United Ireland Should Be Political Objective, Former PM Says [ungated] - "'What I hope we'll see happen in the next government, no matter which parties are in it, is that that we'll see what is a long standing political aspiration toward unification become a political objective,' [former Prime Minister Leo] Varadkar said at an event in Belfast on Saturday."

• The inevitability of a united Ireland - "As demographics keep shifting, the direction of travel seems fixed despite ongoing conflict."
• The prospect of a united Ireland emerges as a republican leader takes office in Belfast - "Until now, Northern Ireland's first minister has always come from a British unionist party, but Sinn Fein, which advocates for Northern Ireland to rejoin the Republic, won the most seats in the assembly for the first time in 2022... The elevation of a nationalist to the top seat at Stormont has sparked the question of whether Irish unity is on the horizon." (Is a United Ireland on the Horizon?)
• Tall order for Sinn Fein to revive suddenly flagging Irish election hopes - "Failing to enter government for the first time would be a major setback to its ambition of seeking a referendum on unifying with Northern Ireland, the British region where it is already the lead party."
• A united Ireland is closer than ever. Let's make it a paradise for all of us, not just corporate tax-dodgers - "Arguing over anthems and flags is a distraction. This is our one chance to create an inclusive society across our whole island."

-United Ireland -A Republic for all -A Decade of Opportunity - Towards The New Republic --- *You remember the Irish Unification of 2024, right? - "Like a lot of Star Trek episodes, the 1990 episode 'The High Ground,' features a scene in which the characters discuss a real-world issue in the context of the show. In this case, Data the android (Brent Spiner) cites historical examples of the use of violence to successfully achieve political aims. He refers to the very real Mexican independence from Spain and, typically for Star Trek, a fictional example, the 'Kenzie Rebellion.' But it's his third example, the 'Irish Unification of 2024,' that's really captured the internet's imagination in that very year."

• Star Trek predicts United Ireland in 2024 - "This clip is taken from an episode called 'The High Ground'. The result of this short conversation, and the general theme of the program being centred around insurgency as a means to achieve freedom, led to the BBC (The British Broadcasting Corporation- Britain's national broadcaster) and Sky TV (a Satellite Broadcaster) putting a ban on showing the episode. When Sky did show the episode they cut the part about Irish reunification in 2024. In Ireland on RTE (Raidió Teilifís Éireann-Ireland's national broadcaster) the showing of the full episode came with a warning describing the content as 'Fictional and Aspirational.'"
• Did Star Trek predict an Irish reunification in 2024? - "As you can imagine, the episode was mired in controversy because of the mention of the Irish unification. As a result, the episode wasn't broadcast in the UK or Ireland unedited until 2006. In addition, the actual episode was also disliked by the series writer Ronald D Moore who said in an interview in 1995: 'We didn't have anything interesting to say about terrorism except that it's bad and Beverly gets kidnapped – ho hum. They take her down to the caves and we get to have nice, big preachy speeches about terrorism and freedom, fighting and security forces versus society. It's a very unsatisfying episode and the staff wasn't really happy with it.'"
• Could Star Trek's prediction that Ireland and Northern Ireland will reunify come true? - "The writer of that episode, Melinda Snodgrass, joins News Breakfast to discuss why she wrote that line in the 1990s."
• @MMSnodgrass: "It wasn't just filler. It was to reference the fact that Earth had united and nation states had ended in the Federation."[1]
• Star Trek's Biggest Prediction For 2024: Irish Unification Explained - "The episode aired in 1990 when the Troubles were ongoing and topical. The line implies that the Troubles/armed struggle lasted into the 2020s until the IRA got the U.K. to concede the territory to the Republic of Ireland. However, reality was not so violent. In the 1980s, the Sinn Féin party (meaning We Ourselves, then led by Irish Republican leader Gerry Adams) refocused on electoral politics. This culminated in the Good Friday Agreement between the British and Irish governments, signed in 1998. Under the agreement, Northern Ireland was still part of the U.K., but citizens could claim dual citizenship and the North would be self-governed (the new Northern Irish Assembly required power-sharing to maintain this balance). Moreover, if Northern Ireland chooses to leave the U.K. by referendum, they are allowed to do so."
• Sanctuary Districts And Irish Unification: Star Trek's Vision Of 2024 Comes Strikingly Close - "Despite living in a world of conflict, we have reason to be hopeful. We are growing as a people, but growth is painful. Star Trek gave us the confidence that war and social strife would push us to leave those injustices behind, but offscreen life offers no such reassurance. Science fiction predicted the future, but illustrated clearly that the path to get there would offer the same difficulties we'd always known. It's going to be up to us to make sure that the sacrifices we make now will be seen as worthwhile by future generations."

