This Puts Things Into Perspective

Don't cha think?

How to testing pic.twitter.com/y9iwLK0N12

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) May 9, 2020

Setting The Record Straight

If you watched Planet of The Humans, executive-produced by Michael Moore, like me you probably came away profoundly disillusioned. The film essentially says that the environmental movement and its advocacy for alternative energy sources is a house of cards and a big scam. From biomass to EV batteries to solar panels and turbines, the point is made over and over that they consume prodigious amounts of energy to produce, and the savings over the long term in greenhouse gas emissions are negligible at best.

Fortunately, there has been fierce rebuttal to the claims the film makes. One of them is by Bill McKibben, one of the patron saints of the environmental movement, in a lengthy Rolling Stone article, well-worth the read.

Another is by the always readable and always intelligent George Monbiot, who writes that the film is a gift to climate-change deniers who have for years been using discredited myths promoted in the film to justify their position.

Occasionally, the film lands a punch on the right nose. It is right to attack the burning of trees to make electricity. But when the film’s presenter and director, Jeff Gibbs, claims, “I found only one environmental leader willing to reject biomass and biofuels”, he can’t have been looking very far. Some people have been speaking out against them ever since they became a serious proposition (since 2004 in my case). Almost every environmental leader I know opposes the burning of fresh materials to generate power.

There are also some genuine and difficult problems with renewable energy, particularly the mining of the necessary materials. But the film’s attacks on solar and wind power rely on a series of blatant falsehoods. It claims that, in producing electricity from renewables, “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place”. This is flat wrong. On average, a solar panel generates 26 units of solar energy for every unit of fossil energy required to build and install it. For wind turbines the ratio is 44 to one.

Planet of the Humans also claims that you can’t reduce fossil fuel use through renewable energy: coal is instead being replaced by gas. Well, in the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas plants put together. As a result of the switch to renewables in this country, the amount of fossil fuel used for power generation has halved since 2010. By 2025, the government forecasts, roughly half our electricity will come from renewables, while gas burning will drop by a further 40%.

While Monbiot concedes the film's assertion that a good number of conservation groups take money from fossil fuel companies, he says its relentless attack on 350.org co-founder McKibben is misplaced, as he

takes no money from any of his campaigning work. It’s an almost comic exercise in misdirection, but unfortunately it has horrible, real-world consequences, as McKibben now faces even more threats and attacks than he confronted before.

Monbiot sees the film's 'final solution' as something of a red herring, snce it claims that only by seeing a mass die-off of an overpopulated world can there be any hope:

Yes, population growth does contribute to the pressures on the natural world. But while the global population is rising by 1% a year, consumption, until the pandemic, was rising at a steady 3%. High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low. Where population growth is highest, consumption tends to be extremely low. Almost all the growth in numbers is in poor countries largely inhabited by black and brown people. When wealthy people, such as Moore and Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary caveats, they are saying, in effect, “it’s not Us consuming, it’s Them breeding.” It’s not hard to see why the far right loves this film.

No one can ever accuse me of having an especially sunny disposition or optimistic outlook. Nonetheless, I was heartened to read this piece by George Monbiot. In these terrible times, I will take good news wherever I can find it.

Simply Ghoulish

Vampire. https://t.co/oGRr8I2HhD

— Gord Perks (@gordperks) May 6, 2020

A Soul Soother For These Troubled Times

Baroque music AND a livestream of Venice. I return to this several times a day.

A Fairy Tale

Frank Sinatra sang that fairy tales can come true. One hopes he was right.



H/t Marie Snyder

A Tale Of Two Countries

Each night I allow myself a half-hour dose of news from an American perspective, usually NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. And every night I emerge from the experience immensely thankful that I live in Canada rather than the Benighted States of America. The chasm between our two countries is ever-widening.

