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Youth climate strikers: ‘We are going to change the fate of humanity’

by FinnGooden Posted on March 2, 2019

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The students striking from schools around the world to demand action on climate change have issued an uncompromising open letter stating: “We are going to change the fate of humanity, whether you like it or not.”

The letter, published by the Guardian, says: “United we will rise on 15 March and many times after until we see climate justice. We demand the world’s decision makers take responsibility and solve this crisis. You have failed us in the past. [But] the youth of this world has started to move and we will not rest again.”

The Youth Strikes for Climate movement is not centrally organized, so keeping track of the fast-growing number of strikes is difficult, but many are registering on FridaysForFuture.org. So far, there are almost 500 events listed to take place on March 15 across 51 countries, making it the biggest strike day so far. Students plan to skip school across Western Europe, from the U.S. to Brazil and Chile, and from Australia to Iran, India, and Japan.

“For people under 18 in most countries, the only democratic right we have is to demonstrate. We don’t have representation,” said Jonas Kampus, a 17-year-old student activist, from near Zurich, Switzerland. “To study for a future that will not exist, that does not make sense.”

The letter says: “We are the voiceless future of humanity … We will not accept a life in fear and devastation. We have the right to live our dreams and hopes.” Kampus helped initiate the letter, which was created collectively via a global coordination group numbering about 150 students, including the first youth climate striker, Sweden’s Greta Thunberg.

The strikes have attracted some criticism, and Kampus said: “We wanted to define for ourselves why we are striking.” Another member of the coordination group, Anna Taylor, 17, from north London, U.K., said: “The importance of the letter is it shows this is now an international movement.”

Taylor said: “The rapid growth of the movement is showing how important it is and how much young people care. It is vital for our future.” Janine O’Keefe, from FridaysForFuture.org, said: “I’ll be very happy with over 100,000 students striking on March 15. But I think we might reach even beyond 500,000 students.”

Thunberg, now 16 years old and who began the strikes with a solo protest beginning last August, is currently on holiday from school. She was one of about 3,000 student demonstrators in Antwerp, Belgium, on Thursday, and joined protesters in Hamburg on Friday morning.

In recent days, she has sharply rejected criticism of the strikes from educational authorities, telling the Hong Kong Education Bureau: “We fight for our future. It doesn’t help if we have to fight the adults too.” She also told a critical Australian state education minister his words “belong in a museum.”

The strikes have been supported by Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s climate chief when the Paris deal to fight global warming was signed in 2015. She said: “It’s time to heed the deeply moving voice of youth. The Paris Agreement was a step in the right direction, but its timely implementation is key.” Michael Liebreich, a clean energy expert, said: “Anyone who thinks [the strikes] will fizzle out any time soon has forgotten what it is to be young.”

In the U.K., Taylor said more than 10,000 students went on strike on February 15: “I’m anticipating at least double that on March 15.”

The strikes would not end, Taylor said, until “environmental protection is put as politicians’ top priority, over everything else. Young people are cooperating now, but governments are not cooperating anywhere near as much as they should.” She said students were contacting her from new countries every day, including Estonia, Iceland, and Uganda in recent days.

Kampus, who was invited to meet the Swiss environment minister, Simonetta Sommaruga, on Wednesday, said: “The strikes will stop when there is a clear outline from politicians on how to solve this crisis and a pathway to get there. I could be doing so many other things. But I don’t have time as we have to solve this crisis. My dream is to have a life in peace.”

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Youth climate strikers: ‘We are going to change the fate of humanity’

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A puzzling promo video earns the U.N. new criticism over its support of carbon offsets

by BobPerkins9 Posted on August 29, 2018

The international organization coordinating the world’s effort to stop global warming posted a strange video to social media on Wednesday morning.

The 52-second video from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a bizarre promotion to call attention to the organization’s newly redesigned online platform for purchasing carbon offsets. It’s been deleted from Twitter and Facebook but you can still find it on YouTube and in an official press release.

It’s hard to know what the UNFCCC was thinking in producing this video, which makes fun of well-established ways to cut carbon emissions — like limiting driving, air travel, and meat consumption — in favor of purchasing controversial offset credits. Offsets are an accounting method favored by high-polluting industries as a way of evading real-world change.

