The craft of knitting Cowichan sweaters is handed down through the generations in First Nations families on Vancouver Island, BC.
Having to sell the sweaters at wholesale prices to shops that mark up the retail cost by hundreds of dollars has led to an initiative called Knit With Purpose to deal direct with buyers and give knitters a fair wage for their time and expertise.
If you care about the planet, please make sure you sit down before you start reading this post about ExxonMobil.
So.
The CEO of ExxonMobil just said this in an interview: "We’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions."
Who's the most influential voice on climate change? Who's to blame for inaction on climate change?
According to the CEO of ExxonMobil, it's environmental activists.
No, really:
"Frankly, society, and the activist—the dominant voice in this discussion—has tried to exclude the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies."
Oh, and the CEO of ExxonMobil also apparently thinks consumers are to blame for climate inaction:
"Today we have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that."
Gets better.
He thinks unnamed 'people who generate emissions' should pay for it. (Rather than, say, major transnational oil companies.)
"People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price. That’s ultimately how you solve the problem."
So, remind me again. Who knew about climate change before most of the public?
"Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue... This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation."
And just who, exactly, stood in the way reducing emissions all these years?
"ExxonMobil executives privately sought to undermine climate science even after the oil and gas giant publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, according to previously unreported documents...
"The new revelations are based on previously unreported documents subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general as part of an investigation into the company announced in 2015. They add to a slew of documents that record a decades-long misinformation campaign waged by Exxon, which are cited in a growing number of state and municipal lawsuits against big oil."
Americans learned Wednesday morning the rate of inflation nationally has dropped dramatically, to just 3% annually, down from over 9% one year ago.But not in Florida, which MarketWatch reports “has the highest inflation in the U.S.”For much of the year, even before his presidential campaign official...
FORTUNE: Consumer prices pushed up mostly by corporate profits, new Groundwork Collaborative study finds
"Corporate profits drove 53% of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic, the report found, analyzing Commerce Department data. That’s a massive jump from the four decades prior to the pandemic, when profits drove just 11% of price growth." #greedflation#economy#inflation
Latest comic on a certain pundit's infamous $78 airport meal
(For those outside the US, the commentator David Brooks has made a career out of piously trolling liberals for their supposed decadence and lack of morals.)
America's return-to-office has been a "lagging return," reports the Washington Post: Even with millions of workers across the country being asked to return to their cubicles, office occupancy has been relatively static for the past year. The country's top 10 metropolitan areas averaged 47.2 percent...
The US Department of the Treasury just released a comprehensive new report about labor relations and the middle class that affirms what the workers have been screaming out for at least 150 years no…
Bitcoin mining produces as much carbon emissions as Greece, and as much waste from small IT equipment as the Netherlands.
It is a prime example of how economic growth is only possible through the use of more energy and resources, and how this growth is increasingly disconnected from what people actually need.
“Shrugging off higher interest rates, America’s consumers spent enough to help drive the #economy to a brisk 5.2% annual pace from July through September, the government reported Wednesday in an upgrade from its previous estimate.” #Bidenomics
"According to economist Steven Rattner of Morning Joe, the United States has now had 26 consecutive months—more than two years—of unemployment under 4%, the longest stretch of unemployment that low since the late 1960s.
Rattner pointed out that immigrants have helped to push U.S. growth since the pandemic by adding millions of new workers to the labor market."
Why are political leaders so blatantly unwilling to make the hard choices needed to confront the existential threat of climate change?
One reason, of course, is that their main focus is simply to be re-elected. Voters don’t like hearing that they may be required to alter their lifestyles, and so politicians won’t tell them that, even if they know they should.
But another reason could be that these elected officials are getting some bad advice, especially from economists, whom they are far more likely to listen to than scientists...
Scientists say severe climate change is now the greatest threat to humanity. Extreme weather is expected to upend lives and livelihoods, intensifying wildfires, and pushing ecosystems towards collapse as ocean heat waves savage coral reefs. The threats are far-reaching and widespread.
So what effect would you expect this to have on the economy in coming decades? It may surprise you, but most economic models predict climate change will just be a blip, with a minor impact on gross domestic product (GDP).
Heating the planet beyond 3℃ is extraordinarily dangerous. The last time Earth was that warm was three million years ago, when there was almost no ice and seas were 20 metres higher.
But economic models predict even this level of heat to have very mild impacts on global GDP per capita by century’s end. Most predict a hit of around 1% to 7%, while the most pessimistic modelling suggests GDP shrinking by 23%.
In these models, some countries are completely unaffected by climate change. Others even benefit. For most countries, the damage is small enough to be offset by technological growth.
This, it is becoming clear, is a failure of the modelling. To make these models, economists reach into the past to model damage from weather.
But severe climate change would be a global shock that is wholly outside our experience. Inevitably, models can’t come close to capturing the upheavals climate change could cause in markets fundamental to human life, such as agriculture.
This article by Timothy Neal, a senior lecturer in Economics at the Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney, is truly frightening. The political, governmental, and economic systems currently in place, which control the world, are wholly incapable of responding to the threat we face.
As with all of her postings, everything Heather Cox Richardson says today deserves attention. She opens by noting that the Dow Jones closed above 40,000 for the first time in history. But "in comparison to the breathless coverage of the stock market during Trump’s administration, this milestone is getting very little coverage."
PANIC: Florida takes huge economic hit as conventions reject anti-woke agenda (washingtonpress.com)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has scared off millions of dollars worth of business from his state with his extremist, bigoted agenda.
Inflation is plummeting across America except in Ron DeSantis’ Florida (www.alternet.org)
Americans learned Wednesday morning the rate of inflation nationally has dropped dramatically, to just 3% annually, down from over 9% one year ago.But not in Florida, which MarketWatch reports “has the highest inflation in the U.S.”For much of the year, even before his presidential campaign official...
Workers are Resisting Calls to Return to Offices - Slashdot (it.slashdot.org)
America's return-to-office has been a "lagging return," reports the Washington Post: Even with millions of workers across the country being asked to return to their cubicles, office occupancy has been relatively static for the past year. The country's top 10 metropolitan areas averaged 47.2 percent...
New US Treasury report confirms that unions are good for everybody (boingboing.net)
The US Department of the Treasury just released a comprehensive new report about labor relations and the middle class that affirms what the workers have been screaming out for at least 150 years no…