LaQuedra Edwards entered a Tarzana Vons supermarket and put $40 into a Scratchers vending machine back in November 2021 as reported by the Sacramento Bee. However when she was about to choose her scratcher selection (several less expensive tickets) she inadvertently hit the selection for a $30 scratcher as a result of being “pushed” by a fellow market go-er.
That wrong or accidental button pushed resulted in Edwards winning $10 million as reported by the California Lotto press release on April 6. Oy, in a good way.
The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that to avoid massive losses and damage from global warming, nations must act quickly to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The good news is that experts believe it’s possible to cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 through steps such as using energy more efficiently, slowing deforestation and speeding up the adoption of renewable energy.
Many of those strategies require new laws, regulations or funding to move forward at the speed and scale that’s needed. But one strategy that’s increasingly feasible for many consumers is powering their homes and devices with electricity from clean sources. These four articles from our archives explain why electrifying homes is an important climate strategy and how consumers can get started.
1. Why go electric?
As of 2020, home energy use accounted for about one-sixth of total U.S. energy consumption. Nearly half (47%) of this energy came from electricity, followed by natural gas (42%), oil (8%) and renewable energy (7%). By far the largest home energy use is for heating and air conditioning, followed by lighting, refrigerators and other appliances.
The most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from home energy consumption is to substitute electricity generated from low- and zero-carbon sources for oil and natural gas. And the power sector is rapidly moving that way: As a 2021 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory showed, power producers have reduced their carbon emissions by 50% from what energy experts predicted in 2005.
“This drop happened thanks to policy, market and technology drivers,” a team of Lawrence Berkeley lab analysts concluded. Wind and solar power have scaled up and cut their costs, so utilities are using more of them. Cheap natural gas has replaced generation from dirtier coal. And public policies have encouraged the use of energy-efficient technologies like LED light bulbs. These converging trends make electric power an increasingly climate-friendly energy choice.
The U.S. is using much more low-carbon and carbon-free electricity today than projected in 2005. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, CC BY-ND
2. Heat pumps for cold and hot days
Since heating and cooling use so much energy, switching from an oil- or gas-powered furnace to a heat pump can greatly reduce a home’s carbon footprint. As University of Dayton sustainability expert Robert Brecha explains, heat pumps work by moving heat in and out of buildings, not by burning fossil fuel.
“Extremely cold fluid circulates through coils of tubing in the heat pump’s outdoor unit,” Brecha writes. “That fluid absorbs energy in the form of heat from the surrounding air, which is warmer than the fluid. The fluid vaporizes and then circulates into a compressor. Compressing any gas heats it up, so this process generates heat. Then the vapor moves through coils of tubing in the indoor unit of the heat pump, heating the building.”
In summer, the process reverses: Heat pumps take energy from indoors and move that heat outdoors, just as a refrigerator removes heat from the chamber where it stores food and expels it into the air in the room where it sits.
Another option is a geothermal heat pump, which collects warmth from the earth and uses the same process as air source heat pumps to move it into buildings. These systems cost more, since installing them involves excavation to bury tubing below ground, but they also reduce electricity use.
3. Cooking without gas – or heat
For people who like to cook, the biggest sticking point of going electric is the prospect of using an electric stove. Many home chefs see gas flames as more responsive and precise than electric burners.
But magnetic induction, which cooks food by generating a magnetic field under the pot, eliminates the need to fire up a burner altogether.
“Instead of conventional burners, the cooking spots on induction cooktops are called hobs, and consist of wire coils embedded in the cooktop’s surface,” writes Binghamton University electrical engineering professor Kenneth McLeod.
Moving an electric charge through those wires creates a magnetic field, which in turn creates an electric field in the bottom of the cookware. “Because of resistance, the pan will heat up, even though the hob does not,” McLeod explains.
Induction cooktops warm up and cool down very quickly and offer highly accurate temperature control. They also are easy to clean, since they are made of glass, and safer than electric stoves since the hobs don’t stay hot when pans are lifted off them. Many utilities are offering rebates to cover the higher cost of induction cooktops.
4. Electric cars as backup power sources
Electrifying systems like home heating and cooking made residents even more vulnerable to power outages. Soon, however, a new backup system could become available: powering your home from your electric vehicle.
With interest in electric cars and light trucks rising in the U.S., auto makers are introducing many new EV models and designs. Some of these new rides will offer bidirectional charging – the ability to charge a car battery at home, then move that power back into the house, and eventually, into the grid.
[Over 150,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world.Sign up today.]