The video was swiftly attacked by climate campaigners — a Swiss environmental lawyer called it “shameful” — and no justification has yet been given for its removal. (The UNFCCC did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Grist about the video’s production and its removal from social media.)

The problem with carbon offsets is clear. They’re designed to avoid immediate changes in behavior in favor of less verifiable and less reliable ways of reducing emissions by relying on someone else. You could, say, pay to plant some trees, which then must be tended and kept alive for decades, to atone for a single airline flight.

Sometimes offsetting is worse than doing nothing: It perpetuates high-carbon activities and shifts responsibility from the people and organizations most responsible for climate change. After a brief moment of popularity a decade ago, the credits faded from favor, in part because of these concerns.

This isn’t the first time the U.N. has come under fire for promoting carbon offsets. During the Paris climate conference in 2015, the U.N. set up a booth where attendees could supposedly neutralize the impact of their travel to the summit for as little as $1.  Some observers found that difficult to believe. On a much larger scale, in 2016, the U.N. organization tasked with overseeing the global airline industry was strongly criticized for favoring offsets in an attempt to avoid more radical (and expensive) changes in aircraft design that could reduce emissions.

More recently, at the World Cup in Russia this summer, the U.N. again promoted its carbon offset scheme; again it came under fire for “greenwashing” and relying on questionable math that meant only a small fraction of the promised offsets were actually reducing emissions.

Admittedly, the video is pretty funny as a piece of satire. But I’m not sure that’s what the U.N. was going for.

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A puzzling promo video earns the U.N. new criticism over its support of carbon offsets

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The Criminal Investigation of FIFA’s Sepp Blatter Is Finally Here

by BereniceNepean Posted on September 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Swiss officials opened a criminal investigation into embattled FIFA president Sepp Blatter “on suspicion of criminal mismanagement” and “misappropriation.”

In September 2005, Switzerland’s Office of Attorney General said in a press release, Blatter signed a television contract with the Caribbean Football Union deemed “unfavorable to FIFA” during former FIFA executive Jack Warner’s tenure as league president.

Blatter was also accused of making a “disloyal payment” of 2 million Swiss francs to UEFA president Michel Platini “at the expense of FIFA” for work conducted between January 1999 and June 2002.

The criminal probe comes five months after 14 top soccer officials and corporate executives, including Warner, were indicted for widespread corruption spanning the past two decades. Blatter resigned in June before walking back his resignation weeks later.

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The Criminal Investigation of FIFA’s Sepp Blatter Is Finally Here

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It’s Not the Economy, Stupid. The Spanish Language Is the Ur-Motive of Anti-Immigration Sentiment.

by AbbeyAGWvozn Posted on August 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore on the conservative hostility toward illegal immigration:

This very weekend I was reading an advance copy of an upcoming book that includes the results of some intensive focus group work with what might be called the “angry wing” of the GOP base. The author notes that one thing that simply enrages grass-roots conservatives is the use of non-English languages by immigrants.

Yep. You can read all about it from one of Kilgore’s predecessors, who wrote about it during our last big try at immigration reform in 2006. It’s based on an excellent piece by Chris Hayes, written before he sold out to the bright lights and big paychecks of cable television.

I agree that language is probably the key original driver of anti-immigrant sentiment, though it’s long since inspired further animus based around crime, gangs, social services, and other culture-related issues. The odd thing is that this is one of the few areas where I think the anti-immigrationists have a bit of a point. It’s not a very big point, since (a) Spanish occupies no official role in the United States, and (b) Latin American immigrants all end up speaking English by the second and third generations anyway. Hell, the third-generation Latino who speaks lousy Spanish is practically a cliche.

That said, I’ve long believed that having multiple official languages makes it very hard to sustain a united polity. The Swiss manage, but the whole reason they’re famous for it is because it’s so unusual. Even the Belgians and Canadians have trouble with it, and they’re pretty tolerant people.