In Canada, we have a variety of programs in place supporting a wide swath of Canadians. While none of the supports are perfect and can never replace the income provided by jobs, they have allowed the federal government and the provinces to prioritize public health and safety over the economy. Indeed, the expenditures to date open up a myriad of possibilities for post-pandemic Canada as citizens ponder the possibilities of a newer, better Canada.

Not so south of the border. There, the ugliness of Darwinian neoliberalism is in full view.

When watching the news from there, one sees the ever-strident demands of increasingly desperate people to re-open the economy. Indeed, by Monday more than 30 states, despite the fact that they are nowhere near flattening the curve of Covid-19 spread, will be open. In all the cases, posing as champions of the people, politicians are showing their willingness to sacrifice people to the demands of the economy.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the meat-packing industry. Despite their being repositories of Covid-19 disease and death, that master narcissist, Donald Trump, has mandated they remain open through executive order. Had Americans the capacity for critical thinking, they would realize that they are mere fodder for the economy worshiped and extolled by their neoliberal masters.

The Guardian reports:

The president invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) to mandate meat processing plants stay open during the pandemic.

The move, which essentially labels meat production an essential service, also offers further measures to protect the industry from legal liability should more workers contract the virus.

If one reads the link, one sees that U.S. Labor Department refers to "guidance," not requirements, as to the safe operation of the plants during this pandemic. In other words, there are no penalties if that guidance isn't followed.

Those penalties instead will be borne by the workers by the requirement that they work in life-threatening situations for wages that are not even living ones.

The Tyson company itself seems to have played a major role in Trump's executive order:

The order came within hours of Tyson, a $22bn company and the world’s second largest meat processor, taking out paid adverts in major US newspapers, including the New York Times, to warn that recent closures of a handful of plants due to the virus could lead to “limited supply of our products”.

Prior to Trump's Hail-Mary pass to win votes, (after all, 'Muricans got to have their meat), death was already stalking meat-packing firms, in many ways making them slaughter houses within slaughter houses:

News of the first Covid-19 death at the Tyson Foods poultry plant in Camilla, south-west Georgia, spread slowly.

“It was like they were keeping a secret,” said Tara Williams, a 47-year-old worker at the plant, as she described her account of management’s response to the death of her colleague Elose Willis. “It took them about two weeks to just put a picture up, to acknowledge she had died.”

Williams had worked alongside Willis in the “de-boning” section of the plant until she died on 1 April, aged 56. She had spent 35 years at the facility – five days a week, 10 hours a day, 100,000 slaughtered chickens a shift.

Willis was the first Tyson employee to succumb to Covid-19 at the Camilla plant, but two others would follow in short succession, a marker of the precarity faced by thousands of meat processing workers pushed to toil, closely packed, on the frontlines throughout the pandemic in plants that have quickly become coronavirus hotspots. At least 20 meat packing workers have died from the virus nationwide and 5,000 have become infected, according to union officials, as close to two dozen facilities closed – some temporarily – over past few weeks.

As per the corporate agenda, it is the worker who is obliged to make sacrifices, including the ultimate one.

For Tara Williams, who has worked at the Camilla plant on the overnight shift as a packing scanner for five years earning $13.55 an hour, Trump’s executive order and her company’s adverts were another blow in her fight for workers’ rights.

“I was devastated and I was hurt. Because now, to be truthful – and excuse my language – Tyson really aren’t going to give a fuck about us at all,” she said. “For us employees that work in production, we are treated like modern day slaves.”

Although there is much more to the Guardian article, which I would encourage everyone to read, it somehow seems apt to end this post with that stinging rebuke and indictment from Ms. Williams.

A Graphic Illustration Of Why Peter MacKay Is Unfit To Hold Public Office

As a Nova Scotian, I am outraged that Justin Trudeau is using our tragedy to punish law-abiding firearms owners across Canada.

As Prime Minister, I can guarantee to all Canadians that I will never take advantage of a tragedy like this to push a political agenda. pic.twitter.com/pWDAv4TiwN

— Peter MacKay (@PeterMacKay) May 1, 2020