world without leaders, a world without money, a world where everything that is produced is available freely to everyone in the world.

As we know the dominant view in the world is the one of the Capitalist class.

Socialism is a big idea, it’s a story that has to be told, which needs a platform.

 “You’re nothing, you can’t do anything, you’re the bottom of the pile.” That’s what members of Germany’s Sinti and Roma communities have been told for centuries.

RomnoKher is the nationwide association of Sinti and Roma for the promotion of culture and education, and and issues a survey of  Sinti and Roma people living in Germany, among them both Germans and immigrants.

The authors of the study refer to racism, anti-ziganism and discrimination.

 Some 40% of respondents reported discrimination against their children — including in the classroom — by teachers and fellow students. 

Two-thirds of all respondents feel discriminated against because they belong to a minority, including in the education system. 

Sinti, Roma face systemic prejudice in Germany | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 28.02.2021

 Climate change alone cannot be blamed for the outbreak of war in Syria in 2011. However, neither can it be ignored as a reason the once blossoming country became a parched, war-torn place

“Syria serves as prime example for the impact of climate change on pre-existing issues such as political instability, poverty and scarce resources,” Jamal Saghir, Professor at the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University, told DW.

“Climate disruption was an amplifier and multiplier of the political crisis that was building up in Syria,” as Staffan de Mistura, former UN Special Envoy for Syria between 2014 and 2018, explained. “A toxic cocktail started to turn into an explosive mixture with the ingredients of the Arab Spring, the anger of losing jobs, migration to cities, as well as the purchasing power decline and the anger against the very tough and very cruel reactions by the government,” de Mistura said.

In the past, Syria’s farmers have benefited from relatively fertile and productive lands, as well as the state’s promotion of staple crop production between the 1970s and 1990s. The country of around 17 million people has been hit by three droughts since the 1980s. The most recent stretched from 2006 to 2010, and was recorded as the worst multiyear drought in around 900 years.

Decreased precipitation combined with rising temperatures resulted in desertification and devastation of agricultural land, particularly in eastern Syria. Along with this, 800,000 people lost their income and 85% of the country’s livestock died.

Since crop yields had also plummeted by up to two-thirds, the country had to start importing large quantities of grain. Consequently, food prices doubled. “But the drought still continued and people were hopeless,” Saghir said, thus explaining why 1.5 million rural workers headed to the cities for work. Those who stayed were mainly impoverished farmers who became easy targets for terrorist recruiters from groups like the so-called Islamic State (IS).

The crisis was aggravated by Bashar Assad’s decisions to reduce fuel, water and food subsidies over the years. In addition to water scarcity in rural areas, tensions rose between Kurds, Arabs, Alawites and Sunnis.

Geopolitically, the situation didn’t become any easier with ongoing competition over Syria between archenemies Iran and Saudi Arabia. “We started seeing horrible medieval sieges around many cities or villages when people were cut off from food and water, like in Homs or Aleppo,” de Mistura remembered.

Vast parts of the country have been devastated by war, water remains scarce and infrastructure is in dire need repair across almost the entire country.

“Assad has almost won the territorial war but is still very far from winning peace,” said de Mistura.

Jamal Saghir agrees: “For peace, you need reconstruction,” he said.

But with economic sanctions still imposed  and Assad’s allies reluctant to invest the future is far from promising. 

How climate change paved the way to war in Syria | NRS-Import | DW | 26.02.2021

 For building new homes, certain regulations were introduced to include affordable housing. This proved a problem for the up-market property developers aiming to attract the wealthy buyers who did not wish to mingle with the less affluent. 

So the solution was to design apartment blocks in a way that the rich and the poor were segregated. What has been termed “poor doors” and “poor floors” have been introduced and facilities such as courtyards, communal lounges and roof gardens divided. Separate entrances,  lifts and stairs were installed to keep the wealthier and the less wealthy residents apart. Technology allows developers to control which parts of new buildings people have access to. In many tenure-split blocks, access to certain floors is via a key-code, which prevents movement between levels.

  One  vast £1bn Convoys Wharf development in Deptford, south-east London, will have different entrances for residents paying London affordable rents – those on social housing waiting lists – and for slightly better-off households buying into shared ownership. The most common form of segregation, however, is the tenure-specific block. West London’s Ealing council, with Malaysian developer EcoWorld, is planning six towers with nearly 200 affordable homes confined to two blocks.

‘Poor floors’: anger over new plans to segregate tower block residents | Housing | The Guardian

Countries seeking their own COVID-19 vaccine doses are making deals with drug companies that threaten the supply for the global COVAX programme for poor and middle-income countries, the World Health Organization said.

