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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
It has become very evident that world leaders simply can not or are not willing to do what needs to be done to protect Earth’s matrix of life. The result is going to be chaos, hundreds of millions forced to leave where they live, misery, and death, One would think with a catastrophe of this magnitude clearly in progress that the countries of the world would band together to create a shared coherent plan of response. But you would be wrong, it is not happening.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (center) looks toward Pope Francis as he speaks during the G7 Leaders Summit in Fasano, Italy on June 14, 2024. Credit: Vatican Media / Vatican Pool / Getty
As the Group of Seven summit wrapped up Friday in Italy, climate defenders condemned G7 leaders for their continued failure to take meaningful action to combat the worsening planetary emergency.
Taking aim at what critics called the G7 leaders’ largely empty pledge to undertake “concrete steps to address the triple crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss,” 350.org U.S. campaigns manager Candice Fortin lamented that “yet another meeting ends without real commitments to revert the situation rich countries like the U.S. put us in.”
“As COP29 approaches and the world deals with worsening climate impacts, we can’t afford to waste more time,” Fortin said, referring to the United Nations Climate Change Conference scheduled to take place in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan—a major fossil fuel-producing nation—in November. COP29 is set to be
Lee Hannah, Amy Irvine, Isaac Brito-Morales, Susanna Fuller, Tammy Davies, Derek Tittensor, Grace Reville, Nancy Shackell, Janos Hennicke and Ryan Stanley, - nature
Stephan:
Here is what needs to be done to save the oceans and, thus, save Earth. Will humanity have enough sense to overcome our species’ greed and short-sightedness? Maybe.
L. Hannah et al. Sources: Ranges: aquamaps.org; thick-billed murre data: A. Patterson et al. Marine Ecology Progress Series MEPS-2023-10-023 (in review).
Corals frying in Florida, billions of snow crabs dead in the Arctic — climate change is wreaking havoc in the world’s oceans1,2. The race is on to protect marine areas amounting to 30% of global seas by 2030 under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Controlling uses of the high seas — waters that are beyond national control, comprising around two-thirds of the surface area of the planet’s oceans — is crucial, because there is currently no international policy mechanism for biodiversity conservation in these areas.
That is set to change in the next year, following the adoption in June 2023 of the High Seas Treaty, a new agreement that forms part of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. When it enters into force — probably in 2025, after 60 nations have ratified it — the treaty will enable implementation of new marine conservation tools in parts of the ocean […]
Plastics, once considered a great benefit, have now been revealed to be a dangerous pollutant. But, as this report shows, profit still trumps all other considerations, and all but 22 out of 147 plastics companies are failing to meet their commitment to end the damage they are doing. The Congress could, of course, compel them to do it, but it is too corrupt to do anything meaningful in a positive way that fosters wellbeing.
Plastic beverage bottles packed in polyethylene wrap in a warehouse. Credit: iStock / Getty
In a new report, the nonprofit As You Sow has found that of 147 companies with recyclability targets, only 22 are on track to meet their goals. In total, the report reviewed 225 companies and their progress toward plastic-related goals, with about half of companies receiving an “F” score.
The 2024 Plastic Promises Scorecard has revealed a gap between the plastic waste reduction goals that companies set and the actual actions they are making toward meeting those goals. The report evaluated companies on a total score based on their ambitions and their actions toward goals related to six pillars: recyclability, reduction, recycled content, recovery, reusable and extended producer responsibility. Ambitions counted toward 30% of the total score, while the actual actions companies were taking made up 70% of the final score.
“Plastic Promises Scorecard uses a first-of-its-kind scoring system to evaluate not just what companies say they will do to act on the plastics […]
The strategists in the MAGAt Republican Party as a result of research done by scientists funded by oligarchs learned that one of the best ways to manipulate people is to stimulate fear and resentment. It is the hallmark of this party, and it is getting increasingly bizarre. The latest weaponization of misinformation is, believe it or not, the lie about drinking raw milk. You would think that any person with an IQ higher than their waist size would understand why milk is pasteurized, and the risks of drinking raw milk. But apparently, in MAGAt world no such understanding exists. As with the anti-vaxxer movement that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, the same fear strategy is being used with these Republica lies about milk, and it is playing out, as this report describes, in the same way.
Glass of spilled milk Credit: Max Milne / Getty
Ever vigilant about stoking fears among their constituents regarding the threat of governmental overreach, Republican leaders, as a form of political strategy, frequently crow about all the things liberals allegedly want to take away from working Americans. The White House is coming for their guns, they say, or perhaps their gas stoves — or even pints of raw milk that have potentially been contaminated with bird flu.
In early December, Sonoma County, California, declared an agricultural disaster when two poultry farms had to kill their entire flocks to try to stop “highly pathogenic avian influenza” — or bird flu — from spreading. This particular strain of bird flu, H5N1, had first been reported in the United States in early 2022 and since then, tens of millions of turkey and chickens at commercial farms have since been killed to try to suppress the outbreak.