--- also btw... The Spark - Rhyme Island (BANGER OF THE YEAR)

Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle for America 'Can't Be Compromised' [ungated] - "In a new, secret recording, the Supreme Court justice says he 'agrees' that the U.S. should return to a place of godliness."

The recording, which was provided exclusively to Rolling Stone, captures Windsor approaching Alito at the event and reminding him that they spoke at the same function the year before, when she asked him a question about political polarization. In the intervening year, she tells the justice, her views on the matter had changed. "I don't know that we can negotiate with the left in the way that needs to happen for the polarization to end," Windsor says. "I think that it's a matter of, like, winning." "I think you're probably right," Alito replies. "On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don't know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it's difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can't be compromised. They really can't be compromised. So it's not like you are going to split the difference." Windsor goes on to tell Alito: "People in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that — to return our country to a place of godliness." "I agree with you. I agree with you," replies Alito, who authored the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision, which reversed five decades of settled law and ended a constitutional right to abortion.

Justice Alito questions possibility of political compromise in secret recording - "Martha-Ann Alito spoke to Windsor about her flags on another recording made at the dinner, according to an additional edited recording the filmmaker posted online. She said she wanted to fly a religious flag because 'I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month', an apparent reference to celebratory LGBTQ+ displays during Pride month in June." Supreme Court's Alito appears to back US return to 'godliness' in secret recording - "The 'Appeal to Heaven' flag has come to symbolize hopes by some conservative activists for a more Christian-centered U.S. government." Secret recording puts spotlight on Alito's strong conservative views on religious issues - "The justice has consistently backed religious Christian groups in Supreme Court cases and has often spoke about freedom of religion being under attack." Alito's 'Godliness' Comment Echoes a Broader Christian Movement - "Justice Samuel Alito's secretly recorded remarks come as many conservatives have openly embraced the view that American democracy must be grounded in a Christian worldview."

The unguarded moment added to calls for greater scrutiny by Democrats, many of whom are eager to open official investigations into outside influence at the Supreme Court. But the core of the idea expressed to Mr. Alito, that the country must fight the decline of Christianity in public life, goes beyond the questions of bias and influence at the nation's highest court. An array of conservatives, including antiabortion activists, church leaders and conservative state legislators, has openly embraced the idea that American democracy needs to be grounded in Christian values and guarded against the rise of secular culture. They are right-wing Catholics and evangelicals who oppose abortion, same-sex marriage, transgender rights and what they see as the dominance of liberal views in school curriculums. And they've become a crucial segment of former President Donald J. Trump's political coalition, intermingled with the MAGA movement that boosted him to the White House and that hopes to do so once again in November. The movement's rise has been evident across the country since Mr. Trump lost re-election in 2020. The National Association of Christian Lawmakers formed to advance Christian values and legislation among elected officials. This week in Indianapolis, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, are voting on issues like restricting in vitro fertilization and further limiting women from pastoral positions. [US Southern Baptists effort to enshrine ban on women pastors falls short (earlier: Southern Baptists finalize expulsion of two churches with female pastors), US Southern Baptists condemn IVF procedure] And in Congress, Mike Johnson, a man with deep roots in this movement and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group, is now speaker of the House. Now, Supreme Court justices have become caught up in the debate over whether America is a Christian nation. While Justice Alito is hardly openly championing these views, he is embracing language and symbolism that line up with a much broader movement pushing back against the declining power of Christianity as a majority religion in America. The country has grown more ethnically diverse and the share of American adults who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated has risen steadily over the past decade. Still, a 2022 report from the Pew Research Center found that more than four in 10 adults believed America should be a "Christian nation." Justice Alito's agreement isn't the first time he has embraced Christian ways of talking about the law and his vision for the nation. Shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, a ruling for which Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion, the justice flew to Rome and addressed a private summit on religious liberty hosted by the University of Notre Dame. His overarching concern was the decline of Christianity in public life, and he warned of what he saw as a "growing hostility to religion, or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant." "We can't lightly assume that the religious liberty enjoyed today in the United States, in Europe and in many other places will always endure," he said, referencing Christians "torn apart by wild beasts" at the Colosseum before the fall of the Roman Empire... [T]he resonance of the Sacred Heart goes beyond simply an abstract religious concept, just as the Pride flag does. Each is notable for the vision of America that they symbolize, and the different visions of marriage, family and morality that they represent. For one slice of America that celebrates L.G.B.T.Q. rights, June is Pride Month. For another devout, traditional Catholic slice, June is a time to remember the Sacred Heart.

