Thursday, September 27th, 2018
Jessica Glenza, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is how America is viewed by the former Secretary General of the United Nations. You may be sure he is not alone in these views, and the fact that he is willing to speak out this way publicly I think is very telling. Are you proud of this? I'm not.
Ban Ki-moon: ‘It’s not easy to understand why such a country like the United States, the most resourceful and richest country in the world, does not introduce universal health coverage.’
Credit: Ali Smith/Guardian
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — The former United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon has denounced the United States’ healthcare system as politically and morally wrong, and urged American leaders to enact publicly financed healthcare as a “human right”.
Ban made the comments in an exclusive interview with the Guardian in New York, as part of his work with The Elders, a group founded by Nelson Mandela to work on issues of global importance, including universal health coverage.
The US has the world’s most expensive health system, accounting for nearly one-fifth of American gross domestic product and costing more than $10,348 per American. The United Kingdom, by comparison, spends a little under 10% of GDP according to the latest available statistics, and healthcare is free at the point […]
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Wednesday, September 26th, 2018
Stephan A. Schwartz, Editor - Schwartzreport
Stephan: Things I have been talking about for decades involving climate change are now beginning to get serious mainstream media attention. It is starting to dawn on people who can see past their willful ignorance that we are now in a new era that is going to powerfully affect every aspect of human society. So today's edition of SR is devoted to the latest information I can find. Read and plan accordingly. You have been warned.
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Wednesday, September 26th, 2018
Oliver Milman, Environmental Reporter - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: All SR readers will be aware of my repeatedly comments about the coming internal migrations that climate change is going to create. Here is another take on the same issue. It's coming folks.
By the end of this century, sea level rises alone could displace 13m people. Many states will have to grapple with hordes of residents seeking dry ground. But, as one expert says, ‘No state is unaffected by this’ (emphasis added)
After her house flooded for the third year in a row, Elizabeth Boineau was ready to flee. She packed her possessions into dozens of boxes, tried not to think of the mold and mildew-covered furniture and retreated to a second-floor condo that should be beyond the reach of pounding rains and swelling seas.
Boineau is leaving behind a handsome, early 20th-century house in Charleston, South Carolina, the shutters painted in the city’s eponymous shade of deep green. Last year, after Hurricane Irma introduced 8in of water into a home Boineau was still patching up from the last flood, local authorities agreed this historic slice of Charleston could be torn down.
“I was sloshing through the water with my puppy dog, debris was everywhere,” she said. “I feel completely sunken. It would cost me around $500,000 to raise the […]
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Wednesday, September 26th, 2018
JOE ROMM, - Think Progress
Stephan: The price Americans are going to pay for the failure of the Republican Party and the Trump administration to appropriately address the challenges of climate change will run to trillions of dollars and tens of millions of lives made miserable. Your last chance to push back on this incompetence will be the November elections. Speak now or be complicit in this failure and forever hold your peace
A view of the smoke stack of the 47-year old Cheswick coal-fired power plant in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Local residents complain about the amount of sulphur-dioxide, nitrogen oxide and coal particles originating from the NRG-owned 565-MW power plant that have effected their health and respiratory system.
Credit: by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty
One of the biggest myths about global warming pushed by the President Trump is that climate action benefits other countries much more than us.
But a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change makes clear that, in fact, the reverse is true: There is only one country in the world, India, that benefits more than the United States when carbon pollution is reduced.
The study, “Country-level social cost of carbon,” takes the novel approach of calculating the social cost of carbon (SCC) — “the measure of the economic harm from carbon dioxide emissions” — for each individual country.
This country-level SCC is an estimate of the marginal damage expected to occur in a given country as a consequence of one more metric ton of emissions of carbon dioxide, CO2 […]
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Wednesday, September 26th, 2018
Tyler Cowen, - Bloomberg News
Stephan: Finally, we are beginning to see articles about the failure of the Congress and the Trump administration, as well as the Obama and the Bush administrations before that to deal responsibly about climate change. In my view, the last president to really understand the implications of climate change was Jimmy Carter, who saw what was coming probably because he had trained as a nuclear engineer and understood pollution.
The signs are getting clearer.
Credit: Josh Edelson/AFP
The potential costs of climate change, already the subject of heated debate, may actually be understated. It’s not just the potential disruptions to weather systems, agriculture and coastal cities; it’s that we may respond to those problems in stupid and destructive ways. As the philosopher and cartoon character Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Consider how poorly we have responded to many non-climate-related problems. In the case of Brexit, for example, the Leave movement was arguably responding to some real problems. The European Union bureaucracy is too stringent, and perhaps the U.K. did not have an ideal arrangement with immigration. But Brexit is careening toward disaster, with no good plan on tap, the two major parties in splinters, the British pound declining, the Irish “Good Friday” agreement at risk, and the U.K. seriously talking about food stockpiles and other emergency measures.
It would have been better if the British had responded to their country’s problems in a less extreme […]
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