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Sunday, June 6, 2021
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Top scientists warn of 'ghastly future of mass extinction' and climate disruption
Sobering new report says world is failing to grasp the extent of threats posed by biodiversity loss and the climate crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/13/top-scientists-warn-of-ghastly-future-of-mass-extinction-and-climate-disruption-aoe
The planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” that threaten human survival because of ignorance and inaction, according to an international group of scientists, who warn people still haven’t grasped the urgency of the biodiversity and climate crises.
The 17 experts, including Prof Paul Ehrlich from Stanford University, author of The Population Bomb, and scientists from Mexico, Australia and the US, say the planet is in a much worse state than most people – even scientists – understood.
“The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms – including humanity – is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts,” they write in a report in Frontiers in Conservation Science which references more than 150 studies detailing the world’s major environmental challenges.
The delay between destruction of the natural world and the impacts of these actions means people do not recognise how vast the problem is, the paper argues. “[The] mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilisation.”
The report warns that climate-induced mass migrations, more pandemics and conflicts over resources will be inevitable unless urgent action is taken.
“Ours is not a call to surrender – we aim to provide leaders with a realistic ‘cold shower’ of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future,” it adds.
Dealing with the enormity of the problem requires far-reaching changes to global capitalism, education and equality, the paper says. These include abolishing the idea of perpetual economic growth, properly pricing environmental externalities, stopping the use of fossil fuels, reining in corporate lobbying, and empowering women, the researchers argue.
The report comes months after the world failed to meet a single UN Aichi biodiversity target, created to stem the destruction of the natural world, the second consecutive time governments have failed to meet their 10-year biodiversity goals. This week a coalition of more than 50 countries pledged to protect almost a third of the planet by 2030.
A coral reef dominated by algae in Seychelles ... the climate crisis is changing the composition of ecosystems. Photograph: Nick Graham/Lancaster University/PA
An estimated one million species are at risk of extinction, many within decades, according to a recent UN report.
“Environmental deterioration is infinitely more threatening to civilisation than Trumpism or Covid-19,” Ehrlich told the Guardian.
In The Population Bomb, published in 1968, Ehrlich warned of imminent population explosion and hundreds of millions of people starving to death. Although he has acknowledged some timings were wrong, he has said he stands by its fundamental message that population growth and high levels of consumption by wealthy nations is driving destruction.
He told the Guardian: “Growthmania is the fatal disease of civilisation - it must be replaced by campaigns that make equity and well-being society’s goals - not consuming more junk.”
Large populations and their continued growth drive soil degradation and biodiversity loss, the new paper warns. “More people means that more synthetic compounds and dangerous throwaway plastics are manufactured, many of which add to the growing toxification of the Earth. It also increases the chances of pandemics that fuel ever-more desperate hunts for scarce resources.”
The effects of the climate emergency are more evident than biodiversity loss, but still, society is failing to cut emissions, the paper argues. If people understood the magnitude of the crises, changes in politics and policies could match the gravity of the threat.
“Our main point is that once you realise the scale and imminence of the problem, it becomes clear that we need much more than individual actions like using less plastic, eating less meat, or flying less. Our point is that we need big systematic changes and fast,” Professor Daniel Blumstein from the University of California Los Angeles, who helped write the paper, told the Guardian.
The paper cites a number of key reports published in the past few years including:
The World Economic Forum report in 2020, which named biodiversity loss as one of the top threats to the global economy.
The 2019 IPBES Global Assessment report which said 70% of the planet had been altered by humans.
The 2020 WWF Living Planet report, which said the average population size of vertebrates had declined by 68% in the past five decades.
A 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report which said that humanity had already exceeded global warming of 1C above pre-industrial levels and is set to reach 1.5C warming between 2030 and 2052.
Australia saw a devastating bushfire season in 2020. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/Reuters
The report follows years of stark warnings about the state of the planet from the world’s leading scientists, including a statement by 11,000 scientists in 2019 that people will face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless major changes are made. In 2016, more than 150 of Australia’s climate scientists wrote an open letter to the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, demanding immediate action on reducing emissions. In the same year, 375 scientists – including 30 Nobel prize winners – wrote an open letter to the world about their frustrations over political inaction on climate change.
