India
:{
merri ok
619 primary on building new coal plants, violence b/c of heat/drought, nukes
india is secondary only relative to china; posed to surpass in pop?
see Modi neo-fascist covid fail
CTT colonize th commonwealth, but GMO big fight/stakes in India
indian-am the new model minority?
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bill mck really bad air pollution 2 26 yt
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AN 3 26
Canada on Monday announced "landmark" new deals with India as it moves away from reliance on the U.S., per a report from The Daily Beast, as Donald Trump continued to alienate allies with his military strikes on Iran.
Per the report, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a major 10-year "strategic energy partnership as well as agreements on technology, critical minerals, space, defense and education." The partnership will also include a free trade deal by the end of the year as both countries, who are ostensibly key allies of the U.S., seek to avoid exposure to Trump's sweeping global tariffs. The deal is intended to generate as much as $50 billion in bilateral trade between Canada and India.
Spurred into action by the unprecedented political and economic hostility from the U.S. during Trump's second term, Canada has been seeking new partnerships with other nations. Carney is scheduled to visit with two other key U.S. allies, Australia and Japan, in the coming days. Speaking about the new deal with India, the Canadian prime minister touted just how much engagement with India has resulted from Trump's aggressive global trade moves, and celebrated the two nations "charting our own course for the future."
"There has been more engagement between the Canadian and Indian governments in the last year than there has been in more than two decades combined," Carney said. "This is not merely the renewal of a relationship, it is the expansion of a valued partnership, with new ambition, focus and foresight. A partnership between two confident countries, charting our own course for the future."
The announcement came three days into Trump's unpopular military operation against Iran, conducted in cooperation with Israel. Polls have recently found that more Americans were opposed to the idea of military action against the Middle Eastern nation than supported it, with allies close to Trump worried that he will turn off his own MAGA base by focusing on foreign conflicts that they have long opposed.
As Canada creates new partnerships overseas, allies have also begun to distance themselves from Trump's operation in Iran. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday said that the country would not be aiding the U.S. in the campaign, stating that his government "does not believe in regime change from the skies." Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares said that the U.S. will not be allowed to use military bases in Spain to conduct operations in Iran, with the country's government condemning the strikes.
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an 2 26
President Donald Trump called for Congress to pass the so-called “Dalilah Law” requiring commercial drivers licenses to only go to legal residents — and in the process continued the MAGA movement’s targeting of the Sikh community.
"Many, if not most, illegal aliens do not speak English and cannot read even the most basic road signs," Trump said during his Tuesday night State of the Union message. "That's why tonight, I'm calling on Congress to pass what we will call the 'Dalilah Law,' barring any state from granting commercial drivers licenses to illegal aliens."
From bus drivers and over-the-road semi-trailer drivers to RV delivery haulers, America has 3.5 million licensed truckers, and the American Trucking Associations trade group (37,000-members strong) supports Trump’s efforts to both enforce immigration laws and “ensure that only properly trained, fully qualified, and English-proficient drivers are behind the wheel of 80,000-pound commercial motor vehicles.” Yet Trump’s approach may also target a group that MAGA repeatedly puts in its sites — Sikhs
“Among the strongest critics of the measures are India-born Sikhs, who make up about 150,000 members of the trucking community, according to regulatory data,” reported USA Today’s Trevor Hughes. “Tens of thousands of Sikhs sought asylum in the United States during the Biden presidency, many of them crossing the Mexican border without advance permission.” The article also pointed out that for thousands of people “the crackdown on foreign drivers would cause them to lose their jobs and homes in one fell swoop ‒ many truckers live in their semis” and simultaneously increase “freight costs from American consumers.”
The White House has often singled out Sikh truck drivers, in particular a California-licensed Sikh driver named Harjinder Singh was involved in a fatal August crash in Florida that killed three people. Trump officials claim Singh was in America illegally and did not speak English well enough to qualify for his license. Sikhs For Justice, a US-based group, donated $100,000 to the victims in the accident Singh is accused of causing.
Others in the Trump movement have expressed prejudice against Sikhs. In June Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) misidentified a Sikh man as Muslim and argued that he should not have been allowed to pray on the House of Representatives floor because he is not a Christian.
“It’s deeply troubling that a Muslim was allowed to lead prayer in the House of Representatives this morning,” Miller said. “This should have never been allowed to happen. America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further…”
Miller later posted a version that swapped the word “Sikh” for “Muslim.” Miller’s target was Giani Singh, a Sikh Granthi from southern New Jersey who had been “welcomes” to deliver the prayer by Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ).
FBI director Kash Patel has also been targeted by xenophobia. When he wished his followers a Happy Diwali on X (Diwali is celebrated by Sikhs, some Buddhists, Jains and Hindus), far-right Christian and white nationalists attacked Patel online. Diwali greetings were similarly attacked when expressed by Indian American Trump officials like former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon.
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2022 6 22 an
international delegates left Germany Friday following the Bonn Climate Change Conference, climate campaigners called the talks, which lasted 10 days this month, an "utter failure" for neglecting to establish plans to support the Global South in adapting to the planetary crisis—months after developing countries demanded aid at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland.
"It is unconscionable that developed countries continue to kick the issue of financing for loss and damage down the road—first COP26, now Bonn," saidJeni Miller, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, referring to the impacts of the climate crisis which developing nations have already suffered and demanding that the issue get badly-needed attention at upcoming talks.
"Such financing would enable countries to deal with the impacts on their people’s lives and livelihoods, homes and health systems, and must be a core component of the COP27 agenda," Miller added.
deepening campaigners' anger was the fact that European countries present at the Bonn conference are currently boosting fossil fuel imports to replace the gas shipments they previously received from Russia, which were largely discontinued after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine earlier this year.
"The E.U. completely misses the point of what it is to be a climate leader," said Chiara Martinelli, director of Climate Action Network Europe. "European countries also urgently need to massively ramp up their climate and energy targets, rather than displace oil and gas from Russia with those from developing countries, further locking them into fossil fuels. That's what climate leaders should do."
Focusing on sourcing new fossil fuels from overseas while "consistently" blocking discussions about loss and damage financing in Bonn "exposed [the E.U.'s] hypocritical stance," saidHarjeet Singh, the group's senior climate impacts advisor.
Patricia Espinosa, the outgoing executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), claimed the talks in Bonn took steps "in several technical areas" including a "global stocktake" mechanism, which will allow officials to assess international progress toward the target of limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
That view,said Aurore Mathieu, international policy coordinator for Climate Action Network France, highlights "the huge disconnect between the urgency of the climate crisis and the inability to progress on concrete outcomes to respond to it."
"Climate impacts are worsening throughout the world, hitting the most marginalized communities, and rich countries are still refusing to acknowledge their climate debt by providing finance for loss and damage," said Mathieu.
Wealthy countries, added Sara Shaw of Friends of the Earth International, are "sleepwalking us all into catastrophe," noting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that the world only has three years at most to reach peak carbon emissions before they must begin reducing them.
"The disconnect between the accelerating climate crisisoutside the conference halls and the lack of concrete action inside is palpable," saidShaw. "Developed countries refuse to even discuss long owed and vital loss and damage finance. Instead of taking action, rich countries are trying to shift responsibility for action to developing countries, while expanding their own plans to extract fossil fuels and chasing unproven technofixes."
"We know the solution is a rapid and equitable phase out of fossil fuels and a shift to people-centered renewables," she added.
The climate talks took place as Delhi, India faced a severe heatwavein which meteorologists have recorded temperatures of 107°F and above for 25 days since the summer began.
Indian delegates were among those who demanded in Bonn that wealthy countries help provide "massive funding so the government can prepare for extreme weather events by building early warning systems."
The climate emergency has also pushed Madagascar toward the planet's first climate-fueled famine and is expected by 2050 to internally displace 86 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, 19 million in North Africa, and 17 million in Latin America.
"One out of five people in Africa are suffering from hunger, and this is just one of countless ways the climate crisis is spurring devastation that is ripping through our communities," said Hellen Neima, Africa climate director for Corporate Accountability International. "We have had enough of rich, polluting countries silencing those trying to fight for justice."
"We have had enough of you offering crumbs with one hand while you starve the world with the other," Neima added. "We have had enough of our lives being valued as less worthy than Big Polluters' profits... Your empty words cannot fill our stomachs or protect our homelands. People in Africa are rising up and will continue to rise up, until the justice that is owed is delivered at COP27."
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/india-modi/
// trump fail covid
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/policing-the-digital-frontiers-is-india-weaponizing-technology-to-silence-civil-society/
on June 15, 2020, Amnesty International andCitizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, uncovered a coordinated spyware campaign that targetednine Indian human rights defenders between January to October 2019.
In the world’s largest democracy, these types of incidents are a concern especially when viewed alongside the government’s broader crackdown on dissent. Under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led government, India has gained global notoriety forsilencing critical voices throughfrivolous defamation suits,arrests and detentions of citizens engaging in peaceful protests, and theimprisonment of journalists.
The activists were sent multiple emails, containing links to malicious software, disguised as important communications. If downloaded, the software would infect a user’s phone or computer withNetWire, a piece of commoditymalware designed to cause extensive damage to data and systems or to gain unauthorized access to a network.
Eight of the individuals targeted had been calling for the release of those indicted in the Bhima Koregaon case dating back to 2018 when, in the wake of violent attacks against Dalit communities in Maharashtra, police arrested several activists known for their advocacy work on behalf of these communities.
Unanswered questions about Pegasus in India
Three of the individuals targeted with Netwire were also targeted earlier in 2019 in the now infamous NSO WhatsApp hack, a spyware attack in which at least two dozen academics, lawyers, Dalit activists and journalists in India were targeted with Pegasus), a spyware that canextract a user’s private data, including passwords, contact lists, calendar events, text messages, and even voice calls. Some variants of it can even turn on a phone’s camera and microphone to capture activity in the phone’s vicinity.
The individuals were informed about this attack by Whatsapp, who contacted and alerted them that their phones had been under state-of-the-art surveillance for a two-week period in May 2019. This hack was part of a wider attack that targeted at least 100 members of civil society around the world and led to Whatsapp suing the NSO group in a US court.
Following the revelation of the Pegasus attacks in November 2019, NSO defended itself saying that it only sells its technology to “licensed government intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Consequently, several of those targeted in India wrote to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology asking whether the government had authorized the use of this spyware. Unfortunately, the Indian government’s Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Information Technology refused to give a straight answer to this question, only claiming that “no unauthorized interception” had taken place. Subsequently, the government sought to shift the blame on Whatsapp, insinuating that the tech platform had allowed the breach to take place and had not informed it about it. Embarrassingly, Whatsapp responded stating that it actually had informed the country’s nodal cyber response agency when the attacks had first taken place.
Illegally intercepting or accessing computer devices is recognized as a criminal act under international law and India’s Information Technology Act. If the hackers were private actors, it is concerning as to why the Indian government has not yet released details of any criminal investigations against them, despite sufficient evidence of a crime having been committed against its own citizens. The alternative scenario, if it happens to be true, is doubly concerning. State surveillance through the use of spyware not only violates India’s own laws around the interception of private communications but also poses a huge threat to free expression, privacy and freedom of thought.
