Get rid of the pioneer just arrived bless you image of short with bear feet no matter the weather and try to speak English without the word Like.
God save, does nothing for a small country on the under belly of the earth.
It’s in desperate need of a written constitution, in order to give equality to its indigenous and its growing Asia/ India population’s.
Yes it’s made up of two islands on the bottom of the world, with two cultures, that could not be more separated by their beliefs, and traditions.
Yes it’s physical beauty, but it’s beauty is out weight by it’s traffic jams, it’s retirement homes, it’s lack of round about, it’s Māori named places with English named bays.
Yes thanks to the All Blacks and its yacht-men it’s world renowned for its sporting prowess.
Yes its cost of living is bleeding its youth to Australia and other parts of the world while its government fails to recognise how small and remote New Zealand is. It does not have very large populations living nearby. You can’t tax your way to prosperity. Tax the sale of any property is declaring war on rural New Zealand.
Yes it’s races.
Yes it has spent billions on children playground and nature tracks.
Yes it has enough low line fencing to go around the world twice.
Yes there is big big money in New Zealand.
Yes its market is still recovering from being dumped by the British Empire, and Covid.
Yes (like the Chagos Islands returning Mauritius after 200 years) it needs to break its English Empire colonisation and join world as an independent country.
Yes it still has sheep, kiwis, wine, and everything grows at a hundred miles an hour.
Yes its world image is still green CO2.
Yes it’s the land of the long white cloud, but it’s also the land of the long yellow traffic line, with never ending road maintenance.
Yes it’s keep up with the Jones housing market that remains free of Capital Gains tax. Having a bach/ holiday home is considered a birth right.
Yes its sun burn requires factor 50.
Yes it’s fully of old ugly men in shorts with legs tattooed up to their arse holes.
Yes like most countries it’s has violence.
Yes it’s volcanic, with a white and green galvanised roof houses on every hump.
Yes it’s welcoming, but difficult to make friends in.
Yes its exports markets are more and more reliant on China – Japanese markets.
Yes it’s professional people attract large salaries. Judges earning up to a half a million per year, but doctors earning 60% less than their counterparts in Australia.
Yes it’s a heaven for the retirement industry.
Yes it’s highly socially awkward.
Yes it’s run like all western countries by the Smartphone/Social Media.
Yes its health system needs investment.
Yes in a world without borders its educational aspersions lacks imagination.
Yes there are issues and grievances with the Waitangi Treaty. It has never been legislatively adopted as domestic law. There still not a commonly shared of the Treaty – its rights and obligations. Nor will there ever be till an agreed constitution is written.
This can only be achieved as an independent country.
Yes it’s has more verity of milk than cows.
Yes it’s a Mount Ruapehu.
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
There appears to be only one solution to the world’s woes.
Mass Algorithmic Surveillance.
They might be invisible but they are now ruling out lives to such an extent that we cannot live without them.
They make us pay more than we should for everything in what’s called the free market which is in fact a capitalist program run by algorithms for profit.
How owns them?
Because the data they are trained can be biased and discriminatory there should be total transparency as to what, who and when they are used.
Is it the code writers, or the company that develops them are the owners?
If they are writing their own code the use of an algorithm is un- own-able, because they start life as abstract ideas which is un -patient able.
They are not legal persons and therefore have no ownership rights, anyone can create their own algorithm.
Only the people who designed, adapted, configured, chose and use the algorithm can be held responsible for their actions.
As more and more products become auto-generated evolutionary algorithms will undermine privacy ownership of almost every thing, as they bypass the traditional need for designer, inventor, author, artist.
However they provide competitive advantages. That’s why they need to be totally transparent.
Are you Flummoxed yet?
Some of the water you drank to day passed through the kidneys of Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Socrates. The Air passed through Napoleon, Beethoven,Lincoln, Billy the Kid.
We do not simply live in this universe.
The universe lives in us.
When it comes to his new smart phone. Elton Musk needs to understand this.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
A global pandemic killing millions of people and forcing entire countries into lockdown.
Then inflation takes off and (not unrelated) one country invades another and the resulting war affects us all.
Whoa! Where on Earth did all that come from?
We have to think about how we got here.
As if we don’t know its all wrapped up in one word Inequality.
The cost of things average people must buy—healthcare, education, housing—tends to have risen more than wages did over the last two decades. Rising inequality across income, race and gender all demand urgent attention. It needs to made clear to leaders that in 2024 their citizens are expecting them to raise their ambition for humanity and deliver bold agreements to tackle poverty, inequality and climate change.
Government’s policy making will need to become more innovative to address such challenges other wise we going to have a left behind technological societies. We’re going to see, unfortunately, more technological unemployment. We’re going to have to think very carefully in political terms and in social terms about the implications of further automation.
Individual responsibility will play a role, too, in areas such as climate change.
To ignore the issue of inequality culture will need to adjust in terms of revisiting some of our values.
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To start thinking outside of the box. We may have to consider very seriously ideas such as a universal basic income.
There are just over 7 billion people living on the planet today, spread between 196 (recognized) countries. Within each of these countries are groups of people with different ethnic backgrounds, different religious beliefs, different political beliefs. It’s because of these differences, you could argue, that the world is plagued by conflict.
Unfortunately, the future isn’t talking. It’s just coming, like it or not and we as individuals need to take ownership of this.
I dont know about you but I realized long ago that globalization was on its last legs. I also realize this isn’t pleasant to think about. Western economies have become knowledge based. This means Marx’s three factors of production (land, labor, capital) now have a fourth.
Politics as a social contract between a sovereign and citizens is no longer working. Each individual’s share of sovereignty, and therefore their freedom, diminishes as the social contract includes more people.
Power now resides with those best able to organize knowledge turning politicians into basically middlemen, bring a shift to direct democracy, with popular social media protests swamping sprawling governments.
We must do more to assertively channel technology to support progress and protect people and the planet.
As we entered the the 2020s it is clear that we are far from unlocking the potential of technology for our toughest challenges. We stand at a critical juncture to put these technologies to work in a responsible way for people and the planet.
Technology and political trends are aligning against mega-powers like the US and China.
How do we reconcile that with democracy in countries with millions of citizens?
Not with “America Alone” ” Brexit” or any other forms of isolation, which are highly problematic, as they are based on anxiety and insecurity, so inevitably create discord and division.
This is obvious to anyone with a brain looking at climate change – trade – wars – inequality – technology’s – and ideologies of I am all right Jack.
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Historically, political regimes tend not to last more than a few centuries.
I’m not sure we can. Some things are so horrible, you don’t want to think about them.
Today’s great powers have little choice but to spend their way to political stability, which is unsustainable, and/or try to control knowledge, which is difficult.
Nor do we have any elder statesmen or nationally unifying figures whom everyone respects, much less agrees with. This will make our various problems worse.
Ownership rights mean little without a government to protect them and courts to settle disputes.
