Raven's Eye View - April 27, 2021
Black Lives Matter impacts, Gates health monopoly, Western U.S. megadrought
Give peace a chance, now more than ever
In a world where great powers are running up against each other, international tensions are increasing, and new generations of weapons are being developed, we need John and Yoko’s spirit now more than ever. Here is a recently released demo of “Give Peace A Chance” done in 1969 at the Sheraton Oceanus Hotel.
Black Lives Matter pushing back police violence
It can seem as if protests against police violence are met with an immovable blue wall of more violence, but there are many indications the people power mobilization is having an impact. The Deric Chauvin guilty verdict might have been unimaginable a couple of years back. Qualified immunity for police officers has been withdrawn in places including New York City and Colorado. Bills to make police more accountable are passing in states such as Oregon and Washington.
Now a new study has put some statistical meat on the bones and documented the effectiveness of the BLM protests.
“The question becomes, ‘Are Black Lives Matter protests having any real effect in terms of generating change?’ The data show very clearly that where you had Black Lives Matter protests, killing of people by the police decreased. It’s inescapable from this study that protest matters—that it can generate change.”
The study “found that municipalities where BLM protests have been held experienced as much as a 20 percent decrease in killings by police, resulting in an estimated 300 fewer deaths nationwide in 2014–2019. The occurrence of local protests increased the likelihood of police departments adopting body-worn cameras and community-policing initiatives, the study also found. Many cities with larger and more frequent BLM protests experienced greater declines in police homicides.”
Black people and other people of color are still being killed and brutalized. A small decline in police killings comes as cold comfort to people who are losing their loved ones. So there is no place for declaring a victory. But there is some evidence that people power is beginning to have an effect. More reason to continue keeping a spotlight on police killings and stay in the streets.
Bill Gates, health monopolist
Today Jeff Bezos is the poster of the predatory billionaire seeking to dominate everything. But we remember when that place was held by Bill Gates, when Microsoft was leveraging its control of the PC operating system to drive other software companies out of business. Today Gates has a more warm and fuzzy image as the benevolent philanthropist. But the old Bill Gates driving to monopolize and control seems to have morphed into a new form. Two recent articles raise disturbing questions about his foundation’s concentrated power in public health, and its impacts during the pandemic.
The first, “How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines,” is subtitled, “Through his hallowed foundation, the world’s de facto public health czar has been a stalwart defender of monopoly medicine,” It details how Gates promoted intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines through the research infrastructure his foundation funded.
Alexander Zaitchik, writes in the New Republic, “In April, Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded institutions in the public health arena, the Accelerator was a public-private partnership based on charity and industry enticements. Crucially, and in contrast to the C-TAP, the Accelerator enshrined Gates’s long-standing commitment to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. Its implicit arguments—that intellectual property rights won’t present problems for meeting global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must be protected, even during a pandemic—carried the enormous weight of Gates’s reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader.”
The unfortunate outcome is that vaccination rates in developing countries are clocking way behind those in developed countries due to limited availability. South Africa and India, now suffering a massive wave of infections, back in December asked the World Trade Organization, to lift intellectual property rules protections for Covid vaccines.
“Gates is certain he knows better,” Zaitchick writes “But his failure to anticipate a crisis of supply, and his refusal to engage those who predicted it, have complicated the carefully maintained image of an all-knowing, saintly mega-philanthropist. COVAX presents a high-stakes demonstration of Gates’s deepest ideological commitments, not just to intellectual property rights but also to the conflation of these rights with an imaginary free market in pharmaceuticals—an industry dominated by companies whose power derives from politically constructed and politically imposed monopolies.”
The second article, published in The Nation, poses the question, “Are Bill Gates’s Billions Distorting Public Health Data?” It details how massive funding by the foundation positioned the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in a position of near monopoly in health statistics, and the lack of transparency in how many of those statistics are developed.
One of the key problems with concentrated power is that when it screws up, the effects are magnified. In the case of IHME, a mistake in projecting the course of the pandemic has had devastating effects. “’Throughout April, millions of Americans were falsely led to believe that the epidemic would be over by June because of IHME’s projections,’ the data scientist Youyang Gu noted in his review of the institute’s work. ‘I think that a lot of states reopened based on their modeling.’”
The IHME has “spawned a legion of detractors who call the IHME a monopoly and a juggernaut and charge the group has surrounded itself with a constellation of high-profile allies that have made it too big to peer review, the traditional method of self-regulation in science. Fueled by more than $600 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—a virtually unheard-of sum for an academic research institute—the IHME has outgrown and overwhelmed its peers, most notably the World Health Organization (WHO), which previously acted as the global authority for health estimates.”
“’In a relatively short period of time, the IHME has exerted a certain kind of hegemony or dominance on global health metrics production,’ says Manjari Mahajan, a professor of international studies at the New School. ‘It’s a kind of monopoly of knowledge production, of how to know global health trends in the world. And that produces a concentration of…power that should make anybody uncomfortable.’”
Western drought second worst in 1,200 years
The conditions under which the U.S. west was settled by modern civilization are coming into question, as a combination of long-term climate variability and human-caused climate disruption merge to create what may be the “most severe drought in modern history,” Jeff Berardelli of CBS News reports. What appears to be emerging is a megadrought, the second worst in 1,200 years, leaving much of the west in a near permanent drought condition.
