stability sustain balance
belated? this is about the goal state
see balancing feedback, moderation
NAS BS
3.4 billion see bak
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/04/sustainability-trend-costs-students-money-peter-wood/
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ref report
https://www.nas.org/blogs/dicta/sustainability_higher_educations_new_fundamentalism1
[pix po'd middle eastern looking guy; climate tshirt backwards]
“Sustainability” is a key idea on college campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world. To many, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word has come to mean something much larger: an ideology that demands new limits on economic, political, and intellectual freedom as the price that must be paid to ensure the welfare of future generations.
This report is the first in-depth critical examination of the sustainability movement in higher education. The movement, of course, extends well beyond the college campus. But the college campus is where the movement gets its voice of authority, and where it molds the views and commands the attention of young people.
Download the report (pdf): Sustainability: Higher Education':{s New Fundamentalism}:
See also:
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https://www.nas.org/articles/An_Elbow_in_the_Ribs_Prof-Prodding_Toward_Sustainability
https://www.nas.org/articles/Sustainability_is_a_Waste_10_Reasons_to_Oppose_the_Sustainability_Movement
sep 09
- Sustainability is deceptive.
Sustainability is not just about practicing good stewardship of the environment. It is also a tool to advance progressive politics and ideology. The sustainability movement is a way for people with a hugely unpopular political program to get into positions of influence so that they can advance their cause despite lack of public support.[1] On many campuses sustainability is marketed to students as saving energy and improving the environment, but turns out to involve projects that have nothing to do with the environment.
- Sustainability is coercive.
Sustainability advocates assume that no one can legitimately disagree with their message. They therefore have no qualms about imposing their politics on students, faculty, and staff. If someone does disagree, they attack that person’s motives and ignore his actual points.[2]
- Sustainability is closed-minded.
Sustainability advocates put their hands over their ears and refuse to listen to people who point out contrary facts or who have different arguments. Sustainability in this sense is an ideology: it shuts out or explains away whatever doesn’t fit with its premises.[3]
- Sustainability is a pseudo-religion.
Some sustainability advocates tip over the edge of ideology into apocalyptic religion, complete with end-of-the-world scenarios, calls to repent, a new eco-morality, and worship of the Earth.[4] This is a religion that misappropriates the ideas of “ethics,” ‘justice,” “social mandate,” and “the right thing” to shame people into compliance.
- Sustainability distorts higher education.
Sustainability advocates don’t want to just addsustainability to the curriculum; they want to make it “thefoundation of all learning and practice in higher education.”[5] How exactly does sustainability help you learn calculus, read Homer, or score well on the LSAT? College is also about preparing for adult responsibilities. How does making sustainability the foundation of higher education prepare you for those aspects of life not encompassed by recycling, green grocery bags, and compact fluorescent light bulbs?
- Sustainability shrinks freedom.
Sustainability advocates don’t like free markets or personal liberty. They believe markets ignore long-term costs and people typically make bad choices. Instead of liberty, sustainability advocates praise “social justice” and “equitable distribution of resources” as the foundation of a sustainable society. [6] These terms may sound nice but they point to governmental control over everyday life. Ultimately, the sustainability movement is about taking away your right to think and act for yourself.
- Sustainability tries to program you.
The proponents of sustainability aim to have “all students engaged as effective change agents in our sustainability challenges.”[7] This is another way of narrowing your education. Can’t students simply be students? What if your goal is to learn something about the world before attempting to change it?
- Sustainability is anti-rational.
Some sustainability advocates—we call them sustainatopians—want to instill in students an emotional way of knowing the world that is “separate from the rational.”[8] Many of them believe the industrial revolution was a mistake and would like to move beyond reason and science in favor of a combination of intuition and empathy. That runs counter to the basic purpose of higher education.
- Sustainability bypasses the faculty.
Historically, college teachers have made the key decisions about what they teach. The sustainability movement on campus, however, took off when college administrators decided to push it. So far, 650 college presidents have signed a commitment to combat global warming and infuse sustainability into the curriculum.[9]
- Sustainability is wasteful.
Sustainability advocates pride themselves on taking the long view and minimizing waste. In fact the movement has a long history of extravagant and false predictions about natural resources, environmental perils, and the consequences of human actions.[10] These predictions have resulted in vastly wasteful expenditures and diversions of human time and talent. Convincing college students to squander their opportunity for a real education is only the most recent example.