Prof Tom Oliver, an ecologist at the University of Reading, who was not involved in the report, said it was a frightening but credible summary of the grave threats society faces under a “business as usual” scenario. “Scientists now need to go beyond simply documenting environmental decline, and instead find the most effective ways to catalyse action,” he said.
Prof Rob Brooker, head of ecological sciences at the James Hutton Institute, who was not involved in the study, said it clearly emphasised the pressing nature of the challenges.
“We certainly should not be in any doubt about the huge scale of the challenges we are facing and the changes we will need to make to deal with them,” he said.
What will the next decade bring? Here are 20 predictions from trend forecasters
Emily Segal
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/15/2020s-trend-predictions-forecasters-working-from-home-ai-climate
At the beginning of every year, trend forecasters the world over put together expensive reports predicting what the future will bring. As a trend forecaster myself, I’ve read literally hundreds of predictions in the past few weeks made by the likes of McKinsey, WGSN and countless others so that you don’t have to. So, what do these professional speculators of the future think the next few years hold?
Many of the themes are predictable: automation, artificial intelligence, climate crisis and climate-related migration, virtual reality and augmented reality, China’s rising power, cryptocurrencies, Zoom, remote work and people agitating for their rights.
Like all predictions, these should be taken with a grain (or boulder) of salt. For example, the firm Mintel “predicts” that by 2030 “corporations will shape transnational politics”, something they have clearly already been doing for decades, or that by 2025 “more subtle gender labels will emerge”, something that’s also already here. Barclay’s 150 trends for investors to watch in the 2020s report, meanwhile, puts smartdust (microscopic sensor systems) in the same “unlikely to happen” quadrant as cryptocurrencies, which are booming. Needless to say, operating in the realm of the speculative and pandering to potential clients is an unsteady combination, though not without its jewels.
Still, here is a sampling of the big and compelling trends that forecasters seem convinced will come to pass, if not in 2021 then over the next five to 10 years:
1 Universal work from home policies
Remote work due to Covid-19 has exposed the inadequacies of compulsory office attendance; now that people are working from home, it will never go back to the way it used to be; geographical requirements around talent acquisitions will loosen or expand beyond urban centers.
2 End of the open-plan office
Besides being notoriously difficult for concentration and privacy, an airborne pandemic has lessened the appeal of cramming big groups of people shoulder to shoulder in a single room.
3 Digital commutes and forced mindfulness
Microsoft is reportedly introducing a “virtual commute” feature intended “to create mental bookends for the remote workday”. It is also partnering with the meditation app Headspace to add a new “emotional check-in feature”.
4 Carbon labelling for consumer goods
Like nutrition facts on food, listing carbon expenditures related to various products on their packaging or in marketing materials will become a norm. This could be used to justify higher prices for certain more “carbon-responsible” items.
5 Cashless biometric payments
You know how iPhone’s Face ID can trigger Apple Pay’s contactless payments? Now imagine this technology being available in many retail settings, and in various implementations outside of the Apple ecosystem.
5 Live shopping outside China
Live shopping, already extremely popular in China, is like Instagram Live meets the Home Shopping Network – influencers show-and-tell products live on social media, which have particular discounts and promotions only while the feed is rolling. Forecasters predict this will become globally popular in the near term.
6 Climate migration
Climate crises will increasingly force huge populations to relocate, causing strain over resource allocation, border issues, culture and the overall safety of millions.
7 Rewilding
Cities and suburbs are looking for places to downshift development and add urban greenery to compensate for rising C02 emissions. Especially if carbon sequestration is eventually monetized, this could have an impact on land use overall, since owning undeveloped forest land would be profitable. This may point to a shift away from increasingly elusive home ownership toward permaculture land ownership.
8 Breakdown of traditional education paths
As the pandemic has interrupted schooling for millions, new relationships to online learning will continue to flourish, in addition to trends like unschooling, which will penetrate new demographics (beyond the fringe). The weight of student debt and continued class conflict will also draw people away from the traditional path of college education.
9 Mushroom mania
Rising vegetarianism and the advancement of home cooking in the pandemic are two drivers for the rising excitement around these versatile fungi. (My firm Nemesis wrote a trend report last year called The Umami Theory of Value, so I am not surprised about this trend!)