This world we now inhabit wasn’t always fit for human’s nothing requires it to remain so. At some point, it will develop into something else. When and how that will happen, we don’t know yet. But we know it will.
We haven’t even talked about climate change. Issues like climate change will create further exacerbations on conflicts, and new forms of technological and cyber warfare could threaten countries’ elections and manipulate populations.
In the last two years: 90% of the data in the world was created.
Now it is up – technology companies large and small, industry, policy-makers, citizens and consumers alike – to use this power for good, before we run out of time. Now is the opportunity for leaders to step up into this new wave of opportunity and expectation.
We are the first generation to know we’re destroying the world, and we could be the last that can do anything about it. Our leaders are not on track to deliver. We need to ensure we hold our politicians accountable.
Food production is a major driver of wildlife extinction. We need to make wasting our resources unacceptable in all aspects of our life. We can all do more to be more conscious about what we buy, and where we buy it from.
We can and must end poverty and hunger, in all their forms and dimensions by addressing the underlying complex issues of fragility, conflict, and displacement and the looming threat of climate change.
The challenges facing the world are complex and intertwined and require complex solutions.
Another word is about to enter our collective dictionaries: permacrisis. What we do between now and 2030 will determine whether we as a collective species are intelligent or just dumm machines
Solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss won’t come from any one sector: they’ll come from governments, finance, business and civil society.
We’re analyzing satellite images but unable to see the picture that we all live on the same planet.
Like most of us, we are brought up to think in terms of countries with borders and different nationalities.
In some cases, there are natural borders formed by sea or mountains, but often borders between nations are simply abstractions, imaginary boundaries established by agreement or conflict.
How then do we explain nationalism? Why do humans separate themselves into groups and take on different national identities? Maybe different groups are helpful in terms of organisation, but that doesn’t explain why we feel different. Or why different nations compete and fight with one another.
When people are made to feel insecure and anxious, they tend to become more concerned with nationalism, status and success. Poverty and economic instability often lead to increased nationalism and to ethnic conflict.
The world in general does not have a sense of group identity.
If a terrorist’s biggest weapon is terror, climate change is going to inflict terror beyond belief.
We must shift 85% of the world’s energy supply to non-fossil fuel sources, not grant more oil exploration licences. Our economies depend on healthy, supportive natural systems.
A more sustainable path is possible. But we need to rally individuals, governments, companies and communities around the world to take action with us over the next decade.
It’s impossible to override the fundamental interconnectedness of the human race.
People from all around the world need to take a stand a citizen’s movement using the NEW BEADY EYE HASHTAG: #movebeyonditwiththebeadyeye
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Like me today, many of us are being constantly bombarded by facts, figures and narratives that tell us our days on earth are numbered, that it’s our fault and that it’s also largely out of our control.
Our problem is that capitalism is designed to squeeze every last cent out of this planet until there is nothing left. We can either fool ourselves about that until it kills us, or we can change it.
Like many horror stories, this one features a main character full of futile determination to maintain a sense of normalcy even as the ominous signs of doom become ever more impossible to ignore.
We can chuckle knowing that the monster is going to come for our designated protectors.
We stop chuckling knowing that it’s coming for all of us next.
Homo sapiens rose above the lesser animals thanks to our ability to wield logic and reason, yet we have somehow gotten ourselves to a place where the knowledge of what is driving all these wildfires and floods is not enough to enable us to do anything meaningful to stop it.
As overwhelming and omnipresent as the climate crisis is, it is not the core issue.
The core issue is capitalism.
Capitalism’s unfettered pursuit of economic growth is what caused climate change, and capitalism’s inability to reckon with externalities – the economic term for a cost that falls onto third parties – is what is preventing us from solving climate change.
It is easy to imagine that a real live existential threat to our way of life would prompt any society to assume war footing and marshal everything it has to fight for survival. Unfortunately, this response only takes hold in actual war situations, where the threat is “other people that we can shoot and kill in glorious fashion”.
When the threat comes not from enemy people, but from our own nature, we find it much harder to rise to the occasion.
Where is the glory in recognizing the folly of our own greed and profligacy? Leaders are not elected on such things. We want leaders who will give us more, leading us ever onwards, upwards and into the grave.
The G20 is a perfect model of our collective failure to build institutions capable of coping with deep, long-term, existential problems that cannot be solved by building more weapons.
On the one hand, the head of the United Nations says that there is no way for the world to meet its 1.5C warming goal without the leadership of the G20 that claims to be bailing out humanity’s sinking ship with one hand while contributing billons of tons of carbon to the atmosphere by subsidising in the past five years $3.3tn to fossil fuel production and consumption.
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It is not good to be too pessimistic on climate change, because we must maintain the belief that we can win this battle if we are to have any hope at all. That said, it sure does seem like we’re screwed.
We’re being led to believe that the society we’ve built has to ‘collapse’ if we’re to save the world.
We’re presented with a binary choice — save the planet and live a miserable existence, or accept that some populations (plant, animal, human) will have to act as collateral damage to ensure a quality of life that vaguely resembles our current one.
This whole thing of it being ‘a trade-off’ or ‘tough choices’ is based on our current lifestyle being awesome and the future being a kind of worthy ascetic hardship.
The message is that all the things you rely on to keep us safe are no longer part of a viable future fit for everyone. The sense is that when these things disappear, life will be unbearable. That we’re going to turn on each other
.It’s almost like our lives are being engineered this way.
Cuts to benefits, dismantling of free healthcare, with Government openly allowing the majority of wealth to be passed on to those who are already most wealthy.
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We haven’t got a hope of addressing complex problems or creating a future fit for everyone.
Given the challenge we’re facing — one that’s complex, systemic and long-term, if we carry on acting from this place we’re going to really screw it up.
Climate change and the destruction of our ecosystems seem to be the result of persistent, rampant over-consumption. This is because our modern society is a consumer society.
It’s based on one simple idea: that consuming will meet your needs.
Others things we think are harmless serve to numb us: Netflix boxsets, smartphones, profit seeking algorithms, masquerade as the answer, but they are really just part of the same system — insurance policies, private healthcare and the multi-billion dollar ‘wellness’ industry.
New industries pop up to give us what we want without the guilt — sustainably sourced, vegan, fair-trade — but even aside from the minefield that is working out whether it’s really ‘sustainable’, it’s still built on the same system. A system built on a disconnection from your needs, that can never leave you satisfied with who you are and the world around you.
None of these things can or will ever meet our unmet needs for love, connection or trust in the world, so we continue consuming, throwing more things into the bottomless pit inside.
We seem to be more unhappy than ever before. More physically and mentally ill. More divided than ever. More stressed about our impact on the world.
Social media is a form of disconnection from ourselves that leads to the disconnection from each other that in turn leads to disconnection from our environment — which is the only thing that has enabled us to create the extractive, destructive system we have in place.
Given all this, ‘conscious consumerism’ and ‘green new deals’ will never offer the solution we need, if they are built on the fundamental idea of citizen is as consumer, working to earn, earning to spend, spending to consume etc.