BJP surveillance measures
While less invasive forms of surveillance have been used by different ruling powers through the decades in India, the BJP’s measures are excessive, to say the least. In December 2018, the Ministry of Home Affairsgave ten agencies blanket legal authority “to intercept, monitor or decrypt information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer.” This order was challenged in the Supreme Court to which the governmentresponded with a statement that “the veil of privacy can be lifted for legitimate state interest.” The order continues to be enforced, pending a final judgement by the apex court.
In May 2020, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting floated and closed a bid for a tool to provide “fact verification and disinformation detection on social media platforms.” According tomedia reports, this was the eighth attempt by this government, since it came into power in 2014, to “explicitly and directly monitor social media”. This latest attempt at mass surveillance is currently beingchallengedin court by the Internet Freedom Foundation. Given the Supreme Court’s 2017 ruling on privacy being a fundamental right, there is hope that this attempt too will be thwarted.
It is important to note that these attempts to monitor citizens’ lives are being made in the absence of a personal data protection law, which if enacted in line with international human rights standards, could offer some protection against these repeated attempts at surveillance. Unfortunately, the data protection bill introduced by the BJP-led government in 2019, which is currently undergoing joint parliamentary review, fails to meet such standards. It seeks to give the government unrestricted access to personal data on vaguely worded grounds of sovereignty, violating key legal safeguards around necessity and proportionality, as enshrined in international law and recognized by the Indian Supreme Court as intrinsic to safeguarding the right to privacy. There are further concerns that this is a backdoor attempt to provide legislative backing to the State’s passive surveillance activities online, which are currently conducted outside the remit of the law, merely through executive action, and thus escape meaningful oversight. Understandably, the bill has faced massive pushback from civil society, and even the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Privacy has expressed concern.
A global trend
These attempts to monitor and police digital spaces are not unique to India alone –digital authoritarianism is on the rise around the world, especially in countries where rising nationalism, combined with weaker rule of law has emboldened governments to crackdown on dissent, increasingly with the aid of technology supplied by dubious corporations eager to make a quick buck.
Spyware, one of the most invasive surveillance tools, has managed to evade regulation at the international level so far, largely because surveillance is a topic that governments are not keen to discuss, mostly due to diplomatic, political and national security reasons. Consequently, the lack of an international framework to regulate its production, sale and use coupled with an increasing interest by repressive regimes in the private lives of their critics, has led to an uptick in the use of spyware, as tracked by Citizen Lab. Concerned by this troubling trend, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression released a report, calling on governments to “establish an immediate moratorium on the global sale and transfer of private surveillance technology until rigorous human rights safeguards are put in place to regulate such practices and guarantee that governments and non-State actors use the tools in legitimate ways”. The US State Department has also released guidance to “assist U.S. companies seeking to prevent their products or services with surveillance capabilities from being misused by foreign government end-users to commit human rights abuses.”
These are steps in the right direction, which have taken effect largely due to the tireless advocacy done by civil society organizations who are bravely calling out human rights abuses, pushing for rights-respecting legislation and engaging in strategic litigation. Countries seeking to prevent the decline of democracy must support these groups, in India and elsewhere, by engaging them as trusted partners in the fight to keep the internet equal, open and free.
Written by Ayesha Khan
This postoriginally appeared on Global Voices
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/when-politicians-use-hate-speech-political-violence-increase/
politicians deepen existing divides when they use inflammatory language, such as hate speech, and this makes their societies more likely to experience political violence and terrorism. That's the conclusion from a study I recently did on the connection between political rhetoric and actual violence.
President Donald Trump is not the only world leader who is accused of publicly denigrating people based on their racial, ethnic or religious backgrounds.
In the 2019 parliamentary campaign in India, politicians from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party targeted Muslims as part of a widespread electoral strategy to galvanize Hindu nationalism. Similarly, in the 2019 Polish election, incumbent president Andrzej Duda made demonization of the LGBT community as well as foreigners the centerpiece of his successful reelection campaign.
Hate speech has also figured prominently in the recent rhetoric of political leaders in a variety of countries including Russia, Colombia, Israel, Egypt, Ukraine, the Philippines, Italy, Greece, Sri Lanka and Iraq.
These remarks are not just empty rhetoric or political theater. My research shows that when politicians use hate speech, domestic terrorism increases – in the U.S. and in other countries.
Indeed, since the beginning of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, domestic terrorism has more than doubled in the United States. During the Obama administration's two terms, the U.S. averaged 26.6 incidents of domestic terrorism per year, according to the Global Terrorism Database. The most active year, by far, was 2016, which saw 67 attacks, more than double Obama's overall average. During the first two years of Donald Trump's presidency, 2017 and 2018 – the latest year for which data are available – domestic terror activity stayed that high, with 66 and 67 attacks, respectively
[graf]
polarizing politics paves the way
Hateful rhetoric targeting minority groups is an established technique to unify and mobilize political supporters and to delegitimize and dehumanize political opponents. Hate speech by politicians also serves to deepen political polarization.
More polarized societies are especially susceptible to bouts of political violence and terrorism when politicians use hate speech. Examples include Weimar Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, which featured assassinations of leftist politicians and street brawling by Nazi partisans; Argentina in the 1970s during the so-called “Dirty War" in which government-backed right-wing death squads fought with left-wing political movements who themselves engaged in terrorism; and Turkey in the late 1970s early 1980s, when ultranationalist right-wing organizations and leftist opposition movements attacked each other.
When taken to an extreme, hateful rhetoric by political leaders can precipitate civil wars and genocides, as was the case in the 1990s in Rwanda, where Hutu extremists used anti-Tutsi radio broadcasts to foment widespread violence.
Examining the data
For my analysis, I used statistical data on domestic terrorist incidents from the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, and major party figures' use of hate speech in about 150 countries between 2000 and 2017 from the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
I tried to determine the relationship between politicians using hate speech and the number of domestic terror attacks the country experienced the following year. Other elements can affect domestic terrorism, so I factored into my analysis each country's political system, its gross domestic product per capita, its population size, its degree of ethnic and linguistic diversity and its level of media freedom.
To further distinguish political violence that was specifically produced by hate speech, I also factored in how much domestic terrorism the country had experienced in previous years and whether or not the country was experiencing a civil war.
[graf]
violence climbs when politicians speak with hate
What I found is that countries where politicians frequently weave hate speech into their political rhetoric subsequently experience more domestic terrorism. A lot more.
Countries such as Costa Rica or Finland, where the data show politicians “never" or “rarely" employed hate speech, experienced an average of 12.5 incidents of domestic terrorism between 2000 and 2017. Countries where politicians were found to “sometimes" use hate speech in their rhetoric, such as Belgium or Cyprus, experienced 28.9 attacks on average.
However, domestic terrorism was quite frequent in countries whether politicians used hate speech “often" or “extremely often." Such countries, including Iraq, Russia, Turkey and Sudan, experienced an average of 107.9 domestic terrorist attacks during that period.
What public figures say can bring people together, or divide them. How politicians talk affects how people behave – and the amount of violence their nations experience.
James Piazza, Liberal Arts Professor of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University
This article is republished from The Conversation
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amnesty int'l
retaliation by Modi, had to pull staff out of india 9/20
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/facebook-thrives-on-the-virality-of-hate/
a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, “Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide With Indian Politics,” has blown the lid offFacebook’s unholy alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the right-wing ruling party in India.
In the August 14 article, WSJ reporters Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz detail how Ankhi Das, Facebook’s high-flying public policy director for India and South and Central Asia, blocked action against the ruling BJP party leaders. Facebook had tagged these leaders internally as promoting “hate speech” and “dangerous” and with the potential to cause, as Purnell and Horwitz write, “real-world violence.” The reason Das reportedly gave for letting these violations of Facebook’s policy go unpunished was that such action would harm Facebook’s business in India.
Facebook also has recently invested $5.7 billion in leading Indian telecom company Reliance Jio for 9.99 percent of its shares—one of the largest investments ever by any tech company for a minority stake. The largest number of Facebook and WhatsApp users in the world are from India, with Facebook having more than 300 million and WhatsApp in excess of 400 million users. Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014 and has business offerings on this platform, whose rules of engagement are completely opaque. Even more than Facebook, WhatsApp has been the major social media platform for the BJP and its troll army to spread disinformation, as it was for President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
On August 21, Horwitz and Purnell wrote that Facebook has subsequently come under attack internally for its failure to address violations of its hate speech policy in India: “Facebook employees are pressing the company’s leadership to review its handling of hate speech in India, saying [in a letter addressed to ‘FB Leadership’ that] the company has tolerated toxic content by prominent political figures."
this is not the first time Facebook’s sheltering of hate speech and divisive right-wing figures has been exposed. In a 2017 article for Bloomberg, Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier wrote that Facebook “actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of ‘troll armies’ that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.” They also wrote that “a little-known Facebook global government and politics team… led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign,” has helped specific political parties “from India and Brazil to Germany and the U.K.—the unit’s employees have become de facto campaign workers.” In 2018, a five-article series for Newsclick by Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta ahead of India’s 2019 general elections investigated the close ties between Facebook executives and the BJP, particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s team, and found that the ties went far beyond Facebook’s relationships with other political parties in India.
The August 14 WSJ article identified three prominent BJP figures whose Facebook posts included hate speech: T. Raja Singh, a state legislator from Telangana, had threatened to kill Muslims who ate cows and toshoot Rohingyas,Muslim refugees fleeing Myanmar; Anantkumar Hegde, a member of Parliament from Karnataka, posted cartoons and essays on Muslims spreading “Corona Jihad.” (The WSJ reported that after it asked Facebook about some of Singh’s and Hegde’s posts, “Facebook deleted some of… them” and “said Mr. Singh no longer is permitted to have an official, verified account, designated with a blue check mark badge.” Similarly, “Facebook took no action until the Journal sought comment from the company about… [Hegde’s] ‘Corona Jihad’ posts.”) Kapil Mishra, a former Delhi legislator, played an active role in inciting violent riots earlier this year in New Delhi, for which he has been widely condemned by opposition parties, independent groups, the press, and even (though not by name) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. These three were among BJP figures flagged internally by Facebook’s team implementing its policy on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” as worthy of a permanent ban, as was done in other countries including the United States.
The WSJ coverage may make us believe that the problem in Facebook is an individual’s fault, that of Ankhi Das, its policy head for India. The real issue goes far deeper. The power of digital monopolies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—is not merely determined by their wealth. The social media platforms—Google and Facebook—have taken over the media space, not only in terms of advertising revenue, the lifeblood of the media under capitalism, but also in terms of influence. The greater the engagement that you can generate, the greater the likelihood of gaining a significant viewership and following. Purnell and Horwitz reported that “within two months of the video of the speech” by Kapil Mishra—in which he incited physical violence in clearing protesters—“being posted, the engagement for Mr. Mishra’s Facebook page grew from a couple hundred thousand interactions a month to more than 2.5 million.”