10 Ultra spicy is the new umami
Forecasts say people will get increasingly excited about painfully spicy flavors, such as those found in ghost peppers and extra-strong chili sauces.
11 Mass psychedelia
Shrooms are the new weed, commercially speaking, as new firms and funds scramble to monetize psilocybin in advance of its extended clinical applications. Psychedelics as a class of drugs continue to be destigmatized, relative to other drugs. Forecasts see this reaching a new level of mainstream saturation in coming years.
11 Escape into fantasy worlds
Perhaps unsurprisingly, global uncertainty has led to a boom in escapism, and all signs point to this continuing strongly into the next decade. Fantasy can and will take various forms, including long-form immersive gaming experiences, ketamine’s recreational popularity and new acceptance as a clinical treatment, and increasing commercial emphasis on the worlds of young adult literature and its spin offs across media.
12 Full-filter reality
Immersive, photo realistic imagery in the form of Instagram-style filter layers will become widespread beyond just phones when applied via increasingly mature augmented reality systems, forcing people to question the relationship between the visual and the real, and potentially fragmenting consensus reality even further.
13 Tech platform exit
Consumer backlash against big tech has been heralded for years, but its widespread implementation finally seems likely. Mainstream awareness of the data power imbalance with big companies will make consumers happy to pay for things like search, email and VPN instead of having companies use their data. Increasing attention to the power imbalances of this model will lead to the adoption of more niche services and platforms.
14 Blockchain
More widespread adoption of blockchain technologies will affect the way people portray identities online. Protest movements will demand transparency from power, which will drive adoption of blockchain technologies with their public accounting systems. Historically speculative products like NFTs (non-fungible tokens) which create unique digital identities for items like digital artworks or gaming items, will go mainstream.
15 China power shift
China’s status as an economic, political and cultural center will continue its meteoric rise. The US will continue its downward spiral. Chinese consumption patterns will set the tone for the world.
16 Amazon Nations
The relationship between enormous corporations whose resources increasingly dwarf actual countries and small countries in need of debt relief will lead to unusually baroque tax-evasion schemes and complex international monopoly issues.
17 Zoom fashion
Fashion designers and retailers will create markedly different strategies for fashion that appears on the upper body, ie above “the Zoom line” compared with the bottom half of the body, which isn’t usually visible on screen.
18 Return of the facelift
More invasive procedures such as surgical facelifts will regain popularity – people are tired of paying over and over for fillers, which is more like a subscription model. Superusers say a surgical facelift is cheaper in the long run, and forecasts seem to be aligned with them, as the plastic surgery sector will continue to boom overall.
19 No-melody music
Stripped-down rap with no melody is perfect for soundtracking viral TikTok videos; the trend of stripping out elements may expand widely into various categories of music and media.
20 Death of music genres
Spotify’s move toward mood-driven instead of genre-driven playlists has been successful to the point of suggesting that musical genres themselves will be increasingly outmoded in the coming years – or at least completely illegible.
YOU CAN DITCH UBER FOR A DRIVER-OWNED RIDESHARE APP
By Whitney Kimball, Gizmodo.
June 3, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/you-can-ditch-uber-for-a-driver-owned-rideshare-app/
The thank-you banners are down, but New York City residents have a real opportunity to show their appreciation for a population of low-paid, primarily immigrant frontline workers. New York City residents can help now by ditching Uber and Lyft for a competing driver-owned alternative app called “Co-op Ride,” created by the mostly volunteer-run Drivers Cooperative. If Co-op’s proposal plays out, drivers could make more money while their passengers, particularly those in underserved communities, could end up paying less for rides.
Launched this past weekend and now available to New York City residents ****in the App Store and Google Play, Co-op Ride is a cooperative, driver-owned business. Each driver owns one share of the company, giving them a vote in the company’s leadership and an even cut of any and all profits. (Even if you’re not in New York, you can donate here to help them grow and achieve profitability.) The app is powered by a combination of Google Maps’ API, Stripe, and Waze.
