#richest country in europe

[banglakhobor]

কাঁড়ি কাঁড়ি টাকা..! গাড়ি-বাংলো-ব্যাঙ্ক ব্যালেন্স..! বিশ্বের সবচেয়ে ধনী 'এই' দেশ

বড়লোকি কী জিনিস এই দেশে এসে দেখুন! আমেরিকা, রাশিয়া, চিন, জার্মানি ও ফ্রান্স বিশ্বের বৃহৎ অর্থনীতি ও শক্তিশালী দেশ হলেও আয়ের দিক থেকে তারা ছোট দেশগুলির চেয়ে পিছিয়ে রয়েছে। বিশ্বাস না হলেও বাস্তবে কিন্তু বিশ্বের ধনী দেশের তালিকায় অনেক পিছিয়ে রয়েছে এই বড় দেশগুলি। চলুন দেখে নেওয়া যাক সেই তালিকা যাতে রয়েছে বিশ্বের সেই ধনী দেশগুলি যারা আয়ের দিক থেকে শক্তিশালী দেশগুলোকে পিছনে ফেলে…

[lgbtlunaverse]

I think a lot of people's perception of "US centrism" on this site is "americans assuming us-specific problems are universal" but i've found it just as often if not more often manifests as the opposite. Usamericans thinking a problem people deal with worldwide (food deserts, late stage capitalism, bigotry) or a problem that did start primarily in the US but has been exported worldwide via cultural imperialism (this particular example is not the us but canada, but I sure did looooove having trucker protests in my country after they got 'inspired' by those in north america /s) are things only they have to deal with. I regularly get tags on this post that say something like 'blame the puritans for ruining american society' or will straight up go '#usa #fuck this country #i bet the rest of the world doesn't have this problem' I am from the Netherlands and have never set foot on the american continent.

[klimanaturali]

Os Países Mais Ricos da Europa (€)

[ravenkings]

Bernie is wrong. He has always been wrong and is still wrong. The flaw in his theory is what he deems the “wealthy elite” versus what everyday Americans consider them to be. Voters don’t see all billionaires as the elites. They see college-educated liberals on the coasts, some of whom are billionaires, as elites.

Bernie-style populism didn’t land because billionaires figured out long ago they could undermine it by being socially right-wing, and the working class would forgive their wealth and privilege. That’s why this same demographic is willing to make it rain for grifters like Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson. That’s why they worship the wealthiest man on the planet like a God and consider him some real-life Tony Stark. People dismissed Donald Trump as a shameless attention-hungry New York oligarch until he called Mexicans rapists. Then he shot up to the top of the GOP primary polls. The working class didn’t think much of Elon Musk until he said “pronouns suck.” Then he became their hero. A scion of working-class Pennsylvania lost his US Senate seat last week to a hedge fund manager from Connecticut. West Virginia elected their richest man to the Senate after electing him governor – as a Democrat and later a Republican. Ohio tossed out their longtime Democratic senator, known for his strong support of labor rights, for – literally, no joke – a used-car salesman.

You can’t tell me the working class in America thinks being a billionaire alone is what makes one a “wealthy elite.” There are significant factors at play here Bernie is either oblivious to or purposely ignorant of.

In college, a professor once told me that Communism never succeeded in the United States because we are too religious and proud as a country. Religion, traditions, and culture were never widely discredited the way they were in Europe and Asia, where the clergy and nobility kept the bourgeoisie in figurative chains for centuries. The relative ease of social mobility made America unique compared to its Western counterparts. Historically, American progressivism has been focused on expanding social mobility – initially limited to only white men – to identity groups who had been denied it at the start: blacks, women, and immigrants. We have done it, with various amounts of success. While it may seem counterintuitive, Americans pride themselves in being the nation that pioneered the idea that wealth and status can be achieved through ingenuity and hard work and not just based on a lucky roll of the genetic dice, as it was in the Old World. It doesn’t mean we don’t have generational wealth in our country; we do, but since it isn’t the sole way to achieve wealth and power, we don’t care nearly as much about destroying all of it. Further, we will happily endorse it if the oligarchs and the aristocrats vow to promote and protect the social values we care about and the social hierarchy that benefits us.

It’s one of the reasons I believe Bernie could never beat Trump. If you ask working-class people what they want: an anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual billionaire or a Vermont socialist backed by kids from Harvard and UC Berkeley who hate our traditions and customs, the working class will always back the billionaire.

