Saturday, June 29th, 2019
Robert Scheer, Editor-in-Chief - truthdig
Stephan: Here is a radical change that is occurring with human cultures across the globe, and it is taking place with almost no awareness on the part of the vast majority of people in the world.
Credit: James Cridland / Flickr
“Every two weeks, the world loses a language. Out of approximately 7,000 languages spoken on earth today, at least half will have fallen silent by the end of this century,” artist Lena Herzog told an audience at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 2018. In a world in which English increasingly dominates global conversations and cultures, every part of Herzog’s statement will seem staggering: the vast diversity, the rapid loss, the impending extinction. Perhaps more surprising, however, are the reasons this mass linguistic disappearance is taking place. As Herzog explained in her speech, which she reads aloud in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” this extinction is no accident. Rather, it is the outcome of a human history in which concentrated hegemonic powers required the erasure of any form of communication that precluded their understanding and, crucially, their control.
“[Power] has also always known that it would be difficult, if not nearly impossible, to control various minority populations and tribes because of the language and cultural barrier,” Herzog […]
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Saturday, June 29th, 2019
Lisa Friedman, - The New York Times
Stephan: Unbeknownst to almost all Americans another pollution crisis has been going on for over a decade in the Gulf of Mexico. Think about this: 4,500 gallons a day, 1,642,500 gallons a year times 14 years equals 22,995,000 gallons of toxic petroleum spreading out across the floor of the Gulf, as this report describes.
The Taylor Energy Company, as well as the company that bought its assets should, in my opinion, be fined out of existence, and its senior executives tried, convicted and sent to prison for the rest of their lives. What will actually happen under the Trump administration? Probably nothing.
A supply ship crossed an oil slick near the site of the Taylor Energy accident in the Gulf of Mexico.
CreditGerald Herbert/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A new federal study has found that an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico that began 14 years ago has been releasing as much as 4,500 gallons a day, not three or four gallons a day as the rig owner has claimed.
The leak, about 12 miles off the Louisiana coast, began in 2004 when a Taylor Energy Company oil platform sank during Hurricane Ivan and a bundle of undersea pipes ruptured. Oil and gas have been seeping from the site ever since.
Taylor Energy, which sold its assets in 2008, is fighting a federal order to stop the leak. The company asserts that the leaking has been slight — between 2.4 and four gallons per day. Oil plumes from the seafloor, Taylor executives have said, are from oil-soaked sediment that has formed around the platform, and any gas rising from the bottom is the natural product of living organisms.
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Saturday, June 29th, 2019
Father James Martin, S.J., - American Magazine - The Jesuit Review
Stephan: I got an email from a woman who described herself as a "recovering christofascist." She and another reader who wrote, synchronistically both sent me this article written several years ago by a Jesuit priest and scholar, when the christofacist Laura Schlessinger gave up her radio program. I am running it because I spent some time yesterday listening to the Fox disinformation operation and reading rightwing media sites, and was once again stunned by the gross hypocrisy of the christofascist world.
I heard two pastors talk about the inerrancy of the Bible and that all good Christians must live by its rules. When I got the Jesuit priest's article I thought it would be worthwhile to publish it and ask, "Christofascists, is this inerrant? If it is, shouldn't you be advocating it."
(Credit: Stocksnapper via Salon)
Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s announcement yesterday that she is quitting her radio show called to mind this clever response to her occasional fundamentalist readings of the Old Testament, particularly when it came to homosexuality. This letter, which has been widely circulated on the web since it first appeared in 2000 (despite difficulties in ascertaining its origin) is a healthy antidote to Scriptural literalism of any sort.
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination…End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God’s Laws and how to follow them.
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not […]
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Kelvin Ross , Editor - Renewable Energy
Stephan: Here is some really good news about the transition out of the carbon-energy era. There was a time when the United States would have been leading the way in this transition, but that time is long in the past. Instead, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to keep carbon-energy alive and well. It is a sad and pathetic story that is going to affect a generation through lost jobs, lost entrepreneurship, lost business opportunities and, most of all, lost environmental improvement. We will leave carbon eventually, there isn't going to be any other choice, but we will do so as followers using equipment manufactured in other countries.
To download the full report discussed in this article,
click here. 
Wind or solar now represent the least expensive option for adding new power generation capacity in approximately two-thirds of the world.
And further falls in technology will see the two leading forms of renewable energy powering nearly half of the global grid by 2050 and attracting $9.5 trillion in new investment between now and then.
Those are two of the headline findings from the latest New Energy Outlook report from BloombergNEF (BNEF), which was unveiled yesterday and compares the costs of competing energy technologies through a levelized cost of energy analysis.
At Bloomberg’s Sustainable Business Summit in London yesterday, BNEF chief executive Jon Moore said: “The good news for the energy transition is that the destination is getting much clearer. In two-thirds of the world, solar and wind are the cheapest energy technologies bar none.”
BNEF says that with electricity demand set to increase 62 per cent, global generating capacity will almost triple between now and 2050 – which in turn will attract $13.3 trillion in new investment, of which wind will take $5.3 trillion and solar $4.2 trillion.
In addition to the spending on new generating plants, $840bn will go to batteries and $11.4 trillion to grid expansion.
And wind […]
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Simon Jessop and Nina Chestney , - Reuters
Stephan: Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, and hunkered America down in the carbon world of the past. In the process, he condemned America to second class status, as the rest of the world realized that the transition out of carbon is going to be as transformative as the transition out of horse-drawn transportation and sailing ships.
A person walks across Waterloo Bridge during the Extinction Rebellion protest in London, Britain April 18, 2019.
Credit: Reuters/Peter Nicholls
LONDON — Investors managing more than $34 trillion in assets, nearly half the world’s invested capital, are demanding urgent action from governments on climate change, piling pressure on leaders of the world’s 20 biggest economies meeting this week.
In an open letter to the “governments of the world” seen by Reuters, groups representing 477 investors stressed “the urgency of decisive action” on climate change to achieve the Paris Agreement target.
Almost 200 nations agreed in Paris in 2015 to limit the global average temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Current policies put the world on track for at least a 3C rise by the end of the century.
The letter comes ahead of a June 28-29 G20 summit in Japan and as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urges countries to back more ambitious climate goals.
“There is an ambition gap… This ambition gap is of great concern to investors and needs […]
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