Category: 03 Environmental Degradation

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Berto Jongman: Is Climate Change Australia’s Greatest National Security Issue?

03 Environmental Degradation, 08 Wild Cards

berto smallWhy climate change is Australia's greatest national security issue

They were given 13 threats or potential threats to consider: adverse global trends and challenges to the international system; terrorism and piracy; instability and failed or failing states; poverty, inequality, and poor governance; serious and organised crime; WMD proliferation; climate change; civil emergencies, including natural disasters and pandemics; state-led threats (such as rising powers and balance of power issues); competition for energy and resources; social cohesion; sovereignty issues (including illegal fishing and illegal entry to Australian waters and airspace) and; cyber threats.  They then had to rank them by scale of impact, geographic proximity and urgency in time, and come up with a 1-13 list in order of priority. I don't have the space here to go through the list of outcomes, but the students' calculations based on current intelligence projections indicated that climate change should be our top national security concern.

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Antechinus: The Leap Manifesto on Energy (Canada)

03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 11 Society
Antechinus
Antechinus

The Leap Manifesto was initiated in the spring of 2015 at a two-day meeting in Toronto and signed up to by more than 100 actors, musicians, labour unions, Indigenous rights leaders, environmentalists and religious leaders. The overarching aim of this “People's Agenda” is to wean the next federal Canadian government off fossil fuels by 2050 with a radical overhaul of the Canadian economy. Significantly, many of the National Democratic Party (currently leading in the polls for next month's federal election) number amongst the manifesto's highest profile supporters. Learn more.

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Antechinus: GMO Are Twice Evil

01 Agriculture, 03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Liberation Technology
Antechinus
Antechinus

Growing Doubt: a Scientist’s Experience of GMOs

GMO crops still run far ahead of our understanding of their risks. Risk assessment of GMOs has been short-circuited and public concerns about them are growing. Until the damaged scientific ethos is rectified, both scientists and the public are correct to doubt that GMOs should ever have been let out of any lab. Science is not the only grounds on which GMOs should be judged. The commercial purpose of GMOs is not to feed the world or improve farming. Rather, they exist to gain intellectual property (i.e. patent rights) over seeds and plant breeding and to drive agriculture in directions that benefit agribusiness.
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CounterPunch: The Perfect Earth Storm

03 Environmental Degradation, Earth Intelligence

counterpunch goodThe Perfectly Nasty Ocean Storm

The oceans of the world are currently experiencing a “perfect storm” that is nasty, real nasty with too much warming, too much acidification, too much CO2, too much fishing, too many chemicals, too much Ag runoff, too much radiation (Fukushima), and too little ice (Arctic Ocean) bringing on too much methane (CH4). Whew!

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