Stephan: If you read me regularly you know I predict three big migrations are coming. One, is out of the Southwest, because of temperature and lack of water. And, for those remaining, a completely different way of living and farming. We must create democracies that recognize we live in a matrix of life and understand it is in everyone's interest to support and foster wellbeing at every level. That must become the first social priority. The amount of pain climate change will cause is directly correlated to how long it takes us to learn that.
Exposed banks of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam show how low water levels have dropped on the Colorado River-fed reservoir due to persistent and worsening drought. Credit: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times
As the West endures another year of unrelenting drought worsened by climate change, the Colorado River’s reservoirs have declined so low that major water cuts will be necessary next year to reduce risks of supplies reaching perilously low levels, a top federal water official said Tuesday.
Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said during a Senate hearing in Washington that federal officials now believe protecting “critical levels” at the country’s largest reservoirs — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — will require much larger reductions in water deliveries.
“A warmer, drier West is what we are seeing today,” Touton told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “And the challenges we are seeing today are unlike anything we have seen in our history.”
The needed cuts, she said, amount to between 2 million and 4 million acre-feet next year.
For comparison, California is entitled to 4.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River […]
Christopher Flavelle, Reporter - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is another manifestation of the same trend as the previous report. And I hope both make it clear we are not doing anywhere near what is needed to prepare for climate change.
Exposed lake bed in the northern part of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
SALT LAKE CITY — If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here’s what’s in store:
The lake’s flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.
Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population.
“We have this potential environmental nuclear bomb that’s going to go off if we don’t take some pretty dramatic action,” said Joel Ferry, a Republican state lawmaker and rancher who […]
Stephan: Gallup has measured the problem: our culture is completely out of whack. Its values are all screwed up. Until we learn and integrate it into our being that fostering wellbeing must be an individual commitment which will, in turn, make it a social, economic and poltical first priority, more and more people will feel the decay of our culture and it will be measurably manifested in our social outcome data.
50% say state of moral values is “poor”; 37% “only fair”
78% think moral values in the U.S. are getting worse
“Consideration of others” cited as top problem with state of moral values
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A record-high 50% of Americans rate the overall state of moral values in the U.S. as “poor,” and another 37% say it is “only fair.” Just 1% think the state of moral values is “excellent” and 12% “good.”
Although negative views of the nation’s moral values have been the norm throughout Gallup’s 20-year trend, the current poor rating is the highest on record by one percentage point.
These findings, from Gallup’s May 2-22 Values and Beliefs poll, are generally in line with perceptions since 2017 except for a slight improvement in views in 2020 when Donald Trump was running for reelection. On average since 2002, 43% of U.S. adults have rated moral values in the U.S. as poor, 38% as fair and 18% as excellent or good.
Republicans’ increasingly negative assessment of the state of moral values is largely responsible for the record-high overall poor […]
Stephan: Since 1978 CEO pay has risen by 940% while worker compensation has gone up 12%. When wealth inequality becomes that great people in both groups literally live in different worlds. If you are making a million dollars or more a year, your experience of $5 a gallon gas and hundred dollar fill-ups is very different from someone who is an average worker making $25,000 a year. This situation exists because in American society profit is the only social priority; fostering wellbeing is a marginal priority. Until this disparity changes America as a country will continue to decline.
Amazon, the second-largest federal contractor in the sample, amassed $10.3bn in federal contracts. Last month shareholders approved a $212m pay deal for Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, 6,474 times the company’s median pay. Credit: Frederic J Brown / AFP /Getty
The wage gap between chief executives and workers at some of the US companies with the lowest-paid staff grew even wider last year, with CEOs making an average of $10.6m, while the median worker received $23,968.
A study of 300 top US companies released by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) on Tuesday found the average gap between CEO and median worker pay jumped to 670-to-1 (meaning the average CEO received $670 in compensation for every $1 the worker received). The ratio was up from 604-to-1 in 2020. Forty-nine firms had ratios above 1,000-to-1.
At more than a third of the companies surveyed, IPS found that median worker pay did not keep pace with inflation.
The report, titled Executive Excess, comes amid a wave of unionization efforts among low wage workers and growing scrutiny of the huge share buyback programs many corporations […]
Stephan: I don't know what it is going to take to get Americans to wake up to the fact that since Reagan, and the rise of increasingly authoritarian racist Republican power, we have been in decline across the board. The other day I picked a piece by Paul Krugman to make this point, and here is another. As a nation, as a culture, we are simply not making the right choices, and it has left us second-rate in dozens of areas from medical care to life span, to wealth inequality, to highways and bridges. Why is this happening? In my view because our policies do not make fostering wellbeing the first priority.
Denmark has overtaken Switzerland as the world’s most competitive economy after the Nordic country outperformed peers during the pandemic.
Europe Icon Sweden Border Symbol Bridge Denmark
Denmark rose from third place last year to take 2022’s top spot for the first time in the 34 years that the IMD Business School has published its World Competitiveness Ranking, according to a statement on Wednesday.
“Denmark is the most digitally advanced country in the world and now takes the top spot thanks to good policies, advantages afforded by being a European country, a clear focus on sustainability and a push from its agile corporate sector,” Arturo Bris, a professor at the Lausanne, Switzerland-based IMD, said in the statement.
Along with the other Nordic nations, the Danish economy fared better through lockdowns than most of its wealthy peers, helped by strong social safety networks, low debt levels and digital progress, as well as lower dependency on tourism. Denmark’s unemployment is at its lowest level in 14 years and gross domestic product will likely expand 3.4% this year, according to the most recent […]
