Rather than filling the world’s open spaces with giant wind turbines, paving them with solar panels (and access roads and substations and powerlines), and building 1000's of nuclear reactors, this article from The Telegraph notes that cutting beef and lamb consumption by half would more effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Cutting global beef consumption and eating chicken instead would do more to tackle climate change than building two million onshore wind turbines and 2,000 nuclear reactors, according to Government analysis.
Cows and sheep are so bad for the environment that switching just half the beef and lamb in an average diet to pork and poultry could enable the world to hit its global warming targets without using any nuclear plants or wind farms at all.
The figures are drawn from a new “global calculator” online tool, launched on Wednesday by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). ...
Most expert analyses show a vast expansion of low-carbon technologies including wind farms and nuclear plants to replace fossil fuels is likely to be needed to hit the targets.
However DECC’s calculator shows that other routes could technically be feasible – if people were prepared to change their behaviour. “Making changes in our lifestyle (for example our dietary and travel choices) can significantly reduce emissions and the effort needed across other sectors,” DECC said.
According to some estimates, beef production results in five times as many harmful emissions as equivalent chicken or pork production, while using 28 times as much land for grazing that might otherwise be used for forestry to help absorb carbon.
DECC works on the more conservative assumption that beef needs four times as much space as poultry, with an area the size of a football pitch used to produce 250 kg of beef or 1,000 kg of poultry.
It assumes that if the world carries on on current trends then by 2050 the global average diet – which is likely to mask huge variations between richer and poorer nations – would include 250g of red meat a week.
Replacing 100g of that with white meat could save 29 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year, it calculates.
The calculation assumes the world population will have grown to 10 billion by 2050, meaning the 100g-a-week switch saves one million tonnes of beef a week. As well as avoiding emissions from those cows, it would free up 1,400 million hectares of land for forests, which help absorb emissions. ...
By contrast, if every country in the world were to build wind farms at the fastest rate possible – increasing capacity to 6,470 gigawatts, or more than two million onshore wind turbines at current spec – that would save about 12 gigatonnes of emissions a year through replacing coal, gas and oil-burning power plants.
Building nuclear reactors at the fastest rate possible, increasing from 460 plants today to 2,340 plants in 2050, could save about 8 gigatonnes a year by 2050, the calculator suggests.
January 28, 2015
January 20, 2015
Remember the Odessa Massacre: May 2, 2014
‘They beat us with bats and chains’ - anti-Maidan activist in Odessa
Odessa slaughter: How vicious mob burnt anti-govt activists alive
West reluctant to point finger at nationalist radicals in Ukraine crisis
Radicals shooting at people in Odessa’s burning building caught on tape
Odessa tragedy survivor: ‘Many people strangled after escaping the fire’
Odessa massacre victims died in seconds, not from smoke – emergency service chief
January 16, 2015
Mediæval crusaders, modern jihadis
To all those hurling the epithet “mediæval” at Western-trained and -provoked “jihadis”:
If only. During the middle age of Europe, after the collapse of the western Roman empire, muslim societies (and monasteries before Roman control was reasserted) were the refuge of learning, art, and relative tolerance.
The later middle ages were characterized by repeated attempts to unite christian Europe with the battle cry of expelling muslims and capturing Jerusalem (the Crusades).
Today’s Europe/US would seem to be the “mediæval” actor still, overthrowing stable secular governments in north Africa and west Asia that aren’t deferential enough to replace them with any brutality that properly genuflects. Or rather, create the vacuum in which violence and thievery thrive (along with weapons suppliers and their bankers). Learning, art, and tolerance are the victims at home as well.
Cloaking one’s solipsistic aggression in secularism is no different than cloaking it in religion.
And to all who raise the spectre of self-censorship: Grow up. From the age of 2, a child learns self-control in the process of socialization. It’s called civilization. A feral free-for-all benefits only the strongest and loudest, the worst of humanity, religious or secular. Even more effectively than any authoritarian state, the absence of self-censorship silences the voices of those less powerful.
