Wednesday, February 5, 2020
DSA: Join Iowa Debrief/Get Out The Vote Call
Who came out for Bernie last night? We did: first-time caucus-goers, M4A supporters, young people, POC, immigrants and workers across Iowa. There’s no time to wait — join our Post-Iowa Get Out the Vote Call tomorrow, Wednesday 2/5 at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT!
The ruling class is panicking because our movement is beating their money. We are powerful when we are organized, so keep the movement going. We’re not getting sidetracked by the Iowa results debacle — we’re planning for the next states now.Join Iowa Debrief/Get Out The Vote Call
Throughout this country’s 244-year history, working people have had precious few chances to take our destiny into our own hands. Yesterday, our movement showed that we can create the future we deserve. We, the multiracial working class, rejected the politics of austerity and corporate greed and instead chose a world for the many, not the few. This fight will only get tougher now that they know we can win.
Tomorrow, Wednesday, February 5th, at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT, DSA for Bernie will be holding our Iowa Debrief/Get Out The Vote call, with special guest Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, a DSA member and Chicago Alderman for the 33rd Ward. Join us to discuss our strategy to turn out every Bernie supporter we can through the primaries, engage Bernie’s base in the week after each election, and bring them into DSA.
And as DSA grows, so too does our movement to elect Bernie. On Friday, DSA announced the formation of People Power for Bernie with eight other pro-Bernie grassroots organizations, representing a total of over 2.3 million members. The working class is coming together and ready to radically expand our efforts to elect Bernie. We'll talk more tomorrow about what this means for DSA for Bernie.
This is an unprecedented moment. We need all hands on deck to fundamentally alter the material conditions of this country's working class. Join us!
Alec Ramsay-Smith
DSA for Bernie Organizer
PS: DSA for Bernie is funded by supporters like you. Please make a $5 donation to the campaign today!
DNC Blames Iowa Caucus Problems On Single Fuck-Up Senior Citizen Volunteer
https://politics.theonion.com/dnc-blames-iowa-caucus-problems-on-single-fuck-up-senio-1841453688?utm_source=TheOnion
WASHINGTON—Claiming the 89-year-old woman’s numerous blunders had caused the delay to the state’s results, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez told reporters Tuesday that all problems with the Iowa Caucus could be blamed on a single fuck-up senior citizen volunteer.
“What it comes down to is that this costly and embarrassing mistake can be traced to one elderly volunteer named Muriel Luntz,” said Perez, adding that the party had hesitated on whether to release details about the Dubuque-based widow and five-time election volunteer, but ultimately decided to do so based on the gravity of Luntz’s empty-headed missteps in singlehandedly derailing the first-in-the-nation caucus.
“Obviously, I don’t want to speculate, but I don’t think this woman is all there upstairs anymore. That’s the only way I could imagine someone bungling our exceptional election security measures. It’s a shame that just one numbskull could blemish the DNC’s sterling record. So let me just say that I completely hear the outpouring of frustration from voters and want them to know that any of their outrage should be sent directly to her home address, which we’ll be releasing online soon.”
Perez also pledged that as an effort to tamp down on further mistakes, he would ensure that by the next election, the idiotic octagenarian would no longer be alive.
Timber buildings can help to slow global heating February 4th, 2020, by Tim Radford
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/timber-buildings-can-help-to-slow-global-heating/
Tomorrow’s town planners could take a leaf from nature’s book with timber buildings. More than a leaf: the whole tree and all the cuttings as well.
LONDON, 4 February, 2020 − European and US scientists have a root-and-branch answer to the challenge of tomorrow’s cities: switch to wood, construct timber buildings and reduce the risk of even more devastating global temperature rise.
Their reasoning is bold and simple: it takes energy to make steel and cement, which must be mined or quarried, a process that puts the remaining wilderness at risk.
Forests represent stored atmospheric carbon. If timber from the planet’s forests could be used to construct the houses and offices needed for the additional 2.3 billion urban dwellers expected by the year 2050, then that would mean that the great cities could become sinks or repositories of stored carbon.
And new trees could grow in the space left by the harvested timber to add to the world inventory of stored carbon. The new towns and cities could become a kind of bank vault in which to save up to 700 million tonnes of carbon a year that might otherwise have spilled into the atmosphere as the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have been releasing into the atmosphere all of this carbon that had been stored in forests and in the ground,” said Galina Churkina, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany.
“We wanted to show that there can be a vision for returning much of this carbon back into the land.”
Strong fire-resistance
Wood is a fuel. It burns well. Paradoxically tree trunks, and treated timber assembled from laminates, do not. Structural timbers may char in a fire, but this has been shown to make them more resistant to burning. Experiment and research has shown that buildings of engineered timber up to 18 stories in height can be resistant to fire.
In effect, atmospheric carbon, turned into high-strength wood fibre by photosynthesis, could be made as safe as reinforced concrete. But, according to a new study in the journal Nature Sustainability, in 2014 the making of cement spilled 1,320 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and steel manufacture added another 1,740 million tonnes.
And between 2005 and 2015, mining in Brazil alone was responsible for 9% of the loss of all Amazon forest land during that decade: the act of prospecting for or extracting mineral commodities destroyed 12 times more than the areas stipulated in the mining leases.
The Potsdam scientists are not the first to suggest wood as an alternative to bricks and mortar, or bamboo as a replacement for cement, steel and glass. But their analysis may be the most detailed so far of a new way to confront the challenge of tomorrow’s climate-tested cities.
The researchers built a series of scenarios to test their hypothesis. New city structures must be built to accommodate an additional million or more humans every week for the next three decades. The proportion now expected to be fashioned from timber is half of 1%.
A five-storey house made from laminated timber could store 180 kilos of carbon a square meter: that is three times the biomass above ground in natural forests. If construction from wood was stepped up to 10%, new construction could store 10 million tonnes of carbon a year; if the world switched to 90% this figure could rise to almost 700 million tonnes.
“Trees offer us a technology of unparalleled perfection,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a co-author of the study and a founder director of the Potsdam Institute.
“They take CO2 out of our atmosphere and smoothly transform it into oxygen for us to breathe and carbon in their trunks for us to use. There’s no safer way of storing carbon I can think of.
“Societies have made good use of wood for buildings for many centuries, yet now the challenge of climate stabilisation calls for a very serious upscaling. If we engineer the wood into modern building materials and smartly manage harvest and construction, we humans can build ourselves a safe home on Earth.” − Climate News Network
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)