Would a congressional declaration that English is the official language of the United States do anything to calm anti-immigrant fervor? At this point, probably not. But if it were written narrowly and carefully, I’d probably support it. I figure that if God considered a single common language such a boon that it threatened his dominion, it must be pretty powerful stuff.

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It’s Not the Economy, Stupid. The Spanish Language Is the Ur-Motive of Anti-Immigration Sentiment.

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Growers Are Making Bank on This Green, Fragrant Bud. No, Not That One.

by JermainFsm Posted on February 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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In 2011, Jan-Erik Paino, a former construction worker and grape-picker, launched a new craft beer company in Sacramento inspired by Captain Frank Ruhstaller, a Swiss immigrant who owned several of the city’s hundreds of breweries in the late 1800’s. Paino wanted to make a beer to carry on Ruhstaller’s legacy.

Ruhstaller’s JE Paino Maddie Oatman

Paino’s first recipe, a malty red ale called “1881,” sold pretty well right away, especially to one local grocer, Darrell Corti, who ordered 10 cases, and then soon after, 12 more. When Paino paid a visit to Corti at his store in East Sacramento, “I was expecting a pat on the back,” says Paino. Instead, Corti “gave me a stern look. He said, ‘you don’t deserve the words Ruhstaller and Sacramento together if you aren’t using hops grown in Sacramento.'”

Hops are the fluffy green buds whose oils give beer its bright and bitter flavor. They grow on bines, and always clockwise. Up until World War II, Sacramento was a hop-growing empire. Corti grew up in California’s capital, and remembers the days when miles and miles of these cone-shaped flowers still lined the riverbanks. “Corti had this intensity I couldn’t ignore,” says Paino. To truly make beer in the spirit of Ruhstaller, he realized, he would need to become a hop farmer.

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Growers Are Making Bank on This Green, Fragrant Bud. No, Not That One.

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That Antioxidant You’re Taking Is Snake Oil

by DominiqSikora Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Plants can’t move. They’re sitting targets for every insect, two- and four-legged creature, and air-borne fungus and bacteria that swirls around them. But they’re not defenseless, we’ve learned. Under pressure from millions of years of attacks, they’ve evolved to produce compounds that repel these predators. Known as phyotochemicals, these substances can be quite toxic to humans. You probably wouldn’t enjoy the jolt of urushiol you’d get from a salad of toxicodendron radicans (poison ivy) leaves.

But other phytochemicals have emerged as crucial elements of a healthful human diet. Indeed, they’re the source of several essential vitamins, including A, C, and E. But according to an eye-opening Nautilus article by the excellent science journalist Moises Velasquez-Manoff (author of a recent Mother Jones piece on the gut microbiome), our view of how these defensive compounds benefit us might be wildly wrong.

The accepted dietary dogma goes like this: The phytochemicals we ingest from plants act as antioxidants—that is, they protect us from the oxidative molecules, known as “free radicals,” that our own cells produce as a waste product, and that have become associated with a range of degenerative diseases including cancer and heart trouble.

It’s true that many phytochemicals and the vitamins they carry have been proven in lab settings to have antioxidant properties—that is, they prevent oxidization. And so, Velasquez-Manoff shows, the idea gained currency that fruits and vegetables are good for us because their high antioxidant load protects us from free radicals. And from there, it was easy to leap to the conclusion that you could slow aging and stave off disease by isolating certain phytochemicals and ingesting them in pill form—everything from multivitamins to trendy antioxidants like resveratrol. “A supplement industry now worth $23 billion yearly in the U.S. took root,” he notes.

And yet, antioxidant pills have proven to be a bust. In February, a group of independent US medical researchers assessed 10 years of supplement research and found that pills loaded with vitamin E and beta-carotene (the stuff that gives color to carrots and other orange vegetables) pills are at best useless and at worst harmful—that is, they may trigger lung cancer in some people. Just this month, a meta-analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that antioxidant supplements “do not prevent cancer and may accelerate it.”

And a 2009 study found that taking antioxidant supplements before exercise actually negates most of the well-documented benefits of physical exertion: That is, taking an antioxidant pill before a run is little better than doing neither and just sitting on the couch.