COVAX aims to vaccinate 20% of people in low- and middle-income countries by the end of 2021 – a modest ambition, to UK ears. Late last week, COVAX was boosted by additional donations from the US, UK and European Union. But COVAX and the low-income countries that depend on it are still on the back foot. Despite wealthy countries’ apparent support for COVAX, most have raced to clinch bilateral deals with pharmaceutical companies, “pre-ordering” vaccines even before efficacy trials had been completed – and there is a global shortage of vaccine stock.

The WHO director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told the body’s recent executive board that 44 bilateral deals had been done in 2020 and a further 12 this year. Manufacturers, Tedros said, have prioritised regulatory approval in rich countries where the profits are highest 

“Even as they speak the language of equitable access, some countries and companies continue to prioritize bilateral deals, going around COVAX, driving up prices and attempting to jump to the front of the queue. This is wrong,” said Tedros. Securing private bilateral deals directly with pharmaceutical companies is unaffordable for the least developed countries. Uganda, for example, is paying the Serum Institute of India $7 per dose for the AstraZeneca vaccine – triple the price paid by the European Union ($2.16).

 WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for countries to waive intellectual property rules, to allow other countries to make vaccines more quickly.

 The WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requires countries to give pharmaceutical corporations lengthy monopoly control over the knowledge and technology used to produce medicines. India and South Africa in October 2020 introduced a proposal (pdf) calling on the WTO to exempt member nations from enforcing pandemic-related patent protections. The TRIPS waiver is backed by more than 100 countries, but a small group of powerful states in the Global North—led by the U.S., U.K., and Canada—is actively and successfully impeding the will of a majority of the world.

Biden, despite having had the opportunity to do so at two recent WTO committee meetings, has not yet ended U.S. opposition to India and South Africa’s proposal—even though current trends indicate that the world’s poorest countries will be forced to wait until 2024 for mass inoculation, causing needless suffering and death, and generating more than $9 trillion in economic losses.

“As an expert in intellectual property law and access to life-saving medicines, I can assure the Biden administration that intellectual property barriers are real, and they’re blocking millions of people around the world from accessing life-saving Covid-19 vaccines,” Brook Baker, senior policy analyst at Health GAP and professor of law at Northeastern University, said during the press conference. “By obstructing the TRIPS waiver proposal, President Biden is breaking his promise to share Covid-19 vaccine technologies with the world.”

The world does not have time to wait for the usual, slow, and unequal distribution of treatments, diagnostics, and vaccines. The new Covid-19 variants, which show more resistance to vaccines, prove that further delay in immunity around the world will lead to faster and stronger mutations. The TRIPS waiver would give countries more ways to tackle the legal barriers to maximizing production and supply of medical products needed for Covid-19 treatment and prevention. 

Akshaya Kumar, director of crisis advocacy at Human Rights Watch, pointed out, “Sharing the recipe for vaccines by pooling intellectual property and issuing global, open, and non-exclusive licenses could help scale up manufacturing and expand the number of vaccine doses made.”

 Abby Maxman, president of Oxfam America, said that “rather than slicing the existing pie of vaccines even more finely, we need to share the recipe so that we have enough for everyone. We need a people’s vaccine. A vaccine that is free to everyone around the world, that is fairly distributed based on need and not on nationality or ability to pay.” Decrying the “vast chasm of inequality” created by giving “just a handful of giant pharmaceutical corporations… monopoly control over the live-saving technologies we all need,” Maxman noted that the U.S., with only 4% of the world’s population, has purchased almost half of Pfizer’s total expected supply in 2021.

Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, emphasized that “rich nations have an obligation to share with the global community. That is the only way to protect the vulnerable here and abroad. The United States must stop blocking the WTO TRIPS waiver in order to share the vaccine with the developing world and to prevent the killing of our vulnerable siblings in the developing world,” Campbell added. “If we don’t get the waiver, we in the United States, I believe, will have blood on our hands, and we cannot allow that to happen. Let’s change this.”

Asia Russell, executive director of Health GAP, which has campaigned for equitable access to medicines for over two decades says, “The only solution is for vaccine manufacturers to share their technology so we can start to overcome artificial vaccine supply scarcity through easing monopoly restrictions. Why is gross profiteering being tolerated, while front-line health workers in poor countries are dying waiting in line for access? Aren’t their lives worth as much as people in the UK or US? Pharmaceutical companies must wake up. Donation schemes and feel-good initiatives won’t fix vaccine apartheid. They must relinquish their patents, share their know-how, and co-operate.”

‘Blood on Our Hands’: 400+ Groups Call on Biden to Support Making Vaccine Recipes Available to the World | Common Dreams News

Opinion | The Most Fundamental Stumbling Block To Vaccine Access Is That Private Pharmaceutical Companies Are in Control and Rich Countries Are Enabling Them (commondreams.org)

 Supermarket chains are throwing away the equivalent of 190 million meals a year that could be given to the hungry.