Last September, I travelled from Western Canada to New York City to see human rights lawyer Steven Donziger. Donziger cannot travel. He cannot even stroll the hallway of his Upper West Side apartment building on 104th Street without special court permission. He remains under house arrest, wearing an ankle bracelet.
For a century our cities have been transformed by the car industry, making way for drivers at the expense of cyclists and pedestrians. A renewed movement for urban public transport is pushing back.
Review of James Wilt, Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?: Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk (Between the Lines, 2020)
Five studies, all published in the past six weeks, indicate that global heating is intensifying more rapidly than expected, giving increased urgency to our common cause.
1. Climate sensitivity measures how much global temperatures will rise for a given increase on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Getting it right is essential for predicting how hot it is going to get.
June 12, 2020 - In his June 9 piece for Counterpunch, entitled “Big Green Meltdown Over Planet of the Humans,” Josh Schlossberg revealed the extent to which he was “shunned, censored, slandered and blacklisted” by many environmentalists because of his criticism of biomass energy a decade ago. He relates that experience to what has been happening currently with Big Green attacks on the documentary Planet of the Humans, and he states: “Anyway, my story is just another example of what happens when you bring up topics that aren’t rubber stamped by the mainstream Greens.
This crisis has reinforced what we already know — our current economic system is leading us down a path of destruction
Economists are cautioning that the Canadian economy has entered one of the deepest recessions in our history. Our country is not alone in this. The impact of COVID-19 has put the global economy on track for a “new Great Depression.”
Late last week, Bloomberg reported that a US$320-billion Saudi wealth fund controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had snapped up shares in Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. and Suncor Energy, becoming CNRL’s eighth-largest and Suncor’s 14th-largest owner. The fund made its move after CNRL’s shares lost 43% of their value this year, and Suncor’s dropped 46%, compared to a 15% decline across the Standard & Poors/Toronto Stock Exchange Composite Index.
