Originally published at http://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/04/09/greta-thunberg-says-shell-skip-un-climate-conference-over-covid-19-vaccine-inequity
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I think people would be wise to emulate Thunberg because the UN has become a stooge of the WEF and influenced in bad ways to allow the corporate takeover of the entire planet.
Vaccines for betacoronaviruses may not work long because it mutates so much. Other approaches would likely be better.
The US should fund it so they arent forced to take the “donations” being held out by the sleaziest billionaires. Who are trying to lock the world into bad decisons. All gifts have strings now.,
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This is a good choice by Thunberg, but vaccine inequity is not the only reason to skip COP26. These conferences have resulted in little real action, and certainly not on the scale required to meet the crisis (assuming it’s not already too late). A general strike is going to be the only way to move the world’s elite.
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Why WOULD she go? They’ve cast her as media diversion. It’s clear, they’ve CHOSEN their agenda & attendance only adds a cynical facade of virtue signalling “legitimacy?” If she actually LEADS, it HAS to be AWAY from Capital!
~https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/09/climate-hacking-experiments-already-taking-place/
~https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-two-faces-of-joe-biden-cec
~https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/09/sacrifice-zones-how-people-of-color-are-targets-of-environmental-racism/
~https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/07/21/clinton-swipes-the-gops-lyrics/9c725e88-b5a7-46a5-bb74-8bc12b22795b/
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I would like to see Greta talk and concentrate more on the real need, which is to bring atmospheric CO2 down to c. 350 ppm - preferably within fifty years.
All else is theater.
Meanwhile, an outright maniac in Brazil shows just how incompetent on Covid it is possible to be.
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If polio is eliminated in the wild over the entire planet then we have permanently gotten rid of polio. We’re close.
If the SARS virus (covid-19) is eliminated over the entire planet then it can’t mutate to become more virulent and more able to evade the current vaccines. We will have permanently gotten rid of the covid. If we let it brew and mutate in Brazil, we’ll surely get it back here soon enough. You or a friend might then get the mutated covid and become a long hauler.
In the same way, we need almost all people in almost all countries to reduce greenhouse gas production, to enhance agricultural sequestration of greenhouse gases and to take care with regional soil moisture, air temperature and wildfire issues. It doesn’t do that much good if the industrial countries offload their manufacturing to debtor countries so that the debtor countries create the CO2.
The wealthy nations already signed the Montreal protocols to protect the planet’s ozone layer from CFC emissions. It worked.
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For some 30 years the only place you could find Polio was in bioweapon laboratories.
It is hard to eradicate diseases when billions are poured into preserving them.
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Ms. Thunberg must feel like she is bashing her head on a brick wall.
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Don’t a lot of us feel like that Wings ?
BUT - There is some talk now of having reached a social ‘tipping point’, with the idea of "net zero carbon emissions’, which may be a dog with legs.
“Net” zero might mean that if you’re poor you need to lower your carbon footprint and sequester carbon, and if you’re fabulously rich, why, somebody else will take care of that. That’s what money is for.
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Yes - but the concept is important.
Inequality is unlikely to go away soon - BUT -
- that CO2 curve must stop going up - and then it MUST come down, c. 350 ppm.
SInce legal liability is based on lost income, it makes economic sense to locate polluters in areas where any injured peoples lives were not “expensive” in terms of lost wages. How do you calculate lost wages for children the retired or the chronically unemployed or underemployed. Whatever damages were calculated they would not be based on lost wages.
Offshoring jobs also reduces the future costs of environmental disasters to corporate polluters substantially. Also, if the injured cannot afford healthcare so they have a record of their medical situations, that helps reduce damages because causation is hard to prove. Contrast that with the astronomical cost of toxic chemicals and endocrine disrupting chemicals in Europe, where regulation of such chemicals is higher than here. Most certainly the real costs here are higher, but since so many people cant afford medical care, there is a dearth of information to prove causation. This is a conscious strategy to nullify the rights of the poor to health.
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Here, rich NYC slumlord superdelegates were all about lowering their tenements’ carbon footprint by converting from scores-of-thousamds of ancient boilers, fueled with mob #4 fuel-oil to fracked PA natural gas, from delayed Williams & Spectra lines. Co-gen and 15 peaker plants (which could switch to dilbit) in the very worst COVID-devastated, densely populated sacrifice zones, red-lined and now difficult to gentrify. Flipping serendipitously vacant apartments to chronically I’ll precariate “essentials” (indentured into 1099 gigs, from usurious medical debts) seems FAR less likely, than “gentrification” with immigrants & displaced students? NJT & Pocono real estate might prosper, not NYC’s usual victims?
These vaccines are not that expensive. The EU ended up paying around $16 per vaccine.
Contrast that with the yearly cost of a retroviral AIDS drug. $12,000 to $15000 from US and EU companies, compared to $365 from CIPLA the renegade Indian generic drug maker.
See this:
~https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVf2UUu_w4o
Blight makes white
Read Kelo v New London, and especially the many legal papers written about the case… You can find many on Google Scholar.
The propaganda machine is gearing up to support the large scale evictions of urban dwellers - most will never find affordable homes in the cities again. The shift will also force out possibly millions of small businesses. Read up on the history of “urban renewal” efforts… (also called “Negro removal” They have been planning for this elimination of rent stabilization for decades).
If the cheap heat goes away so do millions of apartments. And millions of families will have to find new homes in cities which will be impossibly expensive for them, basically its a transition they wont be able to make. The apartments they had a right to rent at n affordable price will be declared ‘blight’ even if they are well maintained and condemned because their fuel will mean they are ‘obsolete’ . Leading to mass displacement of the middle class. The government wont be able to build new public housing for the same reason it cant fix dozens of other problems, GATS.
“difficult to gentrify”? Why? I didn’t follow what you said there (all of it) very well at all. Could you break it down a bit more into pieces and explain?