Co-op Ride claims to take a 15% commission from fares for operating expenses: much lower than 25%-30%, which drivers have said Lyft and Uber take. Neither Lyft nor Uber provide standard commission percentages on their website, due to the fact that it varies based on location and trip times relative to distance (profitability), leaving open a possible range from zero fees to exorbitantly high ones. (Oddly, Uber also cites a 25% flat commission here. It’s unclear whether this is out of date.) Longtime driver and Co-op Ride recruiter Michael Ugwu told Gizmodo that Uber can take up to 40%, depending on the circumstances.
Ugwu, who’s incurred thousands of out-of-pocket expenses on car payments, primarily wants drivers to at least know that they’re getting the maximum benefits from their labor. “Drivers’ lives are in the hands of Uber and Lyft,” Ugwu told Gizmodo. “This is our time to make money for our own selves, instead of enriching those giant companies. We made them giant, by the way. Drivers invested their money in big cars— eighty or ninety thousand dollars, just to drive for them, and they don’t care.”
On Tuesday morning, Gizmodo found that Co-op Ride seemed to cost the same as Uber—$16.55 for a 17-minute ride within Brooklyn (without tolls, etc.) versus $16.56 through Uber X. Unlike Uber, though, Co-op Ride had priced in a 20% tip. (A tip is not required, but encouraged, as an optional standard percentage the user can select during the sign-up process.)
Erik Forman, a Driver’s Cooperative co-founder (as well as facilitator for Spectrum strikers’ cooperatively-owned ISP), told Gizmodo that every driver gets a background check and safety training as part of the licensing process through the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and Co-op Ride provides additional training. But Forman granted that lawmakers need to secure better industry standards so that Co-op Ride can operate more ethically while competing with corporate giants.
“Unfortunately our competitors Uber and Lyft have refused to pay into the state unemployment benefits fund,” he noted. “We think that’s wrong. We would like to pay the state unemployment benefits fund, but we call on the state to enforce the law equally so that Co-op Ride would not be put at a disadvantage.” Currently, the model is to just incorporate the four percent unemployment tax in additional worker pay.
Another potential holdup for the profit-sharing concept is that even Uber and Lyft are not yet profitable. Forman pointed out that keeping exorbitant lobbying costs, such as about $3 million on down-ballot New York State legislators and over $200 million (with DoorDash) on Prop 22 could help. “When you’re not buying [state] senators, it turns out you can actually save a lot of money,” he said. (And also investments like flying taxis.) In the event of a loss, Co-op Ride can draw on grant funding and donations.
Co-op Ride would also need to be mindful of the balance of riders to drivers. Researchers have found that Uber and Lyft drivers’ pay has decreased in part because the companies put too many drivers on the road, reducing wait times for riders but also the number of fares per shift.
“We think it’s frankly reprehensible that Uber misled tens of thousands of working-class New Yorkers into investing money in vehicles and going on the road when they knew that demand would outstrip supply,” Forman said. “They artificially flooded the market and priced themselves below break-even in order to put their competition out of business. We think there needs to be planning to match supply and demand to make sure drivers can make a decent living and make sure to make sure people who live in transit deserts, especially, can get a car when they need it.”
For tax purposes, Co-op Ride drivers are still independent contractors, a status which legislators have correctly argued for years bars drivers from labor protections. Uber and Lyft have claimed that non-employee status is better for drivers, primarily allowing them to retain flexibility. If all goes well for Co-op, we’ll find out what they think about ownership status.
PEACE IN COLOMBIA SHOULD MEAN LAND REFORM AND AN END TO HUNGER
By Vijay Prashad and Zoe Alexandra, People's Dispatch.
June 3, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/peace-in-colombia-should-mean-land-reform-and-an-end-to-hunger/
Colombia’s Ongoing National Strike Is Part Of A Decades-Long Struggle Against The Political And Economic Elites To Demand Peace And Dignity For All.
Since the end of April, Colombia’s streets have smelled of tear gas. The government of Colombian President Iván Duque imposed policies that put the costs of the pandemic on the working class and the peasantry and tried to suffocate any advancement of the Havana peace accords of 2016. Discontent led to street protests, which were repressed harshly by the government. These protests, Rodrigo Granda of Colombia’s Comunes party told us in an interview, “are defined by the wide participation of youth, women, artists, religious people, the Indigenous, Afro-Colombians, unions and organizations from neighborhoods of the poor and the working class. Practically the whole of Colombia is part of the struggle.” A range of concrete demands defines the protest: running water and schools, the disbandment of the riot police (ESMAD), and the expansion of democratic possibilities.
