Tag: pollution

UN report names the world’s most polluted places

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Sunday, 13 March, 2022 — — Origin: Climate & Capitalism

‘Sacrifice Zones’

Pollution kills more people than all wars, murders and other forms of violence combined

Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. One of the most polluted places on earth.
(Photo: Garth Lenz, Ecojustice)

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment has identified the most polluted places on earth. In his annual report to the UN Human Rights Council, David Boyd describes these places as Sacrifice Zones, a term originally used for areas made uninhabitable by nuclear weapons tests.
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Judge Preska terminates all Zoom access to Donziger trial in effort to limit public access, say lawyers

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7 April 2021 —  Make Chevron Clean Up by Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía

U.S. trial judge Loretta Preska (Twitter: Steven Donziger)

U.S. trial judge Loretta Preska has denied all Zoom access to the upcoming contempt trial of human rights lawyer Steven Donziger in a widely condemned move that his lawyers say is designed to limit public access to an unprecedented one-sided trial run by a private Chevron prosecutor.

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Africa, plastic-wrapped?

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30 October 2020 — DeSmog UK

Five years ago this month, the UK took a step to cut back plastic use, slapping a 5p charge on plastic carrier bags. Two years later, Kenya did the same.

The East African country has since gone one further, celebrating this year’s World Environment Day in June by banning single-use plastic in all beaches, forests and conservation areas. Continue reading →

Book Review: Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, pork, and power in America

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8 May 2020 — Climate & Capitalism

How pigs became commodities and key elements of the interlocked social, economic and political institutions of US capitalism.

J.L.Anderson
CAPITALIST PIGS
Pigs, Pork and Power in America
West Virginia University Press, 2019

reviewed by Martin Empson

Consider the pig. You might think of it as an animal that snuffles around the farmyard and ends up as bacon. If you are more acquainted with industrial agriculture you might think of it as one of the animals that frequently spends most of its life in a small pen, with thousands of others, before ending up as bacon. But, as this fascinating account of the role of pigs in American social, economic and gastronomic life shows, there is a lot more to the hog.

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Lockdown: Locking in the New Global Order

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2 April 2020 — Source: Off Guardian

Colin Todhunter

On 12 March, British PM Boris Johnson informed the public that families would continue to “lose loved ones before their time” as the coronavirus outbreak worsens. He added:

We’ve all got to be clear, this is the worst public health crisis for a generation.”

In a report, the Imperial College had warned of modelling that suggested over 500,000 would die from the virus in the UK. The lead author of the report, epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, has since revised the estimate downward to a maximum of 20,000 if current ‘lockdown’ measures work. Johnson seems to have based his statement on Ferguson’s original figures.

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As the ocean waters rise, so do the islands of garbage: The 30th Newsletter 2019

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26 July 2019 —  The Tricontinental

The Thirtieth Newsletter (2019)

by

Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Twelve-year-old Aeshnina Azzahra’s letter to Donald Trump.

Twelve-year-old Aeshnina Azzahra’s letter to Donald Trump. (click to enlarge)

On 12 July 2019, a twelve-year-old girl from Gresik (Indonesia), Aeshnina Azzahra, wrote a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump. The letter was delivered to the U.S. embassy in Jakarta and released to the press. ‘My country’, she wrote, ‘is the second largest contributor to waste. And some of that waste is your waste’. Then, she asked three powerful and sincere questions: ‘Why do you always export your waste to my country? Why don’t you take care of your own waste? Why do we have to feel the impact of your waste?’

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Exposing the Dirty Business Behind the Designer Label By Michelle Chen

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19 May 2019 — Truthout

Fashion is the world’s second-most polluting industry after the oil industry

Even before it gets worn once, that new T-shirt you bought is already dirtier than you can imagine. It’s soaked through with toxic waste, factory smog and plastic debris—all of which is likely just a few spin cycles away from an incinerator, or maybe a landfill halfway around the world. Our obsession with style rivals our hunger for oil, making fashion the world’s second-most polluting industry after the oil industry.

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Inspections and pollution tests drop as Environment Agency sheds thousands of staff

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22 December 2018 — True Publica
Inspections and pollution tests drop as Environment Agency sheds thousands of staffBy Zach Boren and Russell Scott: The number of site inspections by England’s environmental regulator has fallen by more than a third over the past four years, an Unearthed analysis has found.

Conservation experts told Unearthed the cutbacks – which have come at a time of rapid staffing cuts at the Environment Agency (EA) – had hampered efforts to revive the country’s dirty rivers and depleted fish stocks.

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It’s time to break up capitalism’s love affair with plastic By Amy Leather

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9 November 2018 — Climate & Capitalism

A valuable invention is massively misused in the service of profit, producing unprecedented waste and pollution. How can we stop the plastic plague?

Plastic is bad, isn’t it? That is certainly the new consensus. And no wonder there has been a public outcry. Many of us have been shocked by images like those on Blue Planet of a sperm whale with a stomach full of plastic waste, albatrosses feeding their young plastic or turtles trapped in plastic bags.

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CAPITALISM COULD COST US THE EARTH!

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8 October 2018 — The Planning Motive

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just released its report on Global Warning. Global temperatures broke through the 1 Degree barrier in 2017 and will breach the planet altering threshold of +1.5 Degrees sometime in the next ten to twenty years. The IPCC has produced a vivid graph showing the thresholds:report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_fig1.pdfThe only important point to come out of this report is that capitalism is not slowing down this rise, never mind reversing it. It confirms that capitalism is putting society together with the planet, in harm’s way.

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Sadiq Khan’s ‘T-Charge’ to tackle air pollution is essentially a nonsense. Here’s why

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24 October 2017 — The Canary

“100 companies produce 71% of the world’s total greenhouse gases”

On Monday 23 October, the ‘T-Charge’ came into force in London. It is a scheme from Mayor Sadiq Khan to try and tackle air pollution. But analysis of the charge on older vehicles shows that, in fact, it will do very little to tackle the crisis that kills over 9,000 people a year in London.

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New research shows irreversible changes in England in the Anthropocene

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29 July 2017 — Climate & Capitalism

A planet transformed

Scientists find irreversible changes that have no precedent in the 4.54 billion years of Earth history, caused by new human-made materials

‘Omnipresent’ signs demonstrating the effects of human impact on England’s landscape have been revealed by researchers from the University of Leicester.

Concrete structures forming a new, human-made rock type; ash particles in the landscape; and plastic debris are just a few of the new materials irreversibly changing England’s landscape and providing evidence of the effects of the Anthropocene, the research suggests.

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