Majorityrights News > Category: Environmentalism & Climate Change

United States Border Patrol at Algodones Sand Dunes, California, USA. The fence on the US-Mexican border is a special construction of narrow, 15 feet tall elements, that are movable vertically. This way they can be lifted on top of the ever shifting sand dunes (image Public Domain, Wikipedia).

Lest there be any misunderstanding, the position here is that the matter of a United States Southern border wall, fence, whatever, as any requirement of border control, is very important.

Border control there is particularly illustrative of a central matter, which is that border control is crucial to the management of populations in human and pervasive ecology; issues which include territorial carrying capacity - hence, at this border, the particular demographic is a secondary matter; salient there is the matter of Mexico’s massive population - Mexico City being among the most overpopulated cities in the world.

Nevertheless, the demographic and rule structure of The United States is already on a disastrous trajectory for Whites, will remain so, even with a wall on the south border.

While border control is essential at any rate, the worst case scenario of its instantiation would be that it will be used to lull complacency of propositional conservatism - “we Americans all being in the same relatively taken-care-of boat” - and further close us in and galvanize us into mulattoization; furthering the trajectory of those who left us susceptible for the Cartesian rule structure of the constitution and to the Jewry which weaponized it against our necessary discrimination both at the border and within the borders.

...galvanizing us with the demographic upshot of this manipulation unfortunately against a population that does have some warrant as native American behind them and which, for their nature, is highly ethnocentric. It is a demographic thus, which has been effective against integration with blacks, against integration with Whites, indifferent to Jewish violin playing; as such, in the most optimistic scenario, could be allied with other Asians and Whites against black power, Jewish supremacism and Islamic imposition over human ecological coordination (agreed, getting Mestizos to cooperate in ecological management is no small trick; perhaps Asians proper could help reason, coordinate and enforce such management).

Failing that is a default “alliance” by contrast in sudden, “conservative” implementation against Meztiso populations that looks suspiciously in line with Jewish interests against an Asian, Mestizo, White alliance as it would resist continued instigation of the Mulattoization of the broad mass of American Whites, while allying Jewry with increasingly rare White sell-out elites; whose precarious situation would be more and more prone to interbreeding with Jewry or the Mulatto mass.

Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is part of a group of Congress members pushing for a Green New Deal. (Charles Krupa / AP Photo)

TruthDig.Com, “This Radical Plan to Fund the ‘Green New Deal’ Just Might Work”, 16 Nov 2018:

With what author and activist Naomi Klein calls “galloping momentum,” the “Green New Deal” promoted by Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., appears to be forging a political pathway for solving all of the ills of society and the planet in one fell swoop. Her plan would give a House select committee “a mandate that connects the dots” between energy, transportation, housing, health care, living wages, a jobs guarantee and more. But even to critics on the left, it is merely political theater, because “everyone knows” a program of that scope cannot be funded without a massive redistribution of wealth and slashing of other programs (notably the military), which is not politically feasible.

That may be the case, but Ocasio-Cortez and the 22 representatives joining her in calling for a select committee also are proposing a novel way to fund the program, one that could actually work. The resolution says funding will come primarily from the federal government, “using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate, in order to ensure that interest and other investment returns generated from public investments made in connection with the Plan will be returned to the treasury, reduce taxpayer burden and allow for more investment.”

A network of public banks could fund the Green New Deal in the same way President Franklin Roosevelt funded the original New Deal. At a time when the banks were bankrupt, he used the publicly owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a public infrastructure bank. The Federal Reserve could also fund any program Congress wanted, if mandated to do so. Congress wrote the Federal Reserve Act and can amend it. Or the Treasury itself could do it, without the need to even change any laws. The Constitution authorizes Congress to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof,” and that power has been delegated to the Treasury. It could mint a few trillion-dollar platinum coins, put them in its bank account and start writing checks against them. What stops legislators from exercising those constitutional powers is simply that “everyone knows” Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation will result. But will it? Compelling historical precedent shows that this need not be the case.

Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has studied the hyperinflation question extensively. He writes that disasters such as Zimbabwe’s fiscal troubles were not due to the government printing money to stimulate the economy. Rather, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”

As long as workers and materials are available and the money is added in a way that reaches consumers, adding money will create the demand necessary to prompt producers to create more supply. Supply and demand will rise together and prices will remain stable. The reverse is also true. If demand (money) is not increased, supply and gross domestic product (GDP) will not go up. New demand needs to precede new supply.

The Public Bank Option: The Precedent of Roosevelt’s New Deal

Infrastructure projects of the sort proposed in the Green New Deal are “self-funding,” generating resources and fees that can repay the loans. For these loans, advancing funds through a network of publicly owned banks would not require taxpayer money and could actually generate a profit for the government. That was how the original New Deal rebuilt the country in the 1930s at a time when the economy was desperately short of money.

The publicly owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was a remarkable publicly owned credit machine that allowed the government to finance the New Deal and World War II without turning to Congress or the taxpayers for appropriations. First instituted in 1932 by President Herbert Hoover, the RFC was not called an infrastructure bank and was not even a bank, but it served the same basic functions. It was continually enlarged and modified by Roosevelt to meet the crisis of the times, until it became America’s largest corporation and the world’s largest financial organization. Its semi-independent status let it work quickly, allowing New Deal agencies to be financed as the need arose.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act of 1932 provided the financial organization with capital stock of $500 million and the authority to extend credit up to $1.5 billion (subsequently increased several times). The initial capital came from a stock sale to the U.S. Treasury. With those resources, from 1932 to 1957 the RFC loaned or invested more than $40 billion. A small part of this came from its initial capitalization. The rest was borrowed, chiefly from the government itself. Bonds were sold to the Treasury, some of which were then sold to the public, although most were held by the Treasury. All in all, the RFC ended up borrowing a total of $51.3 billion from the Treasury and $3.1 billion from the public.

In this arrangement, the Treasury was therefore the lender, not the borrower. As the self-funding loans were repaid, so were the bonds that were sold to the Treasury, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The financial organization was the lender for thousands of infrastructure and small-business projects that revitalized the economy, and these loans produced a total net income of $690,017,232 on the RFC’s “normal” lending functions (omitting such things as extraordinary grants for wartime). The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms and much more, and it funded all this while generating income for the government.

The Central Bank Option: How Japan Is Funding Abenomics with Quantitative Easing

The Federal Reserve is another Green New Deal funding option. The Fed showed what it can do with “quantitative easing” when it created the funds to buy $2.46 trillion in federal debt and $1.77 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, all without inflating consumer prices. The Fed could use the same tool to buy bonds earmarked for a Green New Deal, and because it returns its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs, the bonds would be nearly interest-free. If they were rolled over from year to year, the government, in effect, would be issuing new money.

This is not just theory. Japan is actually doing it, without creating even the modest 2 percent inflation the government is aiming for. “Abenomics,” the economic agenda of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, combines central bank quantitative easing with fiscal stimulus (large-scale increases in government spending). Since Abe came into power in 2012, Japan has seen steady economic growth, and its unemployment rate has fallen by nearly half, yet inflation remains very low, at 0.7 percent. Social Security-related expenses accounted for 55 percent of general expenditure in Japan’s 2018 federal budget, and a universal health care insurance system is maintained for all citizens. Nominal GDP is up 11 percent since the end of the first quarter of 2013, a much better record than during the prior two decades of Japanese stagnation, and the Nikkei stock market is at levels not seen since the early 1990s, driven by improved company earnings. Growth remains below targeted levels, but according to Financial Times, this is because fiscal stimulus has actually been too small. While spending with the left hand, the government has been taking the money back with the right, increasing the sales tax from 5 to 8 percent.

Abenomics has been declared a success even by the once-critical International Monetary Fund. After Abe crushed his opponents in 2017, Noah Smith wrote in Bloomberg, “Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party has figured out a novel and interesting way to stay in power—govern pragmatically, focus on the economy and give people what they want.” Smith said everyone who wanted a job had one, small and midsize businesses were doing well; and the Bank of Japan’s unprecedented program of monetary easing had provided easy credit for corporate restructuring without generating inflation. Abe had also vowed to make both preschool and college free.

