Tweet
https://youtu.be/08j-kaXHobY
"With a thirty year Boeing veteran at the Pentagon, Patrick Shanahan as Acting Secretary of Defense, and with John Bolton and Mike Pompeo at the helm, war with Iran is likely says the former chief of staff to Secretary of State, Col. Larry Wilkerson"
SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) -- “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” (Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Monday, May 20, 2019
Sunday, May 19, 2019
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Friday, May 10, 2019
Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending!!!
Tweet
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-fuel-subsidies-pentagon-spending-imf-report-833035/
The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-fuel-subsidies-pentagon-spending-imf-report-833035/
The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion.
The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution.
These subsidies are largely invisible to the public, and don’t appear in national budgets. But according the the IMF, the world spent $4.7 trillion — or 6.3 percent of global GDP — in 2015 to subsidize fossil fuel use, a figure it estimated rose to $5.2 trillion in 2017. China, which is heavily reliant on coal and has major air-pollution problems, was the largest subsidizer by far, at $1.4 trillion in 2015. But the U.S. ranked second in the world.
The human, environmental and economic toll of these subsidies is shocking to the conscience. The authors found that if fossil fuels had been fairly priced in 2015, global carbon emissions would have been slashed by 28 percent. Deaths from fossil fuel-linked air pollution would have dropped by nearly half.
Oil, gas and coal companies — and their stooges in public office — have long argued that making consumers pay for the full impacts of fossil fuel use would cripple the economy. The IMF experts call bullshit on this idea, revealing that the world would, in fact, be more prosperous. Eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels would have created global “net economic welfare gains” in 2015 of “more than $1.3 trillion, or 1.7 percent of global GDP,” the study found. (These net gains are “calculated as the benefits from reduced environmental damage and higher revenue minus the losses from consumers facing higher energy prices.”)
For the United States, the $649 billion in fossil fuel subsidies exceeded even the extravagant amount of money the country spent on defense. To offer a sense of scale, Pentagon spending accounted for 54 percent of the discretionary federal budget in 2015. In comparison to another important, but less well-funded part of the federal budget, fossil fuel subsidies were nearly 10 times what Congress spent on education. Broken down to an individual level, fossil fuel subsidies cost every man, woman and child in the United States $2,028 that year.
At the opening of the IMF’s spring meetings in April, Managing Director Christine Lagarde laid out the benefits she sees in properly pricing fossil fuels. “The numbers are quite staggering” she said, referring to the savings that could be achieved “fiscally, but also in terms of human life, if there had been the right price on carbon emission as of 2015.”
Lagarde continued to rattle off the benefits to humanity of realizing these savings. “There would be more public spending available to build hospitals, to build roads, to build schools and to support education and health for the people,” she said.
For Lagarde and the IMF, the conclusion was obvious: “We believe that removing fossil fuel subsidies is the right way to go.”
Thursday, May 09, 2019
Tuesday, May 07, 2019
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Profit Over People--The Story of Capitalism, Boeing Style
Tweet
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/boeing-kept-mum-to-customers-faa-about-disabling-of-737-max-warning-system.html
Comment from Naked Capitalism discussion of Boeing Max 737 tragedies
Comment from Naked Capitalism discussion of Boeing Max 737 tragedies
Friday, April 26, 2019
Thursday, April 25, 2019
[China's] BRI Transforming World Economic Order [Peacenik Trump?]
Tweet
https://www.asiatimes.com/
https://www.asiatimes.com/
all this development won't help CO2 levels. but did anyone see the Trump quote about peace (scroll to end below) in the mainstream press?
EXCERPT:
China’s capacity to bring long term infrastructure to nations torn by Western-funded wars and regime change is seen as a vital stabilizing influence not only to alleviate poverty and de-radicalize but also to provide a framework for genuine independence from Western intrigues. Commenting on the forum, the president of Lebanon stated, “The Arab countries have huge markets. We regard China as a good friend and are willing to further consolidate the relationship with China. We would like to draw the experience from China’s reform and development so as to benefit our people and seek our opportunities for development.”
Rather than embrace this new potential, Western “old paradigm” forces representing the entrenched deep state have screamed and hollered against the “dangers of China and Russia threatening our democratic way of life.” Exemplifying this outlook was The Washington Post’s April 20 feature article “How Washington can beat China’s global influence campaign,” calling for an “alternative to the BRI” controlled by the Western elite. This plan is entirely absurd, since America has not only permitted its own infrastructure and productive powers to rot for 50 years, but has created no relevant infrastructure that has benefited nations abroad during that same time frame. All that has been created under decades of lending by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank that has meant debt slavery, impoverishment, and a $700 billion derivatives bubble that is ripe to explode.
Although great efforts were made over two years by the Five Eyes/Mueller-led witch hunt to destroy the potential alliance US President Donald Trump was proposing to form with Russia and China, the now published Mueller report turned out to be little more than a goose egg, failing to prove any of the claims of Russian collusion. Jumping off that victory, Trump called loudly on April 5 for a conversion of vast military expenditures that only risk World War III toward a program of long-term investments among Russia, China and the US:
“Between Russia, China and us, we’re all making hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is ridiculous.… I think it’s much better if we all got together and didn’t make these weapons … those three countries I think can come together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace.”
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Friday, April 19, 2019
Our Planet Is in Trouble! #ExtinctionRebellion Required!
Tweet
SEATTLE EXTINCTION REBELS DAAG with solidarity banner informing travelers flying in from Britain that XR is global!
SEATTLE EXTINCTION REBELS DAAG with solidarity banner informing travelers flying in from Britain that XR is global!
Thursday, April 18, 2019
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)