I think the fundamental answer lies instead in rebuilding our lives around connection.
Recognise that if you would love other people to live in a certain way or see the world from a different perspective, this is only going to happen if others sense you’re not judging them to be wrong.
People are slowly but steadily finding that their real needs are met more consistently in self-awareness and relationship than they are in quick fix consumption.
We can’t all join a five-day protest and we’re not all ready to sit in a circle and talk about our feelings but that’s not what’s being asked of us.
Indeed, climate change itself is the ultimate negative externality: fossil-fuel companies and assorted polluting corporations and their investors get all the benefits, and the rest of the world pays the price.
Now the entire globe finds itself trapped in the gruesome logic of capitalism, where it is perfectly rational for the rich to continue doing something that is destroying the earth, as long as the profits they reap will allow them to insulate themselves from the consequences.
The path we are on, still, is not one that leads to a happy ending.
Rather, it is one that leads to the last billionaire standing on dry land blasting off in his private rocket as the rest of us drown in rising seas.
We talk about tipping points when it comes to the climate, but the real tipping point has long passed.
Its called inequality.
A strict definition of capitalism is a society where capital is privately owned, and workers are paid wages by private firms. Essentially it is a society with minimal government intervention and resources are distributed according to the outcome of free markets.
A looser definition of capitalism is a situation where business is left to the free market, but the government intervene in many areas of the economy like business regulation, health care and education.
In practice, using this definition of capitalism – most modern economies are essentially capitalist because it is the free market that dominates in the production and distribution of scarce resources.
Therefore, you can say the potential of reward makes inequality an essential ingredient of capitalism.
Therefore, capitalists with access to private property can ‘exploit’ their monopoly power to make a much higher profit than other people in society. Therefore those who inherit capital can enjoy high income even without any effort.
To redress some of the inequalities of capitalist society.
Regulate monopoly power, provide free education, so everyone has access to education and equality of opportunity.
Capitalism is unconcerned about equity. It is argued that inequality is essential to encourage innovation and economic development.
Socialism is concerned with redistributing resources from the rich to the poor. This is to ensure everyone has both equal opportunities and in some forms of socialism – equal outcomes.
Aspects of Democratic socialism
Advocates nationalisation of key industries (often the natural monopolies, like electricity, water)
Prices set by the market mechanism, except public goods, such as health and education.
Provision of a welfare state to provide income redistribution
Support for trade unions in wage bargaining
Use of minimum wages and universal income to raise low-income wages
Progressive tax and provision of public services. For example, marginal income tax rates of 70%. Tax on wealth.
There is no reason thatDemocratic socialism can not operate in a Capital society that is disappearing into the world of Profit seeking algorithms.
For anyone still unsure that big, important things are now broken, several new titles paint a convincing portrait of grossly unsustainable inequality, corrupt political processes, and a looming crisis—much of it stemming from a financial system that for 40 years or so has prioritized short-term profit over all else and systematically removed any checks on its own worst impulses in pursuit of that goal.
The single most important step is re-empowering governments, to start putting out the inferno.
All Human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Some things we can mitigate, some we can’t. Some things we can adapt to, some we cannot.
The question of how (or whether) we respond to climate change ultimately is a matter for policymakers to decide, but politics cannot (and should not) be separated from good science. And so on, and so on. We’ve heard them all.
As CLIMATE CHANGE impacts grow in frequency and severity, they will—and in many cases already have—create crises for people and nature around the world. If unchecked, these impacts will spread and worsen with more animal extinction and biodiversity loss, water shortages, and displaced communities.
Climate change is one of the most contentious issues facing society today.
Over the past several decades, we have seen not only increasing environmental degradation, but also the erosion of the concepts of the public good and collective responsibility to preserve nature.
In embracing the monetary valuation of nature as a strategy for mobilizing support for environmental conservation, environmentalists are resigning themselves to a political status quo that can only comprehend value in terms of money and markets.
By viewing ecosystems and their services through a pecuniary lens, monetization profoundly changes our relationship with nature, and, if taken to the point of commodification, can subject the fragility of nature’s balance to the destructive logic and volatility of markets.
Even though the trend toward the privatization of public goods has been pervasive over the past decades, we should not acquiesce so easily in allowing the privatization of the most basic public good of all—nature itself.
We must meet the grave environmental challenges of the twenty-first century with boldness and prudence, using the precautionary principle, along with the principles of fairness and democracy, to set boundaries that human action must not transgress.
Some argue that monetization, by revealing the economic contribution of nature and its services, can heighten public awareness and bolster conservation efforts. Others go beyond such broad conceptual calculations and seek to establish tradable prices for ecosystem services, claiming that markets can achieve what politics has not. Such an approach collapses nature’s complex functions into a set of commodities stripped from their social, cultural, and ecological context.
Although the path from valuation to commodification is not inevitable, it is indeed a slippery slope.
Do nature’s services need a monetary value?
Do conservation policy need an economic motive to get sufficient attention from policymakers and the public?
One approach seeks to monetize the value of nature simply in order to reveal its immense economic contribution to society.
Monetization is only meaningful and effective if there are markets to set prices for the ecosystem services in question. Markets for such commodified ecosystem services, they argue, can protect conservation policy from the vagaries of political will. Roll back bureaucratic red tape, and let the market work its magic to save nature.
The line between valuation and commodification, although clear in theory, becomes blurred in practice.
The monetization of any resource can cause long term problems for people.
To be sure, valuation alone does not inevitably entail the risks to the preservation of nature intrinsic to commodification. Nevertheless, it changes how we see and relate to nature and can inadvertently pave the way for the privatization of ecosystem services that the advocates of valuation often oppose.
Environmentalists, business leaders, and policymakers have all sought to make environmental protection an economic rather than just a political issue. The introduction of “no net loss” policies, which allow economic development to proceed as long as the net acreage of a specific type of ecosystem is maintained, has effected a paradigm shift in environmental policymaking. However, offsetting ignores how unique and interconnected biodiversity is, and it overlooks the importance of nature for local communities and the ways they suffer when their ecosystems are damaged. Land-use policies based on whether a company can pay for an offset, and not on what local communities and humanity need to survive, undermine basic rights and democratic principles
National economic accounts such as GDP remain blind to the services of nature. Such accounts likewise fail to distinguish between constructive and destructive economic activity with respect to human and ecological well-being. Needless to say, a deeper understanding and greater awareness of the relationship of society to nature is always welcome, but the rigor and usefulness of GDP-level information remains questionable.
Delineating an individual ecosystem from the complex fabric of nature poses numerous significant challenges. For example, the provision of oxygen for humans and animals to breathe is an ecosystem service of global scale.
But how do we value the contribution of individual sub-systems like a single forest to this global service?
We could all still breathe if one forest is cut down, but not if all forests were cut down.
Embarking upon the path of valuation also changes the way we see and understand nature.
