Environment

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER Image by NOAA. Jungfraujoch’s foreboding temperatures this September at the top of the world in Switzerland at 2.25 miles altitude alarmed glaciologists. If anybody has lingering doubts about global warming’s strength of power to directly impact Earth’s ecosystems, think again. Antarctica, at the bottom of the world, experienced record high temperatures during its winter, as record high temperatures were also recorded at the top of the world in the Swiss Alps, where it’s always icy cold. As it happened, both the top and the bottom of the world hit record high temperatures, simultaneously, give or take a few days. There’s no known record of this ever happening before. It’s proof positive that global warming is powerfully impacting the entire planet, simul...

BY TOM ENGELHAR A long-exposure photograph of Lahaina on the night of August 8 to 9 from South Maui. Photograph Source: Wtp22 – CC BY-SA 3.0 From the earliest kingdoms to late last night, history has been the story not just of the rise of great powers but of their decline and fall. So, normally, there would be nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the aging America of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a classic imperial power distinctly in decline and threatening to split into pieces. As it happens, though, there’s something all too new about the twenty-first-century decline and fall of that other great power of the Cold War era — you know, not the Soviet Union. After all, the present downhill slide of this country is happening on a planet that itself is distinctly in...

Not so much an environmental measure as a tax on driving and an effort to keep the car monopolies in profit. Party leaflet Subscribe to our  channel Dozens of numberplate-reading cameras have been vandalised or covered up by people opposed to Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s widening of the (buy a new car) ‘clean air zone’ to the Greater London boundary. https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1503280519%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-u58k1cr7QBB&color=%23ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true Download this leaflet as a pdf. The ‘ultra-low emission zone’ (ULEZ) was introduced in central London in April 2019 by London mayor Sadiq Khan, and expanded in October 2021 to cover central London between the North and ...

BY GARY LEUPP Lahaina, after the fire. Youtube screen grab. It’s a damn tough life full of toil and strifeWe whalermen undergo.And we don’t give a damn when the day is done/gale has stoppedHow hard the winds did blow.’cause we’re homeward bound from the Arctic groundWith a good ship, taut and freeAnd we won’t give a damn when we drink our rumWith the girls of Old Maui. (Chorus) Rolling down to Old Maui, me boysRolling down to Old MauiWe’re homeward bound from the Arctic ground Rolling down to Old Maui. This sea song (not technically a “shanty”) was sung from at least the 1850s, by mariners en route from “six hellish months” in the whaling grounds of “the cold Kamchatka Sea,” driven by “a northerly gale,” towards their “island home” in Old Maui. The Maui “girls” ref...

BY SONALI KOLHATKAR Photo by Chris Gallagher As temperatures soar in the United States this summer, some among us are lucky enough to be able to remain in air-conditioned interior spaces, ordering food, groceries, clothing, and other products to be delivered to us. The rest, toiling in the extreme heat to pull products off hot warehouse shelves and drop them off curbside in scorching delivery trucks, are risking health and even life. July 2023 marked the planet’s hottest month on record. In San Bernardino, California, where retail giant Amazon has a massive warehouse and fulfillment center, daily temperatures reached triple digits for the majority of days in July and have been dangerously hot all summer. Workers with the Inland Empire Amazon Workers U...