To learn how you can oppose the sustainability movement on your campus, visit the National Association of Scholars website at www.nas.org for articles about sustainability and for suggestions on how to respond to sustainability on your campus.
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recall: inequality --> instability --> crisis/system fail = chaos
an 3 22 richard wolff
The growing disconnect between the capitalist system and the economic realities plaguing the United States is now nearing completion. On the ground, the accumulated problems of U.S. capitalism undermine its empire and challenge its very future. Meanwhile, the ever-deepening inequalities of wealth and income conjure up images of ancient Egypt’s pharaohs. Three economic crashes opening the new century (2000, 2008, and 2020) have shaken the system; so have the two wars America lost against very poor countries in the Middle East: Afghanistan and Iraq. The worst public health crisis in a century during the COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed how unprepared U.S. capitalism was and is, thereby imposing massive new human and financial costs lasting into the future.
A government that serves U.S. capitalism first and foremost borrowed trillions and enabled trillions more of new debt (corporate and household) that was used to fight long, losing wars and shore up a faltering economy. Now, after two terrible years of COVID plus an economic crash, with 3 million fewer jobs in 2022 than before COVID hit, a sharp inflation looms.Meanwhile, aided partly by profit-driven U.S. capitalists who moved their operations to China, the Asian country is now in a position where it is challenging U.S. capitalism globally.
Above the troubled ground sit two old political parties, the GOP and the Democratic Party, which are formed by and are stuck in the old political economy before all these problems accumulated into crises. From 1820 to 1970, U.S. capitalism experienced cycles, but these cycles were securely anchored in a long-term upward trend. Real wages rose every decade, at least for white workers. Recessionary downturns only interrupted the long trend up (and even then not for long). The Republican Party and the Democratic Party rarely went beyond the routine rituals of orderly contests over who deserved the credit for economic growth and who deserved the blame for the interruptions during recessions.
The one big exception resulted from the one super big interruption: the 1930s Great Depression. This shook U.S. capitalism to its core. Mobilized and led by a coalition of militant unions (CIO), socialist parties, and a communist party, the U.S. working class shifted sharply to the left. This shift won a New Deal from the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. That deal taxed corporations and the rich significantly more. It then poured much of those funds into the new Social Security system, unemployment compensation, and a massive federal jobs program. Because of the New Deal, Roosevelt was reelected three times, and was the most popular president in U.S. history. Correspondingly, U.S. corporations and those they enriched felt seriously threatened during this period.
The GOP reacted strongly. Once FDR died and World War II ended, the Republican Party took the lead to undo the New Deal. It did this by splitting the coalition (which included the CIO, socialists, and communists) from the Democratic Party and the coalition partners from one another. Anti-communism, McCarthyism, and the Cold War served as the weapons of choice for the Republican Party. The GOP succeeded partly because the Democrats offered mostly weak opposition or none at all. Postwar Democrats were largely complicit in destroying most of what the New Deal had achieved (with the help, ironically, of many of the Democratic Party’s own prewar efforts). After 1945, the White House, Congress, and state and local governments resumed orderly political contests between the GOP and the Democratic Party. Both endorsed a musical chairs type of rotation of public authority personnel between them (until this system was undone by former President Donald Trump in 2020).
The old, established leaders of both parties still do not grasp or accept that the orderly rotation of public authority personnel is now over. Unable or unwilling to critically evaluate U.S. capitalism, these leaders missed the signs leading up to the accumulation of capitalism’s problems that now overwhelms them. The Bushes, Clintons, President Joe Biden, and their ilk want the old political system to persist. After all, for them this old political system did well. But now their disconnect from the capitalist reality that ultimately controls them threatens to render them blatantly ineffective, sadly out of their element. Because they cannot or dare not criticize that reality, its increasing difficulties and resulting mass disaffection are beyond their reach with the old tools, arguments, and spins that used to work.
Given the disconnected mainstreams of U.S. politics, mass disaffection provokes escapism and scapegoating. The GOP eagerly validates many of them (anti-immigration, white supremacy, quasi-fascism, culture wars, and anti-leftism) to enlarge its voter base. The Democrats, meanwhile, try to fight the extreme forms of that escapism and scapegoating (as in “basket of deplorables”) without offering any real alternative to it. The socialism represented by politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is so soft-pedaled by them that, given mainstream media biases, it only marginally hovers at the edges of the national political conversation.