The value of the whole ecosystem to society is more than the sum of its monetized parts:
Reducing its value to mere monetary terms, even if it were technically practical, strips away its cultural and spiritual value. A bad policy can be replaced, but the holistic functions of nature cannot.
Through disaggregation, each service can be rendered into a discrete monetizable “package” so that it can have its own market and its own price. Such an approach tilts policymaking in favour of the interests of the economically powerful. The least powerful actors—often local communities, indigenous peoples, women, small-scale farmers, etc.—get pushed to the margins, their voices ignored.
In order to prevent monetization from slipping into commodification, we must revisit one of the hallowed principles of environmental policy: the precautionary principle. It states that when an action or policy could pose a substantial risk to the environment, a very high burden of justification should fall on those seeking to take such an action. Like the classical mantra of medical ethics, the precautionary principle insists upon first doing no harm.
What if one of those billionaires manipulates the market by withholding or restricting the free flow of water?
71% of Earth’s surface is water.
There are 326 million trillion gallons of it on and in the planet. 96.5% of the water is ocean water, and just 3.5% is fresh water. Of that 3%, 69% of that water is locked up in glaciers. Another 30% of that freshwater is underground and usually requires costly extraction. That leaves 114 million billion gallons of readily accessible freshwater, not necessarily drinkable water, but water nonetheless. That sounds like enough, but it represents just 1% of the Earth’s water for every man, woman, child, and animal on the planet. That 1% of the water has to also serve every agricultural and industrial need on the planet. In most cases, it also needs to be filtered and treated before it is safely consumable.
So, though there is plenty of water on the planet, not very much of it is drinkable. Not very much of it is accessible, and the distribution methods are easily manipulated, legislated, and monetized. That’s never good for the common man. Nestle Water, for instance, extracted 36 million gallons of water from a national forest in California in 2015 to sell as bottled water, even as Californians were ordered to cut their water use because of a historic drought in the state.
Farmers, hedge funds, and municipalities alike can now hedge against — or bet on — future water.
While that may seem innocuous enough, the cost disparity probably gets passed on to the cities and individual consumers. It’s easy to imagine how many ways the monetization of water as a commodity is a dangerous first step in government and corporate overreach and intrusion. Mega-banks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are consolidating their control over water.
Wealthy tycoons such as former President George H.W. Bush and his family, Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, Philippines’ Manuel V. Pangilinan, and others are also buying thousands of acres of land with aquifers, lakes, water rights, water utilities, and shares in water engineering and technology companies all over the world.
Complicit governments are legislating your rights to access and accumulate Earth’s free-flowing resources. It falls from the sky onto your property, but it is owned by someone else the minute it touches the Earth.
Water rights are conveyed as real property interests using the same formalities as real estate, but in most cases, everyone is tapped into the same source. If fracking, mining, or industrial operations pollute that source, they spoil it for everyone. So, merely having access to a water source is not enough.
The fact is that water is being restricted, legislated, and monetized more every year, and the rich are grabbing up the rights as fast as they can.
During periods of drought, when water levels are already low, it is easy to imagine how one person’s control over a large water area can lead to huge profits. This is why the super-wealthy are snapping up water, water contracts, water rights, and governments letting them do so all over the world. Two billion people now live in nations plagued by water problems, and almost two-thirds of the world could face water shortages in just four years. Even on a planet covered and steeped with water, water is a resource. As a resource, it can be monetized and controlled, and you could be denied or deprived of access to it.
Whatever you choose to call it, the most important thing is that we act to stop it.
If it is not the capitalization and exploitation of the resources of our planet with climate change will continue.
I can assure you, the super-wealthy are not buying up the water around the planet for altruistic purposes. They are doing so because they see a profit from it. Freshwater first then fresh air.
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CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOW A PRODUCT AND NET ZERO A SLOGAN.
There is now no stopping sea levels rising. A two meter rise would displace more than 2% of the world’s population and cut world food production/ supply by 25%. The rate of carbon emissions are the highest they’ve been in 66 million years and the amount of warming in the coming decades is expected to be 250 times greater than the average warming during the past century.
The rate of ocean acidification is the highest it has been in 300 million years!
Warming surface waters may be contributing to slowing ocean currents.
The warming climate is contributing to rising populations of insect / pests.
To mitigate the effects of climate change is going to cost quadrillions.
We are on course to match the worst extinction of earth species both on land and in the oceans.
We at a point where money will not suffice to make a difference.
There’s no consensus on global warming.
Many species are approaching—or have already reached—the limit of where they can go to find hospitable climates. In the polar regions, animals like polar bears that live on polar ice are now struggling to survive as that ice melts.
From straining agricultural systems to making regions less habitable, climate change is affecting people everywhere.
Climate change also exacerbates the threat of human-caused conflict resulting from a scarcity of resources like food and water that are less reliable as growing seasons change and seasons become less predictable. Around the globe, many of the poorest nations are being impacted first and most severely by climate change, even though they have contributed far less to the increase in carbon emissions that has caused the warming in the first place.
Higher temperatures are affecting the length of seasons and in some places, are already crossing safe levels for ecosystems and humans.
Now more than ever in order to enable a just transition to a low-carbon economy, gender and equality, human rights, and food security, with links to climate change we must use the power of the law to fight those who would harm our communities, our climate, and the natural world we value so deeply.
Recently, many countries have focused on mainstreaming net zero emissions targets: 138 states have now made a net zero pledge.
However, targets in all climate-related national laws and policies are currently far from the pledges made in NDCs (Simply put, an NDC, or Nationally Determined Contribution, is a climate action plan to cut emissions and adapt to climate impacts) and from enabling global warming to be limited to below 2 °C.
For NDCs to work, they need to be widely understood and used by businesses, civil society, academia and ordinary citizens. Each has roles to play, which is why many governments invite different constituencies to take part in defining NDC priorities.
For many reasons, including a lack of adequate finance, capacity and, in some cases, insufficient political commitment combined with the pandemic-related economic downturn is expected to constrain implementation.
For developing countries, moving forward depends on developed countries realizing their commitment to provide $100 billion in climate finance to developing countries. Dedicating half of this amount to adaptation, would help close significant financing shortfalls for vital measures to protect lives and livelihoods. Rapid policy developments are required to achieve this goal.
Climate change legislation is less a politically partisan issue than is commonly assumed:
Everyone is a climate actor and can be part of the change that needs to happen.
If we can slow or stop deforestation and manage natural land so that it is healthy, we could achieve up to one third of the emission reductions needed by 2030 to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C (3.6°C).
We must as a planet commit ourselves to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The truth, however, is that even if we do successfully reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, we will still have to address harmful climate impacts, and so the solution to climate change must also include measures to adapt to the impacts of global warming.
We need to increase renewable energy at least nine-fold from where it is today. This cannot be achieved without a major shift to renewable energy.
There is not a hard and fast deadline on climate action vs. inaction. There is no definitive line of demarcation that we can protect against; instead it is a matter of minimizing the effects of climate change.