Justice Alito, in secretly recorded audio, apparently agrees nation needs to return to place of 'godliness' - "In the edited clips that were posted to X, Windsor approached Martha-Ann Alito at the event and seemingly expressed sympathy for 'everything that you're going through' and that it 'was not okay.' 'It's okay because if they come back to me, I'll get them,' Martha-Ann Alito said, referring to the news media. 'I'm gonna be liberated, and I'm gonna get them.' ... Windsor then turned the conversation to the stir caused by the 'Appeal to Heaven' flag, to which Martha-Ann Alito said the 'feminazis believe that [Justice Alito] should control me. So, they'll go to hell, he never controls me,' she added." In Secret Recordings, Alito Endorses Nation of 'Godliness.' Roberts Talks of Pluralism. - "The two justices were surreptitiously recorded at a Supreme Court gala last week by a woman posing as a Catholic conservative."

The justice's comments appeared to be in marked contrast to those of Chief Justice Roberts, who was also secretly recorded at the same event but who pushed back against Ms. Windsor's assertion that the court had an obligation to lead the country on a more "moral path." "Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path?" the chief justice said. "That's for people we elect. That's not for lawyers." Ms. Windsor pressed the chief justice about religion, saying, "I believe that the founders were godly, like were Christians, and I think that we live in a Christian nation and that our Supreme Court should be guiding us in that path." Chief Justice Roberts quickly answered, "I don't know if that's true." He added: "I don't know that we live in a Christian nation. I know a lot of Jewish and Muslim friends who would say maybe not, and it's not our job to do that." The chief justice also said he did not think polarization in the country was irreparable, pointing out that the United States had managed crises as severe as the Civil War and the Vietnam War. When Ms. Windsor pressed him on whether he thought that there was "a role for the court" in "guiding us toward a more moral path," the chief justice's answer was immediate. "No, I think the role for the court is deciding the cases," he said.

The Grab: "a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources."

The Grab, from the Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite and filmed over the course of six years, captures the CIR team's developing understanding of the pattern in real time, connecting Halverson's Smithfield reporting in 2015 to a New York investment company's purchase of Arkansas farmland to supply Hong Kong, WikiLeaks cables detailing how Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah ordered national companies to buy up resources abroad to drained aquifers in Arizona, and a leaked trove of emails from a private security company to displaced farmers in Zambia. The notches in the pattern are geographically disparate and murky, but they underscore one point: what oil was to the 20th century, food and water will be to the 21st – precious, geopolitically powerful and contested. "The 20th century had Opec," says Halverson in the film. "In the future, we're going to have Food Pec." That trend is already under way, from Mexico's avocado militias to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which the film argues was motivated, in part, by Putin's desire to control a bread basket. The Grab has the feeling of a revelation, though the reveal is not a conspiracy; the pattern is less a plan than a series of reactions, from a variety of actors, to the fact that every single human needs food and water, and there is not enough arable land on Earth for the projected increase of 2 billion people by 2050. The instinct, on a primal and national level, is to hoard.