Earlier, it was widely accepted that the press—what Thomas Carlyle had called the Fourth Estate in a democracy—has a social role and therefore needs to be regulated for public good.The Press Council of India, however weak it might be in actual practice, has a code that the press is expected to follow. In the U.S., cross-holdings between different kinds of media are regulated.
There are two issues we need to recognize. The first is that the media is not just any other business but is important for democracy. And the second is that monopoly by itself is also a danger to democracy. U.S. Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis is widely quoted to have said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
More than 75 years after Brandeis lived, his words on monopoly were cited in the congressional hearing in July with the CEOs of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. The combined market value of the four companies is nearly $5 trillion. If we compare this to the GDPs of entire countries, they come out above Germany, and behind only the U.S., China and Japan. It is this market power that gives them the ability to bend, or in the case of weaker economies, twist out of shape, their legal and regulatory structures.
Unfortunately, the interests of tech companies with this much capital are less and less often aligning with the interests of society. This is becoming clearest with the case of Facebook, as 98.5percentof its income is from advertisements. Advertisements depend on the number of views, and the virality of posts and engagement are the main drivers of Facebook’s revenue model. Facebook has discovered, as MIT researchers did, that hate and fake news posts drive virality, and therefore it has no incentive to curb such posts. While it has professed lip service for community standards and healthy discourse, the driving force of its business empire comes from its need to have more eyeballs, and therefore it feeds off hate and fake news. An internal study had found that64percentof members who had joined extremist groups did so thanks to Facebook’s recommendation tools.
This pathology of social media is not limited to Facebook. Google’s search engine has shown similar problems, as has its image recognition algorithms. But undoubtedly, Facebook has been the leader in spreading hate politics and fake news in the world.
What Trump, Bolsonaro and Modi have in common, apart from their right-wing politics, is their reliance on Facebook and WhatsApp in their campaigns. Though we have seen the phenomena of troll TV—Fox News in the U.S. and Republic TV in India—penetrating the traditional media space, WhatsApp and Facebook have been the primary playground of trolls, aided by Facebook’s algorithms. While it may seem that the right understands digital platforms better than others, and that is why it has had so much success with them, there is increasing evidence that the support that Facebook provides to various right-wing figures and hate speech is not an accident but a part of its strategy.
In the language of new tech, hate speech is not a bug in the systems of social media but a basic feature. The problem of hate speech cannot be solved by politely petitioning the Zuckerbergs of digital monopoly platforms to behave more responsibly. It needs, at the very least, breaking up their monopolies and regulating them as public utilities.
Prabir Purkayasthais the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.
This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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8/20
predictable mo-fo, see https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/chapter-2/**
2019
In summary, there is very high confidence that glacier and snow cover decline have affected and will continue to change the amounts and seasonality of river runoff in many snow-dominated and/or glacier-fed river basins. The average winter runoff is expected to increase (high confidence), and spring peak maxima will occur earlier (very high confidence). Although observed and projected trends in annual runoff vary substantially among regions and can even be opposite in sign, there is high confidence that average annual runoff from glaciers will have reached a peak, with declining runoff thereafter, at the latest by the end of the 21st century in all regions regardless emission scenario. The projected changes in runoff are expected to affect downstream water management, related hazards and ecosystems (Section 2.3.2, 2.3.3).
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3008/stunning-forecast-a-century-of-ice-loss-for-nearly-100000-glaciers/
Pat Brennan,
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The ice in one of the world’s highest concentrations of non-polar glaciers could see significant melting before the end of the century, potentially affecting sea levels around the globe, according to a new computer model from the NASA Sea Level Science Team.
The region, known as High Mountain Asia, could see ice loss run from 29 to 67 percent, depending on the level of greenhouse gas emissions over the period modeled.
According to the study, water flow in monsoon-fed river basins, driven largely by melting glaciers, could hit its peak by 2050 – potentially reducing runoff beyond that time and forcing changes in how water is consumed, or forcing communities to find other water sources. Understanding the coming changes in such flows is critical to proper planning for hydropower, irrigation, and water supplies.
A Leap Forward in Glacier Modeling
The new “Python Glacier Evolution Model,” or PyGEM, uses extensive data sets, instead of less detailed estimates from isolated, regional effects or extrapolations based on a small number of glaciers.
“This is a huge advance compared to previous studies,” said David Rounce, a researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a member of the NASA Sea Level Science Team, who is lead author of the new modeling study. “We are able to assess changes in glacier mass and runoff at an unprecedented scale.”
By sheer number, High Mountain Asia accounts for 44 percent of all the glaciers in the world—apart from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets—though it accounts for only a fraction of glacial mass. The melting of these glaciers over decades contributes significantly to rapid, and accelerating, global sea-level rise.
As they grow in power and precision, computer models are revealing the intricate dance of climate, ice-melt, and sea-level rise with increasing clarity....[map]
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india and brazil covid surge 6/3/20, brazil #2 behind US; west pt cadets (ceremony is still on?!) dn
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6/2 1st cyclone in hist --> mumbai?
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https://www.ecowatch.com/:{cyclone:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:-amphan-india-bangladesh-2646063894.html
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an 5/20
India’s treatment of Muslims and migrants puts lives at risk during COVID-19
Jay Ramasubramanyam, The Conversation
by Jay Ramasubramanyam, Carleton University In India, the second most populous country in the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed pre-existing fault lines of inequality and communalism, exposing current problems…
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21012020/china-india-hydrofluorocarbon-hfc-23-greenhouse-gas
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-thums-up
...During [Indira] Gandhi’s tenure as prime minister, Parliament passed a set of regulations that would trigger the chucking. The Foreign Exchange Regulation Act of 1973 required many multinationals to hand over 60% of the equity in their local subsidiariesto Indian partners. Coca-Cola would have had to release its top-secret syrup recipe and IBM its computer codes in order to comply. Faced with an ultimatum from Fernandes, Coca-Cola—along with Mobil, Kodak, and 54 othercompanies—left.
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https://www.thoughtco.com/coca-cola-groundwater-depletion-in-india-1204204
supplies across India, and many villagers in rural areas are blaming... In the southern Indian village of Plachimada in Kerala state, for example, persistent droughts have dried up groundwater and local wells, forcing many residents to rely on water supplies trucked in daily by the government.
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An act of mass surveillance’: India’s use of facial recognition tech against protesters angers privacy advocatesEoin Higgins / Common Dreams
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cop25 madrid big polluters back off, poor 3rd w steps up
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/indias-government-is-going-to-war-against-its-own-people/
4 shot live ammo?
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1219 dn
India’s Upper House Passes “Anti-Muslim” Citizenship Bill
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India: Toxic Smog Sparks Public Health Emergency in Delhi
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/how-democracy-is-being-turned-on-its-head-in-india/
no lnx
How democracy is being turned on its head in India
Written by Teesta Setalvad / Independent Media Institute September 19, 2019
There were some notable differences between the swearing-in ceremonies of the Hindu-supremacist government of Narendra Modi in its first victory on May 26, 2014, and its re-election on May 30, 2019.
The 2014 victory was tentative yet triumphant. There were attempts to paint a narrative of the South Asian leaders who were invited, including Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and others. While Indian elite and stars from Bollywood dotted the forecourt of the president’s residence (Rashtrapati Bhawan, in New Delhi), the message to neighbors was that India is the Big Brother offering a hand to other nations. Modi, who touts the humble beginnings he overcame, has repeatedly shown a penchant for trying to make history and create a grand narrative. By the 2019 swearing-in ceremony, it seemed that Modi’s government had abandoned the pretense that India needed the approval of the outside world.
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a celebrated internationalist. His firm belief in collaborations among the developing nations, fed on his socialist roots, led him, along with other legendary leaders, to the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). There was a major shift for India in the 1990s when the Indian National Congress, under a leadership committed to freeing India from a controlled economy, chose the path of neoliberal economics, drawing closer to the United States and Israel.
Then came the vitriol of the campaign that led to Modi’s first victory, his almost no-holds-barred unleashing of hatred, and his rhetoric of “us versus them” (where “us” can only mean “Hindu India”—never mind the segregations of caste complications that come with the term). His master stroke of inviting “enemy nation” Pakistan to share the glory of his electoral win was hailed by many as a strategic shift—one that never materialized.
Appealing to a vast section of India as the “tea seller” from a humble background, there was no shame for his followers that the man aspired to riches, wearing an outrageously expensive coat (when he met President Obama in Delhi months later) or using a luxe Mont Blanc pen as he signed documents to take his oath—crass expressions of personal wealth.
The first five years of the regime were signs of the time to come. An immediate centralization of power, an assault on university campuses (especially on student leaders who questioned this hegemonic and proto-fascist ideology that has groomed Modi since teenage years), cutbacks on workers’ and farmers’ rights, arrests on activists and lawyers and worst of all, lynchings of Indians who did not fit the definition of the ‘ideal’ Indian—that is, Muslims, Dalits, Christians and communists (read: dissenters) were brutally killed. The slaying of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh (only the first happened before 2014) by an extreme right-wing group was also something India has not seen.
The ideology of this Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded in 1925, its core belief is that India should not be a democratic republic but a Hindu theocracy; it subscribes to unequal and discriminatory levels of citizenship (following both Mussolini and Hitler) and is wedded (in its own writings) to overthrow the Constitution. Propaganda around the glory of the nation and “development” subsumed the gory 2014-2019 reality of violence, fear and lynchings. The unilateral move to “liberalize” India’s legal currency crippled India’s flagging economy and virtually killed the informal sector. Reports of the aggrandizement of the ruling party’s coffers came in only to be snuffed out by men who led the party and were intolerant of media reporting reality. Those men are now in positions of unbridled power today.
I wrote some months ago that this government has all but declared a war against its own people. That was before the 2019 results that took the supremacist victory to even higher levels, making a mockery of parliamentary debate and all-party dialogue. The second Modi regime sworn in this year has demonstrated in just three months what we can expect.
Parliament, which met to pass the budget in July, has been used thereafter to push through legislation without even the show of referring them to parliamentary committees for consultation or feedback. Not only does this second regime seem in a particular hurry, but, as Modi’s swearing-in ceremony on May 30 showed—the number of guests at the same venue had doubled to 8,000—there was no need (nor inclination) this time for India to send any messages internationally. One-sixth of the world lives in India, and as sole spokespersons for those over whom they now rule, the Modi 2.0 regime felt no real need to assuage any foreign concerns.
The first session of Parliament in 2008 made rushed amendments to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) that perverted its meaning in a way that sanctioned the curbing of civil liberties of minorities, as well as nationalist violence against them under the guise of fighting vaguely defined terrorism. (Before that, the UAPA had last been amended by the 2004 Indian National Congress party-led regime with the intention of preventing terrorism—and, ironically, at the time, those amendments were supported by the supremacist BJP, with only the parliamentary left vociferously opposing validating laws that had serious questions for personal liberties.) Even during the previous 10 years of Congress rule—which had an otherwise decent record—of legislating on rights (be it the right to information, right to rural work, right to food, or rights of forest workers/Adivasis), these draconian provisions of the then-amended UAPA were used selectively in targeting youth from the minority on charges—often judged by courts to be fabricated—of “terrorism.” Now these aberrations have been taken a step further.