January 14, 2015
The Road to Damascus Goes Both Ways
Afshin Rattansi writes:
... Is this just propaganda from a Western press that isn’t free? Is there a playbook for Western journalists in which “Islam” can be swapped for “Socialism in 1930s Spain”, “Communism in Russia”, “Maoism in China”, “Bolivarism in Latin America”, “Non-Aligned Movement in Asia”? It doesn’t matter what it is – just that it is seen as the enemy because that is in the interests of hegemonic Western capital.
Journalists in the West who have fought to tell the truth about 20th/21st century interventions in the developing world – they have destroyed the lives of billions – know what it’s like. Fight against the system, and power will threaten your livelihood. And, more likely than not, you’ll be left with nothing but the ability to say “told you so” after a scale of slaughter is unleashed that not only kills more than ISIS could ever dream of but also catalyses the deluded to carry out atrocities like those in Paris.
There is something suicidal about elite media responses to the Charlie Ebdo massacre. It’s not only that what goes for journalism ignores the fact that the worst slaughters in history – world wars – trace their lineage from secularism. It’s that journalists seem unaware of what questions to ask about the European enlightenment, let alone the French Revolution.
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité” did not so much concern the freedom to publish anti-Semitic or Islamophobic cartoons in Charlie Ebdo magazine. It was about the revolutionary emancipation of the dispossessed. Satire aimed at Marie-Antoinette, not the sans-culottes; the slave-masters of Haiti not the slaves. In due course, the so-called terror at the hands of secular Saint-Just and Robespierre would be as nothing compared to what happened with the ensuing retrenchment of power. Who knows what the Jacobins would have made, a quarter of a millennium on, about rising religious fundamentalism in America and corporations as Gods in Europe? Zhou-en Lai, Communist China’s first premier, had it right – whether he was referring to 1789 or 1968 – when he said it was too early to give his assessment of events in Paris.
But, now, a rotten Western journalism accompanies an entire Western economic crisis. There’s mass austerity because of gigantic, corrupt financial services but no context of the logical need for a complete overhaul of society. The response of the so-called free press has been to write and broadcast as if only sovereign debt ratings rule civic life. Journalism ceases to be free when all mainstream political debate in Western countries centres on pleasing a minuscule percentage of the one percent about deficit reduction. Western journalists appear not to be free to question whether society really is just what gilt-traders tell them.
As for guilt for Western war crimes, there is fear of terrorist attack from “the other.” Fear is what “free” Western journalists use when they cover NATO militarism. And ever greater restrictions on press freedom in NATO countries prevent journalists from talking about something more cataclysmic and eschatological. Recent world events suggest that Western corporations think they have found a way out of the crisis, a kind of final solution. It’s arguably the reductio ad absurdum of the powerful counter-revolutionary forces unleashed by the guillotining of the Jacobins: an out and out, overt, world war.
Lethal, foreign interventions appear on the world scene as if they are the twitches of a dying superpower. No amount of socio-economic strife at home can prevent NATO governments from perceiving military existential threats. Journalists repeat lies and [the great forgetting of] history. Wars are prepared against the great powers of the 21st century. NATO plays war games for attacks on China – and, of course, Russia. A breathless Western journalism about Ukraine allows no dissent so that all developments are seen through the prism of Russian expansionism, not NATO’s. But, they merely posture against Russia, China and India. And in Africa and Latin America, there are signs that they sense the game is already up.
One region – dominated, as it happens, by Islam – remains in focus. It doesn’t matter that Saudi Arabia has been the financial source for ISIS. Fossil fuel profits of the Middle East are paramount. Environmental catastrophe isn’t even an issue. Nor are repeated defeats in Mesopotamia. To explain this to the people, NATO powers require a “free” press of fake stenographer-journalists who repeat what’s leaked to them. It can be fake dossiers, redlines and fake WMD and it’s all in the context of a fundamental misunderstanding of the post-1789 world. ...
... Is this just propaganda from a Western press that isn’t free? Is there a playbook for Western journalists in which “Islam” can be swapped for “Socialism in 1930s Spain”, “Communism in Russia”, “Maoism in China”, “Bolivarism in Latin America”, “Non-Aligned Movement in Asia”? It doesn’t matter what it is – just that it is seen as the enemy because that is in the interests of hegemonic Western capital.