–Nick Rafter, "Bernie Sanders Can Take a Seat"

[ezrazone]

i was so frightened when i saw the fires outside al aqsa martyr’s hospital in the center of the strip. a hospital still standing, one of the last, named in honor of the palestinian dead.

this is where my dearest friend mohamed, his wife manal, and these three beautiful children have been sheltering. i waited in dread and fear to learn if these children were among the human beings burned alive. i couldn’t eat. i paced and shook.

when the intensification of the genocide on palestine began on october 7th, 2023 (a continuation of the nakbas, “catastrophes” “disasters” that the illegitimate entity has visited upon the people of the land since its inception less than a hundred years ago), i struggled to pray.

god seemed all around in the silence, but i felt insecure at the prospect of shouting into that darkness with all of my heart. it seemed petty, somehow - what did i have to pray for? my ancestors escaped a catastrophe in europe. many, many died, but enough survived to drop me in this white skin in the richest country in the world. what does a winner in a global bloodsport have to pray for?

as i have watched israel’s unmasking, it is as if the scales have fallen from my eyes with hashem. i know now that i cannot gaze upon the lord god’s silent face in the abyss but look instead upon my muslim brothers who are my own family. my own flesh and blood.

when i finally received a text from mohamed, i quietly left the room i had stood in and dropped to my knees in the quiet dark. there, i made god. here is god’s face:

how we care for these children. look into their eyes. how will you honor them? do you have a skill? will you write a song for them? draw a picture for them? so the world knows their story and loves them enough to tear this wretched world open and build one that keeps them safe?

my favorite drawings i have ever made are my drawings for mohamed’s family.

how do we meet what empire is doing to our family?

throw sand in its gears by any means necessary. love the living with all of your heart.

give your money away. it’s only money. give your time away. that’s what time is for. give your heart away. that’s what that’s for too.

Y'varekh'khah Adonai V'yishm'rekha; a free Falastin, B’ezrat Hashem, Adonai Adonai Amen.

[alpaca-clouds]

Solarpunk Autumns. Solarpunk Winters.

Solarpunk as a genre exists in a state of a permanent summer. Both as a genre, and an aesthetic. Solarpunk pictures usually show us worlds that have everything in so many shades of green. Green bushes. Green trees. Green everything. Fields in Solarpunk are always filled with ripe corn and wheat. And trees in Solarpunk are full of ripe fruit.

But if we look into Solarpunk worldbuilding there is also the fact that of course at some point at many places of the world it will become autumn, and winter.

I mean, I am feeling it right now, sitting here in my bed with three blankets and shivering, as the summer has very suddenly ended.

Sure, Solarpunk originated from Brazil. And while I do not know a whole lot about Brazillian climate, I do understand that it is close enough to the equator to be fairly warm yearround.

But I honestly would love to see more stories and artworks set in Solarpunk worlds during the autumn and winter. Especially because it is a very interesting topic when it comes to both the renewable energies and the food systems of Solarpunk worlds.

Now, admittedly, the renewable energy is less interesting to me, but we still should talk about it. In winter and autumn a lot of the renewable energy sources are a bit less viable. The sun has less energy and the further north (or south) you go, the less sun you get during the winter. Wind turbines also often struggle because there is in fact too much wind - and some older turbines do not do too well during harsh winter conditions. Water usually has less of a problem, unless the water energy is created in shallow conditions where the water freezes. But of course, there is nuclear energy to take care of most issues, even if everything else fails - even though some people still do not want to hear about it.

The food aspect is a lot more interesting though, especially from a modern point of view.

Because we people today are very used to eating the same stuff year around. Like potatoes, carrots, bellpeppers, tomatoes, cabbage, oranges, apples, pears, and bananas are usually available in the supermarket no matter when you go there. But of course we also know that those only are there because of the rather destructive ways we use to cultivate food and bring it to us. These things usually are grown somewhere closer to the equator and then are brought to Europe/North America via plane, emitting a lot more CO2.

Of course, this is a fairly new development. For the most of human history, nobody - or only the very richest people - had access to imported food like that. So instead they would only eat was either was available in their own country and their own fields right now, or that they could conserve in some way or form.

And frankly... I think that is something I would like to see some more off in Solarpunk media. In people not needing everything to be available all the time. And people also working to conserve food in one way or another to make it last longer.

Also I do want to bring it up again: There were a lot of well known "winter vegetables" in Europe during most of our history there. Stuff that would get ripe in late autumn and would keep rather well. And a lot of those vegetables have been forgotten.

So... Yeah, I really would see that issue discussed a bit more.

And sure, we might be able to worldbuild around the issue in some degree with greenhouses and stuff. But I think it would be nice to just question our relation with the always available foods.