And the Modi 2.0 regime has now passed an amendment that allows even an individual to be unilaterally declared a terrorist—without judicial scrutiny and only by the government’s executive decision—and his/her properties to be attached and seized. As if these amendments were not bad enough, the completely unilateral and unconstitutional abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and stripping the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its special status (a legal requirement under the state’s Instrument of Accession to the Indian Union) on August 5 are the worst examples of Modi 2.0 regime’s running roughshod over law, decency, morality and the Constitution.
The Kashmir Valley has been blocked in or blotted out, internet and communications shut down, even landline phone connections shut down. A fundamental decision that affects the very existential reality of the Kashmiri people has been taken without hearing their voice or representation. The state has been under the president’s rule for months. If the Modi 1.0 government will be recognized for subverting and perverting India’s institutions by appointing to crucial posts men and women who have no regard for notions of equality and non-discrimination, then the second time around, the regime will be known for targeting any opposition to Indian federalism. No Indian state is now safe from these rapacious hands.
How did the Modi 2.0 regime notch up its spectacular victory?
A realistic assessment before the results were out was that the BJP itself would get about 180-200 and the National Democratic Alliance party would notch up about 220 or 240 seats out of the total 542 seats that make up the Indian Parliament. It’s the 80-100 seats extra and the massive margins in some that appeared programmed (and even manipulated for some) to send out a message.
The manner in which the Election Commission of India (ECI) functioned through the entire seven-stage polling phase has raised eyebrows. There was clear effort neither to question the huge display of funds (beyond legal limits) used by the ruling party nor to check violation of election law, through misuse of official position or speech that violated constitutional norms (read: hate speech). More money was spent on the Indian 2019 election than on the American elections ($6 billion!), of which 80 percent was spent by the ruling BJP. They have, through their enactment of a non-transparent and opaque law (electoral bonds)—during the last term—ensured that they both have the money and do not need to disclose the source. Neither the ECI nor India’s Supreme Court has in any real sense questioned this abuse. This reflects on the erosion (if not complete takeover) of India’s institutions whom we expect to uphold foundational constitutional principles.
The RSS, the ideological backbone of the BJP election machine, has always had a formidable cultural and social presence, again made easy with the free flow of funds from abroad to its various outfits. Whether the RSS works on charity or education, a core component is its ideological slant, bending or perverting Indian minds toward an unquestioning authoritarianism where a supremacist male Hindu hierarchy is both valorized and validated.
Through demonetization and election bonds, that access to funds has grown even further, and the BJP now has an election machine that can compete with the RSS’s octopus-like organization.
Propaganda, the key tool of any authoritarian protofascist regime, is run or fueled through the BJP’s paid saffron shirts. The party has put in place a formidable 24–hour–connected network that disseminates their message (read: propaganda), which is not one message but rather several layered messages: these praise the one strong leader willing to strike out for drastic change, vilify the opposition (the BJP since its last term has spoken of a “Congress-mukt [free] Bharat [India]”), “promote” every government scheme that they have introduced—its efficacy multiplied and glorified a thousand times over through this well-oiled propaganda—and all the while, layer this with a subconscious message of othering and “hatred.”
Months before the May 2019 elections, the poor economic conditions, farmers’ protests, a revived and belligerent opposition, and charges of corruption over the Rafale deal had started to bother the BJP’s dispensation of propaganda. Come February 2019 and the Pulwama terror attack on Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel in the Kashmir Valley was quickly diverted away from the abysmal intelligence and governance failure that it was, and instead spun into a high-voltage, chest-thumping show of nationalistic machismo. Within a week, a staged “attack” on Pakistan at Balakot—even the efficacy, efficiency and truth behind this raises serious questions—provided the requisite miniscule and banal fodder to refurbish Modi as the man India needed, the man against evil.
Finally, serious questions of electronic voting machine (EVM) tampering have also been raised that cannot be wished away. The battle to be fought needs to factor in and deal with all of these things. The scarcely veiled and calibrated messages of Muslim-bashing/othering, aggressive pseudo-nationalism, and the “selling” of the government schemes need to be dealt with. As does the shameful belittling of the opposition that is also happening at alarming speed with little regard for facts or the truth. It is this formidable body of misinformation and meticulously well-organized and well-oiled/heeled organization that we collectively need to counter.
How, is the question? Who can do this? Political parties in the Opposition that look moribund need to be moved, shoved, and pushed by Indian citizens. Remember also that (unlike in 2014 when even if the results were more startling, they at least appeared believable) this time, state power has also been (illegally) used to garner data from Facebook and other platforms to the service of one party, to help further disseminate the propagandist message, through WhatsApp groups and Facebook messaging. There is also the structural issue of sections of voters who have been deliberately or otherwise disenfranchised (missing voters). The questions to address remain: How will we rectify those missing voters? And how will we bring voters out to the polls?
A hard and meticulous strategy for political education and cultural messaging that includes the history and relevance of principles of constitutionalism is as relevant today as ever before and needs to be not just created and disseminated but organized. Every space, school, college, office, and gram panchayat needs to be involved. The campaign needs to be sustained, layered, fun, historic, relevant, and aimed at building real perceptions away from heaps of propaganda-filled hate.
Two little instances give me hope. One is from last month, when left parties organized a protest at Azad Maidan in Mumbai against the dismantling of Article 370 of the Constitution. Many present felt that engaging with the Mumbai commuter was useful. There was curiosity in the midst of misinformation, that then can be our first lesson: how do we refurbish energies toward rebuilding a sense of resistance after first establishing our new sense of communities?
Second, our Opposition may be weak in Parliament. However, can Indians creatively work to show a strong united opposition on India’s streets?
Teesta Setalvad is a writer, activist, and journalist living in India. She is a writing fellow for Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and the secretary of Citizens for Justice & Peace. She has been a longtime advocate for civil rights for all Indian citizens, especially minorities and women.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-august-20-2019/
ucsd
Political elites and technocrats in many countries believe we can innovate our way out of poverty. But can problems of development be tackled by profit-driven entrepreneurialism? Lilly Irani’s book looks at what professional design is and isn’t doing for poor people and communities. She reveals who gets ignored and what goes unaddressed when innovation is championed by liberalized economies like India’s.
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watches shift of term "entre" become a thing that can be sold/IP, monopolized
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India Set to Lower ‘Normal Rain’ Baseline as Droughts Bite
icn FTimes
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36 Die in India Heat Wave, Delhi Records Its Highest All-Time Temperature
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619 dailly kos
Rare and strange’: Clash over water kills 15 monkeys in India during brutal heatwave
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## In India, WhatsApp is a weapon of antisocial hatred
Rohit Chopra, Santa Clara University
India's parliamentary elections, now underway, will show how social media is affecting Indian society and government.
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india and paki fight for water in Kashmir? Dar Jamal ice bk
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Are India and Pakistan on the Verge of a Water War?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/25/are-india-and-pakistan-on-the-verge-of-a-water-war-pulwama-kasmir-ravi-indus/
Interview Are India and Pakistan on the Verge of a Water War? In reprisal for a deadly terrorist attack in Kashmir, the Indian government says it will divert river waters that downstream Pakistan ...
India** to cut **water** to Pakistan as **Kashmir** conflict escalates ...
https://www.dw.com/en/india-to-cut-water-to-pakistan-as-kashmir-conflict-escalates/a-47622188
News India to cut water to Pakistan as Kashmir conflict escalates. The move has come amid rising tensions in Kashmir after an attack on an Indian military post.
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EW
https://www.ecowatch.com/worlds-most-polluted-cities-2630812632.html
The latest data on the world's most polluted cities is out, and confirms that Asia has a major crisis on its hands when it comes to air pollution.
The report, released by Greenpeace and software company IQAir AirVisual, shows that 22 of the world's 30 most polluted cities are in India. Five are in China, two in Pakistan and one is the capital of Bangladesh: Dhaka.
While India dominates the list numerically, Bangladesh is actually the world's most polluted country on average when weighted by population, followed by India and Pakistan, The New York Times reported.
The report looked at 2018 air quality data assessing levels of particulate matter PM2.5, a particularly dangerous form of air pollution that has been linked to a growing number of health problems from pneumonia and heart disease to dementia and diabetes.
The report assessed 3,000 cities and found that 64 percent of them had PM2.5 levels higher than World Health Organization (WHO) safety guidelines, according to The Guardian. Every city in Africa and the Middle East exceeded the guidelines, as well as 99 percent of South Asian cities and 89 percent of East Asian cities. The study estimates that air pollution will cause seven million early deaths next year, CNN reported.
"Air pollution steals our livelihoods and our futures, but we can change that," Executive Director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia Yeb Saño told The Guardian. "We want this report to make people think about the air we breathe, because when we understand the impacts of air quality on our lives, we will act to protect what's most important."
The report indicated that China was having some success in its war on pollution. PM2.5 levels fell around 12 percent for the Chinese cities listed in the report between 2017 and 2018, The New York Times reported. India, however, has had less success. Its cities' pollution levels saw relatively no change between the two years.
"We're still in denial," Jai Dhar Gupta, founder of Indian pollution mask company Nirvana Being, told The New York Times. "The priority for 99 percent of Indians is necessities: food, shelter and clothing. Health and environment are not even in the top 10."
Here are the world's 100 most polluted cities according to the report, as summarized by CNN:
1. Gurugram, India
2. Ghaziabad, India
3. Faisalabad, Pakistan
4. Faridabad, India
5. Bhiwadi, India
6. Noida, India
7. Patna, India
8. Hotan, China
9. Lucknow, India
10. Lahore, Pakistan
11. Delhi, India
...
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/activist-arrests-india-are-part-dangerous-global-trend-stifle-dissent
On Tuesday morning, the police from the Indian city of Pune (in the state of Maharashtra) raided the homes of lawyers and social activists across India and arrested five of them. Many of them are not household names around the world, since they are people who work silently on behalf of the poor and oppressed in a country where half the population does not eat sufficiently. Their names are Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira and Varavara Rao. What unites these people is their commitment to the working class and peasantry, to those who are treated as marginal to India’s state. They are also united by their opposition, which they share with millions of Indians, to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Gautam Navlakha, a writer, was brought before the Delhi High Court. One of the two High Court judges—S. Muralidhar—was puzzled by the documents produced by the Pune Police. Some were in Marathi, which the judge could not read, while others seemed indecipherable. “It is not possible to make out a case from the documents placed before us,” he said. “What is the specific allegation against him?” the judge asked. The police remained silent. The others are to be moved to Pune. Their fate is uncertain.
I heard the news in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I was—coincidentally—reading carefully the 1977 letter written by the writer and militant Rodolfo Walsh. Walsh’s Operation Massacre (1957) inaugurates a genre of writing now called “narrative non-fiction.” He went to Cuba in the early years of the revolution and cracked the CIA code that warned the revolutionary Cuban government about the Bay of Pigs invasion. Returning to Argentina, Walsh became part of an organization—Montoneros—that fought against the drift of his country into the arms of the ruthless military dictatorship that began in 1976. On the first anniversary of the dictatorship, Walsh mailed several copies of his letter—an open letter—that detailed the “raw numbers of this terror,” the arrests and detentions, the vanished militants of the trade union and student movement, the gasping for air of his society. “You have arrived at a form of absolute, metaphysical torture, unbounded by time,” wrote Walsh in the letter that sealed his fate. He was arrested and vanished—his body burned and thrown into a river in Buenos Aires.