Journalists in the West who have fought to tell the truth about 20th/21st century interventions in the developing world – they have destroyed the lives of billions – know what it’s like. Fight against the system, and power will threaten your livelihood. And, more likely than not, you’ll be left with nothing but the ability to say “told you so” after a scale of slaughter is unleashed that not only kills more than ISIS could ever dream of but also catalyses the deluded to carry out atrocities like those in Paris.
There is something suicidal about elite media responses to the Charlie Ebdo massacre. It’s not only that what goes for journalism ignores the fact that the worst slaughters in history – world wars – trace their lineage from secularism. It’s that journalists seem unaware of what questions to ask about the European enlightenment, let alone the French Revolution.
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité” did not so much concern the freedom to publish anti-Semitic or Islamophobic cartoons in Charlie Ebdo magazine. It was about the revolutionary emancipation of the dispossessed. Satire aimed at Marie-Antoinette, not the sans-culottes; the slave-masters of Haiti not the slaves. In due course, the so-called terror at the hands of secular Saint-Just and Robespierre would be as nothing compared to what happened with the ensuing retrenchment of power. Who knows what the Jacobins would have made, a quarter of a millennium on, about rising religious fundamentalism in America and corporations as Gods in Europe? Zhou-en Lai, Communist China’s first premier, had it right – whether he was referring to 1789 or 1968 – when he said it was too early to give his assessment of events in Paris.
But, now, a rotten Western journalism accompanies an entire Western economic crisis. There’s mass austerity because of gigantic, corrupt financial services but no context of the logical need for a complete overhaul of society. The response of the so-called free press has been to write and broadcast as if only sovereign debt ratings rule civic life. Journalism ceases to be free when all mainstream political debate in Western countries centres on pleasing a minuscule percentage of the one percent about deficit reduction. Western journalists appear not to be free to question whether society really is just what gilt-traders tell them.
As for guilt for Western war crimes, there is fear of terrorist attack from “the other.” Fear is what “free” Western journalists use when they cover NATO militarism. And ever greater restrictions on press freedom in NATO countries prevent journalists from talking about something more cataclysmic and eschatological. Recent world events suggest that Western corporations think they have found a way out of the crisis, a kind of final solution. It’s arguably the reductio ad absurdum of the powerful counter-revolutionary forces unleashed by the guillotining of the Jacobins: an out and out, overt, world war.
Lethal, foreign interventions appear on the world scene as if they are the twitches of a dying superpower. No amount of socio-economic strife at home can prevent NATO governments from perceiving military existential threats. Journalists repeat lies and [the great forgetting of] history. Wars are prepared against the great powers of the 21st century. NATO plays war games for attacks on China – and, of course, Russia. A breathless Western journalism about Ukraine allows no dissent so that all developments are seen through the prism of Russian expansionism, not NATO’s. But, they merely posture against Russia, China and India. And in Africa and Latin America, there are signs that they sense the game is already up.
One region – dominated, as it happens, by Islam – remains in focus. It doesn’t matter that Saudi Arabia has been the financial source for ISIS. Fossil fuel profits of the Middle East are paramount. Environmental catastrophe isn’t even an issue. Nor are repeated defeats in Mesopotamia. To explain this to the people, NATO powers require a “free” press of fake stenographer-journalists who repeat what’s leaked to them. It can be fake dossiers, redlines and fake WMD and it’s all in the context of a fundamental misunderstanding of the post-1789 world. ...
Hollande: International community must throw more petrol on the flames
Agence France Presse, 21 August 2014:
What if Assad (or Saddam Hussein, or Moammar Qaddafi) had been supporting forces attempting to overthrow by armed rebellion the Fifth Republic? The arrogance on display here is astonishing.
The problem according to Hollande is that "we" did not arrange two years ago for Assad to make way for "rebels" more favorable to Europe/US. The problem was compounded, according to Hollande, because one year ago, Europe/US did not "react" to the use of chemical weapons, presumably with overt war against Assad instead of, as was done with Russia's help, preventing further use of chemical weapons (including by "rebels").