Not that all is idyllic in Japan. Forty percent of Japanese workers lack secure full-time employment and adequate pensions. But the point underscored here is that large-scale digital money-printing by the central bank to buy back the government’s debt, combined with fiscal stimulus by the government (spending on “what the people want”), has not inflated Japanese prices, the alleged concern preventing other countries from doing the same.

Abe’s novel economic program has done more than just stimulate growth. By selling its debt to its own central bank, which returns the interest to the government, the Japanese government has, in effect, been canceling its debt. Until recently, it was doing this at a whopping rate of $720 billion per year. According to fund manager Eric Lonergan in a February 2017 article:

The Bank of Japan is in the process of owning most of the outstanding government debt of Japan (it currently owns around 40%). BOJ holdings are part of the consolidated government balance sheet. So its holdings are in fact the accounting equivalent of a debt cancellation. If I buy back my own mortgage, I don’t have a mortgage.

If the Federal Reserve followed suit and bought 40 percent of the U.S. national debt, it would be holding $8 trillion in federal securities, three times its current holdings from its quantitative easing programs. Yet liquidating a full 40 percent of Japan’s government debt has not triggered price inflation.

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“Attribution of the 2018 heat in northern Europe” - key findings from the World Weather Attribution report -

* The heat based on observations and forecast is very extreme near the Arctic circle but less extreme further south.

* From past observations and models we find that the probability of such a heatwave to occur has increased everywhere in this region due to anthropogenic climate change, although in Scandinavia this increase was not visible in observations until now due to the very variable summer weather.

* We estimate that the probability to have such heat or higher is generally more than two times higher today than if human activity had not altered climate.

* Due to the underlying warming trend, even record breaking events can be not very extreme but have low return times in the current climate.

* With the global mean temperatures continuing to   increase heat waves like this will become even less exceptional.

The authors acknowledge that the report is not peer reviewed but are confident in their methodologies. Another report will be published before the end of the year.

Full report -

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/analyses/attribution-of-the-2018-heat-in-northern-europe/

Obviously they haven’t heard that the alleged human contribution towards global warming is “fake news” and a “scam to transfer wealth from the developed world” (otherwise known as America) to the developing world (otherwise known as “shit holes”) and to argue otherwise is “poison to nationalism”. - Mancinblack

New Observer, “China Identified as Source of Ozone-Destroying CFC-11 Despite Worldwide Ban”, 10 July 2018:

China’s foam-blowing industry has been identified as the source of a dramatic increase in the ozone-destroying CFC-11 chemical, despite a worldwide ban on the production and use of that chemical, a new environmental report has revealed.

An investigation carried out by the UK-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) said that 18 companies in 10 Chinese provinces confirmed their use of CFC-11 for making foams used to insulate buildings and appliances.

The report, titled “Blowing It: Illegal Production and Use of Banned CFC-11 in China’s Foam Blowing Industry,” said that “detailed discussions with company executives (in China) make clear these are not isolated incidents but common practice throughout the industry.

“Producers and traders of polyurethane foam blowing agent repeatedly told EIA sources that the majority of China’s foam industry continues to use CFC-11 due to its better quality and lower price.”

Some companies appear to produce CFC-11 themselves. But traders were also supplied by factories in undisclosed locations, the EIA said.

Several companies also referred to the ease with which CFC-11 could be exported in the pre-blended polyol compound used to make the foams, it added.

This comes in the wake of “shocking evidence showing significant and unexplained emissions of the ozone-destroying chemical CFC-11 in the atmosphere”, said EIA.

In May 2018 scientists revealed that atmospheric levels of CFC-11, a potent ozone depleting substance banned since 2010, were significantly higher than expected, leading them to conclude that new illegal production and use of CFC-11 was occurring in East Asia.

Traders and buyers of CFC-11 in China estimated that it is used in the majority of China’s rigid PU foam sector.

