ben franta

The Pernicious Influence of Big Oil on America’s Universities
https://newrepublic.com/article/158086/pernicious-influence-big-oil-americas-universities

Stanford’s divestment debate shows how effective fossil fuel companies have been at colonizing academia.

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While divestment campaigns often focus on ethics, removing investments from fossil fuel production isn’t just ethical: It’s necessary. In 2013, the International Energy Agency estimated that to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), global investments in fossil fuels would need to decline by $5 trillion by 2035 (about $200 billion per year, on average). In its latest Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also found that stopping climate destruction at that level would require fossil divestment of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Peer-reviewed research in top scientific journals further shows that to meet that two-degree goal—now codified in the Paris climate agreement—new fossil fuel development should cease (because even current reserves cannot all be used), and no more fossil-fueled power plants can be built unless they are retired before the end of their economically useful life (rendering them unattractive investments). A recent analysis in the top scientific journal Nature Energy found that to create an investment trajectory consistent with the Paris climate agreement, investors should increase the proportion of their energy investments in clean energy systems over time: At least half such investments should be in clean energy by 2025 and 80 percent by 2035.

In other words: To avoid climate catastrophe, investors must move away from fossil fuels over time. Divestment isn’t an optional step: It’s a necessary condition, ideology aside. The question facing all investors—universities, pension funds, individuals, and others—is not whether to divest but rather how to do so and how quickly.

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on May 28, when it came time for Stanford’s faculty senate to discuss divestment, faculty hesitated. When I went to watch the debate, I saw professor after professor at one of America’s richest universities first declare concern about climate change, then pivot to defend Big Oil, with many pointing to their receipt of industry funding. One professor suggested society needs oil to make hand sanitizer. To state the obvious: The vast majority of fossil fuels are not used for that purpose. When I marveled over the comment later to my adviser, science historian Robert Proctor, he said he recalled a similarly bizarre argument being made in the faculty senate in 2007 to justify continued acceptance of tobacco funding: One faculty member, according to Proctor, had said we needed the cigarette industry to make vaccines. Records of that debate also show professors’ fear that if the university rejected tobacco funding, people would start to question its receipt of oil money next.

“Funding from fossil fuels supports a lot of environmental and alternative energy research on campus,” geophysics professor Dustin Schroeder argued at the recent oil divestment meeting, as reported by The Stanford Daily. Yet fossil fuel spending on alternative energy research is comparatively minuscule: The industry spends 99 percent of its capital expenditures—over $100 billion per year—to explore for, develop, and acquire new fossil fuel reserves, despite the fact that current reserves are already more than enough to cause irreversible, catastrophic damage to life on Earth.

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Oil money runs deep at Stanford. The largest energy and climate research center on campus, the Global Climate & Energy Project, was co-founded by ExxonMobil and receives a majority of its funding from fossil fuel interests, who retain formal control over research portfolios. The university’s Precourt Institute for Energy is named after an oil and gas executive, and its Energy Modeling Forum is funded by the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Schlumberger, and other fossil groups. The list goes on. These industry-funded centers, in turn, hire, provide work space for, and fund the professors and graduate students responsible for helping the world transition away from fossil fuels. If that sounds like a conflict of interest, it is.

With decisive action, times of crisis—converging crises even more so—can be turning points. Institutions whose mission statements often explicitly cite the well-being of all of society as an ultimate goal face a moral test. Trustees making the decision should consider their legacy. Researchers receiving company money should recognize the conflict of interest. And the rest of us should examine the ties between our nation’s universities and the industry propelling the world to ruin.

Michael by byl fakt rád kdybyste omrkli jeho videa a napsali mu. Je to pastor, deep ecology, tuhle se s Rogerem Hallamem shodovali v tom rozhovorovem videu a la Havel (je potreba delat co ma smysl, nikoliv co vypada ze klapne). Nevidela jsem zatim

For any in the PDA community who might be interested, THIS is the main thing I have been working on for the last few months. It is the core of what I feel called (compelled by Life/Reality) to teach and preach throughout 2020. If I died tonight, this is my most important legacy contribution. IF you take time to watch either or both of these videos, *please* do let me know what your mental and emotional response is. And be radically honest with me. Time is too short to be inauthentic. Thanks!