So what gives? Velasquez-Manoff points to emerging science suggesting that phytochemicals’ antioxidant properties may have thrown us off the trail of what really makes them good for us. He offers two key clues. The first is that plants produce them in response to stress—e.g., pathogenic bacteria, hungry insects. The second is that exercise itself is a form of self-imposed stress: You punish your body by exerting it, and it responds by getting stronger. Leaning on the work of Mark Mattson, Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, and other researchers, Velasquez-Manoff proposes that phytochemicals help us not by repelling oxidant stresses, but by triggering them.

Consider that exercise actually generates free radicals in our muscles—the very thing, according to current dogma, that makes us vulnerable to cancer and aging. But a while after a bout at the gym or on the running trail, these free radicals disappear, replaced by what Velasquez-Manoff calls “native antioxidants.” That’s because, he writes, “post-exercise, the muscle cells respond to the oxidative stress by boosting production of native antioxidants.” And these home-grown chemicals, “amped up to protect against the oxidant threat of yesterday’s exercise, now also protect against other ambient oxidant dangers” like ones from air pollution and other environmental stressors, he writes. In the exercise study, the supplements may have interrupted the process, the study’s main author, Swiss researcher Michael Ristow, tells Velasquez-Manoff—they prevent the body from producing its antioxidants, but what they deliver doesn’t offset the loss.

Yet phytochemicals found in whole foods—”the hot flavors in spices, the mouth-puckering tannins in wines, or the stink of Brussels sprouts”—may work on our bodies much as exercise does. Velasquez-Manoff writes: “Our bodies recognize them as slightly toxic, and we respond with an ancient detoxification process aimed at breaking them down and flushing them out.”

To bolster his case, Velasquez-Manoff cites the example of sulforaphane, the compound that gives broccoli and other members of the brassica family of vegetables—such as Brussels sprouts—their sulfurous smell when they cook. It’s what’s known as an “antifeedant”—i.e., it’s pungency discourages grazing (and makes many people hate Brussels sprouts, etc). Unlike many phytochemicals, sulforaphane isn’t an antioxidant at all, but rather a mild oxidant—that is, it mimics free radicals and thus under the old dietary dogma, we should avoid it. And yet…

When sulforaphane enters your blood stream, it triggers release in your cells of a protein called Nrf2. This protein, called by some the “master regulator” of aging, then activates over 200 genes. They include genes that produce antioxidants, enzymes to metabolize toxins, proteins to flush out heavy metals, and factors that enhance tumor suppression, among other important health-promoting functions. In theory, after encountering this humble antifeedant in your dinner, your body ends up better prepared for encounters with toxins, pro-oxidants from both outside and within your body, immune insults, and other challenges that might otherwise cause harm.

In this theory, what causes cancer and general aging isn’t oxidative stress itself, but rather a poor response to oxidative stress—”a creeping inability to produce native antioxidants when needed, and a lack of cellular conditioning generally.” And that’s where the modern Western lifestyle, marked by highly processed food and a lack of physical exertion, comes in.

The National Institute on Aging’s Mattson calls this the “couch potato” problem. Absent regular hormetic stresses, including exercise and stimulation by plant antifeedants, “cells become complacent,” he says. “Their intrinsic defenses are down-regulated.” Metabolism works less efficiently. Insulin resistance sets in. We become less able to manage pro-oxidant threats. Nothing works as well as it could. And this mounting dysfunction increases the risk for a degenerative disease.

While this emerging view of phytochemcials is compelling, Velasquez-Manoff acknowledges that it isn’t fully settled. For one thing, it’s unclear why isolated phytochemicals in pills don’t seem to work the same magic as they do in the form of whole foods. Here’s Velasquez-Manoff:

Proper dosage may be one problem, and interaction between the isolates used and particular gene variants in test subjects another. Interventions usually test one molecule, but fresh fruits and vegetables present numerous compounds at once. We may benefit most from these simultaneous exposures. The science on the intestinal microbiota promises to further complicate the picture; our native microbes ferment phytonutrients, perhaps supplying some of the benefit of their consumption. All of which highlights the truism that Nature is hard to get in a pill.