We need to begin reducing carbon emissions RIGHT NOW to give our planet and our population the future that is least impacted.
The low carbon economy that we need to create will also give us cleaner air, better energy choices, new jobs and may even save us money. Likewise, many of the natural solutions that we need to adapt to even today’s climate change impacts benefit all of us: cleaner air and water, more natural recreation opportunities and jobs.
Nature, like climate, may be approaching irreversible tipping points where changes push systems into completely new states, even as more than half the global GDP depends on the planet’s natural systems.
For climate, the world has a clear net zero emissions goal.
But what’s the goal for nature? It hardly takes a genius to see things aren’t going well in the world or for our civilization.
When we actually look at the state of our civilization — in factual, empirical terms — the results are…well, you’ll be able to judge for yourself in just a moment.
Progress has flatlined and ground to a halt.
Living standards are declining in 90% of countries.
Each generation now does worse than the one before it,
Democracy’s in steep decline around the globe
The points above may in truth be small fry, compared to this one.
We are running out of our most basic, critical, fundamental resources.
People are more pessimistic now than at any point during the last century.
Anxiety, rage, anger, and despair are the defining sentiments of now — along with maybe the numbness of endlessly scrolling some algorithmically generated infotainment feed.
I could go on. But it’s hardly necessary. All the above are facts. They aren’t opinions, speculations, or even conclusions. They’re empirical truths about our civilization.
Each of the points above is its own crisis, and each one of them would be bad enough for any age, challenging, threatening, arduous enough.
But all of them, together, at once? That’s something new. They are painting a caricature without really thinking about the state of life as it is now.
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” — Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time
The stakes facing our generation are much more than they first seem, because our actions might have the potential to bring about a far better world, or cut it short.
The shifting meaning of “capitalism,” and how societies hide their downside with culture.
We’re unclear on what “capitalism” is supposed to be.
From the proletarians, nothing is to be feared.
Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
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Rather than us asking questions of this world, this world asks questions of us.
We need to listen to the world in new ways and hear the fundamental questions that it askes us.
WITH CLIMATE CHANGE – WARS – AI – INEQULITY. – UNITED NATIONS
ALL AT THIS VERY M0MENT ARE ASKING: DO WE WISH TO CONTINUE TO EXIST?
Might it be, then, that we have trouble imagining the end of capitalism because we think capitalism is great, and we’d fear that any alternative would be worse?
It is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life.
Have we been indoctrinated so that we subscribe to an ideology or a myth of capitalism?
All are questing, just what are our values.
We have an easier time imagining an apocalyptic death of the planet than capitalism being surpassed by a superior economic system, promoting equality.
Do we trust in capitalism on what are effectively theological grounds, so that the specious neoliberal arguments in capitalism’s favour are so many superfluous rationalizations?
Will AI Have a Soul? And does it even matter? Everybody uses the internet, but nobody trusts it.
The recent state of the world certainly hasn’t helped.
Even if capitalism is justifiable, it doesn’t follow that those who benefit from that system should be unable even to imagine a better kind of economy.
Neoliberals will say that we can imagine an alternative to capitalism, after all, namely the communist one that failed in the Soviet Union. But that, too, is a red herring since the question is whether we can imagine improvements to capitalism, not worse economies.
Likely, you find your smartphone handy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t imagine improvements to it. You’d prefer to keep your phone, of course, and you may even be addicted to social media. But science fiction is replete with re-imagined technologies. For instance, we could miniaturize smartphones and hardwire them into the brain.
Science doesn’t demonstrate that the quantityof life matters more than its quality, nor can science show which qualities of life should matter more than others.
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How do I get people to do what I want them to do?
Unfortunately there are collective forms of self-deception.
Individuals, of course, can prevent themselves from reckoning with unwanted truths, in that they can underestimate obstacles, confabulate, procrastinate, and so on, unable to realize the meaning of the present moment.
“You can get everything in life that you want if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”
Give and you will receive.
Maybe there are social mechanisms that operate in an analogous fashion, protecting whole populations by steering them towards the party line. The analogue of the individual ego, or of the conscious self, might be the upper class that dictates mass media narratives, such as by instilling neoliberal values via Ivy League education, as Thomas Frank explains.
Societies have worldviews called “cultures,” along with institutions that enforce their biases.
Once large, sedentary societies emerged in history, so too did mechanisms for managing mass opinion. Religion was one such device, but we can speak more neutrally about “ideologies,” as Karl Marx did, to account for how we may protect capitalism, too, with myths and collective fallacies.
If you’re looking for signs of such capitalist myths, have a look at advertising, at how thousands of misleading slogans and manipulative, hyperbolic messages stream through everyone’s consciousness on a daily basis.
In the boom-and-bust cycle in which government spending alone can stabilize.
Capitalism is in runaway mode and must be curtailed.
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The recent pandemic, natural disasters, wars, all shine a light on the inequality that exist and have existed since time immortal.
If we want a world worth living in and on, we must make profit contribute to PROTECTING all the essential values of life, not the pockets of the few.
Whether it’s turning promises on climate change into action, rebuilding trust in the financial system, or connecting the world to the internet.
OUR COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY MUST BE TO REPAIRING THE DAMAGE OF CENTURIES OF GREED.
To achieve these objectives we will need to address a host of issues, with more than common sense but with trillions and trillions pumped into removing and protecting before the planet becomes uninhabitable.
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The Earth’s average land temperature has warmed nearly 1°C in the past 50 years as a result of human activity, global greenhouse gas emissions have grown by nearly 80% since 1970, and atmospheric concentrations of the major greenhouse gases are at their highest level in 800,000 years. We’re already seeing and feeling the impacts of climate change with weather events such as droughts and storms becoming more frequent and intense, and changing rainfall patterns.
By 2050, the world must feed 9 billion people. Yet the demand for food will be 60% greater than it is today. Despite huge gains in global economic output, there is evidence that our current social, political and economic systems are exacerbating inequalities, rather than reducing them. Rising income inequality is the cause of economic and social ills, ranging from low consumption to social and political unrest, and is damaging to our future well-being. More than 61 million jobs have been lost since the start of the global economic crisis in 2008, leaving more than 200 million people unemployed globally.
To function efficiently, the system needs to re-establish trust.
The internet is changing the way we live, work, produce and consume. With such extensive reach, digital technologies cannot help but disrupt many of our existing models of business and government. We are entering the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a technological transformation driven by a ubiquitous and mobile internet. The challenge is to manage this seismic change in a way that promotes the long-term health and stability of the internet. Within the next decade, it is expected that more than a trillion sensors will be connected to the internet.
By 2025, 10% of people are expected to be wearing clothes connected to the internet and the first implantable mobile phone is expected to be sold.
Equality between men and women in all aspects of life, from access to health and education to political power and earning potential, is fundamental to whether and how societies thrive.