The Comunes party was formed in 2017 by members of the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army). Granda, who is known internationally for his former role as the foreign minister of the FARC, is now in the national board of the Comunes party. As a legal political party, Comunes is a direct product of the 2016 Havana peace accords signed by the Colombian government and the FARC. Over the past two years, members of the Comunes have been on the streets alongside their fellow Colombians who are fighting to bring democracy to the country’s economy and politics. Granda spoke to us about the ongoing protests and helped to put these protests in the context of the long history of struggle in Colombia.
Colombia’s Violent Oligarchy
The current protests remind Granda of the 1977 national civic strike that he participated in, with one difference: then, he says, there was “no international solidarity,” while now the global media attention to Colombia’s struggle allows the people in his country “not to lose heart” during a difficult fight. The 1977 strike emerged out of a long struggle against the country’s oligarchy.
Years before the strike, Granda looked forward to the Colombian elections of April 1970. He hoped that the former president and general Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of the National Popular Alliance (ANAPO) would win. Rojas Pinilla was not a leftist, but he offered the country a way out of the grip of Colombia’s oligarchy. Young people like Granda hoped that an ANAPO victory in Colombia and then, later in the year, the victory of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity in Chile would help change the character of South America’s politics. But Rojas Pinilla’s victory was embroiled in fraud, and while Allende won the election, he was ejected from power in 1973 in a coup. Looking back over these 50 years, Granda told us that he feels an “internal frustration” with the theft of that election in 1970 and the tortuous path his country has had to take since then.
The fight has been difficult because the ruling bloc of Colombia, including Duque, is unwilling to honestly participate in a democratic agenda. None of the major political parties that have controlled the state since 1948 have been eager for any kind of change. Suffocation of politics since then and the routine assassination of political leaders moved the left—through the FARC and other groups—into armed struggle in 1964. The FARC regularly called upon the ruling bloc to open negotiations, but with little success. However, talks with President Belisario Betancur in 1982 opened the way to the 1984 La Uribe Agreement, which resulted in a ceasefire from 1984 to 1987. Members of the FARC joined with others on the left to create Union Patriótica (UP) as a legal political party. Attempts to move a reform agenda by the UP came alongside a policy of assassinations by the state against the left. No genuine liberal sentiment pervades the Colombian ruling bloc, which refuses to share even a modicum of power with other groups.
The situation deteriorated under President Andrés Pastrana—who was in power from 1998 to 2002—and US President Bill Clinton, who both signed Plan Colombia, which proved to be the beginning of a policy to define the FARC as “narco-terrorists” and conduct a war of extermination against the rebels. Incidentally, it was Pastrana’s father who stole the election of 1970 from Rojas Pinilla. Brutality characterized the Colombian state’s approach toward the FARC and toward anyone else who questioned its policies. Gradually, the ruling bloc was led by more and more ruthless men, none more so than President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010). Uribe, Granda told us, “promised to exterminate us [the FARC] in four years, but he could not.”
Peace Accords
Granda understands why peace had to define the agenda a decade ago. “After the failure of Plan Colombia and a stalemate in the war,” he told us, “we could not defeat the Colombian army in a short time, and the Colombian army could not defeat the guerrillas in a short time either. Therefore, a political solution through dialogue was necessary.” President Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) wrote a letter to the FARC saying that he recognized the internal problems in Colombia and also recognized that the FARC was a political organization and not a narco-terrorist organization. This set in motion the negotiation in Havana that resulted in the accords.
The accords put in place a plan for integrated agrarian reform and democracy, as well as restitution for the victims of the long war. “We put down our arms,” Granda said, “but we did not disarm ourselves from an ideological point of view.” The signing of the accords is only one part of the FARC’s plan toward peace, since their implementation is key before other kinds of meaningful change can be made. But the Colombian oligarchy, Granda said, has an entirely different view of what peace would mean. For the oligarchy, peace means that the guns of the FARC are silent. “For us,” he says, “peace means an attack on the factors that generate the violence in the first place.” These include factors like hunger, dispossession and the frustration with the oligarchy and the harsh violence by the state against which the people of Colombia continue to protest.
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