politics – Page 7 – Things Are Good

How to Build People Focused Communities

The Sustainable City Show · Ep 3: Creating Car-Free Communities | In Conversation With Eckart Wurzner & Chris Shears

A sustainable world is a walkable city. Over at the Sustainable City Show they talked to two people engaged in making cities walkable, car-free, and down right pleasant to live in. The mayor of Heidelberg and urban designer Chris Shears talked about their efforts to green their cities while also ensuring that old, backwards-looking, individuals understand that good urban living means people can get where they want when they want. The best design approach for cities is to ensure that all people can get where they need to go, and that they don’t need to go far.

The city is attractive. Downtown city is attractive. It has a future vision and now, it pays out what you have implemented, but you have to be fair. It was not the brutal story we tell them at the beginning. So, we were talking about green space, living attractive, downtown is wonderful to stay there with kids. So, you have space, you’re secure. If the kids go to school, they don’t have to fear that the kids were hit by a truck or whatever. If this is the message, it’s not against cars or against anybody. It’s for the future, and this is always a story because otherwise, you’re just working with environmentalists together and this is 50 percent, maybe 20 percent, but it’s not the — also not in the city council, the majority. So, that’s my clear mission. We have to go in this direction, but always create the feeling that this is a better city, a greener city, it’s more livable and so on.

Oil Companies are Useless

Looking at the actions of oil companies it’s clear they only care about one thing: profit. Everything else, like the planet and human life, is a tertiary concern that is easily ignored. With the release of the most recent IPCC report why are governments and thinkers listening to these planet killing companies?

The big oil companies wax ecstatic about how they are investing in renewables, but that it merely a pittance compared to their ongoing extraction of fossil fuels and money spent lobbying for more oil use and exploration. These companies have derailed conversation about how to make the world better and now it’s time to ask why we even listen to their words about caring about the planet when their actions clearly demonstrate they don’t.

Climate policy critics will surely suggest an aggressive push towards renewable energy will cost too much and do too little, although with natural gas and petrol prices in Europe soaring to record levels, it’s much harder for them to pretend fossil fuels are in any way affordable. But according to a recent report from Wärtsilä Energy, a Finnish company that specializes in industrial energy technology, a rapid transition could actually save Europeans money.

“Increasing energy independence does not need to cost more for power companies or energy consumers,” it says. “Accelerating the transition to a clean energy system could save European countries 323 billion EUR by 2030, compared to our modelled baseline scenario.”

Canadians Need to Know Snow-washing

Us Canadians need to live up to the stereotype that we are a nice, peaceful, and safe country. Clearly the so-called trucker protest tarnished our reputation, but in financial circles our reputation is tarnished thanks to our neglect of corporate accountability. Internationally Canada is seen as a great place to launder illegal obtained funds akin to third world tax havens. Laundering money in Canada is known as snow-washing.

Thanks to excellent research to Transparency International Canada (and more organizations) we finally know the extent of snow-washing. In order to address the problem we must first understand it. So let’s hope Canadian politicians step up to fight this corporate corruption in our government.

Although Canada has vowed to establish a publicly accessible corporate beneficial ownership registry, a database that will store details about who ultimately owns and controls millions of private companies, it won’t be operational until at least 2025.

“Open data allows journalists, civil society and other stakeholders to investigate wrongdoing,” the report says. “This is particularly important for Canada, where law enforcement and regulatory authorities have limited capacity to investigate domestic crime, let alone criminal activity beyond our borders.”

As an example, one of the report’s case studies about a Russian transnational laundromat builds on previous reporting by investigative journalists, including The Globe’s Mark MacKinnon.

For far too long, Canada has been saddled with a reputation as an international haven for financial crime. As the report rightly argues, transparency is the only antidote.

Read the snow-washing report.

Thanks to Delaney!

The Climate Change Deniers are Done

Climate change deniers have clearly set back human progress and delayed us in reducing emissions, obviously that’s no good. What is good is that they barely exist anymore. The science has always been done properly around climate change and people are living the chaos that climate change has caused; it’s as impossible to deny as a round Earth. Conversations are no longer hijacked by people who deny climate reality, and that’s a good thing.

How do we know this? Some researchers set out to determine how present climate change denialism was online only to find it declining. A really need potential spinoff from this research is how to look into other aspects of people denying science and how to engage them to better understand reality.

In a study out this week in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, researchers found that outright denying the science is going out of fashion. Today, only about 10 percent of arguments from conservative think tanks in North America challenge the scientific consensus around global warming or question models and data. (For the record, 99.9 percent of scientists agree that human activity is heating up the planet.) Instead, the most common arguments are that scientists and climate advocates simply can’t be trusted, and that proposed solutions won’t work.
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It took Cook and his team about five years to create a machine learning model that was able to reliably detect real-life climate misinformation claims. “Misinformation is messy and doing content analysis is messy, because the real world is always a bit blurry,” Cook said. First, they developed a taxonomy to sort arguments into broad categories — say, “climate change isn’t bad” — narrower claims (“carbon dioxide is not a pollutant”) and even more specific points (“CO2 is food for plants!”). Then they fed common climate myths into the machine until it was able to recognize each one consistently out in the wild.

The Insurrection Index Exists to Defend American Democracy

The Insurrection Index launches today to defend democracy in the United States from internal attacks on democratic institutions. The focus of the initiative is clearly in response to, and all about, the failed coup and insurrection attempt that happened on this day last year. Multiple organizations joined together to create the index to promote democratic transparency around who (and what organizations) helped try to overthrow the government in support of former president Trump. By making the names of people involved in the extreme anti-democratic action it will be easier to keep those people out of office by exposing their anti-American actions.

It’s good to see that there is a concerted effort in the USA to defend their struggling democracy. Let’s hope that this marks a turning point in the country to more open, honest, and better defended democratic institutions.

The index is the brainchild of Public Wise, a voting rights group whose mission is to fight for government that reflects the will and the rights of voters. Christina Baal-Owens, the group’s executive director, said that the index was conceived as an ongoing campaign designed to keep insurrectionists out of office.

“These are folks who silenced the voices of American voters, who took a validly held election and created fraudulent information to try to silence voters. They have no business being near legislation or being able to affect the lives of American people,” she said.