The growth of the digital economy, the rise of the service sector and the spread of international production networks have all been game-changers for international trade. Despite fundamental changes in the way business is done across borders, international regulations and agreements have not evolved at the same speed. In addition, negotiations to reach a new global trade agreement have stalled. There is a pressing need to reform the global trade framework.
Investing for the long term is vital for economic growth and social well-being, serious challenges to global health remain.
The number of people on the planet is set to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 with 2 billion aged over 60. To cope with this huge demographic shift and build a global healthcare system that is fit for the future, the world needs to address these challenges now.
In short, the most pressing problems are those where people can have the greatest impact by working on them.
As we explained in the previous article, this means problems that are not only big, but also neglected and solvable. The more neglected and solvable, the further extra effort will go. And this means they’re not the problems that first come to mind.
First, future generations matter, but they can’t vote, they can’t buy things, and they can’t stand up for their interests. This means our system neglects them. You can see this in the global failure to come to an international agreement to tackle climate change that actually works..
We can’t so easily visualise suffering that will happen in the future. Future generations rely on our goodwill, and even that is hard to muster.
We all know where the Solutions are to be found – in how wealth is distributed.
We should go beyond the focus on reducing the global poverty rate to below 3% and strive to ensure that all countries and all people can share in the benefits of economic development. Nearly half of the world’s population currently lives in poverty. 2/3 of the population in low-income countries is under 25 years old.
The world is facing multiple converging crises — growing food insecurity, rising fuel prices, economic instability, and the climate crisis — and they are all hitting poor countries the hardest. With 349 million people across 79 countries facing acute food insecurity, this is the worst food crisis in decades. While COVID-19, climate change, and conflict have been major drivers, political action has also fallen short.
Poverty entails more than the lack of income and productive resources to ensure sustainable livelihoods. Its manifestations include hunger and malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, social discrimination and exclusion, as well as the lack of participation in decision-making.
And we still wonder why the world we live in is going down the tube.
It is quite obvious that there is no point in been rich without giving – the power to solve some of the most pressing global challenges is not to be found in the words of the United Nations Declaration to end poverty in all its forms everywhere is Goal 1 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Why?
Because it has to beg for funds to implement any of its aspirations.
What is needed is a preputial Fund to create a World Aid system with clout.
HERE IS HOW THIS CAN BE ACHIVED.
We now live in a world driven by technology – Apps for this and Apps that – Smartphone – Algorithms running world stock market, plundering everything for the sake of profit.
Why not introduce a World Aid commission algorithm to collect 0.05% on all activities that produce profit for profit sake.
This funding could be delivered by non repayable grants prioritising adaptation re climate change, vetted projects to reduce poverty, food sustainability, environment protection, etc ( Unlike The International Monetary Fund (IMF) the lender of last resort.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The world relative to its human population is quite large. It is 123 billion acres in size of which 37 billion acres is land, about 4 acres for ever man woman and child.
However to day the world is dominated by corporations that follow the logic of finance capital – the logic of money.
The only thing one can be sure of is that in today’s societies, is that wealth is concentrated.
“It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when one in 10 people survive on less than $2 a day…. Inequality is trapping hundreds of millions in poverty; it is fracturing our societies and undermining democracy.”
Bill Gates
Amancio Ortega (Spanish founder of Inditex)
Warren Buffett
Carlos Slim (Mexican businessman)
Jeff Bezos
Mark Zuckerberg
Larry Ellison
Michael Bloomberg
These 8 Men Control Half the Wealth on Earth.
They hold the equivalent of the wealth of 3.6 billion people.
Six of the eight individuals are American, and four of the eight (half the list) come from the American tech community — Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Ellison. It’s also interesting to consider that four of the arguably most powerful people on the planet weren’t elected, and some of them work actively to fight poverty and injustice. Again, there is that question of perspective.
The problem is that they are deeply interconnected but at the end of the day, this is about something larger than a few wealthy individuals.
With the state of the world we live on ( as we are becoming digitized citizens, driven by technology in the hands of the few.) one could not be blamed for feeling despair because of our inability to shake off the effects of the Industrial Revolution.
If people don’t have a real living wage, they can’t build wealth. If they spend their lives in debt because of a shortage of affordable health care, they can’t build wealth. If they struggle just to get a job in the first place due to discrimination, they can’t build wealth. Wealth for all can only happen when we engage our collective political and social will to distribute it fairly. Unless the growing gap between rich and poor is addressed, the world can and should expect more political unrest, rage, and the kind of backlash many say led to events like Brexit and Trump’s election.
By now must of us know that the world has passed through different ages to get to our digital world, the information economy, or cryptocurrencies.
It has been said that the Industrial Revolution was the most profound revolution in human history, because of its sweeping impact on people’s daily lives but hidden behind its benign name is a history soaked in the ingredients that have the world in the mess it is now in (Imperialism, Greed, Wars, Slavery, Capitalism, Profit, Mass production of goods, Workhouses of the poor, Consumerism, Inequality, the rise of cities, POLLUTION AND DESTRUCTION OF ENVIRONMENT, the rise in technology, the rise of socialism, key inventions and innovations that served to shape virtually every existing sector of human activity along industrial lines, with many new industries. The invention of the Internet in 1969.
Western post-war world order will not continue forever, because system theory states that when a system, or in our case the interconnected elements of life, becomes stressed or unstable it is susceptible to disruption and sometimes momentous change.
That’s where we are right now.
So what do you mean by world?
Most of the time, things are more complicated than they seem initially. All of our norms have been blown up, some have catapulted ahead a dozen years, and others have regressed.
Truth, reality, facts, science and many norms we take for granted are undergoing transformation ad and in theory, governments have the last say. But what if companies/organizations are more powerful than governments?
The toxic polarization we’ve endured is now further dividing into alternate realities where citizens consume different information, see different “facts” and passionately hold opposite opinions. The truth doesn’t matter.
Fundamental values that define every person, family and community regardless of their belief system are under attack from data and profit seeking algorithms.
How are we responding? Go back to our over-consumptive ways?
From the wreckage of 2020 we are a changed society, aware of the waste of fast fashion, committed to supporting local businesses, and soothed by the beauty of the natural world.
Sacrifice defined earlier generations, but not our current generation.
The pandemic has been our era’s true test of character, while authenticity and compassion are in the main social media like clicks. As much as everyone likes to complain about technology, imagine what the pandemic would have been like without the internet, apps, Wi-Fi, streaming, laptops and mobile phones. With no other choice, tech adoption blasted off, as consumers embraced it at levels predicted for five or ten years in the future. Out of all that change, ecommerce has to be the biggest and fastest consumer shift ever, as most of the world logged on to get what they needed.
Amazon emerges from 2020 as an even larger entrepreneur-swallowing black hole that it was before.
We’ve become accustomed to the pace of tech innovation moving society along faster and faster, whether a fun distraction or a necessary evil, people have integrated new devices, applications, and activities into daily life raising the bar on every level.
