Climate Crisis
U.S. Farmers Sue Trump Administration
Several U.S. farmers and some nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration last Thursday, claiming that it is illegally withholding funding from the Department of Agriculture.
The USDA has withheld REAP grant funding https://www.epa.gov/grants as it conducts an agency-wide spending review.
Five farmers involved in the suit say that they were awarded grants through the USDA's Rural Energy for America, REAP program, to install solar panels on their farms.
Its title is Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: Resist False Solutions to Climate Change, is now in its third edition and can be accessed—for free— online. It was put together by “an international coalition of organization and activists,” relates the “Hoodwinked Collaborative” that “was convened to produce and distribute the groundbreaking publication on false solutions to the climate crisis.”
New York, NY— Today, the AI Now Institute released a new report exploring how governments have used recent crises to pass a wave of water “relief” policies that not only expand the footprint of technology in the water domain, but also exacerbate water commodification, environmental racism, and economic extraction.
The use of technology - including artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, and other digital data systems - is rapidly expanding across the water domain. Since March 2020, governments and private entities have enacted a wave of water relief policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, depleting water supply, and economic crises. Many of these newly enacted policies exacerbate the harms and inequities caused by tech-driven water management, allocation, and distribution decisions.
The report's authors argue that these policies fail to address the most urgent and fundamental needs of water transitions and water futures, and these policies put a premium on extractive economic growth over water justice or equity.
Buried deep in Joe Biden’s various infrastructure deals is a bailout every bit as insane as the original decision to stay in Afghanistan – up to $50 billion in handouts to keep old nuke reactors operating … at least until they blow up.
The cost of our arrogant lunacy in Afghanistan was thousands of lives and maybe $2 trillion.
The cost of the inevitable explosion at one or more of these crumbling jalopy nukes could be millions of lives and trillions in both destroyed property and an irradiated ecosphere.
Throughout the globe, the Solartopian technologies of wind, solar, batteries, and efficiency are skyrocketing in production while their prices plummet. But Biden’s proposed bailout would take a huge amount of capital away from clean, job producing renewables and put it into expensive, dangerous, obsolete reactors.
Richard Nixon in 1974 – amidst the Arab oil embargo – promised there’d be a thousand “Peaceful Atom” nukes in the US by the year 2000. In that year there were 104. Today there are 93, with the number still dropping – but not fast enough.
Rome is scorching hot. This beautiful city is becoming unbearable for other reasons, too. Though every corner of the beaming metropolis is a monument to historical grandeur, from the Colosseum in Rione Monti to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in San Giovanni, it is now struggling under the weight of its own contradictions.
In Via Appia, bins are overflowing with garbage, often spilling over into the streets. The smell, especially during Italy’s increasingly sweltering summers, is suffocating.
As those individuals aware of it will have observed, presumably with deep regret, the latest ‘International Day for Biological Diversity’ passed on 22 May with the bulk of the human population continuing to act in ways that destroy Earth’s biosphere at an ever-accelerating rate.
Unaware that many authors continue to report the ongoing destruction of Earth’s biodiversity, which is under siege on a range of fronts by unchecked human destruction of Earth’s biosphere as well as particular assaults on Earth’s living creatures, responses to this ‘hidden’ path to human extinction continue to waver between non-existent and token.
Consequently, in such circumstances, the destruction of biodiversity might yet become the means by which Homo sapiens is consigned to the fossil record ‘beating’ nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and electromagnetic radiation as the fundamental driver of extinction.