Only a few models offer this capacity now, and it requires special equipment that can add several thousand dollars to the price of an EV. But Penn State energy expert Seth Blumsack sees value in this emerging technology.
“Enabling homeowners to use their vehicles as backup when the power goes down would reduce the social impacts of large-scale blackouts. It also would give utilities more time to restore service – especially when there is substantial damage to power poles and wires,” Blumsack explains. “Bidirectional charging is also an integral part of a broader vision for a next-generation electric grid in which millions of EVs are constantly taking power from the grid and giving it back – a key element of an electrified future.”
Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a virtual address on Wednesday urged Congress to push for both a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as well as for additional planes and defense systems to respond to Russia’s continued invasion.
Zelenskyy said in video, “Russia has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death for thousands of people”.
Citing Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the Ukrainian President showed graphic video of death and devastation his country has suffered and continues to deal with daily in the war.
The live-streamed address in the Capitol complex had a translator for majority of his speech. To close, Zelenskyy spoke in English, pleading directly to President Biden: “I wish you to be the leader of the world. Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.”
A day earlier, on Tuesday, President Biden signed into law a $13.6 billion package for emergency aid in Ukraine to help with humanitarian and weaponry assistance. According to Reuters, Biden is also expected to announce further aid in the amount of $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine.
The committee alleges that Trump and his allies engaged in a “corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of Electoral College ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power.”
The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol said in a federal court filingWednesday that former President Donald Trump and his campaign allies committed crimes as they attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
While it is not conducting a criminal investigation and does not have the power to bring charges on its own, the House panel told the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California that lawmakers have “a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371.”
The Justice Department is currently investigating the January 6 attack and has charged more than 225 people for taking part, but it “has not given any indication that it is considering seeking charges against Trump,” the Associated Pressnotes.
The House committee’s filing was submitted in response to a lawsuit by former Trump lawyer John Eastman, who is fighting the panel’s request for thousands of emails related to efforts to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally scrap electoral votes from states President Joe Biden won.
Eastman has cited attorney-client privilege to justify withholding the emails from the select committee, but the panel’s filing argues that the documents Eastman is shielding are not privileged.
“Communications in which a ‘client consults an attorney for advice that will serve him in the commission of a fraud or crime’ are not privileged from disclosure,” the filing states. “The evidence supports an inference that President Trump, [Eastman], and several others entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort.”
The filing points specifically to an email it obtained showing that Eastman urged Pence’s lawyer to violate the law in an attempt to block congressional certification of Trump’s electoral loss.
“I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation [of the Electoral Count Act] and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations, as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here,” Eastman wrote to Pence attorney Greg Jacob on the night of January 6, 2021.
This is amazing. Trump’s lawyer John Eastman admits that their scheme to overturn the election was breaking the law and said in an email “I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation.” pic.twitter.com/YdgsMvhrR6
In a statement late Wednesday, select committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said the panel’s filing “refutes on numerous grounds the privilege claims Dr. Eastman has made to try to keep hidden records critical to our investigation.”
“Dr. Eastman’s privilege claims raise the question whether the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege applies in this situation,” the lawmakers wrote. “We believe evidence in our possession justifies review of these documents under this exception in camera. The facts we’ve gathered strongly suggest that Dr. Eastman’s emails may show that he helped Donald Trump advance a corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of Electoral College ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power.”
Trump and his former aides have sought to impede the select committee’s investigation at every turn, obstructing the panel’s efforts to obtain White House documents—which the former president was notorious for destroying—and testimony from key witnesses.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court formally ended Trump’s attempt to prevent the committee from examining more than 700 pages of White House records related to the January 6 attack.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The first casualty of war, says historian Ronald Suny, is not just the truth. Often, he says, “it is what is left out.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin began a full-scale attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 and many in the world are now getting a crash course in the complex and intertwined history of those two nations and their peoples. Much of what the public is hearing, though, is jarring to historian Suny’s ears. That’s because some of it is incomplete, some of it is wrong, and some of it is obscured or refracted by the self-interest or the limited perspective of who is telling it. We asked Suny, a professor at the University of Michigan, to respond to a number of popular historical assertions he’s heard recently.
Putin’s view of Russo-Ukrainian history has been widely criticized in the West. What do you think motivates his version of the history?
Putin indicates that Ukraine by its very nature ought to be friendly, not hostile, to Russia. But he sees its current government as illegitimate, aggressively nationalist and even fascist. The condition for peaceful relations between states, he repeatedly says, is that they do not threaten the security of other states. Yet, as is clear from the invasion, he presents the greatest threat to Ukraine.