-Why Bill Gates is the largest private farmland owner in the United States -'A system perverted by corporate money': inside documentary sequel Food, Inc 2 What is Behind the Rise in Food Prices as a Few Monopolies Gouge the Public and Farmers While Protected by the Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack [30:12; mp3] - "Then finally we speak with Austin Frerick, an expert on agricultural and antitrust policy. He worked at the Open Markets Institute, the U.S. Department of Treasury, and the Congressional Research Service before becoming a Fellow at Yale University. A 7th generation Iowan, he's the author of the new book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry. We investigate what is behind the rise in food prices, as a few monopolies gouge the public and the farmers while protected by the Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack."[1,2]

• Interview with Austin Frerick, author of 'Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry' - "I got the idea to write this book back in the spring of 2018. Over Busch Lights at the dive bar Carl's Place in Des Moines, an Iowa political operative told me about a couple who had recently donated $300,000 to Republican Governor Kim Reynolds in support of her campaign for reelection in a hotly contested race against Democrat Fred Hubbell. According to the operative, the donors were hog farmers who owned a private jet emblazoned with the phrase 'When Pigs Fly.' I just found this image to be such a powerful example of what happened to Iowa over my life: the power of robber barons in the food system has overrun the state's government to the detriment of its environment and its communities. My curiosity led me to co-write an article about the Hog Barons in Vox. But as I dug into their story, I realized that they're just part of a bigger trend that has transformed the food system in places across the country and beyond."

Each chapter is built around both a baron and a key concept. I first figured out the key ideas I wanted to touch on in the book and then worked backwards to figure out which baron best encapsulates each idea. For example, the Berry Baron chapter is really about the outsourcing of America's produce system. I used the story of Driscoll's to explain how this happened and what it means for farmworkers.

Likewise, I tell the story of JAB Holding Company, which is owned by a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade by gobbling up countless independent companies using wealth traced back to the Nazis. You probably haven't heard of JAB, but I promise that you've heard of their brands: Peet's Coffee, Caribou Coffee, Einstein Brothers Bagels, Bruegger's Bagels, Manhattan Bagel, Noah's NY Bagel, Krispy Kreme, Pret A Manger, Insomnia Cookies, Panera Bread, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Intelligentsia Coffee, Green Mountain Coffee, Trade Coffee, and Keurig. I use their story to talk about changes in American antitrust law and what those changes mean for democracy...

While researching the chapter on the Dairy Barons, I discovered a previously unreported incident in which a worker died on their farm in January 2021. The incident took place in a barn that I happened to tour just a few months later. Records from the Indiana office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration described the man as a forty-seven-year-old recent immigrant born in Honduras who spoke limited English. He had been working a twelve-hour shift near manure equipment when his clothing got caught in the machinery. He was pulled in and died from asphyxiation. He left behind a wife and three children. In response, OSHA fined the Dairy Barons just $10,500. But sadly, what surprised me most in this tragedy was how hard it was for me to uncover what happened. It took years of persistent hounding to get this information...

In May 2021, I was driving down Highway 6 just five miles east of Grinnell heading to a site visit when I noticed a multistory industrial animal facility (what some might call a CAFO) going up. I've driven this stretch of road hundreds of times, so I knew it pretty well and recognized the new building instantly. I had read about the use of multistory industrial animal facilities in China, but I had never seen or read about one in America. I pulled over, took a picture, and tweeted out, "I passed what I assume is one of the first-multi-story CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operations]/confinement farms in America. ... Truly horrifying." The tweet went sort of viral, and the Des Moines Register ended up doing a story based on my tweet.

After the publication of that story, I did not think much of it until a few weeks later when my boss forwarded me an email she had received... My boss told me to laugh it off and not to worry, but I know the story would be different if I was at a university where Big Ag runs the show. To be frank, instead of being told by my boss to laugh it off, I'd probably be shown the door right then or pretty soon after...

