blog of the post capitalist transition.. Read or download the novel here + latest relevant posts
Author: thefreeonline
The Free is a book and a blog. Download free E/book ...”the most detailed fictional treatment of the movement from a world recognizably like our own to an anarchist society that I have read...
Estimates of more than 500,000 people like you and me have already died in the Syrian Civil War. Here we show that the NATO partner, Turkish neo fascist leader Erdogan armed, funded and proxied a local Syrian rebellion into a bloodbath. The US especially helped to organise the massacre. Turkey’s genocidal wars are partly paid for by NATO, i.e. the western taxpayer. (Of about $800bn cost in 2017 Turkey contributed only just over $12bn). Not content with these crimes against humanity Erdogan has ordered his massive NATO military to invade Afrin and Nth East Syria, expel hundreds of thousands of the local mainly Kurdish people from their homes and territory, in winter, and install paid Islamic terrorists, many from Al Qaeda and ISIS, plus pro Turkish refugees,up to a million plantation settlers in all to ‘Turkify’ his conquests . (Help stop the War Crimes, see #RiseUp4Rojava .)
Turkey deserves the blame for what happened in Syria
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan: If he had not intervened Syria would have emerged with a limited number of victims, little damage, few internally displaced and fewer refugees. Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan would also have escaped the negative human, economic and political impacts of the war across their borders.
Syria would have escaped more than eight years of warfare if Turkey had not intervened militarily and politically when Arab Spring anti-government protests erupted in March 2011. Without Turkey’s early involvement, Damascus’s crackdown would have ended the protests and the government would have initiated promised reforms.
see also> Seeing is Believing, Earthworks: Community Empowerment against fracking pollution and climate change. HERE> .https://wp.me/pIJl9-e9f
By Jonah M. Kessel and Hiroko Tabuchi Dec. 12, 2019
Immense amounts of methane are escaping from oil and gas sites nationwide, worsening global warming, even as the Trump administration weakens restrictions on offenders.
Jonah M. Kessel, a New York Times visual journalist, and Hiroko Tabuchi, a Times climate reporter, went to West Texas oilfields with a camera that can photograph methane.
To the naked eye, there is nothing out of the ordinary at the DCP Pegasus gas processing plant in West Texas, one of the thousands of installations in the vast Permian Basin that have transformed America into the largest oil and gas producer in the world.
There is a huge global spike in methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases driving climate change over the last decade, according Harvard University Studies. The U.S. is the biggest culprit, mostly from oil and gas fracking wells, there are over a million of them, with half already abandoned. Obama introduced laws so that the industry would -voluntarily- at least measure the leaks. But even that is being repealed by the Trump administration, a criminal and ecocidal policy in the light of years of concrete scientific proof that the methane emissions are tipping us towards imminent uncontrollable climate chaos..Controlling methane emissions would be a quick way to pause climate change, while CO2 remains in the atmosphere for many decades.
But a highly specialized camera sees what the human eye cannot: a major release of methane, the main component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas that is helping to warm the planet at an alarming rate.
Two New York Times journalists detected this from a tiny plane, crammed with scientific equipment, circling above the oil and gas sites that dot the Permian, an oil field bigger than Kansas. In just a few hours, the plane’s instruments identified six sites with unusually high methane emissions.
DCP Pegasus Gas Processing PlantNov. 5, 2019Using a powerful infrared camera, The Times identified large-scale releases. Here, methane escapes from a device meant to be burning it off.
Methane is loosely regulated, difficult to detect and rising sharply. The Times’s aerial and on-the-ground research, along with an examination of lobbying activities by the companies that own the sites, shows how the energy industry is seeking and winning looser federal regulations on methane, a major contributor to global warming.
Operators of the sites identified by The Times are among the very companies that have lobbied the Trump administration, either directly or through trade organizations, to weaken regulations on methane, a review of regulatory filings, meeting minutes and attendance logs shows. These local companies, along with oil-industry lobby groups that represent the world’s largest energy companies, are fighting rules that would force them to more aggressively fix emissions like these.
Next year, the administration could move forward with a plan that would effectively eliminate requirements that oil companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from oil and gas facilities. By the E.P.A.’s own calculations, the rollback would increase methane emissions by 370,000 tons through 2025, enough to power more than a million homes for a year.
Impacted residents travel to Madrid to highlight that planned infrastructure to process & export Permian oil & gas would guarantee catastrophic climate change
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
[Top] Optical gas imaging by Earthworks reveals normally invisible air pollution from an unlit flare. [Bottom] A regular still image taken at the same time and place shows what you see with the naked eye.
Madrid, Dec 4 — Today at an official COP25 side event Texas and New Mexico residents — impacted by the extraction of Permian Basin oil & gas, and by planned infrastructure to transport, process and export it — informed delegates and other attendees that catastrophic climate change is inevitable unless the Permian infrastructure expansion is stopped.
“The Permian Basin is an oil and gas carbon bomb that’s exploding, and it’s happening right now. If we can’t defuse it, the world cannot avoid catastrophic
climate change. Major oil companies are trying to lock in decades more oil and gas demand by building infrastructure from the Permian to the Texas Gulf Coast to transport, process and export the world’s largest current oil & gas play,” said Earthworks’ Energy Campaigner Ethan Buckner.
