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The COP26 Summit, like other climate initiatives will be remembered as yet another paving stone laid on the path of collective good intentions by the nations of the world (excluding Russia and China…).
“GLASGOW, Scotland — Climate activist Greta Thunbergsaid Friday that the COP26 climate summit is a failure, lambasting the U.N.-brokered talks for turning into a public relations exercise.
“It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve the crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place,” Thunberg said.
“The COP has turned into a PR event, where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the Global North countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.”
Well, there looks to be a little substance behind all of the green washing:
“Here’s a reminder of what has been happening today at COP26 – where there has been a focus on energy.
- More than 40 countries agreed a pledge to shift away from coal but some of the world’s major coal burners, including the US and China, did not sign up
- Critics said that because of that, the announcement fell short of what is needed
- However the US, Canada and the UK were among the signatories to a joint statement on ending international public financing for fossil fuels
- COP26 president Alok Sharma said coal was “no longer king” but admitted more needed to be done
- The influential International Energy Agency said that promises made at the conference would keep the world to a 1.8C degree rise in temperatures
- However that would depend on all promises being kept and delivered – which experts say is far from certain”
Glad to see all those promises being rolled out. I think that a lukewarm response is justified as such promises, once they hit the reality of country’s national politics and ‘interests’ will be quickly ignored and the business will return to usual.
I think many, including myself, are now entertaining their own Dr.Strangelove moment. Presently, renamed to How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Climate-Change.
The forthcoming changes to our way of lives will simply happen.
We will have arable farmland until after the nth season of drought, thenwe will not.
We will have polar vortex events consistently through Canada’s winter at a great pace.
We will have affordable energy and energy infrastructure, until well, we don’t.
Various climate switches are being, and have been thrown, across the world. For instance in the US the involuntary test and stress of its resiliency is already happening –
“Trevor Riggen, the head of the American Red Cross’s domestic disaster program, said the agency is “testing the limits” of its network. This week alone, more than 2,000 staff and volunteers have deployed across 10 states. Many of them are on their second or third crisis of the summer.
“It’s no longer, ‘We have a big event and then there’s time to recover,’” Riggen said. “Disaster has become a chronic condition.”
But the extent of damage wrought by climate change will be determined by how the nation plans for it, and how the communities rebuild.
Almost half of public roadways are currently in poor or mediocre condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers — making events like the deadly collapse of a Mississippi highway during Hurricane Ida more likely. The location and condition of some 10,000 miles of levees in the United States are unknown. Chronically underfunded storm water systems are unable to cope with record rainfall. Many electric utilities have not taken steps to ensure the grid keeps functioning amid worsening hurricanes and wildfires.
Communities need to start preparing for the unprecedented, Fugate said. Coastal cities should develop alternative evacuation plans to avoid getting caught off-guard by rapidly intensifying storms — for example, building comfortable, well-equipped shelters for people who don’t have time to flee. Levees and storm-water systems must be built to withstand floods that would have been impossible in a cooler world. Amid unstoppable wildfires, homes at the edge of forests can be made safer with flameproof building materials.
Social systems are also in need of repair, said Arcaya. During heat waves, early warning systems and check-ins from neighbors have been proved to save hundreds of lives. After hurricanes, research shows, people with strong connections to their neighbors experience less trauma and are better able to get back on their feet.
The country will need a robust support system to help thousands of displaced people navigate the bureaucracy required to obtain federal assistance, Arcaya said. And since disasters often destroy affordable housing, the nation will need to invest in building more places for people to live.
These changes will be expensive, Fugate acknowledged. But the cost of responding to disasters already totals more than $81 billion per year. “It’s a choice between spending now or spending more in the future.”
I’m not going to go out on a limb here and state that we are going to choose to spend now aaaand spend more in the future as we try to correct the fuck ups of the present day.
The saving grace of the entire situation is that when the truly calamitous events start, I most likely will be dead. Strangely reassuring I suppose, but honestly, I think it’s the only way the exploitation driven economic system we have ends. When it starts fucking over the ‘important’ people – then and only then – will we move as a collective to ‘save the earth’. Vastly too little too late, but at least the effort will be genuine then.
This from CBC Kamloops. A nice bit of female erasure to start your day.
It would seem our national news broadcaster has mysteriously misplaced the common knowledge that only women have the capacity to be pregnant. This is blatant female erasure from the public sphere, and it must be stopped.