What people increasingly need is protection from a beleaguered capitalist system itself, from itsintrinsic instability(the accumulated crashes and their effects), intrinsic inequalities of wealth and income (and their effects), devastating ecological damages, and profit fetishism. But the GOP and the Democratic Party have long ago lost the ability to see or contend with any of that. They keep repeating neoliberal ideology (and its reframing of a U.S. empire as “globalization”) so often that they actually believe and are thereby imprisoned within the system.
Thus, a peculiar political theater of disconnectedness has emerged. The Republican and Democratic leaders cannot see what most of us can. They see “the big issues” as not being about capitalism. Yet what they do see and the solutions they propose will in fact be their response as capitalism’s crisis deepens. Thus, under Trump, the Republican Party has moved toward fascism. His GOP has used and will continue to use government to enforce capitalism as it totters by extinguishing what remains of unions, crushing the left, and militarizing media and culture, much as other dictators have, including Adolf Hitler in Germany after January 1933 and Benito Mussolini in Italy after October 1922. Like them, Trump has used hyperpatriotic nationalism mixed with racial superiority to justify all his actions. That is the real meaning behind Trump’s campaign slogans and his audiences’ cheers of “save America” and “Make America Great Again.” How far down the German and Italian fascist paths Trump and others like him will go depends on circumstances.
Capitalism’s crisis exists neither for Biden nor the Democratic establishment he leads, just as it does not for Trump and the GOP. The Democratic establishment defines itself over and against Trump. It is not about to go down the fascist road. It proposes instead to “protect democracy” from what Trump represents. That difference will frame many electoral campaigns in 2022 and 2024; it already does.The Democrats will “protect democracy” by “returning to the pre-pandemic normal.” The Democratic Party’s version of “Make America Great Again” is a resurrected post-World War II political economy, complete with U.S. global dominance based securely, they imagine, on a fast-growing U.S. capitalism.
Both the Republican and Democratic establishments warn their megadonors and the public that allowing the other to take political power will disrupt civil society and prevent America from becoming great again. The GOP screams that antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement will destroy white America and will result in a civil war. The Democrats counter that Trump and January 6 type “insurgents” will dissolve social peace inside the United States, provoke counteractions, and thereby lead to civil conflict. Social peace, each side insists, requires political war to defeat the other side. Neither side glimpses the absurd contradiction of its claims.
Which way U.S. politics will go depends less on the two parties or their disconnected rhetoric. What matters far more are the actualities of U.S. capitalism as the U.S. empire continues to decline and U.S. capitalism’s accumulated problems worsen. These latter factors will determine how the public views the parties’ disconnected policies. Today’s inflation offers an example of this. As a further slap in the face of the U.S. working class who have dealt with two years of economic crash plus the health catastrophe of COVID-19, inflation and the rising interest rates aimed to stop it will ultimately shake capitalism and shape politics.
How many angry working families will now sympathize with a politician who offers big changes versus a politician who offers “stay the course”? The business community wants inflation stopped. The responsive Fed will thus resort to quantitative tightening and raising interest rates. The responsive Biden will applaud the Fed. Those Fed actions can and likely will threaten jobs.So Biden must choose between the electoral risks of inflation versus those of job deterioration. That is the risky dead-end “choice” that the problems of capitalism will dump on Biden. And if 2022 proves to be the year when capitalism’s crisis breaks into the explicit open, will most Americans tilt toward Trump-type fascism or the “democracy protection” offered by the Democrats to protect themselves from capitalism’s crisis?
Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascist solutions to crises in their nations’ capitalisms did not end well. Yet today’s leading U.S. capitalists seem not to know or care about historical precedents. They continue to perform their disconnected politics comfortably, oblivious to the imploding capitalism and the resulting damage to Americans. In that, they resemble the upper classes in Russia (up to 1917), in Germany (up to 1933), and in Italy (up to 1922). The most important questions thus become whether or not and how soon a new left can emerge that targets capitalism per se, proposes an alternative system, and charts a transition to this alternative system.
aha: transparency lowers corruption, info is a signal that allows us to react/ compensate to restore balance; use invisible hand mkt to make smarter decsions
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/07/17/sec-climate-risks-disclosure/
Karen Savage
A bill that would require public companies to disclose the risks posed to their business by climate change passed a crucial committee vote in the House on Wednesday.