Putin sees Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia, believing that if it enters NATO, offensive weaponry will be placed closer to the Russian border, as already is being done in Romania and Poland.
It’s possible to interpret Putin’s statements about the historical genesis of the Ukrainian state as self-serving history and a way of saying, “We created them, we can take them back.” But I believe he may instead have been making a forceful appeal to Ukraine and the West to recognize the security interests of Russia and provide guarantees that there will be no further moves by NATO toward Russia and into Ukraine. Ironically, his recent actions have driven Ukrainians more tightly into the arms of the West.
The Western position is that the breakaway regions Putin recognized, Donetsk and Luhansk, are integral parts of Ukraine. Russia claims that the Donbass region, which includes these two provinces, is historically and rightfully part of Russia. What does history tell us?
During the Soviet period, these two provinces were officially part of Ukraine. When the USSR disintegrated, the former Soviet republic boundaries became, under international law, the legal boundaries of the post-Soviet states. Russia repeatedly recognized those borders, though reluctantly in the case of Crimea.
Historical claims to land are always contested – think of Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis – and they are countered by claims that the majority living on the land in the present takes precedence over historical claims from the past. Russia can claim Donbass with its own arguments based on ethnicity, but so can Ukrainians with arguments based on historical possession. Such arguments go nowhere and often lead, as can be seen today, to bloody conflict.
Why was Russia’s recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent such a pivotal event in the conflict?
When Putin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states, he seriously escalated the conflict, which turned out to be the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That invasion is a hard, harsh signal to the West that Russia will not back down and accept the further arming of and placing of weaponry in Ukraine, Poland and Romania. The Russian president has now led his country into a dangerous preventive war – a war based on the anxiety that sometime in the future his country will be attacked – the outcome of which is unpredictable.
A New York Times story on Putin’s histories of Ukraine says “The newly created Soviet government under Lenin that drew so much of Mr. Putin’s scorn on Monday would eventually crush the nascent independent Ukrainian state. During the Soviet era, the Ukrainian language was banished from schools and its culture was permitted to exist only as a cartoonish caricature of dancing Cossacks in puffy pants.” Is this history of Soviet repression accurate?
Within the strict bounds of the Soviet system, Ukraine, like many other nationalities in the USSR, became a modern nation, conscious of its history, literate in its language, and even in puffy pants permitted to celebrate its ethnic culture. But the contradictory policies of the Soviets in Ukraine both promoted a Ukrainian cultural nation while restricting its freedoms, sovereignty and expressions of nationalism.
History is both a contested and a subversive social science. It is used and misused by governments and pundits and propagandists. But for historians it is also a way to find out what happened in the past and why. As a search for truth, it becomes subversive of convenient and comfortable but inaccurate views of where we came from and where we might be going.
This article has been updated to reflect the correct ethnic and linguistic character of the villages in the Donbas during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. They were Ukrainian.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Almost a year ago, Google took a major step to ensure that its ubiquitous online ad network didn’t put money in the pocket of Steve Bannon, the indicted former adviser to Donald Trump. The company kicked Bannon off YouTube, which Google owns, after he called for the beheading of Anthony Fauci and urged Trump supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to overturn the presidential election results.
Google also confirmed to ProPublica that it has at times blocked ads from appearing on Bannon’s War Room website alongside individual articles that violate Google’s rules.
But Bannon found a loophole in Google’s policies that let him keep earning ad money on his site’s homepage.
Until Monday, the home page automatically played innocuous stock content, such as tips on how to protect your phone in winter weather or how to improve the effectiveness of your LinkedIn profile.
The content likely had no interest for War Room visitors, especially since it was interrupted every few seconds by ads. But the ads, supplied through Google’s network, came from such prominent brands as Land Rover, Volvo, DoorDash, Staples and even Harvard University.
Right below that video player was another that featured clips from Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, which routinely portrays participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as patriots and airs false claims about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The video player running Google ads amid innocuous clips disappeared from Bannon’s website on Monday, after ProPublica inquired with Google, Bannon and advertisers. The change was not Google’s doing: Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the player did not break the company’s rules. He said Google’s policies were effective in preventing ads from ending up on sites with “harmful content.”
“We have strict policies that explicitly prohibit publishers from both promoting harmful content and providing inaccurate information about their properties, misrepresenting their identity, or sending unauthorized ad requests,” Aciman said. “These policies exist to protect both users and advertisers from abuse, fraud or disruptive ad experiences, and we enforce them through a mix of automated tools and human review. When we find publishers that violate these policies we stop ads from serving on their site.”