Reckoning still awaits in realms of policing, environmental reform and justice, racial justice, wealth, income, workplace inequality, and democracy but nothing prepared us for use of Nuclear weapons.
With more human made material than living biomass exists on the planet, we also have physical evidence of another tipping point the Climate.
Will we ever come together?
Can you conceive of something of which you’ve had no prior experience? I cannot imagine any human being capable of doing so. This is a key to how we understand one another, because it exemplifies our reliance upon a pre-existing stimulus for thought.
Abstract concepts such as ‘love’ seem to exist in the entities which harbour them, as they are in many ways incommunicable through experience of the physical world, and are transferable only through language. “
Every being cries out silently to be read differently.
Reconciling with change will take more time for some and less for others but change there has to be. Our problem is how to achieve it without destroying the gift of being alive.
If ever 2023 is the year if a friend asks for help give it.
So here is a proposition.
Why not wage a CPS WAR ( Copy Paste Send) on those who are in power to take Action.
We can become part of a solution, not add to a problem, by posting intentionally on social media, transforming it from an empty distraction to a simple living tool. Being intentional with your posting and your consumption goes a long way to ensuring that social media is a part of your life, not the whole of your life. Social media doesn’t have to be addictive brain-numbing fodder.
As always with this simple living lark, it all boils down to intentionality.
So here is an example where an CPS WAR campaign could make a difference.
TAKE THE COST OF LIVING:
Orange the French Telephone / Internet streaming / monopoly, supplies Live boxes ( That could not cost more than 100 euros to make.)
They charge 29.99 euros rental (a month) for the use of the box, for life.
The current population of France is 65,632,612 as of Thursday, December 29, 2022.
If half the population have a live box ( 30,000,0000) X by 30 = 900,000,000 Euros a month.
I most be missing some thing here. 900,000, 000 a month to supply streaming / internet.
What ever about offering different services this is plain robbery TO BE PAYING 360 Euros a year for a box the cost around a 100 euros.
WHY NOT INSTIGATE AN CPS WAR ON ORANGE TO HAVE THIS CHARGE REMOVED. I.E. SEND THEIR HEAD OFFICES THOUSAND OF EMAILS, SACHERATING ITS OPERATIONS, TILL THEY AGREE TO REMOVE THIS COST.
It won’t save the world, but if did worked it might be the first step to empower technology to be used to benefit the silent without a voice.
Long ago, in the cave known as silence
Man lived in harmony:
song-less, muted, free
Only a hand-print on a wall
Then a distant human call
Would shatter that primal unity.
By day he’d pray to earth and sky
Heed the wisdom of the ancient trees
At night he’d dance ‘round moon and fire
Take solace in the infinite seas.
Gesture would mimic conversation
Silent ritual his only Lord
Collaboration, sweet simplicity
Love in the dormant vocal cord.
But the end came in the name of word
Sending echoes through that cave
Until man’s world became as thus
And the soul met a shrieking grave.
Man lost something upon that hour
Lost intuitive understanding
The human tongue tore man from man
When wordless truth succumbed to speaking.
Confusion, division, language, war
Born upon that single rasping roar
Until misunderstanding between one and all
Beleaguered man forevermore.
Bianca Laleh, Totnes, Devon
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. IS 2023 GOING TO BE THE YEAR THAT HUMANITY FINDS OUT THAT IT IS NOT THE DOMINANT FORCE OF CHANGE ON PLANET EARTH?
What can be achieved in this decade to put the world on a path to a more sustainable, more prosperous future for all of humanity?
Temptation is to say, that you may rest assured that it will be another year of unadulterated verbal dioramas diarrhoea.
With humanity waging war on nature the risks we are taking are astounding.
What did Earth look like from space in 2022?
It looked beautiful, it looked dangerous. It looked small and inconsequential, it looked incredible.
Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.
About 96% of all mammals by weight are now humans and our livestock, like cattle, sheep and pigs. Just 4% are wild mammals like elephants, buffalo or dolphins. Seventy-five percent of Earth’s ice-free land is directly altered as a result of human activity, with nearly 90% of terrestrial net primary production and 80% of global tree cover under direct human influence.
We have grossly simplified the biosphere, a system of interactions between lifeforms and Earth that has evolved over 3.8 billion years. As the pressure of human activities accelerates on Earth, so, too, does the hope that technologies such as artificial intelligence will be able to help us deal with dangerous climate and environmental change. That will only happen, however, if we act forcefully in ways that redirects the direction of technological change towards planetary stewardship and responsible innovation.
Rising greenhouse gas emissions means that “within the coming 50 years, one to 3 billion people are projected to experience living conditions that are outside of the climate conditions that have served civilizations well over the past 6,000 years.
In this decade we must bend the curves of greenhouse gas emissions and shocking biodiversity loss. This means transforming what we eat and how we farm it, among many other transformations.
Nature has now become for us a kind of glossy cardboard, digitized and virtualized, increasingly distant from our lives.
The recent Covid-19 global pandemic is an Anthropocene phenomena. It has been caused by our intertwined relationship with nature and our hyper-connectivity. ( We order Pizza by sending messages into space.)
However our actions are making the biosphere more fragile, less resilient and more prone to shocks than before.
Humans use the majority of natural geo-resources, like minerals, rocks, soil and water.
Two of the biggest barriers are unsustainable levels of inequality and technology that undermines societal goals.
Inequality and environmental challenges are deeply linked. Reducing inequality will increase trust within societies.
It is time to flick the “green switch. We have a chance to not simply reset the world economy but to transform it.
It is time to integrate the goal of carbon neutrality into all economic and fiscal policies and decisions. And to make climate-related financial risk disclosures mandatory.
It is time to transform humankind’s relationship with the natural world – and with each other. And we must do so together.
It’s is time to get off your smart phone and start to demand transparency of Algorithms that are plundering the world for profit. .
The state of the planet is much worse than most people understand and that humans face a grim.
Because as of yet there is no political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action
The problem is compounded by ignorance and short-term self-interest, with the pursuit of wealth and political interests stymying the action that is crucial for survival.
Most economies operate on the basis that counteraction now is too costly to be politically palatable. Combined with disinformation campaigns to protect short-term profits it is doubtful that the scale of changes we need will be made in time.
We need to be candid, accurate, and honest if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face in creating a sustainable future.
Without political will backed by tangible action that scales to the enormity of the problems facing us, the added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of the Earth’s life-support system upon which we all depend.
Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals, and catastrophe will surely follow.
So the Beady Eye wishes all a Happy New Year with the near certainty that the abovementioned problems will worsen over the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries to come, if we dont now get our fingers out of where the sun does not shine.
No one has a right to pollute the air or the water, which are the common inheritance of all.
We have not inherited the Earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children.
The time has come to re-educate to nature and contact with it as a lever to ensure collective well-being, physical and mental; to restore beauty, kindness, ecosystem thinking, emotional intelligence and a formation of values, heritage inherited from the wisdom of the past but negligently neglected.
