Thursday, May 2, 2019
Pompeo Says US Prepared to Take Military Action in Venezuela "If That's What's Required"
"The team that brought
you Iraq seems to thrive on death, destruction, and spending workers' hard
earned tax dollars," said one anti-war activist
Going a step beyond the
"all options are on the table" platitudes consistently parroted by
Trump administration officials, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday
the U.S. is prepared to take military action in Venezuela "if that's
what's required."
"The president has been
crystal clear and incredibly consistent—military action is possible,"
Pompeo said in an interview on Fox
Business.
Trump administration officials
are "trying to do everything we can to avoid violence," Pompeo said,
even as the White House expressed
unequivocal support for the "military
uprising" led by Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guiado.
"In the event that there
comes a moment—and we'll all have to make decisions about when that moment is
and the president will ultimately have to make that decision—he's prepared to
do that if that's what's required," said the Secretary of State.
"The team that brought
you Iraq seems to thrive on death, destruction, and spending workers' hard
earned tax dollars," Evans tweeted.
In an appearance on MSNBC just
hours after Pompeo's interview, national security adviser John Bolton echoed
many of the Secretary of State's talking points while continuing to make the
Orwellian claim that the coup the Trump administration is supporting in
Venezuela is somehow not a coup.
"If [Guaido] holds
constitutional legitimacy as we believe, trying to take control of the
government is not a coup, it's his constitutional obligation," Bolton
told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "The coup that we're worried about in
Venezuela may have already taken place through the insertion of tens of
thousands of Cuban security forces."
As Common Dreams reported,
progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers have condemned the Trump
administration's support for the attempted coup and urged the U.S. to stop
interfering in Venezuela's internal affairs.
"Bolton, Pompeo (and
Guaido) say they want a 'peaceful transition,' even while creating chaos in the
streets and calling for a military coup," Gerry Condon of Veterans for
Peace wrote for Common
Dreams on Wednesday. "In recent years, we have been overwhelmed by
endless wars on multiple fronts. Will Venezuela be one more such war? No,
we say. This will not stand."
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
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Climate change being fuelled by soil damage - report
By Roger Harrabin
BBC environment analyst
There's three times more
carbon in the soil than in the atmosphere – but that carbon's being released by
deforestation and poor farming.
This is fuelling climate
change – and compromising our attempts to feed a growing world population, the
authors will say.
Problems include soils being
eroded, compacted by machinery, built over, or harmed by over-watering.
Hurting the soil affects the
climate in two ways: it compromises the growth of plants taking in carbon from
the atmosphere, and it releases soil carbon previously stored by worms taking
leaf matter underground.
The warning will come from the
awkwardly-named IPBES – the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services - a panel studying the benefits of nature
to humans.
The body, which is meeting
this week, aims to get all the world’s governments singing from the same sheet
about the need to protect natural systems.
IPBES will formally release
its report on Monday 6 May.
About 3.2 billion people
worldwide are suffering from degraded soils, said IPBES chairman Prof Sir Bob
Watson.
"That's almost half of
the world population. There’s no question we are degrading soils all over the
world. We are losing from the soil the organic carbon and this undermines
agricultural productivity and contributes to climate change. We absolutely have
to restore the degraded soil we’ve got."
Prof Watson previously led the
Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
"Governments have focused
on climate change far more than they have focused on loss of biodiversity or
land degradation. All three are equally important to human wellbeing."
Soil expert Prof Jane Rickson
from Cranfield University, UK, added: "The thin layer of soil covering the
Earth's surface represents the difference between survival and extinction for
most terrestrial life.
"Only 3% of the planet's
surface is suitable for arable production and 75 billion tonnes of fertile soil
is lost to land degradation every year." She said soils form at a rate of
1cm in 300 years.
There's uncertainty about the
exact level of global soil degradation. But the major hotspots are reported to
be in South America, where forests are being felled; sub-Saharan Africa; India
and China. Soil scientists in both the biggest Asian nations are worried that
their ability to grow their own food may be compromised.
In the US, some soils are
being restored as forests take over poor quality land previously worked by
small farmers, but others are still being degraded.
The UK is not immune either.
Some maize fields in south-west England suffer major soil loss with heavy
rainfall because growing maize leaves bare soil exposed. Heavy rain is more
likely under climate change. Erosion is also a long-standing issue in the
fertile Fens, where, on dry windy days, peaty soil particles sometimes form a
kind of smog called the "Fen Blow".
Peat has a high carbon content
– and a recent paper suggests there’s far more carbon being lost from peatlands
than previously thought.
And on the chalky hills of
southern England, chemical-intensive crop farming is said to have caused the
loss of over a foot of soil in some places.