And now faced with the choice between a (secular, unlike that of "friendly" Saudi Arabia) dictator and a terrorist group, Hollande supports escalating the cause.
There were always questions about the multifarious Syrian anti-Assad rebels. It was always clear that destabilizing Syria would empower ideological fighters of all kinds, including those of the Islamic State stripe. After Europe/US overthrow of relatively stable Iraq and Libya, those countries are deadly messes — did nobody think that might be the result also of taking the fight to Syria?
Or maybe that is exactly what is wanted. After all, the weapons trade is doing very well. As is the consequently necessary security state in Europe/US.
Yes, the international community bears a "heavy responsibility" for what is happening in Syria. Hollande is representative: an idiot and a terrorist.
President Francois Hollande said on Thursday that France had delivered weapons to rebels battling the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad "a few months ago."
The deliveries took place "a few months ago, when the Syrian rebels had to face both the armies of the dictator Bashar al-Assad and this terrorist group Islamic State," Hollande told reporters on a tour of the French island of La Reunion.
"We cannot leave the only Syrians who are preparing a democracy ... without weapons," he added.
What is happening currently in Syria is "terrible," he said. "On one side, the state of Bashar al-Assad which continues to crush and massacre, (on the other) Islamic State, and, in the middle, those who were supposed to lay the ground for the future, caught in a pincer movement."
"So we should not stop the support that we have given to these rebels who are the only ones to take part in the democratic process," said the president. ...
He added in that interview that the international community bore a "heavy responsibility" for what is happening in Syria, with its knock-on effects in Iraq.
"If, two years ago, we had acted to ensure a transition, we wouldn't have had Islamic State.
"If, one year ago, the major powers had reacted to the use of chemical weapons, we wouldn't have had this terrible choice between a dictator and a terrorist group," adding that the rebels "deserve all our support".
What if Assad (or Saddam Hussein, or Moammar Qaddafi) had been supporting forces attempting to overthrow by armed rebellion the Fifth Republic? The arrogance on display here is astonishing.
The problem according to Hollande is that "we" did not arrange two years ago for Assad to make way for "rebels" more favorable to Europe/US. The problem was compounded, according to Hollande, because one year ago, Europe/US did not "react" to the use of chemical weapons, presumably with overt war against Assad instead of, as was done with Russia's help, preventing further use of chemical weapons (including by "rebels").
And now faced with the choice between a (secular, unlike that of "friendly" Saudi Arabia) dictator and a terrorist group, Hollande supports escalating the cause.
There were always questions about the multifarious Syrian anti-Assad rebels. It was always clear that destabilizing Syria would empower ideological fighters of all kinds, including those of the Islamic State stripe. After Europe/US overthrow of relatively stable Iraq and Libya, those countries are deadly messes — did nobody think that might be the result also of taking the fight to Syria?
Or maybe that is exactly what is wanted. After all, the weapons trade is doing very well. As is the consequently necessary security state in Europe/US.
Yes, the international community bears a "heavy responsibility" for what is happening in Syria. Hollande is representative: an idiot and a terrorist.
I Am Not Charlie
Scott Long writes:
... It’s true, as Salman Rushdie says, that “Nobody has the right to not be offended.” You should not get to invoke the law to censor or shut down speech just because it insults you or strikes at your pet convictions. You certainly don’t get to kill because you heard something you don’t like. Yet, manhandled by these moments of mass outrage, this truism also morphs into a different kind of claim: That nobody has the right to be offended at all.
I am offended when those already oppressed in a society are deliberately insulted. I don’t want to participate. This crime in Paris does not suspend my political or ethical judgment, or persuade me that scatologically smearing a marginal minority’s identity and beliefs is a reasonable thing to do. Yet this means rejecting the only authorized reaction to the atrocity. Oddly, this peer pressure seems to gear up exclusively where Islam’s involved. When a racist bombed a chapter of a US civil rights organization this week, the media didn’t insist I give to the NAACP in solidarity. When a rabid Islamophobic rightist killed 77 Norwegians in 2011, most of them at a political party’s youth camp, I didn’t notice many #IAmNorway hashtags, or impassioned calls to join the Norwegian Labor Party. But Islam is there for us, it unites us against Islam. Only cowards or traitors turn down membership in the Charlie club.The demand to join, endorse, agree is all about crowding us into a herd where no one is permitted to cavil or condemn: an indifferent mob, where differing from one another is Thoughtcrime, while indifference to the pain of others beyond the pale is compulsory.
