- A new report suggests that about 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions result from tourism. Not surprisingly, air travel is the biggest reason. However, there is also some goodish news on the climate front; many experts believe that overall fossil fuel consumption has peaked and may be heading into terminal decline. Too late for Tuvalu and the Maldives probably, not to mention Bangladesh, but it offers hope that there will be something left of civilization in a hundred years. As a specific example, electric school buses have more than doubled in the US in a 15 month period. Of course electric vehicles have their own environmental impacts, but this has to be put into perspective and weighed against the harms that they are offsetting.
- Over 70% of the homes in Gaza have been destroyed, along with over 200 heritage and archaeological sites, since the start of the most recent round of conflict in October. For his part, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is calling for the removal of around 90% of Gaza's current inhabitants and the reestablishment of Israeli settlements there. When Serb leaders say things like this, folks in the West rightly describe it as a call for ethnic cleansing, but apparently we're not supposed to say that when it's the Israelis doing it.
- A series of major earthquakes in Japan has killed at least 48 people and raised fears of tsunamis. And a Dash 8 operated by Japan's coast guard, in service with the relief effort, has collided with a Japan Air Lines Airbus A350 on a runway at Tokyo's Haneda Airport; five of the six people on board the coast guard aircraft were killed, though all 379 occupants of the airliner escaped before it was destroyed by fire. This is the first hull loss of an A350.
- The experts who torment themselves by listening in detail to Donald Trump's speeches are warning that his rhetoric is increasingly overt in its authoritarian and fascistic tone. On a positive note, though, regional branches of the Republican Party are tearing themselves apart in internal conflict; the Michigan branch of the party is facing a revolt against its election-denying leader.
- Jill Wine-Banks, who served as part of the team for Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, agrees with the attempts to use the 14th amendment to remove Donald Trump from ballots, saying "if we don't enforce that amendment we are devaluing the entire Constitution". Whether these efforts, or the various criminal trials he is facing, will proceed in time remains to be seen.
- During the latest bombardment of Ukraine, the Russian military accidentally bombed one of their own villages near the Russia-Ukraine border; no casualties have been reported but at least six homes were damaged.
No comments:
Post a Comment