What befell Rodolfo Walsh is the fate of too many today—in plain sight.
The “raw numbers of this terror” are best counted from Turkey. Since the failed coup of July 15, 2016, the government has arrested, detained or dismissed about 160,000 government officials, dismissing 12,000 Kurdish teachers, destroying the livelihood of thousands of people. The editor of Cumhuriyet, Can Dündar, called this the “biggest witch-hunt in Turkey’s history.” In the name of the war on terror and in the name of sedition, the government has arrested and intimidated its political opponents. The normality of this is astounding—leaders of the opposition HDP party remain in prison on the flimsiest of charges, with little international condemnation. They suffer a fate comparable to Brazil’s Lula, also incarcerated with no evidence.
Governments do not typically like dissent. In Bangladesh, the photographer Shahidul Alam remains in detention for his views on the massive protests in Dhaka for traffic reform and against government corruption. Condemnation of the arrest has come from all quarters, including a British Member of Parliament—Tulip Siddiq—who is the niece of Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The avalanche of criticism has not moved the government. Alam is accused of inciting violence, a charge that is equal parts of ridiculous and absurd.
Incitement to violence is a common charge. It is what has taken the Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour to an Israeli prison. Tatour’s poem, “Resist, my people, resist them” (Qawim ya sha’abi, qawimhum), was the reason given by the Israeli government to lock her up. The Egyptian government has taken in the poet Galal El-Behairy for the lyrics he wrote for the song “Balaha”—the name a reference to a character in a 1980s film who sees the world in a topsy-turvy manner, a name now used colloquially in Egypt for President Sisi. The Ugandan government has arrested the radio show host Samuel Kyambadde, who merely allowed his talk show to become a forum for a conversation that included items labeled by the government as seditious—such as the arrest of journalists and the arrest of the opposition MP Robert Kyagulanyi (also known as Bobi Wine).
All of them—photographers, poets, radio show hosts—are treated as voices of sedition, dangerous people who can be locked up under regulations that would make any fair-minded person wince. But there is not even any public debate in most of our societies about such measures, no genuine discussion about the slide into the worst kind of authoritarianism, little public outcry.
**
Pain shudders through the arteries of Indian society. The rule of the current government has hardened society, allowed people of ferocious hatred to walk the streets and deliver the justice that they think is appropriate. These vigilantes believe that they can kill anyone who they think threatens cows or that they can kill anyone they dislike (Muslims, oppressed castes, leftists). These are assassinations of ordinary people—people whose names are flashed across the screen for a day or so and then forgotten as other names of other people who have been murdered arrive. Some of them are killed for their social background, others for their political commitments.
Four writers and activists—Gauri Lankesh, M.M. Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar—had been killed in sequence.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/india-water-crisis-2579202142.html
India Suffers 'Worst Water Crisis in Its History'
India is facing its "worst-ever" water crisis, according to a report from a government think tank issued last week.
Around 200,000 Indians die each year due to lack of water access, the report finds, and demand will be twice as much as supply by 2030.
"Part of [the crisis] is because of the rising temperature, and the changing rainfall patterns that come with the changing climate," Mridula Ramesh, founder of the Sundaram Climate Institute, told Al Jazeera.
"Part of it is because of unwise choices we have made in managing our waste and water."
As reported by the Thomson Reuters Foundation:
"About 200,000 Indians die every year due to inadequate access to safe water and 600 million face high to extreme water stress, the National Institute for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog said on Thursday, citing data by independent agencies.
'Critical groundwater resources that account for 40 percent of India's water supply are being depleted at unsustainable rates,' the report said, calling for an immediate push towards sustainable management of water resources.
'India is suffering from the worst water crisis in its history and millions of lives and livelihoods are under threat,' it said."
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https://www.ecowatch.com/india-plastics-ban-2575628410.html
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https://www.ecowatch.com/monsanto-india-cotton-patent-2566752905.html
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Report: Monsanto May Leave India After Losing GMO Cotton Patent
https://www.ecowatch.com/monsanto-india-cotton-gmo-2559650068.html
Could Monsanto's six-decade presence in India be coming to a halt?
On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court ruled that the biotech giant cannot claim patents for Bollgard and Bollgard II, its genetically modified cotton seeds, in the country.
Citing India's Patents Act of 1970, the court said that plant varieties and seeds cannot be patented, thereby rejecting Monsanto's attempt to block its Indian licensee, Nuziveedu Seeds Ltd., from selling the seeds.
"What it means is effectively Monsanto has no patent on seeds in India and they have never had it. They have tried to hoodwink the seed companies and farmers for years claiming they have a patent and making huge amounts of money from that," Diya Kapur, a lawyer for Nuziveedu Seeds, told Bloomberg.
As Dilsher Dhillon wrote in Business Insider India, Wednesday's verdict could prompt Monsanto to pull out of the country:
With the latest ruling, Monsanto's claims against Nuziveedu for unpaid royalties have been waived because its patents are invalid. It will now have to settle for the rates decided by the government.
This is a significant blow for Monsanto, the world's largest seed producer, as it currently licenses its seeds to nearly 50 domestic companies through its local joint venture with Mahyco Seeds Ltd. It could, in all probability, lead to the company's complete exit from India.
Monsanto had already threatened to stop business in India after the government imposed price controls on cotton seeds in 2016.
Monsanto first introduced its GM-technology in India in 1995. Today, more than 90 percent of the country's cotton crop is genetically modified. These crops have been inserted with a pest-resistant toxin called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt.
Business Insider's Dhillon noted that the ruling has significant implications for Monsanto and farmers alike:
While yields have increased significantly, Monsanto has long been accused of overcharging farmers for its seeds, especially given the fact that their ability to resist pests diminishes with time. The high cost of seeds and royalties left thousands of farmers in a vicious cycle of debt, which inevitably led to many suicides when crops failed. As a result, the government was forced to start regulating Bt cotton prices in 2006.
Hence, the Delhi High Court's ruling can be seen as a moral reckoning on Monsanto. But it also has wider implications. Yes, it will reduce prices for farmers, given that seed licensing companies pass on the royalty costs to them, but it could prove to be the death knell for innovation in the agriculture sector—something that will hurt farmers in the long run.
However, the company's presence in India may ultimately be decided by its pending mega-merger with Bayer AG.
"Bayer is generally seen as a company with a more collaborative approach towards governments. If Bayer sits down at the negotiating table with the Indian government and works out a solution, then it's possible that the next generation of Bt cotton technology may still see the light of day in India at some point in the future, although it may take years," Abhijit R. Akella, vice president at IIFL Institutional Equities, told Mint.
A Monsanto India spokesman said the company was "very disappointed" with the court's ruling.
"Today's order will have wide-ranging, negative implications for biotech-based innovation across many sectors within India, and is inconsistent with other international markets where agricultural innovation has flourished," the spokesman said.
Monsanto said it might challenge the decision in India's Supreme Court.
...
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https://www.alternet.org/world/india-icon-shivaji-revisionist-anti-muslim-history-hindu-right
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Trump Jr. Pushed ‘Blatantly Illegal’ Project In India, Former Official Says — ‘Trump, Inc.’ Podcast
by Eric Umansky, ProPublica , and Andrea Bernstein , WNYC
A Trump project in Mumbai had its permits revoked after investigators found “significant irregularities.” Then Trump Jr. travelled to India to get the decision overruled.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-donald-trump-jr-india-project
propublica
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https://www.ecowatch.com/coal-renewable-energy-2539963915.html
World's Largest Coal Miner Says It's a 'Matter of Time' for Renewables to Replace Coal
Even the world's largest coal miner thinks the rise of renewable energy and storage technology will pose a "significant threat" to the coal sector.
Coal India, the state-owned mining company that produces 80 percent of the country's coal, has released a new report, "Coal Vision 2030," that outlines what the industry might look like in 2030.
It warns stakeholders that in the case of Indian coal, "trends portent that in the long run the demand is likely to decrease substantially."
"With the increasing threat of climate change impacting humanity (irrespective of the U.S. position) and the global funding focus on renewables, it is a matter of time when alternate clean energy would displace coal," the report states.
Coal India's analysis lists a number of global and domestic events that have intensified doubts on the future of its main product, including:
- Developments in solar PV and energy storage technologies
- COP21 commitments by India
- Apparent shrinkage in global coal consumption
- Apparent downward revision of the economic growth projections of India
- Response to recent tranches of coal block auctions
- Non-performing assets (NPA) crises, especially in the iron and steel, and power sectors, two major consumers of coal and important sectors linked to economic growth
- Changes in various policies pertaining to the domestic energy sector
While coal remains India's main source of fuel, the report notes, "standing in the midst of a change, it is very difficult for anyone to imagine its scale and often most people remain in a state of denial until the change is upon them."
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https://www.alternet.org/world/right-wing-assault-truth-india-claims-life-another-journalist
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tea labor women
https://www.ecowatch.com/assam-tea-cost-2479151757.html
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http://www.alternet.org/world/media-freedom-threatened-under-narendra-modis-india
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http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/donald-trump-polluter-chief
...His decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, which obliged this country to reduce its coal consumption and take other steps to curb its carbon emissions, was widely covered by the American mainstream news media. On the other hand, the president’s efforts to promote greater fossil fuel consumption abroad -- just as significant in terms of potential harm to the planet -- have received remarkably little attention.
Bear in mind that while Trump’s drive to sabotage international efforts to curb carbon emissions will undoubtedly slow progress in that area, it will hardly stop it. At the recent G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, 19 of the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris accord and pledged to “mitigate greenhouse gas emissions through, among other [initiatives], increased innovation on sustainable and clean energies.” This means that whatever Trump does, continuing innovation in the energy field will indeed help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and so slow the advance of climate change. Unfortunately, Trump’s relentless drive to promote fossil-fuel consumption abroad could ensure that carbon emissions continue to rise anyway, neutralizing whatever progress might be made elsewhere and dooming humanity to a climate-ravaged future.
How the two sides of the ledger -- green energy progress versus Trump’s drive to boost carbon exports -- will balance out in the years ahead cannot be foreseen. Every boost in carbon emissions, however, pushes us closer to the moment when global temperatures will exceed the two degrees Celsius rise from pre-industrial levels that scientists say is the maximum the planet can absorb without suffering catastrophic consequences. Those would include rising sea levels that could drown New York, Miami, Shanghai, London, and many other coastal cities, as well as a sharp drop in global food production that could devastate entire populations.
Spreading the Cult of Carbon
President Trump’s pursuit of increased global carbon consumption is proving to be a two-front campaign. He’s working in every way imaginable to increase the production of fossil fuels domestically, even as he engages in a diplomatic blitzkreig to open doors to American fossil-fuel exports abroad.
At home, he’s already reversed numerous Obama-era restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, including curbs on mountaintop removal -- an environmentally hazardous form of coal mining -- and on oil and gas drillingin Arctic waters off Alaska. He’s also ordered the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt -- a notorious enemy of environmental regulations opposed by the energy industry -- to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s program to sharply reduce the use of coal in domestic electricity generation.
