Stephan: If we don't wake up and get serious about protecting earth's matrix of life we are going to pay a civilization threatening price.
Amazon Forest depredations
Ecologists and environmental advocates on Thursday called for swift action to reintroduce species into the wild as scientists at the University of Cambridge in England found that 97% of the planet’s land area no longer qualifies as ecologically intact.
“Conservation is simply not enough anymore,” said financier and activist Ben Goldsmith. “We need restoration.”
The authors of the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, expressed alarm at their findings, which showed that of the 3% of fully intact land, much lies in northern areas which weren’t rich in biodiversity to begin with, such as boreal forests in Canada or tundra in Greenland.
The amount of ecologically intact land “was much lower than we were expecting,” Dr. Andrew Plumptre, head of the Key Biodiversity Areas Secretariat at Cambridge and lead author of the study, toldScience News.
“Going in, I’d guessed that it would be 8 to 10%,” he added. “It just shows how huge an impact we’ve had.”
The researchers examined whether natural habitats had retained the number of species which were present in the year 1500—the standard used by […]
Stephan: American law enforcement, both police and sheriffs are rotten, and the entire structure needs to be reorganized and redesigned. As you can see by the chart at the beginning of this article, American police in 2020 killed 14 TIMES MORE MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN THAN CANADA, AUSTRALIA, GERMANY, THE NETHERLANDS, ENGLAND AND WALES, JAPAN, NEW ZEALAND, ICELAND, AND NORWAY COMBINED. FOURTEEN TIMES MORE!
The facts are clear: If you are a person of color and you are stopped by the police in the U.S. your life is in danger no matter who you are, or how minor the reason for the stop.
In response, Army Lt. Caron Nazario’s legal team said Windsor Police Department Chief Rodney D. Riddle “continues a false narrative” of the case and blaming their client for initiating it. They said the video of the stop “shows otherwise” that their client was nothing but compliant.
“I’m gonna own what we did,” Riddle said about the stop during a news conference Wednesday in the Isle of Wight County, Virginia, community where Nazario was stopped last December while on his way home. “My guys missed opportunities to verbally de-escalate that thing and change that outcome.”
When asked by a reporter if Nazario was owed an apology for that, Riddle replied: “I don’t believe that,” adding he wished the driver […]
David Corn, Washington Bureau Chief - Mother Jones
Stephan: It is now clear and irrefutable, Donald Trump was either a "useful idiot" or functionally a Russian agent, as was Paul Manafort. Now that that is clear, many other things about the Trump administration come into proper focus.
Putin and his “useful idiot” agent Donald Trump.
Imagine this news flash: the campaign manager of Joe Biden’s presidential bid throughout the 2020 race was in continuous and covert contact with a Chinese intelligence officer whom had once been her business associate. During these clandestine communications—which included secret meetings—she passed internal Biden campaign polling data to the Chinese operative, and the operative encouraged her to help advance a Chinese proposal that would allow Beijing to succeed in its territorial disputes in the South China Sea and further extend its influence there. And throughout this all, China was running an undercover operation to help Biden win.
Ka-boom! There would be headlines galore. The right-wing media would go bananas. Fox News would explode. Sean Hannity might lose the power of speech. And congressional Republicans would demand investigation upon investigation. There would be talk of impeachment.
Well, this did happen. Just not with Biden and China, but with Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 election. Yet this key piece of the Trump-Russia story never became a major scandal for the former president, who has not stopped claiming (falsely) that all talk about Vladimir Putin’s attack […]
Stephan: Forty-three percent of Republicans don't want to get vaccinated, only 29 percent believe climate change is happening. But they do believe in White supremacy. However, younger Republicans, who realize they are going to have to live with climate change, have a rather different view, so that is one small fragment of good news.
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when climate change was a bipartisan issue. In 1988, Congress listened with interest as climate scientist James Hansen testified about the links between human activity and climate change. Bills to limit emissions found ample cosponsors. George H. W. Bush’s administration was eager to work with Democrats on energy policy. But in the mid-1990s, the Republican Party, abetted by oil, gas, and coal companies, began its downward spiral into climate denial. That brings us to today, when the gap between Republicans and Democrats on climate change appears to be growing ever wider, even as intensifying hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and floods leave scars across the country.
Gallup’s annual survey of American attitudes about global warming, published last week, shows that Democrats are increasingly in agreement with the scientific consensus. A whopping 82 percent of Democrats said they believe that the effects of global warming have already begun. Meanwhile, only 29 percent of Republicans […]
Stephan: Here is some good news. The rape of the Arctic by the carbon industry okayed by Trump will not happen. Very good news.
Arctic oil exploration
A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt the final blow to former President Donald Trump’s attempt to open nearly 130 million acres of territory in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans to oil and gas drilling.
In April of 2017, Trump signed an executive order aiming to undo an Obama-era ban on fossil fuel exploration in that territory, but a federal judge in Alaska ruled the move unlawful in 2019.
Though the Trump administration appealed the ruling, President Joe Biden revoked his predecessor’s 2017 order shortly after taking office, rendering the court case moot. On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to dismiss the Trump administration’s appeal.
“Because the terms of the challenged Executive Order are no longer in effect, the relevant areas of the [Outer Continental Shelf] in the Chukchi Sea, Beaufort Sea, and Atlantic Ocean will be withdrawn from exploration and development activities,” the court said in its order.
Erik Grafe of Earthjustice, which represented a coalition of advocacy groups that challenged Trump’s order, said in a statement that “we welcome today’s decision and its confirmation of President Obama’s legacy of ocean […]