[femsolid]

“The ultra-rich like to tell us that getting rich takes skill, grit and hard work. But the truth is most wealth is taken, not made. So many of the so-called ‘self-made’ are actually heirs to vast fortunes, handed down through generations of unearned privilege. Untaxed billions of dollars in inheritance is an affront to fairness, perpetuating a new aristocracy where wealth and power stays locked in the hands of a few. The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable. The failure to stop billionaires is now spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth accumulation accelerated —by three times— but so too has their power. The crown jewel of this oligarchy is a billionaire president, backed and bought by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, running the world’s largest economy. We present this report as a stark wake up-call that ordinary people the world over are being crushed by the enormous wealth of a tiny few.”

- Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar.

Oxfam predicts there will be at least five trillionaires a decade from now.

Forbes data indicates that the largest annual increase in billionaire wealth occurred in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sixty percent of billionaire wealth is now derived from inheritance, monopoly power, corruption or crony connections, as Oxfam argues that “extreme billionaire wealth is largely unmerited.” 

Richest 1 percent in the Global North extracted $30 million an hour from the Global South through the financial system in 2023.

Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990, according to World Bank data.

The wealth of the world’s ten richest men grew on average by almost $100 million a day —even if they lost 99 percent of their wealth overnight, they would remain billionaires.

This ever-growing concentration of wealth is enabled by a monopolistic concentration of power, with billionaires increasingly exerting influence over industries and public opinion.

Research by Forbes found that every billionaire under 30 has inherited their wealth, while UBS estimates that over 1,000 of today’s billionaires will pass on more than $5.2 trillion to their heirs over the next two to three decades.

Many of the super-rich, particularly in Europe, owe part of their wealth to historical colonialism and the exploitation of poorer countries.

Low and middle-income countries spend on average nearly half of their national budgets on debt repayments, often to rich creditors in New York and London. This far outstrips their combined investment in education and healthcare.

Despite contributing 90 percent of the labor that drives the global economy, workers in low and middle-income countries receive only 21 percent of global income.

Migrant workers in rich countries earn, on average, about 13 percent less than nationals, with the wage gap rising to 21 percent for women migrants.

Oxfam report published on the 20th of January 2025.

[argumate]

America, the richest country in the world; America, the largest common market for most of the 20th century; America, the country that invented the mass produced motor car and reshaped its entire economy around them; America why are your cars so very bad??

somehow Europe made better cars despite being unable to afford to buy or fuel them, Japan -- a country you nuked! twice! -- had to come to your factories and teach you how to run them, Korea saw Japan overtake you in twenty years and resolved to do it in ten, then China kicked your ass in five; we even manufactured better cars in Australia just because we could!

and it's not for lack of competition, Americans are constantly starting car companies and fighting to the death with them, check this out:

how does so much wealth and so much effort result in so much mediocrity?

[messrsrarchives]

if you are one of the people who goes to comment sections on jegulus or snape posts, who talks about the DE characters having a place etc etc, i hope this is a wake-up call. i really do.

if you are one of the people that throws around the word nazi when you see this content and the term nazi sympathiser to the people engaging in it? in the nicest way possible, wake the fuck up.

it's important to discuss politics in literature, absolutely. but this is a fandom space and the things people ship have absolutely no repercussions on the real world, nor does it reflect their personal views.

this does.

the richest man in the world doing two back to back nazi salutes at a presidential rally for the most powerful country on the world stage? that has repercussions worldwide.

that has the EU looking at X. that has the EU worrying about X because europe took a massive shift to the right after trump's last presidency and the german government has collapsed. that has the EU worried about the influence of a nazi salute on germany's upcoming elections next month. when the us "government" is run by someone who likes AfD (an extremist far-right german political party), and the richest man in the world stands and does a nazi salute. two, mind you. two nazi salutes back to back?

THAT has repercussions worldwide. not fictional character james potter fictionally kissing fictional character regulus black.

i am normally a lot nicer when i address these things but point blank: you are a vile fucking person if you care more about the fictional politics in a fandom space than the real politics that is playing out right now.

these words in fandom have made so many people so uncomfortable for so long. they have tried to explain how uncomfortable it is to come to their SAFE SPACE and see these words thrown around, to have them themselves be called one when they and their families have been affected.

yall ran to tiktok and cried over americans using the word sweater instead of jumper. yall ran to tiktok and said that words. have. meaning?

apply that here. words have meaning. stop throwing them around and put this energy into real world politics if you're so passionate about stamping out nazi ideology.

[madthetruemad]

can't even have a vacation

tf 141 x fem!reader (? not really, but if i continue this, then that is where it would lead to)

cw | blood, death, reader gets hurt, grammatical errors, reader is a u.s. citizen (and has a job as an engineer) but nothing else of reader is described, ghost gives a terrible first impression (terrible jokes too), etc.