These and similar initiatives have gotten a fair amount of media attention already, but it’s no less important to focus on another key aspect of Trump’s pro-carbon global initiative which has gone largely unnoticed. While, under the Paris climate accord, the other industrial powers are still obliged to help developing countries install carbon-free energy technologies, Trump has freed himself to sell American fossil fuels everywhere to his heart’s content. At that G-20 meeting, for example, he forced his peers to insert a clause in their final communiqué stating, “The United States of America states it will endeavor to work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently.” (The “more cleanly and efficiently” was undoubtedly his modest concession to the other 19 leaders.)
To spread the mantra of fossil fuels, Trump has become the nation’s carbon-pusher in chief. He’s already personally engaged in energy diplomacy, while demanding that various cabinet officials make oil, gas, and coal exports a priority. On June 29th, for instance, he publicly ordered the Treasury Department to do away with “barriers to the financing of highly efficient overseas coal energy plants.” In the same speech, he spoke of his desire to supply American coal to Ukraine, currently cut off from Russian natural gas thanks to its ongoing conflict with that country. “Ukraine already tells us they need millions and millions of metric tons [of coal] right now,” Trump said, pointing out that there are many other countries in a similar state, “and we want to sell it to them, and to everyone else all over the globe who needs it.”
He added, “We are a top producer of petroleum and the number-one producer of natural gas. We have so much more than we ever thought possible, and we’re going to be an exporter... We will export American energy all over the world, all around the globe.”
In his urge to preserve the reign of fossil fuels, President Trump has already taken on a unique personal role, meeting with foreign officials and promoting cooperation with key American energy firms. Take the June 26th White House visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. While the media reported on how the two of them took up the subject of future arms sales to India, it made no mention of energy deals. Yet Secretary of Energy Rick Perry revealed that this topic was crucial to their encounter. At a Trump-hosted dinner for Modi at the White House, Perry reported, “we talked about the three areas of which there will be great back-and-forth cooperation -- deal-making, if you will. One of those is in LNG [liquefied natural gas]. The other side of that is in clean coal. Thirdly is on the nuclear side. So there is great opportunity for India and the United States to become even stronger allies, stronger partners -- energy being the glue that will hold that partnership together for a long, long time.”
To put this in context, making deals to sell coal to India is like selling OxyContin to an opioid addict. After all, in 2015, that country overtook the United States to become the world’s second-biggest consumer of coal (after China). To keep up the pace of its rapid economic growth, India had plans to increase its reliance on coal yet more, which would mean a steady increase in carbon emissions. India now trails only China and the United States as an emitter of carbon dioxide and its share is expected to grow. However, it is also likely to suffer disproportionately from climate change, which its emissions will only accelerate. Given that future extreme heat events are expected to periodically destroy crops on which a large part of its population depends, Modi’s government has recently begun seeking ways to reduce the country’s long-term reliance on fossil fuels, in part by becoming a solar superpower. In other words, in pitching coal to India -- a true case of bringing coals to Newcastle (or at least Mumbai) -- Trump is functionally working to sabotage India’s struggle to free itself from the scourge of carbon addiction.
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desmog
On June 3, two days after President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi exchanged a hug with French President Emmanuel Macron during an official visit to Paris. Modi and Macron pledged to achieve emissions reductions beyond their nations’ commitments under the Paris Agreement, and Macron announced he will visit India later this year for a summit on solar power.
For observers who equate India’s energy production with a reliance on coal, this exchange came as a surprise. Modi’s internationally visible pledge would put India three years ahead of schedule to achieve its “Intended Nationally Determined Contribution” to the Paris climate agreement. Instead of shifting to 40 percent renewables by 2030, India now expects to surpass this goal by 2027.
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http://www.alternet.org/world/11-disturbing-parallels-between-hate-politics-india-and-united-states
There is a strange sense of déjà vu these days. Quick on the heels of assuming the U.S. presidency, Donald Trump has unleashed a series of brutal actions, proving that he is true to his word. Chillingly, it has been reported that an executive order currently being battled in the courts could bar 500,000 legal residents from returning to their homes after traveling abroad.
Large sections of the media within the U.S. have been prompt in condemnation and this column will therefore not list the obvious. Limiting myself to the surge of protest spurred by the most brazen Friday, January 28 executive order of banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, I cannot but bring myself to draw some comparisons.
In India, on May 16, 2014, I wrote on my Facebook wall quoting from the famous Berthold Brecht lines: “In the dark times, Will there also be singing?/Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”
Narendra Modi had swept to power that day. There was a palpable silence in the public domain that May, and for close to six months at least, there was no real resistance from a large section of the public sphere, the Indian media. I wrote about how the pernicious attacks on freedoms within India are a warning to Trump's America. Now the worst, in a sense, has happened. And even as, with dark humor, we wonder what Modi and Trump discussed in their telephone conversation, it's worth sparing a thought for the quality of protest and resistance that both of the world's largest democracies have evoked.
As a woman, I felt humbled by the six-continent Women's March to protest the way politics is turning in the United States. I also wondered shakily why Mohsin Shaikh's brutal, hate-driven murder in June 2014, within days of Modi's capture of Delhi, drew protests that were much smaller and more scattered. As Indians, we often argue that Trump is out of line, but India is "normal," a phenomenal blindness that is clearly on display.
Consider these parallels in India:
1. Muslims not allowed. The Citizenship Bill amendments, introduced in Parliament but not yet passed, clearly exclude Muslims from the subcontinent from trying to avail of citizenship. What is that if not blatantly exclusionary?
2. The Mexican wall. Isn't India far down the fencing road—with Pakistan and Bangladesh? Isn't there a view that all economic migrants are "illegal Bangladeshis," which the ruling party clearly and unequivocally says? What is so different from the Trumpian Mexican-as-outsider line?
3. Erosion of civil rights. As far as outrage about protest and civil rights groups, how much do we in India actually support groups and individuals who fight in courts for civil rights and other things? They are mostly dismissed as toxic, out of the mainstream or such.
4. Voter disenfranchisement. Well, the Indian Supreme Court has ruled in favor of BJP states that have tried to tie representation with literacy, toilets or other accessories. So you cannot contest local elections in several BJP states if you did not go to school or don't have a toilet. Is that not eventually curtailing democracy?
6. Rise of corporate power. The corporate land grab has been made official by the Modi regime's nullifying existing federal (central) legislation by overarching authority to local administrations to disempower the farmer.
7. Similarly, rights of the indigenous people over forests have been curtailed.
8. Histrionics over culture and assimilation. The mass hysteria over "allowing" Pakistani film artists to perform in Indian films. What does that make us?
9. Attacks on Centers of Higher Learning. Indian universities have become battlegrounds for the Modi regime's theocratic, majoritarian notion of politics, education and culture. Student leaders, articulate and aggressive, have been faced with sedition cases that are still pending. One Dalit research-scholar even took his own life (the protest movement calls it an "institutional murder") and another Muslim scholar has simply disappeared for over three months from one of India's most prestigious campuses, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). In both instances—as in others where university campuses have turned into battlegrounds—the agent provocateur has been the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the strong arm of the supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The ABVP bears a sinister similarity to the Jamiat-e-Talaba of Pakistan. “If you want to change a country, change its students,” noted American journalist Dan Brooks in an article in 2011. The RSS wants to “change India” just as the Jamaat-e-Islami (IJT) is trying to “change Pakistan.” If the ABVP is the former’s instrument for “changing students” in India, the IJT is the latter’s tool for “changing students” in Pakistan.
10. Online abuse. India's leading political party, the BJP, allegedly directly commanded online abuse against key Indian public figures, including journalists, actors and political opponents, claims a new book. A former BJP volunteer has reportedly alleged that the party ordered a special social media unit of party volunteers to target specific individuals and troll them on social media. Former volunteer Sadhavi Khosla, who quit the BJP in 2015, claims in the book that she was part of the party's social media unit and was one among many party volunteers who was allegedly pushed to target public figures, perceived by the party as dissidents and/or anti-Modi.
11. And this list is incomplete without the facile decision of de-monetization that has set back India's economy, virtually crippling the informal sector.
These are just some thoughts. Let's be a bit careful before we join the lament about Trump. We must see a spade for what it is back home.
Protests swelled across America, flooding airports in New York, Newark, Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and beyond. A Brooklyn Court declared Trump's order illegal and unconstitutional. The University of Michigan defied Trump's witch-hunt of undocumented students by refusing to provide key information. Academics have protested, the U.S. media is on fine display and it seems time that we in India, breathe deeply and take stock.
How have Indians responded post-2014 to a Modi-fied India? People? Opposition political parties, academics, cultural practioneers, the media, our courts? It is time to take stock.
It has not been all gloom and doom, certainly. While large sections of the electronic media have caved in to crass corporate interests, the "other" media has emerged, fairly brave and unflinching. In print, the newspapers have not been as crudely supine, though sharp, critical and consistent campaigns against the executive-driven majoritarianism are sorely missing.
Both situations, in a sense, happened due to the easy and available play of the politically ambiguous, where even sharp critics of Modi and Trump came across as confusing and rattled. Both leaders emerged in reaction to decades of a certain kind of politics, and while none in programmatic vision or policy really signal change, strongmen appeared to give large numbers of people succor.
The real problem with this paradigm, however, is and was the hate politics that the rise of Modi and Trump effectively mean. I argued then, as I feel more certain now, that it was not just the development plank that won Modi his clinching victory with a bare 31 percent of the vote in May 2014, but the fact that here was a man who had "successfully overseen the pogrom of 2002" that won him chunks of the vote.
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ESA
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cdc conf ~
THE SENATE VOTED to confirm Donald Trump’s pick for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency today over the objections of Democratic senators, hundreds of former EPA officials, and hundreds of current EPA employees. Although an Oklahoma judge had ruled on Thursday that Pruitt’s office had to release more than 2,500 emails he had exchanged with energy and gas companies and industry groups, Republicans crammed through his confirmation in a 52-46 vote (with Democrats Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp voting with the Republican majority) before anyone had a chance to review the emails exchanged with the companies he’s now in charge of regulating.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, while Republicans in Washington were holding the first of two votes to confirm an EPA chief who will roll back regulations on the oil and gas companies responsible for most global warming, hundreds of climate scientists gathered in Atlanta to talk about the way climate change is already sickening and killing people around the country and the world.
The Climate and Health Meeting, which was organized in January after the CDC cancelled a similar conference, was far from being a litany of the gloom and doom predictions and statistics that you might expect from the scientists studying increases in temperature, rising sea levels, and extreme weather. Those things were present, of course, summed up perhaps most frighteningly by former Vice President Al Gore, the meeting’s host, who noted that humans emit 110 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours — and that the heat energy trapped by this daily dump is the equivalent of “exploding 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs.” Or the graph that showed how the continued release of these greenhouse gases could lead to a 12-degree temperature rise by 2300, a change that would render large swaths of the earth uninhabitable.