A spokesperson for Bannon, who was indicted this month for stonewalling Congress’ bipartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection, declined to answer questions for this article.
Zach Edwards, the founder of Victory Medium, a consulting firm that advises companies on online advertising, said the digital ad industry, including Google, is rife with loopholes and bad behavior, and its complexity prevents advertisers from understanding what they’re funding. “A lot of times ad buyers just shrug their shoulders and are like, ‘It’s video ads, what can you do?’” he said.
Of Bannon’s dodge and Google’s acquiescence to it, Edwards added, “Nothing about this is aboveboard.”
The vast majority of online ads aren’t purchased through direct relationships with the sites on which they appear. Instead, brands use automated ad exchanges like Google’s that rely on real-time auctions to automatically place ads in front of people who fit a brand’s target audience. As long as Google keeps the War Room website in its network, and as long as brands don’t specifically block it from their ad buys, Bannon’s site can keep collecting money. Warroom.org draws between 450,000 and 1 million visits a month, according to traffic tracker SimilarWeb.
And Google takes a cut of each dollar from ads it places on the War Room site.
“For most advertisers, having an ad placed on a Steve Bannon-affiliated outlet is the stuff of nightmares,” said Nandini Jammi, the co-founder of Check My Ads, an ad industry watchdog. “The fact that ad exchanges are still serving ads should tell brands that their vendors are not vetting their inventory, and I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers who have found themselves on War Room request refunds.”
Companies contacted by ProPublica said they didn’t intend to advertise on War Room’s site and would take steps to stop their ads from appearing there. Land Rover called the ad “an error.” Harry Pierre, a spokesperson for Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, said the school is working with its ad buyer to update its list of unwanted websites. Adobe said its ad was a violation of its brand safety guidelines. “We worked with the ad partner to remove the ads from the site,” a spokesperson said.
DoorDash also blamed a third-party vendor. “DoorDash’s mission is to empower local communities and provide access to opportunity for all, and we stand against the spread of disinformation that undermines those principles,” the company said in a statement.
Spokespeople for Volvo did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Google may have banned a different site affiliated with Bannon. Until recently, the site Populist Press earned money via Google’s ad network. The site, styled to imitate the Drudge Report, was prominently linked on the War Room homepage and draws roughly 5 million visits a month, according to SimilarWeb.
According to an online disclosure from a former advertising partner, Populist Press is affiliated with August Partners, a Colorado company registered to Amanda Shea, whose husband, Tim Shea, was a partner of Bannon’s in We Build the Wall initiative. Bannon and allies used We Build the Wall to solicit money to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Federal prosecutors accused Bannon, Tim Shea and other associates of misusing the money, and Trump pardoned Bannon before leaving office. An attorney for Tim Shea, who is awaiting trial, declined to comment, and Amanda Shea did not respond to a request for comment.
At some point during the week of Nov. 15, Populist Press stopped showing Google ads — and it stopped being promoted on the War Room homepage. Aciman, the Google spokesperson, declined to comment on whether Google had banned Populist Press, but said that the site “is not monetizing using our services.”
Bannon’s “War Room” podcast draws a massive audience, with more than 100 million total downloads across more than 1,000 episodes, available on platforms including Apple’s. A sort of far-right “Meet the Press,” it’s the go-to talk show for pro-Trump influencers and Republican hopefuls. Frequently using violent imagery, Bannon and his guests promote new ways of trying to overturn the election, such as demanding “audits” of the 2020 ballots. Since February, Bannon has inspired thousands to take over local-level Republican Party committees, unlocking influence over how elections are run from the ground up.
On his podcast in 2020, Bannon called for the beheading of Fauci and FBI director Chris Wray. On the eve of Jan. 6, Bannon said, “We’re on the point of attack” and “all hell will break loose tomorrow.” Bannon was also reportedly involved in the Trump team’s command center on the day of the riot, which is part of congressional investigators’ interest in his testimony and records. Since the insurrection, Bannon has taken up the cause of people held on charges related to the Capitol riot.
In addition to his podcast, Bannon has spun a complex web of political and business ventures. He co-founded a training academy for right-wing nationalists that got mired in a legal dispute with the Italian government over control of a medieval monastery near Rome. A media company he launched with Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire on whose yacht Bannon was arrested in 2020, was part of a $539 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in September for illegally marketing digital currency. Before advising Trump, Bannon had a wide-ranging career in finance and movies, and his pardon from Trump lifted a $1.75 million lien against his house in Laguna Beach, California.
