Have a look at what we do for wildlife and then explain to us in plain words why we are not supported by conservation officials. Indeed, why they proactively undermine our efforts.
Even though our Karoo Wildlife Centre is a project of the international award-winning NGO, Campaign Against Canned Hunting, and we followed procedures to obtain permits as much as possible until the excessive bureaucracy defeated us.
Far away from the paper world of government policies and regulations, in the real world, here is how rehab sanctuaries work. An animal is orphaned or injured and taken by good samaritans to the local vet. She attends to its wounds and needs, and then what? She has a veterinary surgery in a built-up area. She needs a wilderness facility with large natural camps where the animal can be fed and nurtured until it is fit for release back to the wild. It then needs a soft (gradual) release into suitable habitat where it can survive and flourish.
Rio Tinto’s (ASX, LON, NYSE: RIO) iconic Argyle mine in remote Western Australia, the world’s biggest and the main global source of high-quality pink diamonds, will close in the fourth quarter this year, potentially pushing prices up and spurring exploration.
The planned closure, the company said, will impact its total diamond output for the year. Rio now expects to produce between 12 and 14 million carats of rough diamonds in 2020, down from the 17 million carats it churned out last year.
The impact on Rio’s balance sheet, however, will be minimal. Diamonds bring in only about 2% of its earnings, while iron ore — the company’s main commodity — accounts for almost 60%.
Have you ever asked yourself this very important question since your life relies on money?
Knowing that all the money in the world is NOT based on any unit of value but is simply counterfeited at central and commercial banks, why don't governments simply print money and clear their debts?
And why do governments force citizens to pay hashtag#IncomeTaxes when it's possible to just counterfeit all the money they need to pay their bills and fund national projects?
They could've done so, of course, but they're not allowed to do so by the banking elites.
You see, it's the banks that tell governments what to do, not vice versa.
The city of Barcelona has declared a “climate emergency”, setting a new target to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 through more than 100 main measures that will also help residents adapt to the impacts of a warming planet.
Mayor Ada Colau said the public awareness campaign accompanying the new strategy drew on the words of Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg with its slogan: “This is not a drill”.
Spain's second largest city, capital of the northeastern region of Catalonia, said last July it would declare a climate emergency at the start of 2020 only after consulting with citizens on how to act effectively in response.
After successfully creating a health care app for doctors to view medical records, Diego Fasano, an Italian entrepreneur, got some well-timed advice from a police officer friend: Go into the surveillance business because law enforcement desperately needs technological help.
In 2014, he founded a company that creates surveillance technology, including powerful spyware for police and intelligence agencies, at a time when easy-to-use encrypted chat apps such as WhatsApp and Signal were making it possible for criminal suspects to protect phone calls and data from government scrutiny.
The concept behind the company's product was simple: With the help of Italy's telecom companies, suspects would be duped into downloading a harmless-seeming app, ostensibly to fix network errors on their phone. The app would also allow Fasano's company, eSurv, to give law enforcement access to a device's microphone, camera, stored files and encrypted messages.
PROLOGUE: The biggest risk of all is that the sheer scale of global inequality is almost too staggering to comprehend: The richest 1% capture $19 trillion in income each year. That's more than the GDP of the "poorest" 169 countries *combined* - a list which includes Norway, Switzerland, Argentina and Saudi Arabia.
Global Risks Report 2020
Global Risk Report 2020
By Insights - January 2020
Economic and political polarization will intensify, as collaboration is needed more than ever to respond to severe threats to climate, public health, and technology systems
The Global Risks Report, published by the World Economic Forum with support from Marsh & McLennan, provides a rich perspective on the major threats that may impact global prosperity in 2020 and over the next decade. The 15th edition of the report draws on feedback from nearly 800 global experts and decision-makers who were asked to rank their concerns in terms of likelihood and impact.
This year’s report highlights important threads across the global risk landscape. Intensifying confrontations, both between and within countries, as well as a heightened sense of urgency and emergency around some critical global problems.
Latest update from the World Economic Forum:
The 5 top risks summarised
1. Extreme weather events with major damage to property, infrastructure, & loss of human life.
2. Failure of climate-change mitigation & adaptation by governments, businesses.
Prologue: But make no mistake, the change of tact in BlackRock is not just because the investment and locust company came under serious fire from the environmental movement. They have clear risk and economic reasons.
Here's an interesting new strategy in the fight against climate breakdown: Put public pressure on law firms to drop fossil fuel clients. On 14. January 2020 Harvard Law students shut down a fancy recruitment session by @PaulWeissLLP over their defense of Exxon. #DropExxon.
The Important Question that all investors and shareholders have to ask themselves is: Would my children and grand-children approve this investment?
BlackRock C.E.O. Larry Fink: Climate Crisis Will Reshape Finance
In his influential annual letter to chief executives, Mr. Fink said his firm would avoid investments in companies that “present a high sustainability-related risk.”
“The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance,” Laurence D. Fink, the chief of BlackRock, wrote in his annual letter. Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
Laurence D. Fink, the founder and chief executive of BlackRock, announced Tuesday that his firm would make investment decisions with environmental sustainability as a core goal.
BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with nearly $7 trillion in investments, and this move will fundamentally shift its investing policy — and could reshape how corporate America does business and put pressure on other large money managers to follow suit.
Mr. Fink’s annual letter to the chief executives of the world’s largest companies is closely watched, and in the 2020 edition he said BlackRock would begin to exit certain investments that “present a high sustainability-related risk,” such as those in coal producers. His intent is to encourage every company, not just energy firms, to rethink their carbon footprints.
