A lot of legacy outlets are divorcing them selves even further form audiences with this kind of behavior, sticking to obviously manipulative narratives even as they see public opinion unaffected my them.
Nah, I wish he’d live forever. Forever decaying, more frail and incapable with each passing day. Just wishing for the sweet release of death, but never actually getting it.
Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001.
McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger…
author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s …meant the end of between three and four million people.
John Oliver did a great show on chocolate around Halloween time. It showed just how much child labor goes into producing chocolate for the world, when almost no one really spends any time thinking about where it comes from.
The CNN clip in that video, is even better: the reporter gives the guys a bar of chocolate, and they go all “ohh, it tastes so great!”. Then he asks them if they’ll give any to the children, to which the guy answer “they can have the wrappers”… at which point the reporter produces out a second bar saying “don’t worry, give them this”… still, I don’t recall the kids getting any.
I enjoyed the part with the other journalist where he was on the phone with someone who hung up when the reporter pointed out that kids could stop working if their parents made more money. Insane that he was defending that practice.
So these children are driven to work due to poverty right? So isn’t the answer to try to address that rather than to say “stop using cocoa harvested by child labor?” Like I’m totally pro-non-child-labor-cocoa, but wouldn’t the kids just get other jobs then?
their parents also work harvesting cocoa. The reason they are poor despite being working a lot is that they are not paid enough for their work… by Mars (or Nestle, Mondelez, etc)
That is why I’m buying chocolate made in Africa, rather than chocolate made from beans from Africa. That way the value is generated there and not here.
It’s not about child abuse, it’s about not making enough money so they need their children to help out. If they get a fair salary, they don’t need to exploit their kids for labor.
Yes, and this is a vestige of the destabilization of African nations by white colonial powers to have and sell enslaved people. What boggles my mind is that paying a living wage to workers would increase the price of Mars chocolate slightly if at all (corporate profits could eat the difference) but the people with the power to make those decisions are like “nope! We could get even more profits by paying less for raw materials!” so they seek and/or create even more disenfranchised workers. Doesn’t get more disenfranchised than a 5 year old that has to go to work to help the family make ends meet, but I’m sure the corporate overlords are cooking something up as we speak.
Still, this is exceptionally commendable. Most of the time, when other countries have claimed they ran only on renewables, they have neglected the fact that they are net exporters and were running combustion generation across some of their network. The total renewable generation was greater than the total demand, but some of their generation was combustion and the excess passed off to other countries, with a bit of number fiddling to say that they were 100% green. With this, Portugal didn’t run any combustible generation, and they still exported to other countries.
Norway ran on 100% renewables for like 80 years, but no one cares.
Only reason we’re not at 100% anymore is because politicians don’t find it a priority to be self-sufficient and it’s much better to sell Norwegian renewable electricity to Europe for a profit, then buy back dirty electricity and let the consumers in Norway pay a cable transit tax to the government.
See, now you get to sell the energy twice, and both times at a higher rate.
You can’t compare other countries with the likes of Norway or Iceland. For most countries, hydro isn’t enough to meet the needs. Not to mention the fact that it isn’t truly renewable. What happens when climate change makes water more scarce?
The true renewable production became possible only recently with the advances in PV, wind and battery tech.
Yeah I’d agree with you, I think the reason Norway isn’t 100% renewable has a little more to do with growing demand, as well as seasonal variation. Saying that, I’m sure this could have been addressed if the government had properly encouraged development of more clean generation.
Honestly, the entire world could have been in a much better situation if we had pushed for renewables a long time ago. The first identification of the global greenhouse effect was in 1892 - more than 130 years ago. There was plenty of time to come up with alternatives, considering how fast technology develops (how many knew mobile phones before 1995?).
We are in a serious mess not for the lack of understanding or resources. Some people wanted to be rich at the expense of the majority of ordinary people, all other species and the entire planetary biome. They made sure that no other technology would challenge the world’s dependence on oil. They chose profits over countless lives on the brink of a mass extinction event.
I understand why you feel the need to blame the government. But I can’t help but rant about the insatiable greed and the crime that resulted from it on a scale that the planet has never witnessed before (I don’t think any species, much less a few individuals, ever caused so much destruction before). And while those criminals (for lack of a better word suitable for their actions) live a life in luxury without consequences, the rest of us are being gaslighted by the same vermin for the damage they caused.
I’m sorry for the lengthy rant. Thank you for understanding!
Even now, going hard on renewables is the best strategy. The technology is cheap, proven and readily available. If we build an excess of renewables we can wean off of fossil fuels most quickly, even diverting resources to nuclear will only slow down this goal.
The government do have ultimate responsibility, even if they’re influenced by the greed of wealthy people and organisations.
Well, portuguese here, that record period can be mostly attributed to hydropower as we’ve seen unusually high levels of rainfall over that period that we haven’t seen in a while. And because we decided to try and ditch stuff like coal in a rush, there was an uncomfortable while where our grid very much depended on electricity imports, which don’t come from clean sources, we just outsourced the problem.
Renewable capacity is still growing however, but with climate change making droughts here more frequent, the main hydrofallback may not become as much of an option
That’s where energy storage comes in. Either more traditional elevated water storage, or new battery storage. Batteries is a massive growth sector at the moment, and governments are making it easier for batteries to get approval - to developers and land owners, it’s becoming more appealing than solar.
news
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.