Please follow the link back to the article and report a typo in the headline and correct the headline so it matches the reality we all share.
Thank you.
Kathleen Lowrey is one the few and the brave women inside the University of Alberta that manage to retain an authentically feminist outlook. Furthermore, her criticisms of the new gender ideology are spot on and her insights are useful in understanding the ontology of transactivism in academic and real-world settings.
Sex, Ptolemaic Style
“The pervasiveness of this formula helps to explain the widespread enthusiasm for gender identity ideology in the academy. The relevant flippages are of at least three kinds. First is the reversal of the sex:gender relation as it is commonly understood. Ordinarily sex has primacy. It is the biological given upon which the cultural constructions of gender are elaborated. In gender identity ideology, the terms are reversed. Gender is essential, and sex is the unsteady social construct. Second is the relation of men to women. Conventionally, the social standing of men is understood to be privileged relative to that of women. This relationship is reversed in gender identity ideology. Trans identified men (“transwomen”) are figured as vulnerable relative to women and are even described as the most vulnerable of all women. Third, the quotidian apprehension is that children develop their gender identities as they grow up and engage with and adjust to cultural norms. Under gender identity ideology, it is asserted that children know from very young ages exactly their gender identities independent of cultural conditioning. As a corollary, adult men who express gender identities late in life that appear to be wholly fashioned out of sexist cultural norms about femininity have in fact been real women–the very realest of women–all along. The department colleague who was my most enthusiastic denouncer placed two signs on her office door after I put up gender critical feminist messaging on mine: “trans rights are human rights” and “transwomen are women.” She understood very well the messaging required of a “trans ally” and displayed it quite correctly.
Gender critical feminists like me notice, of course, that one infinitely more often sees and hears the slogan “transwomen are women” than its counterpart “transmen are men.” To understand why this is the case, you’d have to pay attention to patterns of power in the world rather than to Ptolemaic valence-flipping. One of the signs on my office door that most infuriated feminist academic women colleagues on social media described the parallels between men’s rights activism and trans rights activism. Many feminist academic women clearly saw it as their moral and intellectual duty to decry this assertion.”
Children cannot consent to puberty blockers. This should not be a contentious issue in society. Yet here we are.
This post will have been queued up, so here is what I think will happen.
The deck chairs on the good ship Canada might rearrange a bit, but the overall layout will remain the same. We shall emerge from this election with a Liberal minority government.
The Liberal stratagists that suggested that they call an election during the 4th wave of a pandemic will have their asses fired *even though* the polls at the time put the Liberals far into majority. This is a case in which common sense was overlooked for political expediency. The voting during pandemic backlash has taken all the gild off of the hopes for a Liberal Majority government.
The bottom three parties – the Greens, NDP, and PPC, – will continue to toil in obscurity while the separatists in Quebec will make small gains because the stupid spectre of Quebec nationalism still needs to periodically stir and reprove its unworthiness to the rest of Canada.
The Maritimes will stay Liberal, Ontario will split the pie slightly differently, and the west will once again stick mouth over the Conservative tailpipe and inhale deeply – voting conservative blue because fuck thinking about politics seriously – we still have a grudge against the decades ago National Energy Policy – so any progressive thought must GO.
So, in conclusion, roughly more of the same. Oh Canada…
I recommend not playing the pronoun game with people. It is a disservice to your autonomy and really, your allegiance to the material reality we all share. When someone demands your disbelieve your senses for their validation it becomes a problem.
Playing the pronoun game is like a taking a gateway drug as it leads you to endorse even more fantastical claims. Human beings cannot change sex, and yet men will tyrannically try and police one’s correct use of language.
I have no problem identifying that male from his aggressive behaviour. Male violence and dominance displays don’t magically change if men wear their hair long and start wearing pink. Calling him a sir corresponds to reality. What responding to the reality we all share doesn’t do is validate his subjective gender identity – here’s the rub though, no one is obligated to so. And really, we shouldn’t because the bullshit above leads to bullshit like this below:
Men in female prisons. Male sex offenders in female prisons. What could possible go wrong? Of course, here in Canada we’re all aboard the unreality train and have made male sex offender’s dreams cum true.
Yeah, so I won’t be playing the pronoun game anytime soon as I support the rights and boundaries of females in Canadian society.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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