Instead, the focus was on the extremes that have already happened— and, more importantly, their human consequences. Gore pointed out the parts of the world that are already on the outer limits of human habitability, a spot in Iran where the heat index hit 165 for the first time in 2015, for instance, or a town in India, where the temperature hit a record 123.8 degrees last year. He showed people in Pakistan digging mass graves in advance of killer heat waves because they now know what to expect and traced how warmer temperatures contributed to the spread of the virus that causes dengue fever in India, where there are now 37 million infections each year.
While poor countries are being hit the hardest, the U.S. is already seeing its fair share of human casualties. Air pollution, which is worsened by heat — and produced by the same fossil fuel combustion that warms the climate — already kills 200,000 Americans each year and costs the country almost 4 percent of GDP in 2010. Two-thirds of water-borne disease outbreaks in the U.S. are set off by extreme weather events. We saw pictures of refrigerator trucks for bodies that couldn’t fit into the morgue after a Chicago heat wave, elderly people felled by heat stress in the American Southwest, and children forced to carry around backpacks of emergency asthma supplies for their heat-exacerbated asthma.
In what was may have been the saddest presentation in a day of sad presentations, psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren described the mental health consequences of climate change on children, telling of kids suffering from clinical anxiety about the climate and the particular difficulty of reckoning with human-caused crises. “What happens from intentional negligence is harder to put behind us,” she explained. Van Susteren predicted that children, as they grow older, will experience their parents’ “destructive inaction on climate” as child abuse.
If the unsparing presentations about the mounting human toll of climate change begged for “bowls of Prozac and certificates for free vasectomies,” as one scientist joked, they also reflected the recognition that past efforts to convey the urgency of climate change to voters had failed — and were partly responsible for the fact that the climate experts were presenting their calamitous news essentially in exile.
With its focus on climate reality, the meeting paid less attention to the political reality that is the biggest obstacle to addressing it. Most presenters made just the barest nods to our anti-science president who derides climate change as a hoax. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, noted dryly that walls won’t keep out the malnutrition, diseases, and death that await us if we don’t reduce our burning fossil fuels.
Former President Jimmy Carter, who made the Carter Center available for the conference, was also restrained, referring only obliquely to “this last election.” At the same time that the victor of that last election was signing a bill that will reverse protections on waterways from coal mining ash, Carter, who has devoted his life to humanitarian causes, was talking about the impact of climate change on “the lives of the poorest people on earth.” Carter acknowledged his relative freedom to speak his mind on the subject, noting, “I have secret service protection the rest of my life.”
The few representatives of the CDC who attended the meeting were more constrained. Only about 12 staff members from the federal agency originally slated to host the conference were in attendance, according to CDC Spokesperson Bernadette Burden. And many of them were using personal or vacation time to be there, exercising “their right to attend as private citizens,” as Burden put it.
George Luber, a CDC epidemiologist who attended the meeting in an official capacity, gave a clear presentation showing the agency’s efforts to prepare cities and states for the health changes brought by climate change. The program helps project local disease burdens, draft response plans, and develop “the best science so we can make the best decisions,” Luber said.
What was less obvious was whether that government work will continue under the new administration. “No one knows what will happen,” said Julia Gold, who manages the Rhode Island’s climate change program, which is funded by a grant from the CDC.
Patrick Breysse, director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, of which the Climate and Health program is part, told me he’s confident the agency’s health-focused work will continue. While there may be disagreement over the root causes of climate change, Breysse said, “The good news is that people generally agree that there are increasing temperatures, more wildfires.” He even expressed hope that the agency would reschedule its climate meeting, but was unable to say when that might happen.
As government scientists find themselves less able to communicate about the environmental disaster to which they’ve devoted their professional lives, those free to speak are trying to figure out how to rectify the communications failures that have cast them politically powerless. Climate change used to be understood mostly as a problem of the planet and the endangered species on it. But this meeting made it clear that the emphasis will no longer be on shrinking habitats or abstract graphs with lines pointing off into the distant future. However poignant, the plight of the polar bear is out.
In its place, we’ll be seeing images of kids like Will, a 7-year-old in Texas, who is now forced to wear a cooling vest because of a medical condition that makes him particularly susceptible to heat and to stay inside on the increasing number of very hot days in his hometown in Texas.
The best strategy, according to Ed Maibach of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, is to keep the message simple — that climate change is real and — if we cut back on fossil-fuel use — reversible.
Maibach, who has divided the American public into six categories according to their beliefs about climate change, presented perhaps the most encouraging message of the event: that much of the country is open to learning about climate change. The good news, according to Maibach, is that only 9 percent of the country are “dismissers,” the most ideologically extreme end of the spectrum who are dead-set against recognizing the reality of climate change. The bad news is that that many of them are now leading our government.
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water
http://www.alternet.org/environment/contamination-threatens-one-worlds-biggest-freshwater-supplies
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modi meet BO
http://ecowatch.com/2016/06/08/solar-power-obama-modi-agreement/
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http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/26/u-s-blocks-india-solar-plan-trade-rules/
India has been told that it cannot go ahead as planned with its ambitious plan for a huge expansion of its renewable energy sector, because it seeks to provide work for Indian people. The case against India was brought by the U.S.
The ruling, by the World Trade Organization, says India’s National Solar Mission—which would create local jobs, while bringing electricity to millions of people—must be changed because it includes a domestic content clause requiring part of the solar cells to be produced nationally.
Sun-tracking discs at a vast solar thermal power plant in Rajasthan, India. Photo credit: Brahma Kumaris / Flickr
What a difference two months make. On Dec. 12 last year, U.S. President Barack Obama praised the Paris agreement on tackling climate change, just hours after it was finally concluded. “We’ve shown what’s possible when the world stands as one,” he said, adding that the agreement “represents the best chance we have to save the one planet that we’ve got.”
Clear-Cut Victory
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agw progress http://ecowatch.com/2015/08/14/countries-hope-climate-action/2/**
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http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/06/pakistan-heatwave-climate-change/
Pakistan’s lack of preparedness in the face of increasingly intense weather events is being blamed for a growing death toll following what has been one of the most sustained heatwavesin the country since records began.
And weather experts say that the extreme heat—which lasted for much of the second half ofJune, and was felt most in the southern province of Sindh—is linked to climate change.
Ghulam Rasul, director general of the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD), told Climate News Network that the intense heat was caused by an unusually persistent area of low pressure over the Arabian Sea off Pakistan’s coast.
“Usually, in summer, cool winds blow from the sea to land, and in winter the situation is the opposite,” he said. “This moderates temperatures in the port city of Karachi, but this summer, this didn’t happen.”
Climate Task Force
Pervaiz Amir, formerly a member of a special task force on climate change set up by Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, said: “The mortality from heatstroke could have been avoided had the Sindh provincial government responded to a heatwave forecast issued by the Pakistan Meteorological Department.”
Karachi, a city of nearly 20 million, was worst hit, with bodies piling up in the city’s morgues, and hospitals crammed with people suffering from severe heatstroke as daytime temperatures climbed to well over 40°C for extended periods.
About 65,000 heatstroke patients were treated at the city’s hospitals, and the death toll in southern Pakistan climbed above 1,200.
Chronic energy shortages—a common occurrence in Pakistan—added to the problem, and the heatwave came during Ramadan, the Muslim fasting period when people do not eat or drink during daylight hours.
Experts say Karachi has also suffered from what’s known as the urban heat island effect, with poor urban planning and a lack of green spaces making conditions even hotter.
Social workers say the majority of those who have died have been the poor and homeless. At one stage, Karachi’s cemeteries ran out of space for burying the dead.
Mohsin Iqbal, a climate scientist at the state-owned Global Change Impact Study Centre in Islamabad, says temperature increases in Pakistan are above the rise in average global temperatures.
Extreme Events
“This is leading to more extreme weather events, with floods and heatwaves becoming more intense and frequent in recent years,” he says.
Climate experts say weather patterns throughout the Asian sub-continent are changing, with more intense periods of heat, delays in the monsoon season and a greater incidence of drought conditions.
In April and May this year, many parts ofIndiawere hit by an intense heatwave, causing the death of more than 2,000 people.
AccuWeather, a global forecasting service, says delays in the arrival of monsoon rains and further hot periods are likely to exacerbate drought conditions in Pakistan and northwest India in July and August, threatening crop production across a wide swathe of land.
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8 Major Cities Running Out of Water
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http://insideclimatenews.org/news/14052015/whats-behind-indias-crackdown-social-justice-climate-activists
India has recently ramped up attacks on environmental and development organizations that work on climate, clean energy and sustainability issues. The world’s largest democracy has frozen bank accounts, restricted international donations, and in some cases prevented the organizations’ staffers from traveling abroad.
The actions come just seven months ahead of international climate treaty talks in Paris in December, and are inspired by fear that foreign interests are trying to curb the nation's economic growth. India is the world's third largest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind China and the United States, and home to millions of the world's people most vulnerable to global warming impacts such as flooding, extreme heat and sea level rise. As a result, India will play a crucial role in the negotiations. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stressed in recent international speeches that his nation must take a leadership role in the "pressing global problem" of climate change.
Environmentalists said his administration's attacks on the very civil society groups that have been integral in pushing India and other nations to take action on climate change "could hamper the country’s global standing" at the talks, according to Divya Raghunandan, program director of Greenpeace India.
Greenpeace India has had its foreign donations repeatedly frozen—and later unfrozen by Indian courts—over the last year. In late April, the green group learned government officials had frozen seven of its bank accounts that are built largely on domestic donations, which make up approximately 70 percent of its $3.2 million annual budget. The maneuver put the organization in danger of having to shutter its operations in the country before the end of the month. No other country has restricted Greenpeace in this way.
Since opening in 2001, Greenpeace India has been one of the most vocal anti-coal groups in the country, bucking the Modi administration's all-of-the-above, pro-fossil fuel energy strategy. The group successfully blocked coal mining in the Mahan forest in central India after a four-year legal battle and civil disobedience campaign. The organization, which has a staff of 340, also persuaded tea companies to phase out pesticides after it conducted an investigation into their health impacts on workers and consumers.
Greenpeace is hardly the only such organization facing government strictures. The Ford Foundation, 350.org and the ClimateWorks Foundation have seen their donations into India restricted or questioned by federal agencies as well. Nearly 9,000 NGOs (non-government organizations) were notified last month that their licenses to receive funding from abroad had been revoked. So far, even basic details about these groups, such as the issues they work on, haven't been revealed.
The maneuvers haven't completely paralyzed the organizations. Several groups, however, have shifted their focus to less volatile issues or toned down their protests since the attacks began. 350.org, for example, has shifted its focus from stopping coal production to fighting air pollution, but even that work has come under fire recently.
The government's concerns about foreign funding stem from the economic slump that India experienced between 2010 and 2013: its growth rate dropped 5 percentage points in four years. According to an Indian intelligence report leaked last year, government officials believe foreign-based environment and development groups were being paid by foreign interests to purposefully curtail the country's economic growth by subverting projects like coal mines and timber harvesting.
William Antholis, an expert in climate change, international negotiations and development at the University of Virginia, said it is "hard to read what is happening" in India.