You raised your phone to eye level, a light, little smile on your lips as you pressed on the white circle on the screen. The camera on your phone sounding out a quiet click as it snapped a picture of the view.

As a U.S. citizen who worked the day they graduated college, you were finally able to take your very first vacation. So with your newly acquired passport, your newly bought luggage, and your taste for something other than the bland walls of your overpriced apartment you turned off your electric and water so you wouldn’t get billed, handed the keys to your sister so she could watch your apartment from time to time and headed off out of the U.S. borders and across the sea.

With all the time you worked, you had managed to obtain a considerable amount of paid time off, two months’ worth, in fact, so taking advantage of that you decided to take exactly two months. The second month of your vacation having your birthday reside in which you plan to enjoy fully in some rich, extravagant hotel and restaurant.

Now, you may not be the richest person, but as an engineer, you could say that you made enough money to at least enjoy the small things.

In other words, you needed this vacation. Where have you decided to vacation to? Europe. Originally you wanted to go to Japan with your two best friends that you had since high school, but one of them is currently focusing on their Master’s program in college and the other is trying to get their nursing degree, and you? You needed the break. You felt like you would explode and disintegrate into dust if you worked another assignment for a moment longer.

Your friends were luckily understanding and even gave you some options. To be on the safe side and not to struggle as much, you decided to vacation where people spoke English. If you had your friends with you, then you would be a bit more daring and maybe visit a country with no English at all (not counting other tourists), but since you were alone, you didn’t want to risk it.

You brought your phone down then, your eyes bright with excitement as you moved out of everyone’s way a bit inside the hallway to sift through all the cool pictures you managed to take.

You were only three days into your vacation and so far everything was good.

“I am getting hungry though,” you said to yourself, “maybe I should go change out my currency in my wallet instead of using my card all the time…”

You thought it over for a moment before deciding that that was what you wanted to do and searched for the map icon on your phone. Though, before you could type out what you needed, the floor shook suddenly, violently. The force of whatever caused the shaking made both you and everyone else in the hallway of the building fall to the ground.

Your knees hit the floor rather harshly as you winced before looking up, the lights flickered on and off before you heard a door slam open down the hall. Shaking your head, you turned so that you were sitting on the floor to see where the door slam came from, only to see the people with guns come up from the stairway.

“What the-“

Before you could finish the question, there were gunshots. The sound made you flinch and duck down as everyone else around you began to scream and hastily get up to start running. Not wanting to be left to whoever started shooting, you managed to get up in your panicked state and follow the crowd. Though, before you could get far, you were pushed harshly from the side making you stumble again and fall backward. Instead of hitting the floor, however, your ass made contact with an abandoned wheelchair instead.

Huffing, you went to stand up, but before you could even move a muscle, your eyes were met with an end of a gun barrel. The mere sight of it caused you to freeze, your hands slowly coming up to raise above your head.

The man holding the gun seemed to start laughing as he called over one of his “buddies” over and started to talk to one another in a language you didn’t recognize. Then the man who still had his gun pointed at you, kicked your shoe and spoke to you. The confused look on your face gave him the answer he needed as cleared his throat.

“Little disabled girl got abandoned, huh?”

Disabled?

You looked down at the wheelchair you were in.

Oh.

You didn’t know if you should correct him or not. I mean, is it morally wrong to act disabled if it lets you live? Biting the inside of your cheek, you decided not to lie about it even if it saved your life.

“Not disabled,” you managed to say, “when I was running, I was pushed aside and fell into the chair. Before I could get up and run again, you were already pointing your gun at me.”

You didn’t know how much English the man understood, but you hoped it was enough.

The man seemed to laugh again as you spoke, “weird accent, you have. United States?”

You nodded, hands still raised.

“Poor little American. Wrong place, wrong time.”

Well, damn.

You watched as he fixed his hold on his gun and re-aimed it. The barrel of it now more center with your forehead. You didn’t realize it, but your breath became quicker, your heart running like a horse as time seemed to slow. It was like you could feel everything all at once. The sweat that started to form in your palms, the way your back started to feel cold, how your legs and knees were as tenses as logs, and the way you could feel your blood coursing through your heart as he thumped loud against your rib cage.

And just as he moved his finger to the trigger, there was another explosion catching the men off guard, a foot soon colliding with the glass window as someone broke right through it.

“Shit! They’re here already?!”

Turning his attention from you, you watched as he shifted his gun to the windows which was when you could finally hear the helicopters and see what you hoped were good guy soldiers zip lining down to the windows and breaking them open.

Bullets immediately began to fly, and this time you didn’t wait for anyone to stop you as you jumped from the wheelchair and made a beeline for the empty hallway.