Most of these barons became powerful because they were willing to cross ethical lines that others weren't willing to cross. They then used this advantage to corrupt the political system and compound their economic power. You really see an example of this process in my first chapter on the Hog Baron. The cost of this corruption is that we can't solve basic problems and government is no longer responsive to people's needs. It increasingly functions to serve the barons' interests.

This corruption matters to all of us. The food we consume and the way it is produced has enormous implications for our health and our environment. It impacts the strength of our cities and towns, the cleanliness of our air and our water, and, in the face of global climate change, the livability of our planet. Food is also incredibly important to our sense of identity and culture. The corruption of our food system benefits a handful of barons to the detriment of all of these values.

• The Hog Barons - "How Iowa's largest hog producer courted power, turned farming into a numbers game, and transformed the American heartland."
• Why Austin Frerick Is Taking On The Grocery Barons - "Cargill is really the story of the Farm Bill and what happened to it. Cargill is the largest private company in America. They're all about from the second grain is picked, to when it's put on your plate. They want to own that process and they don't have consumer facing brands. A lot of people don't know who they are. They're almost like the 19th century British Empire because they're so global. We've never had companies like this before."

I view places like Iowa as extraction colonies. They remind me of West Virginia in the 19th century and the coal companies, or the way the British Empire would run colonies in Africa.

But what this really means is we're not doing anything about climate change in the food system. I mean, all of our solutions for addressing climate change in the food system are a joke.

This book is intellectually two things. First this is what neoliberalism did to the food system. But also, where do we go from here? I mean, it's easy to complain, but what should a post-neo-liberal food system look like? And that to me is where the hope is. What does a multicultural democratic system look like?

The focus needs to be on labor. So many more people work in the food system when you include people like my parents. I'm also of the opinion that we need to abolish the Farm Bill. I think the system is to just too corrupted. It's designed for Wall Street. It picks winners and losers. It's incredibly expensive. So I'd rather take all the money in the Farm Bill, and I'm not talking about the food assistance programs, but just actual farm programs and just put it into conservation. Go from there. And then, to me, a silver lining, especially for rural America, is putting animals back on the land.

One of the beautiful things of writing a book like this is I just spent a lot of time with different people doing it right. And what you quickly realize is throughout the food system, there's a lot of people trying to do the right thing, trying to implement reforms to get us to a better, healthier, more sustainable, inclusive, multicultural food system. We just have a few greedy people holding us back.

• Book excerpt: 'Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry' - "But the New Deal Farm Bill had devastating flaws. Black farmers, especially those in the South, did not enjoy the same support. Sharecropping, adopted in the South after the Civil War, replaced slavery as an institution for perpetuating white control. Wealthy landowners who had virtually no connection to the land and rarely farmed relied on the labor of tenant sharecroppers for most of the planting and harvesting. These landowners accrued nearly all the profits while sharecroppers endured perpetual poverty."

Yet for all its flaws, the New Deal Farm Bill accomplished its goal of protecting white farmers, and for a while, it produced a relatively balanced farm economy. For Cargill, the New Deal Farm Bill did not threaten the company's power or force it to pay a penny to limit overproduction.

But as soon as these policies were put in place, Cargill and its corporate brethren still worked to destroy them. Even without a tax on processors, the New Deal Farm Bill placed a ceiling on the growth of companies such as Cargill that benefited from processing commodities on a large scale. After all, the incentives in the New Deal Farm Bill that limited the production of commodities in turn limited the grain crops that companies like Cargill could store, process, and transport. For decades, their allies slowly took it apart, and 50 years on, they found a way to pass what I call the Wall Street Farm Bill.

Meet the uber-wealthy families who control much of the food system in the US and Australia - "The average American farmer doesn't fix fences and drive tractors. Thanks to market concentration, there is now a handful of companies that dominate the US food system, and they are impacting Australia too."

Could Elaine May Finally Be Getting Her Due? [ungated] - "A new biography gives a compelling sense of a comic and cinematic genius, and also of the forces that derailed her Hollywood career."