Soils are "incredibly
important" for our well-being, said Dr Joanna Clark from Reading
University.
"We all know that crops
are grown in soil, but soils are important for climate change as well. There's
three times more carbon stored in soil than there is in the atmosphere. So
imagine if all that carbon was released, we’d get runaway climate change. So we
need to keep the carbon in the soil."
The simplest way to protect
soils while combating climate change is to let forests grow back. This option
is favoured by fans of re-wilding.
But some farmers believe they
can continue to produce food by changing the way they farm to enhance the soil.
Brexit could give the UK
greater flexibility on how to spend public money on farming - enabling much
more leeway to reward farmers for capturing carbon in the earth. But there are
more than 700 soil types in the UK alone, so it won’t be simple.
Antibiotic resistance as big a threat as climate change – chief medic
Dame Sally Davies calls for
Extinction Rebellion-style campaign to raise awareness
Fiona Harvey Environment
correspondent
Mon 29 Apr 2019 08.17 EDT
Protests against climate
change should be extended to the other greatest threat facing humanity,
according to England’s chief medical officer, who says an Extinction
Rebellion-style campaign is needed to save people from antibiotics becoming
ineffective in the face of overuse and a lack of regulation.
The threat
of antibiotic resistance is as great as that from climate change, said
Dame Sally Davies, and should be given as much attention from politicians and
the public.
“It would be nice if activists
recognised the importance of this,” she said. “This is happening slowly and
people adjust to where we are, but this is the equivalent [danger] to extreme
weather.”
Davies said efforts to combat
the problem of common illnesses becoming untreatable by antibiotic medicines
should be coordinated at a worldwide level in a similar way as the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of scientists set up in
1988 to tackle global warming.
The IPCC warned
last year that climate change would lead to disaster within 12 years
if urgent action was not taken to reverse the growth in greenhouse gas
emissions. Davies said the consequences of antibiotic resistance posed at least
as great a threat to humanity’s future, and in the same timescale, but few
efforts had been made to deal with the issue.
“There is not the appetite
[among pharmaceutical companies] to develop new medicines,” she said. “There is
a systemic failure. We need something similar to the IPCC.”
She listed a series of
problems that the world has allowed to build up, from overuse of antibiotics
and a lack of restraints on prescribing strong medications, to the rampant use
of the drugs on
animals, including by farmers for “growth promotion”, as the drugs can make
animals put on weight faster. Such use has been banned in Europe and the US,
but is common elsewhere, and even in the EU and US, the use of strong
antibiotics critical to human health is still allowed on animals despite
scientific advice to the contrary.
Davies said she had to be
persuaded to regard any use of antibiotics on animals as ethical, given the
potential for overuse leading to increased bacterial resistance. “I do think
now they can be used on sick animals, I have been convinced,” she said. But she
is still concerned that antibiotics are vastly overused in farming, and that this
is one of the biggest factors behind the growing problem of resistance.
Globally, by far the majority of antibiotic use is for animals.
Fish
farming is also a major concern, said Davies, as the use of
antibiotics has been largely overlooked in that industry. Few areas of farming
are free from concern – she noted antibiotics are allowed to be used in
spraying citrus fruit in the US, which she regards as a serious danger.
Davies will leave
her post later this year, so will no longer have a government role
when post-Brexit trade deals with the US are likely to be signed. But she made
it clear she would continue to speak out against deals that she viewed as
weakening the UK’s protections on antibiotic use. The US has different rules to
the EU on antibiotic use on animals and plants.
A landmark report published on
Monday by the the UN’s Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial
Resistance (IACG) recommended stronger rules should be brought in across the
world to prevent the overuse of such medicines on farms, and on people.
Haileyesus Getahun, the
director of the IACG, said the threat of antimicrobial resistance was “a silent
tsunami”. He said the public were still largely unaware of the problem, but
that it could yet be solved if people were educated about the dangers. “We are
calling for people to come together,” he said. “We don’t see the effects of it
yet, but what is coming will be a catastrophe.”
The report calls for the use
of antibiotics as growth promoters in farm animals to be abolished globally,
and for the strongest antibiotics to be reserved for human use. The authors
also called for pharmaceutical companies to “prioritise public good over
profit”, because of the market failure that means developing new drugs, while
of enormous public benefit, does not result in companies making more money.
Another critical issue is
sanitation, because the lack of clean water and good sanitation that afflicts
more than 2 billion of the world’s population is fuelling the rise of
antibiotic resistance that quickly spreads around the globe, including to rich
countries.
The report found that failing
to take urgent action would result in 24 million people being forced into
extreme poverty by 2030, and lead to 10 million deaths a year by 2050.
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