The House Financial Services Committee passed the Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2019, which was introduced by Illinois Rep. Sean Casten in 2018. The bill would require the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to develop and implement guidelines for companies on disclosing climate risks. The SEC would be required to make the information available to the public on its website.
“Climate change is a risk to the stability of the global financial system,” Casten said. “This bill presents a market-based solution to understand the impact of a changing climate on companies and provide investors, lenders, and insurers with better information.”
The bill now moves on to a vote by the full House, and if it passes, on to the Senate. With the Senate still controlled by Republicans, it is unlikely to have enough support.[odd given fundamentalist mkt faith]
Companies are currently required to disclose the risks that other issues—including lawsuits, significant corporate events and other business trends—pose to their business in annual SEC reports known as 10-Ks. But they are not required to specifically disclose risks posed by climate change.
A study by ClimateWire in 2016 found companies’ voluntary risk disclosures are often vague, with little useful information for investors. Because there are no standard guidelines for measuring and reporting climate risk, comparing risk from company to company is difficult, if not impossible.
The Climate Risk Disclosure Act would require companies in the finance, insurance, transportation, electric power, mining and non-renewable energy sectors to disclose direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and to disclose the total amount of fossil fuel-related assets owned or managed by those companies. Companies would be required to use specific parameters for climate scenario analyses and to disclose the methods used in calculating the social cost of carbon. That makes it easier for investors to compare companies based on their climate risk.
Fossil fuel companies have long been accused of not providing complete, consistent or transparent information on the risk climate change poses to their business.
Exxon is currently facing a lawsuit by the New York attorney general’s office for allegedly deceiving investors for years by deliberately downplaying the climate risks to its business and long-term financial health.
In recent years, BP, Exxon, Shell, Chevron and many other major fossil fuel companies have faced intense shareholder pressure to disclose their climate risks. While some have begun to deal more transparently with the issue, many continue to reject shareholder requests.
A law requiring disclosure will help shareholders make better-informed investment decisions, said Danielle Fugere, president of As You Sow, a nonprofit that advocates for corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy.
“Climate change is very important to investors and shareholders because climate will impact every facet of the economy, from agriculture to supply chains to realty, we’re already seeing those impacts,” Fugere said.
“It’s impossible to predict the next PG&E bankruptcy will be—that was a bankruptcy related to climate change that nobody saw coming last year.”
PG&E, California’s largest utility, has been found liable for several of the state’s largest wildfires, with climate change intensifying the conditions that lead to them. The company’s shareholders have lost more than $10 billion since the company filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.
More than 50 investor and advocacy groups sent a letter last week to Casten and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment, in support of the bill.
“Ensuring climate risk disclosure is standardized will allow companies and investors—especially those managing state employee pension funds and other long-term portfolios—to plan for a low-carbon future, and that science and data guide the process,” the groups wrote in the letter.
Casten said residents in his home state are already feeling the effects of climate change and said it’s crucial that investors understand the risks.
“In just the past few decades rising temperatures have worsened extreme weather events; wildfire seasons are longer; in Illinois the painting season has been shortened from seven months to six months. Mosquitoes are expanding their territory, spreading tropical disease. Two feet of sea-level rise is already baked in,” Casten said.
“What does that mean if you are a property manager investing in assets on Miami beach? What does that mean if you are a seed developer who has seeds that are not going to be able to germinate at the rising temperatures in my home state of Illinois?
“If you are an investor, you would like to know the answers to those questions.”
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819
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/analysis-of-25-worlds-wealthiest-families-a-reminder-of-inequalitys-economic-drain/
no lnx
Analysis of 25 world’s wealthiest families a reminder of inequality’s economic drain
Written by Common Dreams August 11, 2019
If the world needed yet another example of just how unequal the global economy has become, a new analysis of the top 25 wealthiest family dynasties published Saturday revealed that while one out of ten people in the world live on less than $2.00 per day, these super rich families now control a total of $1.4 trillion in assets and are making as much as$4 million every single hour.
According to Bloomberg, the numbers are “mind-boggling” and include a look at—just to name a few—the fabulous riches of the Walton family, which controls the Walmart fortune, the Mars family, descendants of the candy empire, the Saudi Royal family, and the infamous Koch brothers, the right-wing libertarians who inherited their father’s oil, gas, and other holdings.