Among the many merits of "Miss May Does Not Exist," a deeply researched, psychologically astute new biography of May by Carrie Courogen, is that the author sees continuities and patterns in a career that is unified, above all, by the force of May's character. Courogen also assesses May's fortunes in the light of social history, giving a detailed account of the many obstacles that May, as a woman, faced in the American entertainment industry of the late fifties and early sixties—a time of few female standup comedians or playwrights and no female movie directors working in Hollywood... She offers a vision of a society in which the crudely learned behavior of crudely socialized men brutalizes the women in their orbit even as it leaves the men vulnerable to calamities and catastrophes of their own making. The core of May's work is the horror of romantic relationships as experienced by women—the physical violence and mental cruelty endured by women at the hands of men... May is essentially a social filmmaker, one whose comedy involves more than her distinctive worlds: in their looseness, her movies defy the geometry of the frame and suggest ragged, shredded edges that reach out and tie in to the real world at large. Her next film would do so even more explicitly—and she'd pay the price for her audacity. After the eleven years in movie exile that May endured for "Mikey and Nicky," she made "Ishtar," a film that's far more famous for its negative publicity than its intrinsic qualities. Owing to reports of its out-of-control budget and May's domineering direction, her career was instantly, definitively crushed, and May has, for all intents and purposes, been serving a life sentence. The injustice of a great film being submerged under ignorant disdain is grievous enough; the wickedly punitive aftermath is an outrage... Alongside the film's scathing anti-Reagan politics, it's a tale of earnest grimness on a subject of fundamental importance to May: creative obsession... As discerningly intricate as her movies are about love and friendship, they're never limited to the private sphere but plugged into the wider world of power. She filmed with a bitterly realistic view of what people do to one another for the sake of perceived advantage, necessity, desire, or compulsion. The theme that unites these films is betrayal. Growing up poor and female, as the child of a man who was a desperate failure and a woman who was a desperate survivor, and in a household linked with the Mob, she felt the cold pressure of institutions and families alike, and witnessed the death grip of whoever had the upper hand. She saw the cruel side of show business from childhood, and entering show business, in her early twenties, negotiated its maelstrom of personal demands and implacable financial pressures. Even with no alter ego in her movies, they're filled with the dramatic essence of her experiences—and with their ravaging emotional effects. She revealed the unspeakably painful and the outrageously hostile, unseemly sympathies and scandals from behind antic masks and with the irresistible power of involuntary laughter. It's among the most vital bodies of work in modern cinema. But in 1987 her accomplishments mattered little. She instantly became a pariah and a has-been.

(previously: 1,2,3,4)

New Book Blames Yuppies for Trump, Housing—Basically Everything [ungated] - "Tom McGrath's Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation is not a flattering portrait of a generation."

A gluttonous desire for wealth ultimately led the yuppies to help dissolve post-war political orthodoxies like corporate responsibility for its workers, progressive income tax on higher-wage earners and protections for unions and American jobs. These led them to support right-winger Ronald Reagan and his supply-side economics. Panaceas such as tax cuts for the wealthy, shrinking of government programs, deregulation of industry and deficit military spending emerged as de rigueur Republican positions. McGrath details the ruinous historical results: The rich got richer, while everyone else floundered. Middle-class manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas as executives privileged shareholder value and their own compensation. Social programs were slashed, harming working people and the vulnerable.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are surging "faster than ever" to beyond anything humans ever experienced, officials say - "Not only is CO2 now at the highest level in millions of years, it is also rising faster than ever."

Secretary-General's special address on climate action "A Moment of Truth" [yt] - "Climate change is the mother of all stealth taxes paid by everyday people and vulnerable countries and communities. Meanwhile, the Godfathers of climate chaos – the fossil fuel industry – rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies."