After all, this is what ecology is all about: looking at reality as it is, understanding its connections, accepting its complexity, and striving for harmony between all parts.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The next general election is due, in January 2025 is Labour’s to lose.
Nowadays both Labour and Conservative claim to represent people from the whole of society but essentially the base difference between either party is philosophical, which is in view of the state of the country, not to mention the world, pure unadulterated – trickle down, trickle up foodbanks, delusional bullocks.
With problems from health to education, economic growth, its time to change the name of the Party to the SP Party – Self-help.
Long before the Pandemic exposed what is wrong with the country, now exacerbated by the war in the Ukraine with resulting inflation (due to the supply chain and cost of energy) the Tory party had more power than for a quarter of a century – power to hurt the families, communities and public services which they achieved with the trauma of Brexit that has without doubt contributed to a blindness to the misfortunes of others and the Labour Party.
Britain is now in a recession and set to lose more working days to strikes in 2023 than in any year since the 1980s.
If Labour MPs now put their troubled past behind them, run a non Presidential campaign, by building a campaign on what’s right for the country.
With the right set of policies to create a clear alternative and inspire the British public that they could governed differently you would win the forthcoming election.
How could this be achieved?
The state should be benevolent and caring for the neediest, but what if instead of relying on giving benefits you armed the population to look after its self.
Instead of a living wage Labour introduced (over a period of ten years) a living income.
That would achieve leavening up, drive growth and remove central state governance, enabling collective action and responsibility with individual liberty and responsibility.
Equality of outcome’s.
Young voters are brought up to use multiple sources of digital news and social media, the Google generation is able to use to internet to think critically, check facts and make up their own mind.
There is one thing that is in front of there minds and all countries Climate Change. The need to turn to generating green energy.
Unlike many land locked countries England is an Island surrounded by ebbing and incoming tides.
The labour party needs to fully embrace green energy as a alternative to radioactive waste,,
Tide technology at half the cost of nuclear power already exist. Millions of jobs await your creation to achieve zero emissions.
Wake up Labour before its to late.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Most of the world’s governments agree by now that global warming poses a serious threat to the future well-being of all people and they agree that it is desirable to reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by lowering our emissions of CO2.
But it would appear that we have given up with the emphases how moving to Adaptation. Another words prepare for the consequences rather then trying to prevent them. The problem isn’t how to convert the world but it remains and will remain just who will pay for the conversion to keep global temperature rise below 2C.
( About 20 billion tonnes of CO2 would need to be removed from the atmosphere every year by 2100.)
Most of the world ( at least 84% now have some sort of adaptation plan but there is plenty of variation across these plans.
The Disparity between the money needed to meet an adaptation targets and the money actually available is laudable as the funds needed will not keep up as the impact of climate intensify and most of this kind of finance is in the form of loans trapping poorer countries in long cycles of debt.
A simple “carbon tax” approach does not guarantee any particular total emissions amount and if a country wanted to use such a tax to meet specific goals, the tax would have to be adjusted frequently, which businesses would have a hard time dealing with (they like predictability in things like taxes).
Electrical cars won’t do it because it take 80,000 miles for the carbon of a new EV to balance out with a new gasoline car.
Planting billion of trees won’t do it in time.
Climate change is not an American, a Chinese, an Oil industry, problem it is a species thriving problem.
What’s is needed out of the forthcoming COP Summit in Egypt is to stop tearing each other apart and instead fund adaptation to the changes we are now all facing.
What we will get is two weeks of the usual verbal without any world financial commitment’s
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We could regulate our way to zero carbon emissions, but this will not solve the problem because once China comes out of Covid lockdown its admission will dwarf any regulations.
What is needed (as I have said in many previous post) is to create a perpetual non begging world fund
So why not ask Sport the biggest industry (with its associated to the gambling Industry and media Sponsorship) to give a helping hand.
Sport is not just about participation. It is also part of the commercial world, managed and marketed to make money. Sponsorship and the media are now significant influences on sport.
With the advent and overwhelming popularity of social media—including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram—Sky Sports apps.
So what could sport do?
One only has to look at the carbon emissions generated by the forthcoming World Football Cup.
The World Cup is very important and it is bound to have a carbon footprint.
There will be a direct human cost to this tournament. This is a huge amount of emissions for one sporting event.
FIFA says the Qatar World Cup will have a footprint of 3.6 million tonnes of equivalent carbon waste it will be ten times this.
The offset scheme the World Cup has chosen doesn’t remove carbon from the atmosphere, so it’s a bogus term. It’s very misleading to call this a carbon neutral World Cup. They’re not even removing carbon to compensate.””
FIFA’s claim this is the greenest World Cup ever doesn’t make any sense.
The Tokyo Olympics also made a bold offset claim before the Games.
After confirming that Tokyo 2020 was carbon-negative.
(According to the report, the Games generated around 1.96 million tonnes of CO2e. This figure would have been around 2.76 million tonnes if domestic spectators were able to attend thanks to Covid. ) It’s an impressive feat, given that the event’s estimated carbon footprint—2.3 million metric tons of CO2—is equal to the annual emissions from about half a million cars. The highlighted of the Games was the fact that the athletes’ medals in Tokyo were made from metals extracted from recycled electronic and electrical devices.
Even setting aside the carbon footprint question, the Tokyo Games are representative of an overall declining level of sustainability in the Olympics over time. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has mandated that all Olympic Games from 2030 will need to be certified as carbon-neutral or carbon-negative.
This can only be achieve by stopping the Olympic circus and ask the world to build a permanent Olympic stadium in Greece where the games originated.
The circus of Formal One could also do the same by build a permanent racing track.
Indeed the great majority of world sporting events could take place in permanent position.
Of course the chances of this happing is zero.
We now have over two hundred countries attending the Cop27 conference which marks the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change A Reason for hope or doomed to disappoint?
As we once more witness countries across the world fail to meet climate commitments to keep global temperatures below a fateful 2 degrees Celsius, can this year’s COP27 in Egypt rise above the failures of the past — or is it destined to disappoint?
It’s a matter of defining what criteria will be used to measure the progress. Only 79.6 billion dollars’ worth of climate finance have been provided, far less than the 340 billion per year needed for adaptation by 2030, according to the UN.
With out a world Aid Fund COP conferences have served very little or no purpose at all other then helping prepare the ground for future conferences.
We all know that Climate change leads to population displacement, tensions over natural resources and challenges powerful interests,”
SPORT COULD AGREED TO PLACING A 0.005% COMMISSION, ON ALL GAMBLING, ON ALL PRIZE MONEY, ON ALL SPONSORSHIPS ON ALL MEDIIA AND SPONCERSHIPS DEALS, ON ALL TRANSFER FEES, ON ALL TICKETS TO WORLD EVENTS.
Without a world perpetual aid fund the alternative is war and power struggles at the international level.
Cop27 is now all about money: ( See previous post. How to create a perpetual World Aid Fund – fair and transparent)
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin
bobdillon33blog 