You passed by a few others who got shot before you, none of them moving. You couldn’t bring yourself to look down at them as you turned a corner, but just as you did you felt a hand roughly grab you and slam you hard against the wall. An arm soon moves to pin your neck making you wince and panic. On instinct you raised your hands to try to remove the arm, but it was like trying to pry a dog’s mouth open. Impossible.

Opening your eyes, you were met with a skull mask. The mere sight of such a mask sent you in a frenzy as you thrashed harder. Bringing up one of your knees, you hit him as hard as you could in his hip. He didn’t even flinch.

Thinking of something new and as quickly as possibly, you reached for his face instead, Your right hand grabbing onto the skull plating and shifting it in hopes of blocking his view.

“Ghost, let her go! She’s a civilian!”

Just as the voice broke through and the arm that pinned your neck was gone, you had let out a sputtering cough. Both of your feet touching solid ground as you hadn’t even realized the man had lifted you.

Looking up then at who you assumed was “Ghost,” you watched as he fixed his mask. His attention back on you.

“Are you alright?”

It was someone else who spoke to you. A man, probably the same age as your father, helped you steady yourself.

“N- no,” you immediately said, “thought he was going to kill me for a second there.”

You raised your hand to your throat and immediately flinched with how tender it already was. That was definitely going to bruise.

“Your accent… American?”

You nodded.

“Why are you here?”

“Vacation. But let me say that it isn’t going to well.”

You all could hear the gunshots going off from where you just came from.

“Come with us, we’ll get you out.”

“Only if he doesn’t pin me to the wall again.”

“No promises,” quipped the man with the mask immediately causing you to make a face at him.

“Next time I’ll aim for your crotch,” you muttered, referencing to when you kneed him in the hip.

He made an amused sound, as he crossed his arms over his chest, “was that what you tried to do when you hit my hip? Cause I didn’t even feel it.”

“You-“

“Enough. Ghost can apologize later, for now we will focus on meeting up with the others and getting you out of here.”

You were tempted to ask why they weren’t going to assist with the fighting down the hall, but kept your lips shut otherwise.

“Ghost, watch our back. Missy, stay behind me.”

So, for now, with the slight pain in your neck and everywhere else, you decided to follow this man’s lead.

Yeah… definitely the worst vacation you ever had, and it doesn’t help that it’s your first vacation either.

“Try not to get pinned again,” Ghost said behind you.

“Then I’ll be sure to watch out for you.”

A part of you knew that he was only quipping at you to make the tone lighter and to maybe not make you so scared of him since he did get you pretty good, but you still kept on your toes. Wait, who even were these guys anyway?

You were so caught up in the way that they didn’t point their guns at you that you forgot to even ask them, but before you could open your mouth the man ahead of you was already prepared.

“We’re the good guys, so don’t worry. You’ll be back home in no time.”

You decided to take his word for it.

[elbiotipo]

The US isn't a real country. There's 89 towns called Springfield, and another ten with the same name as each town in europe, the judges are allowed to make laws because their legal system is essentially the same as the one used by early medieval germanic chiefdoms, they insist on claiming to be a democracy even though they have an electoral college and only two parties (which are almost as old as the country itself), they're divided into a federation but are more regionally homogenous than Luxembourg, they make such an absurd incredible amount of drama and destruction worldwide over two singular office buildings getting attacked, it's ridiculous. We should ISOT them to the center of the sun so they leave us alone

Don't forget that they use driving licenses as IDs because they built their entire society around cars, they see guns as fashion and status items (though that might be in line with ancient and medieval cultures) and despite being one of the richest societies in history, almost all their cities are ugly and boring.

Also, Donald Trump is a real person instead of a cartoon of a capitalist that came to life.

Someone was very very drunk when they did the worldbuilding of the US.

[mariacallous]

Climate denial may be on the decline, but a phenomenon at least as injurious to the cause of climate protection has blossomed beside it: doomism, or the belief that there’s no way to halt the Earth’s ascendant temperatures. Burgeoning ranks of doomers throw up their hands, crying that it’s too late, too hard, too costly to save humanity from near-future extinction.

There are numerous strands of doomism. The followers of ecologist Guy McPherson, for example, gravitate to wild conspiracy theories that claim humanity won’t last another decade. Many young people, understandably overwhelmed by negative climate headlines and TikTok videos, are convinced that all engagement is for naught. Even the Guardian, which boasts superlative climate coverage, sometimes publishes alarmist articles and headlines that exaggerate grim climate projections.