Postdoom Thinking & Living
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcAlqMeyeaW-Lx9uENNYbDzjq2-ESR8uJ

Budu rada pokud zkouknete a napisete dojmy i sem

PAD: ad climate change a ai/machine learning jsem sem rozsahleji daval: viz TADEAS, TADEAS, TADEAS, TADEAS, TADEAS

‘Six Months To Avert Climate Crisis’: Climate Breakdown And The Corporate Media – Media Lens
https://www.medialens.org/...nths-to-avert-climate-crisis-climate-breakdown-and-the-corporate-media/

One of the study’s co-authors, Will Stefen, emeritus professor of climate and Earth System science at the Australian National University, told Voice of Action, an Australian publication, that all this raises the ultimate question:

‘Have we already lost control of the system? Is collapse now inevitable?’

In other words, there may simply not be enough time to stop tipping points being reached, as he explained with this metaphor:

‘If the Titanic realises that it’s in trouble and it has about 5km that it needs to slow and steer the ship, but it’s only 3km away from the iceberg, it’s already doomed.’

We searched the ProQuest media database for mentions of this particularly disturbing quote by Steffen, a world-renowned climate expert, in national UK newspapers. We found the grand total of one in a short article in the Daily Express. What could better sum up the pathology of the ‘mainstream’ news media than ignoring urgent authoritative warnings of the likely collapse of the climate system?

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Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told Voice of Action that the looming end of organised human society would not be a single event. Instead, we are approaching a stage:

‘where we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep things going for a bit longer.’

He added:

‘Capitalism is quite good at dodging bullets and escaping temporary challenges to its legitimacy and viability. But its condition, I feel, is terminal.’

Meanwhile, Steffen believes that current mass protests, such as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion, are not yet a sign of collapse but one of ‘growing instability’. Alexander concurs, saying that it is a sign of ‘steam building up within a closed system’. Without large-scale grassroots action and radical shifts in government policies, we are ‘likely to see explosions of civil unrest increasingly as things continue to deteriorate’. However, he offered hope that, with sufficient public pressure, the future could still be ‘post-growth / post capitalist / post-industrial in some form.’

Graham Turner, a former senior Australian government research scientist, observed:

‘I think if we all manage to live a simpler and arguably more fulfilling life then it would be possible still with some technological advances to have a sustainable future, but it would seem that it’s more likely … that we are headed towards or perhaps on the cusp of a sort of global collapse.’

He fears that the public as a whole will only demand change once ‘they’re actually losing their jobs or losing their life or seeing their children directly suffer’.

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Many new and dramatic climate findings are, of course, reported in the science and environment sections of newspapers. But the compelling case for a radical shift in society towards sustainability are barely touched upon in corporate news media, for obvious reasons.

In particular, the imminent threat of climate collapse rarely intrudes into the numerous pages devoted to ‘politics’, business and the economy. These pages feature a whole slew of correspondents, columnists and commentators who are rewarded for not questioning the status quo.

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as we and others have long argued, a fundamental obstacle to shifting to a saner, more democratic society is the narrow concentration of media ownership; a structural impediment in today’s world to truly free and open debate. This extreme state of affairs has been tracked in the UK by the independent Media Reform Coalition which represents several groups and individuals committed to promoting journalism and communications that work for the benefit of the public. The MRC is currently chaired by Natalie Fenton, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The coalition’s most recent report on UK media ownership, published in 2019, revealed that the problem is now even worse than at the time of its previous report in 2015. Just three companies – Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, Daily Mail Group and Reach (publisher of the Mirror titles) dominate 83 per cent of the national newspaper market (up from 71 per cent in 2015). When online readers are included, just five companies – News UK, Daily Mail Group, Reach, Guardian and Telegraph – dominate nearly 80 per cent of the market

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A fundamental obstacle to radical societal change to avert climate breakdown, therefore, is that ‘mainstream’ media, including BBC News, exist primarily to uphold the interests of capital and, in addition, particularly in the case of the BBC, the state:

SHEFIK: nadrz 33x33m, metr hluboka je milion litru, 100 Ml je celkem prd, ne.

TUHO: ja myslel to spalovani, kdyz ma byt primarni ucel letecky palivo. jestli maj 100 milionu litru cisty vody rocne navic, tak ok...

YEETKA:

I am a preacher’s daughter, and my dad is a climate-denying megachurch pastor. To me, it seems most white evangelicals are lost in a false nostalgia and brainwashed by the cult of Trump and Fox News. They’re driven by an ideological identity and a mentality of my team vs. yours, not science, or even compassion, and stuck in the culture wars of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. I like to remind people that there’s a lot more to Christianity than what white evangelicals have to say. There’s still a lot of hope among young people who were raised in that space, and even those who still identify with it, who are far more likely to embrace science and social justice. And there are millions of progressive Christians who care about the climate crisis and are inspired by Jesus’ teachings and other tenets of Christianity to act. But I fear that many, if not most, older white evangelicals may be lost—not that I won’t still keep trying.

TADEAS, TADEAS