CARICOM Unified on COP24 Expectations

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The twenty-fourth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate, known as COP24, will take place in Poland from December second to the fourteenth. The key objective of this year’s conference is to adopt the implementation guidelines of the Paris Agreement. It brings together world leaders and champions of the environment in a number of high-level events. Belize is part of the block of countries identified as Small Island Developing States. Last week, CARICOM member states of the grouping met in Barbados to prepare for the conference. The Caribbean Community Climate Change Center’s Carlos Fuller shares the region’s expectation of the event:

Carlos Fuller

Carlos Fuller, International & Regional Liaison Officer, CCCCC

“For us, COP24 is an important one because it is the most significant COP after the Paris Agreement, which will actually provide the rules of the Paris Agreement. So, when you read through the…

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Trickle Down Economics Vs Extinction

 

Homo Sapiens are a curious race, for although our name means Wise Man we have swallowed the bait of capitalistic Kool Aid with alacrity, and now fully subscribe to the theory that enriching the elite 1% will benefit everyone.
If this were not the heights of ignorance, our lack control over the fossil fuel industry and the imperial war machine will certainly be the our undoing, leading, in all probability, to extinction of life on this planet.
Let us therefore live a life in keeping with our species name and cooperate globally to save our Home World, this planet Earth.
Nicholas Robson, Cayman Islands, 18 November 2018

How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet

 

In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments. Read More

The World’s Largest Floating Solar Plant Is Finally Online

 

Sungrow Floating Power Plant

The world’s largest floating solar power plant is now online in China. Built by Sungrow, a supplier of PV inverter systems, the 40MW plant is now afloat in water four to 10 meters deep, and successfully linked to Huainan, China’s grid. The placement was chosen in large part because the area was previously the location of coal mining operations; and, as a result, the water there is now mineralized and mostly useless. The lake itself was only formed after years of mining operations, the surrounding land collapsed and created a cavity that was filled with rainwater.

Floating solar plants are advantageous because they put otherwise useless water and land to good use, and the water naturally cools the system and the ambient temperatures, improving generation and limiting long-term damage from heat.

(https://futurism.com/the-worlds-largest-floating-solar-plant-is-finally-online

GCF signs off funding for Barbados water sector resilience project

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PRESS RELEASE – Songdo,

On 1 November, GCF and the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) signed the Funded Activity Agreement (FAA) for the project Water Sector Resilience Nexus for Sustainability in Barbados (WSRN S-Barbados).

The project aims to make the provision of potable water in Barbados less vulnerable to the impacts of hurricanes which have been increasing in intensity over the past decades. It involves installing a photovoltaic (PV) power generation field next to one of the main pumping stations, yielding a mitigation benefit from the reduced dependency on diesel-generated electricity. In addition, the installation of water storage tanks and rainwater harvesting systems in several strategic locations on the island will ensure that any disruptions in water supply do not lead to immediate loss of potable water to vulnerable populations.

Patrick Van Laake, Senior Ecosystems Management Specialist at GCF and Task Manager for the project, stated: “The 2017 Atlantic…

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Historic Climate Change ruling that puts ‘all world governments on notice’

Dutch appeals court upholds landmark climate change ruling | Environment | The Guardian

Campaigners celebrate at the Hague after the court of appeal upheld the historic climate ruling on the Dutch Government. Photograph: Chantal Bekker Chantal Bekker/GraphicAlert/Urgenda Foundation

A court in The Hague has upheld a historic legal order on the Dutch government to accelerate carbon emissions cuts, a day after the world’s climate scientists warned that time was running out to avoid dangerous warming.

Appeal court judges ruled that the severity and scope of the climate crisis demanded greenhouse gas reductions of at least 25% by 2020 – measured against 1990 levels – higher than the 17% drop planned by Mark Rutte’s liberal administration.

The ruling – which was greeted with whoops and cheers in the courtroom – will put wind in the sails of a raft of similar cases being planned around the world, from Norway to New Zealand and from the UK to Uganda.