This gloom-and-doomism robs people of the agency and incentive to participate in a solution to the climate crisis. As a writer on climate and energy, I am convinced that we have everything we require to go carbon neutral by 2050: the science, the technology, the policy proposals, and the money, as well as an international agreement in which nearly 200 countries have pledged to contain the crisis. We don’t need a miracle or exorbitantly expensive nuclear energy to stave off the worst. The Gordian knot before us is figuring out how to use the resources we already have in order to make that happen.

One particularly insidious form of doomism is exhibited in Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, originally published in 2020 and translated from Japanese into English this year. In his unlikely international bestseller, Saito, a Marxist philosopher, puts forth the familiar thesis that economic growth and decarbonization are inherently at odds. He goes further, though, and speculates that the climate crisis can only be curbed in a classless, commons-based society. Capitalism, he writes, seeks to “use all the world’s resources and labor power, opening new markets and never passing up even the slightest chance to make more money.”

Capitalism’s record is indeed damning. The United States and Europe are responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s emissions since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, yet the global south suffers most egregiously from climate breakdown. Today, the richest tenth of the world’s population—living overwhelmingly in the global north and China—is responsible for half of global emissions. If the super-rich alone cut their footprints down to the size of the average European, global emissions would fall by a third, Saito writes.

Saito’s self-stated goals aren’t that distinct from mine: a more egalitarian, sustainable, and just society. One doesn’t have to be an orthodox Marxist to find the gaping disparities in global income grotesque or to see the restructuring of the economy as a way to address both climate breakdown and social injustice. But his central argument—that climate justice can’t happen within a market economy of any kind—is flawed. In fact, it serves next to no purpose because more-radical-than-thou theories remove it from the nuts-and-bolts debate about the way forward.

We already possess a host of mechanisms and policies that can redistribute the burdens of climate breakdown and forge a path to climate neutrality. They include carbon pricing, wealth and global transaction taxes, debt cancellation, climate reparations, and disaster risk reduction, among others. Economies regulated by these policies are a distant cry from neoliberal capitalism—and some, particularly in Europe, have already chalked up marked accomplishments in reducing emissions.

Saito himself acknowledges that between 2000 and 2013, Britain’s GDP increased by 27 percent while emissions fell by 9 percent and that Germany and Denmark also logged decoupling. He writes off this trend as exclusively the upshot of economic stagnation following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. However, U.K. emissions have continued to fall, plummeting from 959 million to 582 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent between 2007 and 2020. The secret to Britain’s success, which Saito doesn’t mention, was the creation of a booming wind power sector and trailblazing carbon pricing system that forced coal-fired plants out of the market practically overnight. Nor does Saito consider that from 1990 to 2022, the European Union reduced its emissions by 31 percent while its economy grew by 66 percent.

Climate protection has to make strides where it can, when it can, and experts acknowledge that it’s hard to change consumption patterns—let alone entire economic systems—rapidly. Progress means scaling back the most harmful types of consumption and energy production. It is possible to do this in stages, but it needs to be implemented much faster than the current plodding pace.

This is why Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at the University of Oxford, is infinitely more pertinent to the public discourse on climate than Saito’s esoteric work. Ritchie’s book is a noble attempt to illustrate that environmental protection to date boasts impressive feats that can be built on, even as the world faces what she concedes is an epic battle to contain greenhouse gases.

Ritchie underscores two environmental afflictions that humankind solved through a mixture of science, smart policy, and international cooperation: acid rain and ozone depletion. I’m old enough to remember the mid-1980s, when factories and power plants spewed out sulfurous and nitric emissions and acid rain blighted forests from the northeastern United States to Eastern Europe. Acidic precipitation in the Adirondacks, my stomping grounds at the time, decimated pine forests and mountain lakes, leaving ghostly swaths of dead timber. Then, scientists pinpointed the industries responsible, and policymakers designed a cap-and-trade system that put a price on their emissions, which forced industry into action; for example, power plants had to fit scrubbers on their flue stacks. The harmful pollutants dropped by 80 percent by the end of the decade, and forests grew back.

The campaign to reverse the thinning of the ozone layer also bore fruit. An international team of scientists deduced that man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) in fridges, freezers, air conditioners, and aerosol cans were to blame. Despite fierce industry pushback, more than 40 countries came together in Montreal in 1987 to introduce a staggered ban on CFCs. Since then, more countries joined the Montreal Protocol, and CFCs are now largely a relic of the past. As Ritchie points out, this was the first international pact of any kind to win the participation of every nation in the world.

While these cases instill inspiration, Ritchie’s assessment of our current crisis is a little too pat and can veer into the Panglossian. The climate crisis is many sizes larger in scope than the scourges of the 1980s, and its antidote—to Saito’s credit—entails revamping society and economy on a global scale, though not with the absolutist end goal of degrowth communism.