“In the past 20 years, the two worst stretches of drought came in 2003 and 2013 – but what is happening right now appears to be the beginning stages of something even more severe,” Berardelli writes. And as we head into the summer dry season, the stage is set for an escalation of extreme dry conditions, with widespread water restrictions expected and yet another dangerous fire season ahead.”
Around the Bay area, researchers found record dry conditions. “'This has never happened': California's only wildfire research center makes scary discovery,” “On April 2, lab researchers also visited Blackberry Hill, collected chamise samples and conducted calculations that revealed a shocking number. The average fuel-moisture content for this site is 137% and the previous low was 115%. This year it was 97%.”
Recalling those days last summer when Portland had the worst urban air in the world, while Seattle had the second, this comes as very bad news. The climate crisis is with us now, there is no doubt.
We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So
That is what Scientific American entitled a recent article, reporting a joint statement by the magazine as well as Covering Climate Now, Scientific American, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, The Guardian, Noticias Telemundo, Al Jazeera, Asahi Shimbun and La Repubblica:
“The planet is heating up way too fast. It’s time for journalism to recognize that the climate emergency is here.
“This is a statement of science, not politics. Thousands of scientists—including James Hansen, the NASA scientist who put the problem on the public agenda in 1988, and David King and Hans Schellnhuber, former science advisers to the British and German governments, respectively—have saidhumanity faces a ‘climate emergency.’
“Why ‘emergency’? Because words matter. To preserve a livable planet, humanity must take action immediately. Failure to slash the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make the extraordinary heat, storms, wildfires and ice melt of 2020 routine and could ‘render a significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable,’ warned the January Scientific American article.
The media’s response to COVID-19 provides a useful model. Guided by science, journalists have described the pandemic as an emergency, chronicled its devasting impacts, called out disinformation and told audiences how to protect themselves (with masks and social distancing, for example).
“We need the same commitment to the climate story. As partners in Covering Climate Now, a global consortium of hundreds of news outlets, we will present coverage in the lead-up to Earth Day, April 22, 2021, around the theme ‘Living Through the Climate Emergency.’ We invite journalists everywhere to join us.”
Go full renewable by 2035, scientists say.
Forty-seven leading scientists coming together as the global 100% renewable energy strategy group have made a joint declaration calling for rapid energy transition.
“A world based on 100% renewable energy is possible, and we are able to transform the energy system fast enough to avoid the climate catastrophe!
“The Earth’s climate emergency requires the completion of a zero-emissions economy much sooner than the generally discussed target year of 2050. A target year needed for ending our CO2 and other climate-warming and air pollutant emissions is proposed to be 2030 for the electric power sector and soon thereafter, but ideally no later than 2035, for other sectors. The core solution to meeting this timeline is to electrify or provide direct heat for all energy and provide the electricity and heat globally with 100% renewable energy.”
There are no immaculate conceptions, and the shift to renewables is going to have impacts. Right now there is an argument we cannot continue endless economic growth, which is quite logical on a limited planet. But whatever level of economy we have must be propelled by energy that does not pollute the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases. Anything that slows the shift from fossil to renewable energy is undermining the prospects of humanity and the biosphere.
‘Sink into your grief.’ How one scientist confronts the emotional toll of climate change
Those of us who have really taken the implications of the climate crisis to heart often have a hard time coping, which is why so many people evade the issue. But going right at it is the only way to go.
“’I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts,’ sustainability scientist Kimberly Nicholas recalls in her new book, Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World. But as research has increasingly revealed how climate change will forever alter the ecosystems and communities she loves, she has struggled to address her feelings of sadness. ‘My dispassionate training,’ the Lund University researcher writes, has ‘not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change,’ or how to respond to students who come to her to share their own grief.
“It’s a situation many scientists and professors are facing these days, Nicholas writes. ‘Being witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job description.’ But Nicholas says the untimely death of a close friend helped persuade her that the only way forward was to acknowledge that ‘we are not going to be able to save all the things we love.’ Instead, she says, we have to ‘swim through that ocean of grief … and recognize that we still have time to act, and salvage many of the things we care about.’”
Coyotes make it in the city
“How coyotes have managed to find success in the city like no other predator” was the title of a CBC article on the urban success of the coyote. Of course, like the raven, the coyote is a trickster and knows how to get by.
"’They've become extremely widespread,’ Dennis Murray, associate professor of biology at Trent University, told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald. ‘It's been a longer term phenomenon, but it's been, I would say, more aggravated in the last 20 or so years.’”
"’This is the one animal that has been able to expand their range, and increase their numbers in the face of tremendous amounts of persecution by people,’ said Stan Gehrt, director of the Urban Coyote Research Project at Ohio State University. ‘So they've been successful without any help from us. And they're pretty much the only wildlife species that you can really make that claim.’”
"’This is the one animal that has been able to expand their range, and increase their numbers in the face of tremendous amounts of persecution by people,’ said Stan Gehrt, director of the Urban Coyote Research Project at Ohio State University. ‘So they've been successful without any help from us. And they're pretty much the only wildlife species that you can really make that claim.’”