Notable in the new analysis is not just the size of the massive wealth these families now have, but just how exponentially it has grown, especially compared to others in the economy—both in the last several decades and over the last 12 months.
As Bloomberg points out:
Even in this era of extreme wealth and brutal inequality, the contrast is jarring. The heirs of Sam Walton, Walmart’s notoriously frugal founder, are amassing wealth on a near-unprecedented scale—and they’re hardly alone.
The Walton fortune has swelled by $39 billion, to $191 billion, since topping the June 2018 ranking of the world’s richest families.
Other American dynasties are close behind in terms of the assets they’ve accrued. The Mars family, of candy fame, added $37 billion, bringing its fortune to $127 billion. The Kochs, the industrialists-cum-political-power-players, tacked on $26 billion, to $125 billion.
So it goes around the globe. America’s richest 0.1% today control more wealth than at any time since 1929, but their counterparts in Asia and Europe are gaining too. Worldwide, the 25 richest families now control almost $1.4 trillion in wealth, up 24% from last year.
In 2014, the United Nations issued a scathing report which warned that escalating income and wealth disparities across the world was creating economic and political instability. The report, put forth by the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), cautioned leaders that if unaddressed the trend of inequality would “undermine the very foundations of development and social and domestic peace.”
Earlier this year, Oxfam International also warned that global wealth inequality was “out of control” and urged immediate far-reaching action. “Our economy is broken,” the group said at the time. “Hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty while huge rewards go to those at the very top. There are more billionaires than ever before, and their fortunes have grown to record levels. Meanwhile, the world’s poorest got even poorer.”
So while the Trump administration in the United States and other right-wing forces advocating on behalf of the global oligarchy continue to tell workers and struggling families around the world that the threat to them is “immigrants taking their jobs” or “socialists trying to provide better wages and more universal protections”—others pointed to the new Bloomberg analysis as an alternative explanation for why there seems to be less and less for some people in the economy while the ultra-rich continue to amass fortunes at breakneck speed.
As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, an analysis by Dallas Morning News finance columnist Scott Burns found that if current trends continue, the wealthiest Americans “will truly ‘have it all’ just 33 years from now”as they gobble up a larger and larger share of the overall economic pie.
“However you slice it, the rich have been getting richer. Lots richer,” Burns wrote.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19012019/migration-climate-change-trump-state-department-guidance-diplomats-gao-report
As the movement of refugees strains countries worldwide and becomes fuel for political clashes in the United States, the Trump administration has eliminated guidelines that the government once gave to American diplomats about how to plan for the impact of climate change on migration and global security.
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In a reportreleased Thursday, the Government Accountability Office recommended the State Department restore the guidelines so U.S. diplomats are prepared for major population shifts that could destabilize a country or region.
"Without clear guidance, State may miss opportunities to identify and address issues related to climate change as a potential driver of migration," the report said.
In the report, the GAO, an auditing and analysis arm of Congress, sought to assess the U.S. government's shifting response to human migration driven by climate change. It highlighted the impact of President Donald Trump's decision in March 2017 to revoke an Obama-era executive order and presidential memorandum that called on federal agencies to weigh the effects of climate change on international development decisions.
The GAO found that as a result of Trump's changes, the State Department no longer provides its diplomatic missions "with guidance on whether and how to include climate change risks" as they develop country strategies. The guidance is effectively a toolkit diplomats use to establish the priorities that the U.S. has in a given country and plans to best address them.
State Department's Response Raises Eyebrows
The State Department offered a contradictory response to the GAO's recommendation. It said it would "update" the guidelines, but did not go into detail as to how. At the same time, the State Department wrote that it will consider recommending that climate change be further scrubbed from its priorities, which would mean asking Trump to rescind yet another executive order.
The report's co-author, David Gootnick, said that such a response was unusual. "After the GAO put the spotlight on the fact that they've dropped two executive orders, their response is to say, 'Okay, we might drop the third,'" Gootnick said. "To drop this executive order would be a potentially controversial thing to do."
The GAO plans to monitor the State Department's work over the next four years to see if it complies with the report's recommendation.
State Department spokesman James Dewey said he could not "offer an official response at the moment due to the partial shutdown." At the root of the government shutdown is a dispute over a wall to keep migrants out.