Ritchie doesn’t quite acknowledge that a thoroughgoing restructuring is necessary. Although she does not invoke the term, she is an acolyte of “green growth.” She maintains that tweaks to the world’s current economic system can improve the living standards of the world’s poorest, maintain the global north’s level of comfort, and achieve global net zero by 2050. “Economic growth is not incompatible with reducing our environmental impact,” she writes. For her, the big question is whether the world can decouple growth and emissions in time to stave off the darkest scenarios.

Ritchie approaches today’s environmental disasters—air pollution, deforestation, carbon-intensive food production, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing—as problems solvable in ways similar to the crises of the 1980s. Like CFCs and acid rain, so too can major pollutants such as black carbon and carbon monoxide be reined in. Ritchie writes that the “solution to air pollution … follows just one basic principle: stop burning stuff.” As she points out, smart policy has already enhanced air quality in cities such as Beijing (Warsaw, too, as a recent visit convinced me), and renewable energy is now the cheapest form of power globally. What we have to do, she argues, is roll renewables out en masse.

The devil is in making it happen. Ritchie admits that environmental reforms must be accelerated many times over, but she doesn’t address how to achieve this or how to counter growing pushback against green policies. Just consider the mass demonstrations across Europe in recent months as farmers have revolted against the very measures for which Ritchie (correctly) advocates, such as cutting subsidies to diesel gas, requiring crop rotation, eliminating toxic pesticides, and phasing down meat production. Already, the farmers’ vehemence has led the EU to dilute important legislation on agriculture, deforestation, and biodiversity.

Ritchie’s admonishes us to walk more, take public transit, and eat less beef. Undertaken individually, this won’t change anything. But she acknowledges that sound policy is key—chiefly, economic incentives to steer markets and consumer behavior. Getting the right parties into office, she writes, should be voters’ priority.

Yet the parties fully behind Ritchie’s agenda tend to be the Green parties, which are largely in Northern Europe and usually garner little more than 10 percent of the vote. Throughout Europe, environmentalism is badmouthed by center-right and far-right politicos, many of whom lead or participate in governments, as in Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, and Sweden. And while she argues that all major economies must adopt carbon pricing like the EU’s cap-and-trade system, she doesn’t address how to get the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, to introduce this nationwide or even expand its two carbon markets currently operating regionally—one encompassing 12 states on the East Coast, the other in California.

History shows that the best way to make progress in the battle to rescue our planet is to work with what we have and build on it. The EU has a record of exceeding and revising its emissions reduction targets. In the 1990s, the bloc had the modest goal of sinking greenhouse gases to 8 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12; by 2012, it had slashed them by an estimated 18 percent. More recently, the 2021 European Climate Law adjusted the bloc’s target for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions from 40 percent to at least 55 percent by 2030, and the European Commission is considering setting the 2040 target to 90 percent below 1990 levels.

This process can’t be exclusively top down. By far the best way for everyday citizens to counter climate doomism is to become active beyond individual lifestyle choices—whether that’s by bettering neighborhood recycling programs, investing in clean tech equities, or becoming involved in innovative clean energy projects.

Take, for example, “community energy,” which Saito considers briefly and Ritchie misses entirely. In the 1980s, Northern Europeans started to cobble together do-it-yourself cooperatives, in which citizens pooled money to set up renewable energy generation facilities. Many of the now more than 9,000 collectives across the EU are relatively small—the idea is to stay local and decentralized—but larger co-ops illustrate that this kind of enterprise can function at scale. For example, Belgium’s Ecopower, which forgoes profit and reinvests in new energy efficiency and renewables projects, provides 65,000 members with zero-carbon energy at a reduced price.

Grassroots groups and municipalities are now investing in nonprofit clean energy generation in the United States, particularly in California and Minnesota. This takes many forms, including solar fields; small wind parks; electricity grids; and rooftop photovoltaic arrays bolted to schools, parking lots, and other public buildings. Just as important as co-ownership—in contrast to mega-companies’ domination of the fossil fuel market—is democratic decision-making. These start-ups, usually undertaken by ordinary citizens, pry the means of generation out of the hands of the big utilities, which only grudgingly alter their business models.

Around the world, the transition is in progress—and ideally, could involve all of us. The armchair prophets of doom should either join in or, at the least, sit on the sidelines quietly. The last thing we need is more people sowing desperation and angst. They play straight into the court of the fossil fuel industry.

