by Gaius PubliusThe Paris climate talks — officially COP 21, or the 21st "conference of the parties" to the UN's climate treaty-making body, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) — are much in the news these days, and I imagine most people have no idea how to think about them. That is, they don't think much will happen there that will help, and beyond that, it's just numbers and speeches, stuff that flies over people's heads.
Alan Cumming tells you why you can't have nice thingsby Gaius PubliusThe reason we won't have nice climate — until we fight for it — is money. Rich people's money. And frankly, the money of mainly old, soon-to-be-dead, rich people, like this one from Exxon, or these two from god knows where.
NASA | A Year in the Life of Earth's CO2 (source). Note first that emissions are greater in the industrialized northern hemisphere, which probably explains why the Arctic is melting first. Then note the difference between winter emissions in the north, which remain airborne, and summer emissions, which are partially withdrawn by growing vegetation. by Gaius PubliusThis is written for anyone who is climate-concerned, but specifically for our DC readers in the policy-making community.
Climate Change: The Next Generation from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo. Kelsey Juliana, an 18-year-old activist, is fighting climate change in the courts and walking across the country to spread the word on global warming.by Gaius Publius(Implicit in the headline, of course, is that it will take a lawsuit to force him.
Rachel Maddow with the context for the shooting discussed below, plus updatesby Gaius PubliusShort and the opposite of sweet, but with two points to make. First is a news point, per the headline. Five people were shot at a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in Minneapolis. Police are looking for several white suspects, likely white supremacists.The story via Adam Johnson at Alternet:
The price of two oil benchmarks, Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate (WTI), in danger of collapse?
by Gaius PubliusThanks to the Democratic primary, there's been a lot of discussion on the left about the benefits and ills of ACA, the Obamacare public health law, versus single-payer and "Medicare For All," which Bernie Sanders is advocating. Clinton is a strong defender of the ACA and a strong, if disingenuous, critic of Sanders' Medicare For All.
ISIS acts like a state that owns an oil company. Notice, at the bottom right, that the non-ISIS market for ISIS oil is local, meaning civilians, and also includes anti-ISIS rebels in Syria and Iraq (click to enlarge; source).by Gaius PubliusISIS is a complex entity, in part a state and in part a jihadist insurgency.