Potential economic benefits of reversing rising temperatures would benefit developing countries greatly, representing a global GDP growth of 200%
New research from the University of California San Diego finds that solar geoengineering–the intentional reflection of sunlight away from the Earth’s surface–may reduce income inequality between countries.
In a study recently published in Nature Communications, researchers examine the impacts of solar geoengineering on global and country-level economic outcomes. Using a state-of-the-art macroeconomic climate impacts assessment approach, the paper is the first to look at the economic impacts of climate projections associated with solar geoengineering.
“Stop the Money Pipeline”: 150 Arrested at Protests Exposing Wall Street’s Link to Climate Crisis
We have to cut our fossil fuel emission by 50% in 10 years!" - Jane Fonda
By DemocracyNow - 13. January 2020
Nearly 150 people were arrested on Capitol Hill Friday in a climate protest led by Academy Award-winning actor and activist Jane Fonda. Fonda has been leading weekly climate demonstrations in Washington, D.C., known as “Fire Drill Fridays,” since October.
For her last and 14th protest, actors Martin Sheen and Joaquin Phoenix, indigenous anti-pipeline activist Tara Houska, journalist Naomi Klein and dozens more lined up to get arrested as they demanded a mass uprising and swift political action to thwart the climate crisis.
As we all know by now Europe has a plan called the Green Deal, which has been announced with great pride by President Mrs Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice President Mr. Frans Timmermans. They want Europe to be the first climate neutral continent in 2050. That sounds ambitious and it gives the impression that Mrs Ursula von der Leyen and Mr. Frans Timmermans and the entire European Union are very concerned about the climate and want to take all possible measures in the fastest way possible.
But is that so ?
Let’s analyse our current global economic system and some ideas to get this planet – starting with Europe – sustainable in the fastest way possible.
Lions are rapidly disappearing from the African continent. The species suffers thanks to our own expansion and exploitation. Declining numbers are attributed to loss of habitat and subsequent prey, retaliatory killings, trophy hunting, and legal lion bone trade.
Unfortunately, some countries continue to promote trophy hunting and lion bone trade as solutions to the problems of habitat loss and retaliatory killings. Those countries are stuck in the past with the archaic idea we must kill to protect.
When we look at trophy hunting, proponents claim the practice places value on the lives of lions that incentivizes communities to protect the species and their habitat. And Tanzania has protected a lot of land in the name of trophy hunting.
Under U.S. pressure, social media companies censor critical content and suspend Venezuelan, Iranian, and Syrian accounts
The downfall of corrupt and insecure BigTech social and communications media like Fascistbook, Twitter, Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, and Instagram will come soon.
As the USA escalates its hybrid wars, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are suspending accounts and censoring content that conflicts with Washington’s pro-war narrative. The Grayzone spoke to several people silenced in these social media purges.
By Ben Norton - 12. January 2020
The Donald Trump administration is ramping up its information war against Venezuela, Iran, and Syria. And it has enlisted social media platforms as weapons in its assault on these top regime-change targets.
In the first two weeks of January, Twitter suspended dozens of accounts run by real, live people — not bots — in Venezuela, Iran, and Syria.
The world is full of negative news, and the planet seems to be in an ecological crisis, and this can be downright disheartening and disenfranchising because we feel that there’s nothing that each one of us can do is an individual that can make any difference.
Highlights
How many of the world’s problems can be solved in a garden
The problem with the industrial food system and how a garden can eliminate it
Compost and other soil building strategies to build fertile and carbon rich soil
How fertile soils reverse climate change
Harvesting rainwater for soil building and carbon sequestration
Empowering you to make ecological and regenerative choices and develop your own solutions to the ecological problems of the world
Wanted Rains - Created Floods, Hail and Snowstorms
PROLOGUE: Dubai Has 4 Years of Rain in 2 Hours - After 9 Cloud Seeding Flights - There is only so much moisture in the atmosphere - so if other countries are seeding clouds to make it rain (China, Dubai, India) does that explain why countries like Australia are missing out?! It has been going on since many years (see down below report from 2017).
UAE rains: 9 cloud seeding flights have been completed, more to take place
It started just with overcast skies in Dubai on Saturday Image Credit: Evangeline Elsa
Dubai: Will it rain more in the UAE tonight? Yes, according to the National Center of Meteorology.
An NCM source told Gulf News that nine cloud seeding flights have been completed since Thursday. The weather forecaster added: “There were some cloud seeding flights we launched today and it is going to continue."
Last week, when the UAE weather bureau noticed that clouds from the western regions of the country were going to pass over the country, they were quick to put the team on standby for cloud seeding flights, to enhance the rainfall in the region.
The forecaster added that “The clouds are now over southern and Eastern areas such as Al Ain.
Just like the weather, climate changes, of course. No reasonable person can argue otherwise.
This change can be natural or unnatural (i.e. artificially created by corporations and governments). Drop a few nuclear bombs here and there and you’ll successfully plunge Earth into a nuclear winter for hundreds of years. Therefore, it’s completely possible for governments and big corporations to alter the Earth’s climate.
Governments and corporations are already altering the weather EVERY DAY by injecting chemicals into the sky to make it rain or snow through a process called “cloud-seeding.”
In 2030, we ended the climate emergency. Here’s how:
Underneath the article, you can read more about these photos of 20,000-year-old ice cores extracted in Greenland and Antarctica. The images shown here are all from the series Climate Archive by photographer Suzette Bousema.
If words make worlds, then we urgently need to tell a new story about the climate crisis. Here is one vision of what it could look and feel like to radically, collectively take action.