[klimanaturali]

Os Países Mais Ricos da Europa (€)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Capping demand from the top fifth, even at a fairly high level, cut greenhouse gas pollution from energy consumption by 9.7%, while raising demand from people in the bottom fifth who also live in poverty to a fairly low level increases emissions by just 1.4%. “We have to start tackling luxury energy use to stay within an equitable carbon budget for the globe,” said Milena Buchs, a professor of sustainable welfare at the University of Leeds and the lead author of the study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Energy, “but also to actually have the energy resources to enable people in fuel poverty to slightly increase their energy use and meet their needs.”

[...]

“The study confirms that energy demand reductions can contribute significantly to climate change mitigation, even as poorer households are lifted out of energy poverty,” said Felix Creutzig, an IPCC author and professor of sustainability economics at the Technical University of Berlin, who was not involved in the study. “High-income, high-education households have more scope and also more capacity in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions – and also carry more responsibility.”

[...]

Studies have shown the global rich – which includes middle-class people in rich countries – play a disproportionate role in heating the planet. In 2015, the top 1% of earners emitted twice as much carbon dioxide as the bottom 50%, according to estimates from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Oxfam. Rich people have more agency to cut their emissions and those of others. A commentary in Nature Energy argued in 2021 that this covered not just how they shop, which the authors stressed was a powerful lever, but also how they act as citizens, investors, role models and workers.

[leyenra8]

Can You Handle The Truth And Face The Facts?   

Without Capitalism – You Are Venezuela 

In a Capitalist economy, the consumer has the ultimate power.  

But in a Socialist economy, the government has the ultimate power.

Instead of millions of people making millions of decisions about what they want, a few people – government elites – decide what people should have, and how much they should pay for it.

Not surprisingly, they always get it wrong.

Venezuela, once the richest country in South America, is the most recent example of Socialism driving a prosperous country into an economic ditch.

But what about Western European countries? Don't they have Socialist economies? People seem pretty happy there. Why can’t we have what they have – free health care, free college, and stronger unions?

Good question. And the answer may surprise you. There are no Socialist countries in Western Europe.

Most are just as Capitalist as the United States. The only difference – and it’s a big one – is that they offer more government benefits than the United Sates does.

We can argue about the costs of these benefits, and the point at which they reduce individual initiative, thus doing more harm than good.

Scandinavians have been debating those questions for years. But only a Free-Market Capitalist economy can produce the wealth necessary to sustain all of the supposedly “Free Stuff” Europeans enjoy.

To get the “Free Stuff,” after all, you have to create enough wealth to generate enough tax revenue to pay for everything the government gives away.

Without Capitalism – You Are Venezuela

Agenda: Grinding America Down

The Fact-Based documentary detailing a COMMUNIST AGENDA for the last 70 years to corrupt American Institutions – from Education to Hollywood to Media – and sabotage America, and its values from within.

The main strategy is to Divide and Conquer – to turn Americans against each other.

After watching the documentary, at least you know why the DEMOCRATS Are COMMUNISTS.

The only way to DEFEAT the DEMOCRATS is to Call Them What They Are – DEMOCRATS Are COMMUNISTS.

Once the American people find out the Truth – DEMOCRATS Are COMMUNISTS, it could DESTROY the party forever.

Sharing Is Caring

Please Keep Reblogging

[poetry-protest-pornography]

From Bend The Arc: Jewish Action, on Holocaust Remembrance Day:

Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, pay tribute to the Holocaust’s victims and survivors, and remember that the lessons of the Holocaust echo into the present.

We remember the six million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime.

We remember the five million others — Roma and Sinti people, people with disabilities, queer and trans people, political prisoners, socialists, and communists.

We remember the millions more who survived dehumanization and torture.

We remember that antisemitism is still a danger to Jews and to all of us.

We remember that Jews were targeted alongside our neighbors.

We remember that the horrors of the Holocaust happened.

We remember that they can happen again under similar conditions.

And we remember that these conditions tie each of us to each other.

We remember that on International Holocaust Remembrance Day eight years ago, Trump signed the Muslim-African Ban, which had a devastating impact on many families and communities in our country.

We remember that during the Holocaust, ships full of Jewish refugees from Europe were turned away from the U.S. and other countries because those in power made people afraid of “the other.”

Today in the U.S., we are watching a presidential administration mirror the early days of Nazi Germany, when Hitler promised to deport 100,000 Osjuden (or “Eastern Jews”) and when queer and trans communities were targeted. We have watched white nationalists celebrate as the president’s richest right hand man gave back-to-back Nazi salutes followed it up with a string of Holocaust jokes on his social platform.

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day we look to the past. We commit to not repeating the past in our present. And in commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we also look to our future. A future we fight for every day, when all of us will live and thrive with safety and security.

Let’s use today as a call to action and a reminder of our responsibility to each other, as well as a reminder that we have the power to make change happen.

Sending love to our Jewish communities and all those facing bigotry and oppression.