Marjan Minnesma, the director of the Urgenda campaign which brought the case, called on political leaders to start fighting climate change rather than court actions.

She said: “The special report of the IPCC emphasises that we need to reduce emissions with much greater urgency. The Dutch government knows that as a low-lying country, we are on the frontline of climate change. Our own government agencies recently concluded that in the worst case scenario sea levels might rise by 2.5 to 3 metres by the end of the century. The court of appeal’s decision puts all governments on notice. They must act now, or they will be held to account.”

Jesse Klaver, the leader of the Dutch Greens welcomed the decision as “historic news”. He told the Guardian: “Governments can no longer make promises they don’t fulfil. Countries have an obligation to protect their citizens against climate change. That makes this trial relevant for all other countries.”
Read More

How America’s Allies Can Protect the Liberal World Order From Trump

 

The order that has structured international politics since the end of World War II is fracturing. Many of the culprits are obvious. Revisionist powers, such as China and Russia, want to reshape global rules to their own advantage. Emerging powers, such as Brazil and India, embrace the perks of great-power status but shun the responsibilities that come with it. Rejectionist powers, such as Iran and North Korea, defy rules set by others. Meanwhile, international institutions, such as the UN, struggle to address problems that multiply faster than they can be resolved.

The newest culprit, however, is a surprise: the United States, the very country that championed the order’s creation. Seventy years after U.S. President Harry Truman sketched the blueprint for a rules-based international order to prevent the dog-eat-dog geopolitical competition that triggered World War II, U.S. President Donald Trump has upended it. He has raised doubts about Washington’s security commitments to its allies, challenged the fundamentals of the global trading regime, abandoned the promotion of freedom and democracy as defining features of U.S. foreign policy, and abdicated global leadership. Read More

Humanity is a scourge upon the planet and should be quarantined on Earth, as they are not evolved enough to be let lose on the galaxy.

Earth from the Moon

Final call to save the world from ‘climate catastrophe’
It’s the final call, say scientists, the most extensive warning yet on the risks of rising global temperatures.
Their dramatic report on keeping that rise under 1.5 degrees C says the world is now completely off track, heading instead towards 3C.
Keeping to the preferred target of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels will mean “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.
It will be hugely expensive – but the window of opportunity remains open.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45775309?SThisFB

Our symbiotic guardians: bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other microscopic species who defend us.

A Doomsday Vault for Seeds Isn’t Enough, We’ll Also Need One for Our Germs

“These microbes co-evolved with humans over hundreds of millenia,” lead researcher and professor of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Anthropology at Rutgers-New Brunswick University, Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello said in a statement. The 20th century is undoing all that good evolution, and as our microbiomes lose diversity and industrialization sweeps across nations, conditions from allergies to obesity will continue to rise.

(https://www.inverse.com/article/49529-microbiome-vault-for-global-health?utm_campaign=science-innovation-2018-10-03&utm_medium=inverse&utm_source=newsletter

Initiation into a Living Planet | Charles Eisenstein

 

Most people have passed through some kind of initiation in life. By that, I mean a crisis that defies what you knew and what you were. From the rubble of the ensuing collapse, a new self is born into a new world.

Societies can also pass through an initiation. That is what climate change poses to the present global civilization. It is not a mere “problem” that we can solve from the currently dominant worldview and its solution-set but asks us to inhabit a new Story of the People and a new (and ancient) relationship to the rest of life.

A key element of this transformation is from a geomechanical worldview to a Living Planet worldview. In my last essay, I argued that the climate crisis will not be solved by adjusting levels of atmospheric gases, as if we were tinkering with the air-fuel mixture of a diesel engine. Rather, a living Earth can only be healthy – can only stay living in fact – if its organs and tissues are vital. These comprise the forests, the soil, the wetlands, the coral reefs, the fish, the whales, the elephants, the seagrass meadows, the mangrove swamps, and all the rest of Earth’s systems and species. If we continue degrading and destroying them, then even if we cut emissions to zero overnight, Earth would still die a death of a million cuts.

(https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/initiation-into-a-living-planet/