But human nutrition is a deeply interesting topic precisely because it resists being settled. As Michael Pollan showed in his 2008 book In Defense of Food, humans have adapted to a wide variety of diets—from the Mediterranean and Mesoamerican ones based mostly on plants, to the Inuit ones focusing heavily on fish. The one diet that hasn’t worked very well is the most calibrated, supplemented, and “fortified” of all: the Western one.

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That Antioxidant You’re Taking Is Snake Oil

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Totem Bags Turns Trash Into Street-Chic Style

by xntaw2b Posted on March 7, 2013

Founded by Toronto mom Melissa Richardson, Totem Bags features street-chic purses, messenger bags and carry-alls made from upcycled materials, including truck tarps, promotional banners, seatbelts and bike tires. Earth911 sat down with Richardson to learn more about her compelling story, her design inspiration and how she took truckers’ trash and transformed it into seriously awesome upcycled fashion.

Each Totem Bags design is made from upcycled materials, such as trashed promotional banners, truck tarps, seatbelts and bicycle inner tubes. Photo: Totem Bags

An inside look at Totem Bags

When she was expecting her first daughter, young mom Melissa Richardson found herself hesitant to return to her job in the corporate world. Inspired by a successful Swiss brand that repurposed old truck tarps into bags and accessories, Richardson decided to modify the idea to fit the urban-hip fashions of her hometown of Toronto, Canada.

Totem Bags founder Melissa Richardson shows off some of her creations. Photo: Totem Bags

With the support of her husband, the budding entrepreneur started Totem Bags in 2009 from the basement of her Toronto home. Created to repurpose durable waste materials, Totem Bags emerged as a creative marriage of style and sustainability.

The young brand got its first big break when the National Ballet of Canada signed on to hand over a stockpile of promotional banners to be repurposed into new products for its gift shop. Not knowing how to use a sewing machine, Richardson sat down and created the very first Totem Bag, which later became the T2 market tote design that is still one of the brand’s biggest sellers.

Since that fateful day, Totem Bags has expanded its list of clients to include top names like Chevrolet, Audi, Honda, IMAX and the Toronto International Film Festival.

Most companies send over their old banners to be remade into bags for giveaways and in-house promotions. But the eye-catching bags made from National Ballet of Canada banners, featuring productions such as Romeo & Juliet, Sleeping Beauty and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, are some of the retail line’s most popular designs.

Other bags in the Totem Bags retail line incorporate non-branded promotional banners, truck tarps, seatbelts and bicycle inner tubes sourced from across Canada.

“It’s kind of like the Johnny Cash song ‘I’ve Been Everywhere,'” Richardson tells Earth911. “That seatbelt, it saved somebody’s life, potentially. The truck tarp has traveled across Canada and in some cases into the states as well. Every single bag has a history.”

Bet You’ll Love: Recycled Purses Will Benefit Haitian School

The Alice Messenger Bag is made from upcycled promotional banners from the National Ballet of Canada’s presentation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and is one of Totem Bags’ top sellers. Photo: Ethical Ocean

As a mom and stepmom to four kids, age one to nine, you would think Richardson has adopted a more hands-off approach to her brand over the years, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Each bag in the line is handmade at a manufacturing facility about five minutes from Richardson’s home, and the Totem Bags founder gives every piece her stamp of approval before it heads out the door.

“I want to make sure that when the bags come off the line, I’m the last one who sees them,” Richardson says. “Everybody should know that I have actually touched every single bag. I continue to do that, and I will continue to do that… because I don’t want to send anything out that has any type of imperfection.”

In addition to lending a personal touch to each bag, Richardson says she is now a well-known upcycler in Toronto and receives calls daily about new shipments of waste materials waiting to be repurposed – jokingly referring to herself as “the crazy bag lady.”

“Every single bag is a win,” Richardson says. “One bag is a little less in the landfill, and that’s what I do this for.”

For more information on Totem Bags, head to the brand’s website, or pick up a bag of your own from the company’s web store or one of our favorite online sellers, Ethical Ocean.

Related: 10 Awesome Upcycled Products from Ethical Ocean

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Totem Bags Turns Trash Into Street-Chic Style

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