Bannon’s megaphone is not just influential. It’s also lucrative. His show and website have promoted fellow election fraud evangelist Mike Lindell’s MyPillow business, as well as a cryptocurrency investing newsletter called TheCryptoCapitalist. (The marketers of an unproven COVID-19 treatment that Bannon promoted were sued by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission in April. The chiropractor behind the treatment denies the government’s accusations.) The War Room site also contains ads from MGID, a network that places content ads that look like links to related articles and sometimes promote dubious health or financial products.
It’s not clear how much money Bannon makes from online ads. But industry data shows that the links placed by MGID are much less profitable than the video ads facilitated by Google. (MGID did not respond to a request for comment.)
The issue is that major brands likely have no idea that they’re advertising on the site of one of the biggest perpetrators of bogus election fraud claims. That disconnect between brands and where their ads and money end up is a failure of digital advertising and a concern for consumers, according to industry experts.
“Over the past few years, consumers have become really vocal about buying from brands that are aligned with their values,” said Jammi of Check My Ads. “When they find out a brand is funding toxic content, that matters to them.”
A similar scenario has played out with ads that aired during Bannon’s podcast airing on a right-wing website called Real America’s Voice. In March, for instance, an ad for prescription coupon company GoodRx appeared on Bannon’s show.
“We take the trust and reputation of our brand very seriously and have strict advertising standards in place, which include not participating in heavily editorialized news programming,” the company said in an emailed statement to ProPublica. “This placement was an error in the media buying policies.”
Bannon’s show also airs on Pluto TV, a streaming service owned by ViacomCBS that is available on Roku and other devices. This month, the show on Pluto featured ads for such major companies as Men’s Wearhouse, Lexus and Procter & Gamble, according to monitoring by the liberal watchdog Media Matters. As with the Google video ads on the War Room website, these ads are not placed directly, and companies were at a loss to explain why they had appeared on Bannon’s show. (Bannon’s podcast is available in the Google Podcasts app, but the company does not place ads in it.) A Lexus spokesperson said the company’s ad was briefly on Bannon’s site and taken down. A spokesperson for Procter & Gamble did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our marketing spend follows targeted customers, rather than choosing specific programs we want to appear alongside,” said Mike Stefanov, a spokesperson for Tailored Brands, which owns Men’s Wearhouse. “The team continually refines the criteria used, but the appearance of advertising on a specific program does not necessarily mean the company agrees with or endorses the views espoused.”
Extreme Weather Accelerates in Frequency and Destructive Power
Ida hit Louisiana with extreme force, causing damage and mayhem, and leaving hundreds of thousands without power earlier this week. The remnants of that destruction have now moved Northeast. Next, Hurricane Larry is expected to become a major storm by Friday according to the National Hurricane Center.
Effects of Hurricane Ida unloaded in the New York City metro area, creating, unprecedented extreme rainfall. So much so that for the first time ever, a “flash flood emergency” was initiated and both New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy declared states of emergency starting late Wednesday.
“This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!,” the National Weather Service wrote. And example of the extreme nature of the deluge comes via the stat that Central Park got more rain in one hour than it normally would in the entire month of September. More than 2.5 times the previous highest count even, which was tallied just recently.
Parts of New York City and the Tri-State, covering a population of where near 9 million people reside have been affected. Roads flooded, transforming the paths to looks more like raging rivers and rendering subways, cars, and basements of homes useless.
At least 9 people have been reported dead as a result of storm.
Images posted throughout social media overnight showed the insane amount of watering surging over roads as public transportations attempt to navigate and cars get stuck in the water. Even a frightening video of tornado happening in real time in Mullica Hill, New Jersey.
All too familiar the Elephant in the room needs acknowledgment
Although barely mentioned in the midst of chaos and people desperately trying to get to work on Thursday, climate change is giving a kind of early warning signal via extreme weather evens like this, as well as influencing the severity of the massive drought worsening daily in the west, immense wildfires and natural disasters that are being seen with unprecedented frequency and intensity.
If there was ever a wake up call to change and respond with speed and action, this is it.
On twitter there was a thread that likened the photos and videos to the prescient sci-fi film “The Day After Tomorrow” which depicted an ice-age occurring as a result of climate change, and also had scenes of massive flooding (due to the sea level rising which is currently happening, day by day).
The comparison is a stark one, with the Hollywood generated special effects stills not nearly as chilling as the current reality showed in photos being shared and tweeted.