Today, Clarence Thomas wrote the Supreme Court majority decision for Garland v. Cargill. No surprise, the majority was made up of the corrupt christofascist cabal that now controls one of the three branches of the U.S. government. It is a decision that I predict is going to result in a significant increase in gun murders. It once again makes bump stocks, a device that turns an ordinary AR-15 into a machine gun, legal. I think you are going to see gangs, mentally ill individuals, and White nationalist terrorists using this device and the result will be increased death. Thomas’ commentary on the majority decision is so stupid and factually wrong that I find it hard to believe any judge, let alone a Supreme Court justice, could write something like this. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing for the the three women of the minority in her commentary makes this very clear. Anyone who know anything about guns knows what bump stocks are and what they do. So, I suspect there is another issue underneath Thomas’ commentary. Maybe it is about supporting the civil violence that I believe will occur if criminal Trump loses. As I said though one thing is sure, there are going to be more gun deaths.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alex Wong / Getty / supremecourt.gov.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is calling bullshit on her conservative colleagues’ rationale for throwing out a 2018 ban on bump stocks, the device used to modify the gun used in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting—the deadliest in modern U.S. history. The Trump administration reclassified guns with bump stocks as machine guns, thereby banning the device’s use under a 1934 law that heavily restricts access to machine guns.
In Sotomayor’s dissent in Garland v. Cargill, which Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan joined, she called out how her conservative colleagues had basically bent over backwards to redefine the legal definition of a “machine gun.” She noted that these linguistic gymnastics are particularly galling given how much conservative jurists claim to prize textualism—a theory that stresses adhering closely to the plain text of the law and to the ordinary meaning of words.
To drive the point home, Sotomayor came with receipts: She quoted past opinions where each […]
Jake Johnson, Staff Writer - truthout / Common Dreams
Stephan:
The Illness Profit System that passes for healthcare in the United States is running amuck financially. Ours is already the most expensive and yet the most inferior healthcare system in the developed world. Also, it is highly racist. It is blatantly obvious that we should convert to universal single-payer birthright healthcare, like the other democracies in the world, but the United States Congress is so corrupt that I don’t see anything happening. Biden is doing what he can, but it is Congress that controls this issue, and if the Republicans have the majority in either house nothing will change. Big pharma, and the corporations that control hospitals, and insurance corporations don’t want any change, and since political bribery is legal in this country, nothing is likely to happen.
A federal analysis released this week projects that U.S. healthcare spending is set to rise to $7.7 trillion by 2032 and account for nearly 20% of the nation’s economy, findings that single-payer advocates described as yet another indictment of the country’s for-profit system and further evidence of the need for Medicare for All.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Office of the Actuary said Wednesday that it expects national healthcare expenditures to outpace U.S. economic growth over roughly the next decade, “resulting in an increase in the health spending share of GDP from 17.3% in 2022 to 19.7% in 2032.”
The CMS analysis showed that U.S. healthcare spending grew at a rate of 7.5% last year, with overall expenditures reaching $4.8 trillion. CMS said it projects health spending will rise by 5.6% annually over the coming years, with overall spending reaching $7.7 trillion by 2032.
Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement Thursday that the coming surge in healthcare spending “has nothing to do with improving care and everything to do with price-gouging, monopolization, […]
Kathleen Culliton, Assistant Managing Editor - Raw Story
Stephan:
As the Republican Congress members yesterday knelt to kiss criminal Trump’s ass, I wonder if his diaper was on or not. It is amazing that they are so frightened about losing their own office and power that they are willing to tolerate anything this convicted felon does. Congress and the Supreme Court have joined forces to remake the United States into christofascist White supremacy male dominant minority rule. And you can see that a large percentage of Americans have no idea what this will mean. As I have said again and again, it all comes down to the vote in November and I am not sure American voters are up to the task of protecting their democracy.
President Donald Trump at his plane Credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr
Former President Donald Trump has funneled nearly $5 million from his presidential campaign coffers into his private businesses, according to a new financial analysis.
Trump — convicted last month of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments ahead of the 2016 presidential election — has yet to donate a cent to his own campaign but his businesses have charged it $4.6 million, Forbes reported Wednesday.
The former president, worth an estimated $6.4 billion, has been collecting donations from MAGA supporters across the U.S. with increasingly threatening rhetoric that, on Wednesday, raised the specter of mass beheadings.
“Haul out the guillotine,” Trump declared in his campaign cash-grab. “It’s not just me they want gone, THEY’RE REALLY COMING AFTER YOU!”
Forbes analysis of Federal Election Commission records found $4.2 million funneled to Trump’s aviation company Tag Air.
Trump’s private jet — which he claims is better […]
Here is some good news about the transition out of the carbon era. I happened to see a reference in a professional journal and went looking for a general audience report and found this. Like most of the good things the Biden administration is doing the development described in this report isn’t really getting any coverage. The media is obsessed with the madness of criminal Trump and the many good things that are happening in the U.S. are hardly mentioned.
The Idaho National Laboratory. Credit, DoE
Across the nation, land set aside for the purpose of possibly destroying the world is now welcoming infrastructure meant to save it.
Sites managed by the Dept. of Energy’s nuclear weapons division are now playing host to solar farms that should be able to power thousands of homes.
As part of a government program called Cleanup to Clean Energy, the Idaho National Laboratory, though never having hosted nuclear weapons itself, will soon be the site of a 400-megawatt solar farm spread across 2,800 acres.
Though the project timeline hasn’t been released, a lease was negotiated for the INL project with Massachusetts-based solar developer NorthRenew Energy for 300 megawatts of solar power.
Another developer called Spitfire was awarded a lease for 100 megawatts and another 500 of battery storage, according to Elektek.
Other locations including the Hanford site in Washington state, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the Nevada National Security Site in Nevada, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, are all considered strong candidates for the […]