... To defend satire because it’s indiscriminate is to admit that it discriminates against the defenseless.
... Of course, Voltaire didn’t realize that his Jewish victims were weak or powerless. Already, in the 18th century, he saw them as tentacles of a financial conspiracy; his propensity for overspending and getting hopelessly in debt to Jewish moneylenders did a great deal to shape his anti-Semitism. In the same way, Charlie Hebdo and its like never treated Muslim immigrants as individuals, but as agents of some larger force. They weren’t strivers doing the best they could in an unfriendly country, but shorthand for mass religious ignorance, or tribal terrorist fanaticism, or obscene oil wealth. Satire subsumes the human person in an inhuman generalization. The Muslim isn’t just a Muslim, but a symbol of Islam.
This is where political Islamists and Islamophobes unite. They cling to agglutinative ideologies; they melt people into a mass; they erase individuals’ attributes and aspirations under a totalizing vision of what identity means. A Muslim is his religion. You can hold every Muslim responsible for what any Muslim does. (And one Danish cartoonist makes all Danes guilty.) ...
This insistence on contagious responsibility, collective guilt, is the flip side of #JeSuisCharlie. It’s #VousÊtesISIS; #VousÊtesAlQaeda. Our solidarity, our ability to melt into a warm mindless oneness and feel we’re doing something, is contingent on your involuntary solidarity, your losing who you claim to be in a menacing mass. We can’t stand together here unless we imagine you together over there in enmity. ...
... It’s true, as Salman Rushdie says, that “Nobody has the right to not be offended.” You should not get to invoke the law to censor or shut down speech just because it insults you or strikes at your pet convictions. You certainly don’t get to kill because you heard something you don’t like. Yet, manhandled by these moments of mass outrage, this truism also morphs into a different kind of claim: That nobody has the right to be offended at all.
I am offended when those already oppressed in a society are deliberately insulted. I don’t want to participate. This crime in Paris does not suspend my political or ethical judgment, or persuade me that scatologically smearing a marginal minority’s identity and beliefs is a reasonable thing to do. Yet this means rejecting the only authorized reaction to the atrocity. Oddly, this peer pressure seems to gear up exclusively where Islam’s involved. When a racist bombed a chapter of a US civil rights organization this week, the media didn’t insist I give to the NAACP in solidarity. When a rabid Islamophobic rightist killed 77 Norwegians in 2011, most of them at a political party’s youth camp, I didn’t notice many #IAmNorway hashtags, or impassioned calls to join the Norwegian Labor Party. But Islam is there for us, it unites us against Islam. Only cowards or traitors turn down membership in the Charlie club.The demand to join, endorse, agree is all about crowding us into a herd where no one is permitted to cavil or condemn: an indifferent mob, where differing from one another is Thoughtcrime, while indifference to the pain of others beyond the pale is compulsory.
... To defend satire because it’s indiscriminate is to admit that it discriminates against the defenseless.
... Of course, Voltaire didn’t realize that his Jewish victims were weak or powerless. Already, in the 18th century, he saw them as tentacles of a financial conspiracy; his propensity for overspending and getting hopelessly in debt to Jewish moneylenders did a great deal to shape his anti-Semitism. In the same way, Charlie Hebdo and its like never treated Muslim immigrants as individuals, but as agents of some larger force. They weren’t strivers doing the best they could in an unfriendly country, but shorthand for mass religious ignorance, or tribal terrorist fanaticism, or obscene oil wealth. Satire subsumes the human person in an inhuman generalization. The Muslim isn’t just a Muslim, but a symbol of Islam.
This is where political Islamists and Islamophobes unite. They cling to agglutinative ideologies; they melt people into a mass; they erase individuals’ attributes and aspirations under a totalizing vision of what identity means. A Muslim is his religion. You can hold every Muslim responsible for what any Muslim does. (And one Danish cartoonist makes all Danes guilty.) ...