"The crackdown on foreign-funded NGOs may be an attempt for Modi to create space so he can act in a way [on climate change] that is not perceived as being influenced by foreign pressure," Antholis said. "But this could also simply be Indian nationalist xenophobia."
The idea that civil society organizations "reduced Indian GDP by a number of percentage points is simply absurd," said Raghunandan. "We are a tiny gnat compared to India’s giant corporations. The idea that a group of a few hundred people have such enormous influence over the Indian economy smacks of paranoia."
The real threat, Raghunandan warned, flows from the top, not the bottom.
"We are being muzzled," he said. "Unless this block on our domestic accounts is removed, our future is in real doubt."
Conflict and Climate
Climate change and power in India are hugely complicated and challenging issues. Parts of the country still lack electricity while blackouts are near daily occurrences in others. In 2012, amidst extreme heat and a late monsoon season that meant hydroelectric plants were generating less than average energy, over 600 million people—half of the entire country and twice the population of the United States—lost power.
Modiserved as leader of the western Indian state of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014. In that time, he transformed the area's power system into India's most expansive and reliable. He did it largely by restructuring the electrical grid, cracking down on electricity theft, and charging residents for their power usage—a novel practice in the country at the time. Modi also embraced an all-of-the-above energy strategy, expanding coal, hydroelectricity, and renewable power generation.
When he ran for prime minister of India in 2014, Modi campaigned on the promise of applying the power reforms in Gujarat to the rest of the country. He has spoken openly about the need for international climate action and expansion of renewable energy, calling the latter "a personal and national priority" during a visit with President Barack Obama earlier this year. But environmentalists disagree with Modi's strong support for a growing fossil fuel sector in India, said Hoda Baraka, a 350.org international spokeswoman who has been watching the situation in India closely. Already, Modi has fast-tracked coal mining projects in several parts of the country. The government plans to double India's domestic coal use by 2019. Political and environmental experts say India, not China, could be the biggest hurdle in reaching an international agreement on climate change in December.
When Modi talks about the growing need to tackle climate change, Baraka said, “It is a contradiction that cannot be overlooked.”
India's wind and solar electricity increased 13 percent in the last year, but the nation is still the world's third-largest coal consumer, after China and the United States. Federal officials argue an all-of-the-above energy strategy with expansion of both fossil fuels and renewables is the only way they will be able to grow their economy and provide reliable power to the 77 million people still living without electricity in the country today. The country's long-term plan is to expand, and increase the tax on, coal production to fund large-scale renewable energy projects. Modi said he hopes to spend $100 billion to reach 175 gigawatts of renewable power by 2022.
"There is no way India is going to grow its economy without growing coal," Antholis said. "The idea that Prime Minister Modi can't make positive pledges to climate without stopping coal is holding India to a higher standard than we're holding China or even ourselves."
'On the Chopping Block'
Environmentalists have long faced pushback from governments for their campaigns. Russia arrested 30 Greenpeace activists in 2013 for trying to board drilling rigs in the Arctic Ocean. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service labeled environmental activists in Canada "a threat to national security" because of their attempts to block the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project, which would carry carbon-intense tar sands crude from Alberta to refineries in Texas. In the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation spied on anti-Keystone XL activists in Houston, labeling them "environmental extremists."
But environmental leaders said the recent crackdown in India is particularly worrisome because the nation's 68-year-old democratic system is chiefly considered stable. India, which is home to 1.25 billion people, has one of the highest voter turnouts in the world—66.4 percent in the 2014 election, compared to the United States' 57.5 percent.
Baraka said 350.org's funds sent to India have come "under scrutiny" by the federal government. The organization does not have headquarters in the country, but does have staffers based there. Hoda said the group is answering officials' questions regarding its financing in the country and trying to work out a solution.
Dozens of others, including the Ford Foundation, were put on a government watch list that requires approval from the Ministry of Home Affairs before they can send money to Indian organizations.
"Any sort of civil society group that has a different viewpoint than the government is starting to get caught up in this," said Nicole Ghio, who works on international climate issues for the Sierra Club.
In a letter to Prime Minister Modi on May 2, nearly 150 groups, including Greenpeace, condemned the attacks. "We write to you today...to express our deep concern at how civil society organizations in general and their support systems, including donors, are being labeled and targeted," they wrote.
The U.S. ambassador to India, Richard Verma, said in a speech in Delhi on May 6 that the muzzling could have "potentially chilling effects." He was joined in this concern one day later by the German ambassador to India, Michael Steiner.
"With so many voices engaged in the debate, there are sure to be some whose views others find objectionable," Verma said. "That is part of the beauty of the vibrant, thriving democracies we have chosen."
Local media have largely chastised the Modi administration's actions, and Greenpeace India said its supporters and donors have increased since the government clampdown began last year, demonstrating widespread public opposition to––and concern about––the attacks.
If Greenpeace does have to shutter its doors, it "would send a chilling signal to the otherwise robust civil society of this country," Raghunandan said. "By strangulating Greenpeace, the government has put every other NGO on the chopping block."
See Also:
Outcry Grows Over Canadian Govt's Undermining of Climate Science
Harper Govt Makes Moves to Silence Canada's Leading Environmental Groups
Runaround: Three Months of Correspondence With the EPA
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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/when-capitalism-becomes-an-act-of-war/
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The document casting Naidoo as a potential terroristic threat puts South Korea among a host of governments recently discovered to be targeting Greenpeace. The Indian government cracked down on the group, as well as other international environmental NGOs, ahead of Obama’s recent visit to the country, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, irked by the group’s anti-Keystone activism, named Greenpeace alongside the Sierra Club and Tides Canada in a leaked document outlining potentially violent threats to Canadian infrastructure.
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http://www.alternet.org/print/why-india-unlikely-do-much-about-cutting-its-emissions
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Why India and China's No-Show at New York Climate Change Talks Could Be a Disaster
Sep 4, 2014
(Quartz)
The leaders of the world's largest and third-largest emitters of greenhouse gases won't be attending a global summit on climate change later this month. China is sending a lower-ranked official; it's not yet clear if India will send its environmental minister.
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In poorer countries, where most of the world's people live and most of the growth in energy use is occurring, photovoltaic electricity is not so much displacing carbon-based energy as leapfrogging it altogether. In his first days in office, the government of the newly elected prime minister of India, Narendra Modi (who has authored an e-book on global warming), announced a stunning plan to rely principally upon photovoltaic energy in providing electricity to 400 million Indians who currently do not have it. One of Modi's supporters, S.L. Rao, the former utility regulator of India, added that the industry he once oversaw "has reached a stage where either we change the whole system quickly, or it will collapse."
Nor is India an outlier. Neighboring Bangladesh is installing nearly two new rooftop PV systems every minute — making it the most rapidly growing market for PVs in the world. In West and East Africa, solar-electric cells are beginning what is widely predicted to be a period of explosive growth.
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Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-turning-point-new-hope-for-the-climate-20140618#ixzz350MwCCQ8
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http://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/9/is_india_on_a_totalitarian_path
As voting begins in India in the largest elections the world has ever seen, we spend the hour with Indian novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy. Nearly 815 million Indians are eligible to vote, and results will be issued in May. One of India’s most famous authors — and one of its fiercest critics — Roy is out with a new book, "Capitalism: A Ghost Story," which dives into India’s transforming political landscape and makes the case that globalized capitalism has intensified the wealth divide, racism, and environmental degradation. "This new election is going to be [about] who the corporates choose," Roy says, "[about] who is not going to blink about deploying the Indian army against the poorest people in this country, and pushing them out to give over those lands, those rivers, those mountains, to the major mining corporations." Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, "The God of Small Things." Her other books include "An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire" and "Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers."
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alternet: The same is true when irresponsible corporations are able to use our air and water like a free dump for hazardous waste. In India, it is estimated [12] that pollution from coal plants causes 20 million new cases of asthma each year and kills 120,000. Here in the U.S., pollution levels are lower and asthmatics are more likely to get timely treatment. Even so we have data [13] going back to the 1970s showing that coal burning increases asthma attacks and respiratory ailments. Coal companies like Peabody don’t have to pay the cost of harm done, which means their profits are subsidized by the American public who take a hit in terms of both health and healthcare costs. Who really pays? The elderly and children. If coal companies had to step up and take responsibility for the real costs of their dirty products, energy innovators might find themselves on a level playing field.
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A longtime friend of the CEI, Klaus founded his own think tank in 1998, the Center for Economics and Politics, in Prague. His Center has published a book in Czech on global warming featuring the work of prominent deniers, as well as a Czech-language translation of “Global Climate Change: Facts Instead of Myths,” by the National Center for Policy Analysis. The think tank describes itself as pro-market, with a mission of formulating and promoting policies based on “free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, and Trans-Atlantic relationship.”
While the group doesn’t disclose its funding sources, saying that it relies on private support, The Cato Institute and The Foundation for Economic Education are featured partners on their website.
Reaching out to international groups to spread climate change skepticism will only increase, said Davies of Greenpeace. At the Heartland Institute’s conference, a number of the event’s co-sponsors were from abroad, including think tanks in India, China, Australia, Europe, and Canada.
The Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change is composed of many of these international groups. In 2007, it published a 100-page book titled Civil Society Report on Climate Change, written by 46 groups in 36 countries. In April, India’s Liberty Institute, a member of the coalition, launched the report at a press conference in New Delhi.
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ifg http://ifg.org/pdf/IFG_plutonomy_Part2.pdf
Wealth: Mukesh Ambani owns Reliance Industries, India’s largest private-sector conglomerate.20 His father,
Dhirubhai H. Ambani, was founder and longtime head of Reliance. After joining Reliance in 1981, Mukesh
initiated Reliance’s “backward integration” strategy, expanding the company’s acquisitions beyond textiles
into polyester fibers and then further “backwards” to control the petrochemical supplies used to make its
synthetic fabrics. Reliance has expanded into petrochemical production, petroleum-refining and oil and gas
exploration. Ambani built the world’s largest petroleum refinery at Jamnagar, India, with a current capacity of
1.2 million barrels-per-day. The Jamnagar site combines petrochemical operations with power generation that
supplies a large port and related infrastructure.21
Power Networks: Ambani enjoys tight links with Indian government and U.S. government officials. He has
met several times with President Obama, most recently in November 2010, when Obama and GE CEO
Jeffrey Immelt announced a $750 million deal in which Reliance agreed to purchase turbines manufactured by
GE. (Immelt was subsequently named Obama’s chief economic adviser.)
Ambani chairs the board of Indian Institutes of Management, India’s leading graduate business schools,
which conduct research and provide consultancy services in the field of management to various sectors of the
Indian economy.
Environment: Ambani owns a controlling interest in Canadian oil sands company Value Creation Inc. (VCI),
which has a partnership with BP Canada.22 According to the VCI website: “VCI is responsible for preparing
detailed baseline environmental studies to find out and understand the potential impacts of the Pilot Project
on the environment. Assessments will be completed in several key areas and submitted to Alberta
Environment as part of the approval process for the Pilot Project. Once the Pilot Project is approved, follow
up environmental evaluation will be conducted. VCI is committed to minimizing surface disturbance and will