EIA’s calculations show that emission estimates associated with the level of use reported by these companies can explain the majority of emissions identified in the atmospheric study. In addition there is significant potential for illegal international trade in CFC-11 containing pre-formulated polyols for foam manufacturing in other countries.

“Several companies acknowledged the illegality of their actions and explained that it was used because it was cheaper and made more effective foams,” the report continued.

THE EIA report concluded by saying that “China has a significant compliance issue to address which requires an immediate clampdown on illegal production and use of CFC-11, along with policy reform and effective intelligence-led enforcement” and that the “scale of the compliance issue is such that it cannot be treated as a series of isolated incidents.”

Reuters, “Japanese PM visits flood disaster zone, new warnings issued”, 11 July 2018:

KUMANO, Japan (Reuters) - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited flood-stricken parts of Japan on Wednesday as the death toll from the worst weather disaster in 36 years reached 176 and health worries increased amid scorching heat and the threat of new floods.

Torrential rain unleashed floods and landslides in western Japan last week, bringing death and destruction in particular to neighborhoods built decades ago near steep slopes.

At least 176 people were killed, the government said, with dozens missing in Japan’s worst weather disaster since 1982.

Abe, who canceled an overseas trip to deal with the disaster, was criticized after a photograph posted on Twitter showed Abe and his defense minister at a party with lawmakers just as the rains intensified.

After observing the damage from a helicopter flying over Okayama, one of the hardest-hit areas, Abe visited a crowded evacuation center. He crouched down on the floor to speak with people, many of them elderly, and asked about their health. He clasped one man’s hands as they spoke.

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Sure, “Whites should be strictly against ‘Hispanics’ and ‘Hispanics’ should be against Whites”, while “black Americans are ‘really ok’...they just need to get back to the days where the black father headed the family with authority”.... if you listen to right wing fools like Dr. Dupe and have the capacity to nerd-rationalize your way around the racial reality, you might even buy that.

In fact, when choosing sides in a friend enemy distinction between so called “Hispanics” and blacks, i.e., regarding whom to form coalitions with, there is no question; and if the Hispanics are truly wise, they will side in coalition with White groups and Asians against blacks, YKW and Muslims.

It won’t be easy to form this coalition, perhaps some form of coordination will have to suffice for now ..the negotiation of coalition with White Hispanics should be easier, of course, except for our dumb White right wing American element, which virtually sees people who don’t have blue eyes and blonde hair as non-White, but White Left Ethnonationalism should reach out to build coalitions with “la Raza”, or some facsimile thereof, not only the ones who are primarily White, but also the ones who are part White and part Indian and ones that are primarily Amerindian.

We have to convince them that the issue of “Hispanics” and Whites is one of negotiation and coordination - critically, of carrying capacity of the nations and resources; and in defense against YKW and Islam and blacks -

The later group of which they are notoriously good at defending themselves against in a perennial fight of theirs; against blacks who would stay on their turf. That defense can help us sort out, and with coordination, achieve separatism from blacks and those “Hispanics” who are significantly black…..

Sooner or later “Hispanics”, not being so flighty and disposed to take recourse in nerd-dome and “intellectual rationalizations” as Whites do, realize that it is absolutely necessary to fight for their women, their people and turf against blacks, to discriminate against them. And they are correct about that. The problem is not that “blacks used to be ok when they were not misled by Jewry” as Dr. Dupe alleges. This their nature, this is reality.

So, when it comes to that fight, we should say, ‘go La Raza Unita!’ or whatever potentially White allied “Hispanic” group is defending their women and themselves against blacks.

Furthermore, they won’t be shedding too many tears about historical Jewish victimhood, nor see much common ground with Israel. La Raza was founded in wise skepticism of Jewry.

Giant Boabab Tree ( CC by SA 4.0 )

Ancient Origins, “9 Oldest Trees in Africa, Some Over 2,000-Years-Old, Now Dead”, 24 June 2018:

Nine of 13 of Africa’s oldest and largest baobab trees have died in the past decade, it has been reported. These trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years, appear to be victims of climate change. Scientists speculate that warming temperatures have either killed the trees directly or made them weaker and more susceptible to drought, diseases, fire or wind.