This insistence on contagious responsibility, collective guilt, is the flip side of #JeSuisCharlie. It’s #VousÊtesISIS; #VousÊtesAlQaeda. Our solidarity, our ability to melt into a warm mindless oneness and feel we’re doing something, is contingent on your involuntary solidarity, your losing who you claim to be in a menacing mass. We can’t stand together here unless we imagine you together over there in enmity. ...
January 12, 2015
Cui Bono?
Pepe Escobar writes:
... Who profits?
US Think Tankland, also predictably, is busy spinning the drama of an “intra-Muslim” split which provides jihadis a lot of geopolitical space to exploit – all this sucking the Western world into a Muslim civil war. This is absolutely ridiculous. The Empire of Chaos, already during the 70s, was busy cultivating jihadi/Kalashnikov culture to fight anything from the USSR to nationalist movements all across the Global South. Divide and Rule has always been used to fan the flames “intra-Islam”, from the Clinton administration getting cozy with the Taliban to the Cheney regime – helped by Persian Gulf vassals – advancing the sectarian Sunni/Shi’ite schism.
Cui bono, then, with killing Charlie [and not just the cartoonists and staffers, but also the policemen and kosher grocery workers and shoppers, and the killers themselves]? Only those whose agenda is to demonize Islam. Not even a bunch of brainwashed fanatics would pull off the Charlie carnage to show people who accuse them of being barbarians that they are, in fact, barbarians. French intel at least has concluded that this is no underwear bomber stunt. This is a pro job. That happens to take place just a few days after France recognizes Palestinian statehood. And just a few days after General Hollande demanded the lifting of sanctions against the Russian “threat”.
The Masters of the Universe who pull the real levers of the Empire of Chaos are freaking out with the systemic chaos in the racket they so far had the illusion of controlling. Make no mistake – the Empire of Chaos will do what it can to exploit the post-Charlie environment – be it blowback or false flag.
The Obama administration is already mobilizing the UN Security Council. The FBI is “helping” with the French investigation. ... The Obama administration is already mobilized to offer “protection” – Mob-style – to a Western Europe that is just, only just, starting to be diffident of the pre-fabricated Russian “threat”. And just as it happens, when the Empire of Chaos most needs it, evil “terra” once again rears its ugly head.
... Who profits?
US Think Tankland, also predictably, is busy spinning the drama of an “intra-Muslim” split which provides jihadis a lot of geopolitical space to exploit – all this sucking the Western world into a Muslim civil war. This is absolutely ridiculous. The Empire of Chaos, already during the 70s, was busy cultivating jihadi/Kalashnikov culture to fight anything from the USSR to nationalist movements all across the Global South. Divide and Rule has always been used to fan the flames “intra-Islam”, from the Clinton administration getting cozy with the Taliban to the Cheney regime – helped by Persian Gulf vassals – advancing the sectarian Sunni/Shi’ite schism.
Cui bono, then, with killing Charlie [and not just the cartoonists and staffers, but also the policemen and kosher grocery workers and shoppers, and the killers themselves]? Only those whose agenda is to demonize Islam. Not even a bunch of brainwashed fanatics would pull off the Charlie carnage to show people who accuse them of being barbarians that they are, in fact, barbarians. French intel at least has concluded that this is no underwear bomber stunt. This is a pro job. That happens to take place just a few days after France recognizes Palestinian statehood. And just a few days after General Hollande demanded the lifting of sanctions against the Russian “threat”.
The Masters of the Universe who pull the real levers of the Empire of Chaos are freaking out with the systemic chaos in the racket they so far had the illusion of controlling. Make no mistake – the Empire of Chaos will do what it can to exploit the post-Charlie environment – be it blowback or false flag.
The Obama administration is already mobilizing the UN Security Council. The FBI is “helping” with the French investigation. ... The Obama administration is already mobilized to offer “protection” – Mob-style – to a Western Europe that is just, only just, starting to be diffident of the pre-fabricated Russian “threat”. And just as it happens, when the Empire of Chaos most needs it, evil “terra” once again rears its ugly head.
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