Fourth and finally, we must directly confront those in the fossil fuel industry who have shown relentless zeal for obstructing progress – over decades. Billions of dollars have been thrown at distorting the truth, deceiving the public, and sowing doubt. I thank the academics and the activists, the journalists and the whistleblowers, who have exposed those tactics – often at great personal and professional risk. I call on leaders in the fossil fuel industry to understand that if you are not in the fast lane to clean energy transformation, you are driving your business into a dead end – and taking us all with you... Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action – with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns. They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies – Mad Men – remember the TV series - fuelling the madness. I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones.

World hits streak of record temperatures as UN warns of 'climate hell' - "Coal, oil and gas still provide more than three quarters of the world's energy, with global oil demand remaining strong." India runs power plants flat out to keep cool in heatwave and election - "In the autumn of 2021 and again in the spring of 2022, coal shortages meant many power generators were unable to start up in response to instructions from the grid... Since then, the government has attempted to prevent a repeat by prioritising coal movements across the rail network and accumulating large coal inventories on site at power generators." Despite extreme heat, climate change barely rated a mention in India's elections - "Low voter turnout was attributed to ongoing extreme heat, with temperatures in New Delhi reaching as high as 52.9 degrees Celsius, causing a party leader to faint during an election rally. But the sweltering temperatures did little to drive climate up the agenda." Phoenix Is Facing a Hurricane Katrina of Heat. It's Not Alone. - "You can see the risk here: If you don't have air conditioning, then Phoenix's summer heat quickly changes from unpleasant to deadly... a power failure during a heat wave in Phoenix or any other city will spread the misery far more broadly and kick a Heat Katrina into high gear." (The Heat Wave Scenario That Keeps Climate Scientists Up at Night)[1]

The number of unhoused people in the city has boomed along with the total population, rising 72% in the past six years to nearly 10,000. People experiencing homelessness made up 45% of the county's heat-related deaths last year, compared with 38% for people with housing (the living situation was unknown for the other 17% of deaths). And none of the 156 people who died indoors last year had functioning air conditioning. In 85% of those cases, AC units were present but broken. When temperatures hit 110F for weeks at a stretch, cooling systems can struggle to keep up. Retirees and people living from paycheck to paycheck may not have the money for repairs.

IEA expects global clean energy investment to hit $2 trillion in 2024 - "China is set to account for the largest share of clean energy investment in 2024 with an estimated $675 billion, while Europe is set to account for $370 billion and the United States $315 billion. More spending is focused on solar photovoltaic (PV) than any other electricity generation technology with investment set to grow to $500 billion in 2024 due to falling solar module prices. Global upstream oil and gas investment is expected to increase by 7% in 2024 to $570 billion, following a similar rise in 2023. This was mostly led by national oil companies in the Middle East and Asia, the report said." India to spend up to $385 bln to meet renewable energy target, Moody's Ratings estimates - "However, despite the steady growth in renewable energy, most of which will likely be solar power, Moody's expects coal will play a significant role in electricity generation for the next eight to ten years." US solar installations hit quarterly record, making up 75% of new power added, report says - "Solar accounted for 75% of electricity generation capacity added to the U.S. power grid early this year as installations of panels rose to a quarterly record, according to a report published by Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association on Thursday. The country's solar industry saw 11.8 gigawatts of new capacity in the first three months of 2024 as electric utilities continued their rapid additions of the renewable power sources, the report said." The Solar Breakthrough That Could Help the U.S. Compete With China - "South Korea's Hanwha Group says it will be the first company to use Lumet's technology. Hanwha's Qcells unit, one of the biggest solar-panel makers outside China, is building a multibillion-dollar solar supply chain in Georgia. The company expects the financial savings and performance gains to help it compete with low-cost products from the world's biggest producer."[2] Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity - "They're delivering solar power after dark in California and helping to stabilize grids in other states. And the technology is expanding rapidly."[3,4,5] EU wind and solar growth displaces fossil fuel generation, report says - "The additional solar and wind capacity helped push the share of total renewables to 44% of the EU electricity mix in 2023 from 34% in 2019. Meanwhile, a decline in coal and gas generation has pulled the share of fossil fuel generation down to 32.5% from 39%."