Old baobabs are not the only trees which are affected by climatic changes. Ponderosa pine and Pinyon forests in the American West are dying at an increasing rate as the summers get warmer in the region. In Hawaii the famous Ohi’a trees are also dying at faster rates than previously recorded.

There are nine species of baobab trees in the world: one in mainland Africa,  Adansonia digitata , (the species that can grow to the largest size and to the oldest age), six in Madagascar, and one in Australia. The mainland African baobab was named after the French botanist Michel Adanson, who described the baobab trees in Senegal.

The African Baobab – Biggest and Largest of Them All

The African baobab is a remarkable species. Not only because of its size and lifespan but also in the special way it grows multiple fused stems. In the space between these stems (called false cavities) bark grows, which is unique to the baobab.

Since baobabs produce only faint growth rings, the researchers used radiocarbon dating to analyse samples taken from different parts of each tree’s trunk and determined that the oldest (which is now dead) was more that 2,500-years-old.

  - Fancy Sipping a Pint in a 1700-Year-Old Tree? You Can at The Baobab Tree Bar
  - The Armada Tree: Sprouted from a Seed in the Pocket of a Fallen Invader
  - Not the Biggest, Not the Tallest, Not the Widest - So What Makes this Giant Sequoia The ‘President’?

300 Uses of the Baobab

They also have more than 300 uses. The leaves, rich in iron, can be boiled and eaten like spinach. The seeds can be roasted to make a coffee substitute or pressed to make oil for cooking or cosmetics. The fruit pulp has six times more vitamin C than oranges, making it an important nutritional complement in Africa and in the European, US and Canadian markets.

Locally, fruit pulp is made into juice, jam, or fermented to make beer. The young seedlings have a taproot which can be eaten like a carrot. The flowers are also edible. The roots can be used to make red dye, and the bark to make ropes and baskets.

Baobabs also have medicinal properties, and their hollow trunks can be used to store water. Baobab crowns also provide shade, making them an idea place for a market in many rural villages. And of course, the trade in baobab products provides an income for local communities.

Baobab trees also play a big part in the cultural life of their communities, being at the centre of many African oral stories. They even appear in The Little Prince.

Cultivating baobab

Baobab trees are not only useful to humans, they are key ecosystem elements in the dry African savannas. Importantly, baobab trees keep soil conditions humid, favour nutrient recycling and avoid soil erosion. They also act as an important source of food, water and shelter for a wide range of animals, including birds, lizards, monkeys and even elephants – which can eat their bark to provide some moisture when there is no water nearby. The flowers are pollinated by bats, which travel long distances to feed on their nectar. Numerous insects also live on the baobab tree.

Ancient as they are, baobab trees can be cultivated, as some communities in West Africa have done for generations. Some farmers are discouraged by the fact that they can take 15-20 years to fruit – but recent research has shown by grafting the branches of fruiting trees to seedlings they can fruit in five years.

Many “indigenous” trees show great variation in fruit morphological and nutritional properties – and it takes years of research and selection to find the best varieties for cultivation. This process, called domestication, does not refer to genetic engineering, but the selection and cultivation of the best trees of those available in nature. It seems straightforward, but it takes time to find the best trees – meanwhile many of them are dying.

The death of these oldest and largest baobab trees is very sad, but hopefully the news will motivate us to protect the world’s remaining large baobabs and start a process of close monitoring of their health. And, hopefully, if scientists are able to perfect the process of identifying the best trees to cultivate, one day they will become as common in our supermarkets as apples or oranges.

This article, originally titled ‘Baobab trees have more than 300 uses but they’re dying in Africa’ by Aida Cuní Sanchez was originally published on The Conversation and has been republished under a Creative Commons license.