Although communities across the region are bearing the brunt of impacts from oil, gas and petrochemical development, those most at risk from the Permian expansion are those already the most impacted by social and environmental injustice. And on Texas’ Gulf Coast — where the oil & gas is processed and exported — they’re suffering twice: from the operations’ toxic pollution, and from intensified climate change.
“I live less than two miles from the Ship Channel in the East End of Houston, TX. My dad was a United Steelworker who died of cancer in 2016, and I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that same year. So I’m well aware that workers and fenceline communities are paying with their health the price of daily exposure to toxic pollution from oil and gas infrastructure,” said Ana
No One Should Have to Breathe These Chemicals – AnaParras of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (@tejasbarrios). HOUSTON — While families across the country celebrated Thanksgiving with their loved ones, more than 50,000 people in Port Neches, Tex., were forced to evacuate from their homes and spend the holiday in makeshift shelters
“I want to make it clear, however, although I am deeply opposed to war, I am not advocating appeasement. It is often necessary to take a strong stand to counter unjust aggression. For instance, it is plain to all of us that the Second World War was entirely justified. It “saved civilization” from the tyranny of Nazi Germany, as Winston Churchill so aptly put it.
But we can only judge whether or not a conflict was vindicated on moral grounds with hindsight. For example, we can now see during the Cold War, the principle of nuclear deterrence had a certain value. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to assess such matters with any degree of accuracy. War is violence and violence is unpredictable. Therefore, it is better to avoid it if possible, and never to presume we know beforehand whether the outcome of a particular war will be beneficial or not.”
Positive traits and behaviour are accessible to and should be embraced by everyone, whether male or female. “Healthy masculinity” is really just healthy humanity.
Increased attention on men’s violence against women has focused attention on not only rape and sexual harassment but also on the cultural support system for such behavior. While only a small fraction of men violate the law, lots of men engage in less blatant forms of aggressive and coercive behavior that injure and undermine women, and even more men are bystanders who fail to challenge other men’s abuse.
This conversation often revolves around a critique of “toxic masculinity” and the search for a “healthy masculinity,” which does bring needed attention to these forms of abuse. But we should be wary of the way those phrases can limit our understanding and reinforce patriarchy.
I propose we replace “toxic masculinity” with “masculinity in patriarchy,” to focus attention on the system out of which problems arise.
An environmental analogy helps: Too often we only think about toxic chemicals when we have to clean up spills and leaks, responses that obviously are necessary. But just as important is challenging an industrial worldview that embraces the use of those toxic substances, along with critiquing the economic system that makes toxic contamination inevitable. The same goes for the patriarchal worldview.
Some may think patriarchy is an out-of-date term, but it’s an accurate description of societies based on institutionalized male dominance — which is virtually all the world, including the United States.
Patriarchal societies change over time and vary depending on culture, but when we recognize “it’s still a man’s world,” we simply are acknowledging that patriarchy remains entrenched.
see below EXPOSÉ: Santander and hypocrisy with climate change
In Spain, the country’s biggest fossil fuel polluters are also some of the most generous sponsors for this year’s U.N. climate talks. On Saturday, we joined activists on a “toxic tour” of Madrid from the Madrid stock exchange to Santander Bank. Activists explained that when Spanish President Pedro Sánchez announced that Spain would host COP25, he went to IBEX 35 — the 35 biggest listed companies in the Spanish stock exchange — offering them a 90% tax break on a $2 million sponsorship. Advocates say that these same companies “have deep and dirty links to the fossil fuel industry.” But midway through, the police shut down the tour, threatening fines of over 3,000 euros if the peaceful tour did not disperse. Climate justice campaigner for Friends of the Earth International Héctor de Prado says he was shocked and “ashamed” by the attempts by police to halt the tour. “It is not normal,” he says.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we broadcast live from the U.N. climate summit, known as COP25, here in Madrid, Spain. We turn now to the fossil fuel polluters that are sponsoring this year’s climate talks. On Saturday, activists took us on what they called a “toxic tour” of Madrid, from the Madrid stock exchange to Santander Bank to the world-famous Prado Museum. But midway through, the police shut it down. This is Pascoe Sabido of Corporate Europe Observatory, or CEO, but begun with Lise Masson of BankTrack.
LISE MASSON: So, welcome to the toxic tour. So, inside COP25, the negotiations are supposed to be tackling the climate crisis. But they’re completely failing, and they have been for 25 years because of the influence of big polluters. The same companies who are causing the crisis are derailing the talks and the real solutions in order to protect their business models. Some of these biggest polluters or even sponsoring the COP, and we’ll be paying a visit to some of them today. The first stop is, in fact, here at la Bolsa, Madrid’s stock exchange.
Crazed with Greed the Capitalist Corporations promote MORE OIL AND COAL burning and prospecting. While irreversible climate chaos begins to take hold and the money system begins to collapse, they DENY climate change and hide in their tax havens. But as General Strikes and Rebellions threaten to sweep out corrupt politicians… Maybe those Climate Criminals will in the future be hunted down and prosecuted like Nazi criminals, one by one.
The Free 