Migration Has Risen Around the World
Estimates vary considerably of how many people are migrating because of climate change-fueled events or might be displaced in the future, because of the lack consistent data. Still, the decisions by the State Department to stop providing climate guidance have occurred as migration has risen worldwide. Globally, about 244 million people are international migrants, and an additional 740 million people are migrants within their home countries, according to theInternational Organization for Migration's 2018 World Report.
Further, the IOM found that since 2008, an average of 25.3 million people have been newly displaced annually, the vast majority due to disasters rather than violence. In 2016, 97 percent of people fled their homes because of "disasters triggered by climate and weather-related hazards," the IOM said.
In the U.S., the national security apparatus has described climate change for years as a "threat multiplier"—the extra pressure that could destabilize countries where resources such as water and arable land are limited and governance is weak. In a 2015 report to Congress, the Pentagon pointed to the Syrian civil war as an example of how climate change can aggravate the fragility of a nation already beset by tensions and unpopular leaders.
Researchers are now looking into how drought and higher temperatures fueled by climate change might be driving the migration of thousands of people from Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua northward to Mexico and the United States. The migration has become a political flashpoint in the U.S., as President Trump's insistence on funding for a controversial border wall to deter migrants has led to the longest government shutdown in American history.
A Global Challenge & National Security Threat
The GAO has written in past reports that climate change exposes the U.S. to profound fiscal risks. In February 2017, it recommended a "cohesive strategic approach" to planning for climate risks across the federal government. SYSTEM?
In its new report on climate change and migration, it focused on the work of the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Defense Department because of their roles in promoting national interests, development and stability overseas. The report was written at the request of five Democratic senators, including Edward Markey of Massachusetts, who voiced concern this week about the findings.
"Our diplomats lack the clear guidance they need to deal with climate change," Markey said, in a written statement. "Because climate change is a global challenge and a national security threat, the United States needs to prepare and take preemptive measures for an uncertain future instead of just waiting to address unforeseen consequences."
The report said that the Obama administration did not focus on climate change as a driver of migration. But it did take steps to ensure federal agencies factored climate change into strategic planning by issuing executive orders on international development, requiring federal agencies to gather and disseminate information on climate preparedness, and issuing a 2016 Presidential Memo on "Climate Change and National Security."
In March 2017, Trump signed his own executive order nullifying all but the international development order. The White House described them at the time as an undue "burden" on the development of fossil fuels.
Besides getting rid of guidance for diplomats to better plan for country-level threats from climate change, the administration has also cut foreign aid to developing nations and international organizations that would help address climate risks.
The joint strategic plan between the State Department and USAID in 2015 described climate change as "an urgent and growing threat to U.S. national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows and conflicts over basic resources like food and water." The 2017 joint plan does not take climate change into account, the report said.
The U.S. has also pulled back from multinational collaboration on climate risks, beyond its withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate accord. The report noted that there is a UN Global Compact for Migration that would work in part to mitigate the impact that climate change could have on migration and a Platform on Disaster Displacement to address the needs of people displaced by climate-driven disasters. The U.S. has declined to participate in both initiatives.
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'Scary': Warming of Oceans Is Equivalent to 1.5 Atomic Bombs Every Second Over Past 150 Years
By Julia Conley
Carbon emissions are affecting life in all of Earth's ecosystems—contributing to drought, flooding and the melting of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. But a new study by researchers at Oxford University details how the planet's oceans are by far the climate crisis's biggest victim, with implications for the global population.
Keep reading...
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The Guardian made that calculation after examining the report, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—and alarmed the study's lead author, who confirmed it was accurate.
"I try not to make this type of calculation, simply because I find it worrisome," Prof. Laure Zannat told the Guardian. "We usually try to compare the heating to [human] energy use, to make it less scary."
But Zannat's preferred calculation was hardly less troubling, with the study finding that the heating of the oceans from 1871 to the present day is also equivalent to 1,000 times the energy used by the entire global population every year.
With carbon emissions rising in recent decades, up 60 percentsince 1990, the warming oceans can be compared to the effects of three atomic bombs, like the ones that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, per second since that year.
As researchers have reported in recent years, the world's oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the carbon emissions caused by oil and gas drilling, agriculture, and other human activity.
Most of the heat the Oxford University researchers studied is being stored deep in the world's oceans, causing sea level rise and making hurricanes and tsunamis stronger and more destructive.
"Obviously, we are putting a lot of excess energy into the climate system and a lot of that ends up in the ocean. There is no doubt," Zanna told the Guardian.
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