There’s an all too familiar thread building here – larger more intense and devastating events that many keep saying are a coincidence or “random”. I think any child can see (@gretathunberg ?) that there is zero chance anymore that coincidence plays any more that a minuscule role in these tragedies growing, expanding and increasing exponentially.
Unfortunately, we can expect more of the same, no only here in this country, as mentioned above with Larry queuing up of shore, but around the world with extreme and dangerous droughts, heatwaves, polar vortex episodes, floods, deadly wildfires and more becoming the “norm”.
The time to recognize the origin of these mounting calamities has passed, but any proactive, powerful response by governments and industry has barely begun. Perhaps the images and tragedies now being documented and shared (such as below) can help to harden our resolve to see that a change, toward the drastic measures required to combat this climate emergency will finally begin in earnest.
Queens Boulevard in Maspeth/Corona is a literal river at the moment. Bus fully flooded driving through, multiple cars stuck in the water. Absolutely insane. pic.twitter.com/LuSL9uWCEl
Evacuations resume with green light from Afghanistan’s new rulers
Although no concrete timetable for the evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies has been solidified with Taliban, according to AP, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan reports that the Taliban has agreed to allow U.S. directed “safe passage” from Afghanistan.
Despite some civilians encountering resistance and even violence as they attempted to reach Kabul international airport, “very large numbers” were reaching destinations. After interruptions (due to Afghans rushing onto tarmac) , per Pentagon officials, the airlift is back on track and schedule being accelerated.
“I cautioned them against interference in our evacuation, and made it clear to them that any attack would be met with overwhelming force in the defense of our forces”
-Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command
A total of more than 6,000 U.S. troops are expected to be involved in securing the airport. The White House reports 13 flights on Tuesday airlifted 1,100 U.S. citizens. President Biden wants the evaluation to be completed by the end of the month, August 31, 2021.
As wildfires swept through the Italian island of Sicily, fueled by an extreme heatwave, officials in one city recorded a Wednesday recorded what is believed to be the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe.
Local meteorologists in Siracusa reported that temperatures reached 48.8ºC or 119.8ºF, breaking the continent’s previous record of 118.4ºF, which was set in 1977 in Athens.
Today has provisionally seen the highest #temperature ever recorded in #Italy 🌡️ ⚠️
SIAS have confirmed that Siracusa in #Sicily reached 48.8ºC earlier this afternoon and if verified by @WMO, it will become a new European temperature record 📈 pic.twitter.com/0L8Af2lp6r
The World Meteorological Organization still needs to independently confirm the high temperature. Local reports of the new all-time record are in line with the weather extremes that have been seen in the Mediterranean region.
“The climate crisis—I’d like to use this term, and not climate change—the climate crisis is here, and it shows us everything needs to change.”
—Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greek prime minister
Firefighters in Sicily and Calabria have carried out more than 3,000 operations in the last 12 hours. Thousands of acres of land have burned, and at least one death was reported in Calabria when a 76-year-old man’s home collapsed in flames.
“We are losing our history, our identity is turning to ashes, our soul is burning,” Giuseppe Falcomata, the mayor of the historic city of Reggio Calabria, said in a statement on social media.
Francesco Italia, the mayor of Siracusa, told La Repubblica that the area is “in full emergency.”
“We are devastated by the fires and our ecosystem—one of the richest and most precious in Europe—is at risk,” Italia said.
As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, wildfires driven by extreme heat have devastated other parts of the Mediterranean.
In Algeria, at least 65 people have been killed in wildfires in recent days, including 28 soldiers who had been deployed to battle the flames. Twelve firefighters were also in critical condition in hospitals on Wednesday.
Tunisia recorded its highest temperature ever on Tuesday, registering 49ºC (120ºF).
In Greece, most of the wildfires that have burned through the country this week were under control on Thursday. Surveying the damage, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called the fires “the greatest ecological catastrophe of the last few decades.”
“We managed to save lives, but we lost forests and property,” Mitsotakis said at a Thursday press conference in Athens.
The wildfires started amid an intense heatwave that lasted several days and forced officials to call on firefighters from 24 other countries across Europe and the Middle East to help fight 100 active fires per day.
Mitsotakis did not express confidence that the situation will remain under control in the coming weeks, as the country’s wildfire season continues.
“We are in the middle of August and it’s clear we will have difficult days ahead of us,” the prime minister told reporters.
“The climate crisis—I’d like to use this term, and not climate change—the climate crisis is here, and it shows us everything needs to change,”