While John Ziegler is a darling of (((the neo-cons))) in their criticism of Trump and his (((paleocon))) agenda, Ziegler’s criticisms of Trump remain informative nevertheless. In this podcast he criticizes Trump’s deal making preparation for meeting Kim Jong-un:

John Ziegler: “There are so many elements of this that are just mind-blowing. I can’t believe that he’s even meeting without any agreement being made to begin with. If you remember, when this whole thing started, the story was that he would meet IF North Korea would gave-up unilaterally their nuclear program. That was going to be a precondition for meeting. That’s gone! This is just an equal-footing get-together - giving-up what ever is left of the prestige of The Presidency of The United States, elevating this evil dictator, this horrible piece of crap - I mean Kim Jong-un is a horrible human being! who tortures people, tortures his own people, has threatened this country with nuclear war, and we’re elevating him! Trump has already called him ‘a very honorable person.’

Can you imagine if Obama or Hillary Clinton had decided to meet with Kim Jong-un with no precondition, with no agreement on his part - Kim doesn’t have to give up anything in order to meet with Obama or Hillary? Can you imagine the heads of Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh exploding into fourth of July fireworks? over even the suggestion of this?

But instead, this is now praised as a great idea, and I think it’s a horrible idea. One of the more baffling takes I’ve heard on this is that ‘well, you need to give Trump credit for meeting.’

Why? What? Credit for meeting? The meeting does us no good. The meeting of itself only does Kim Jong-un good. We’re being brought down to their level, he’s being brought up to our level for nothing! He’s giving up nothing in return; and that’s just the best case scenario…

All Trump cares about is the headline of the day, ‘Trump Makes Historic Deal’, doesn’t matter that the deal might suck, and we get noting in return or that it creates further dangers down the road - Trump doesn’t care about anybody but himself - that is a double whammy when it comes to negotiating nuclear deals with deranged dictators. It’s effectively like he’s got the world’s credit-card and he’s having a big party for himself, and he’s not going to be around when we have to pay the bill.

And, by the way, the fact that comes out of the G7 meeting makes this even more vulnerable to a bad deal. Why? Because Trump had this bizarre temper-tantrum and we’re now - this is not an exaggeration folks, and its mind blowing to even contemplate, but - based upon the statements of our President in the last few days, Russia and North Korea are our allies, they’re the ‘good guys’ and Canada, Germany, Great Britain and France - they’re ‘the bad guys.’

And that’s the other part of this. There are people who think, bizarrely, that Trump knows what he’s doing!

There are two things I’m positive about - I’m not a foreign policy expert (but neither is Donald Trump) - there are two things that I’m positive about - if he was doing exactly the same things, and his name was Obama, or Hillary Clinton The Right would be going bananas! That is a hundred percent factual. And number two, there is absolutely no evidence, what-so-ever, that Donald Trump is playing some amazing eight-dimensional chess and knows what the hell he’s doing. He has no idea what he’s doing - none!

And more importantly, his goals are completely at odds with what is good for the world and good for the country because he wants the headline and he wants the history - and he needs it even more now that he took a dump at the G7. This dump at the G7 wasn’t just a little stinky-one. This was a massive dump.

....when Donald Trump said, on the eve of the G7, that Russia should be let back-in, there is no other way to interpret that but that they’ve got something on him!

...the key wasn’t the statement that Russia should be allowed back in the G7 - that got a lot of play - but what is most interesting was that he prefaced it with, ‘I have been Russia’s worst nightmare’ - that’s classic Trump; why is that classic Trump? Because Trump knows his own weaknesses. And Trump lies the biggest to cover those weaknesses. It’s been part of his M.O. for ever. So whenever he makes a declarative statement, for instance, ‘nobody reads the bible more than I do’, you know that’s bullshit - that means he never reads the bible. So when he says, ‘I have been Russia’s worst nightmare’, if you put that through the Trump translation machine, that means Putin has something on him. That’s the way Trump operates, he believes in the big lie theory - you cover your weakness with a massive lie because you know nobody will call you on it.”

DW Documentary, “The climate cover up - big oil’s campaign of deception”, 25 Feb 2018 (YouTube Posting):

Scott Pruitt was appointed the head of the EPA by Donald Trump. With perverted irony, Trump has appointed severe corporatists to key positions that are supposed to look after our common interests.