Drawing on more than a year of information gathering, this position paper presents a snapshot of the repression and criminalization of peaceful environmental protest and civil disobedience observed by the Special Rapporteur in European countries that are Parties to the Aarhus Convention. It explains why the Special Rapporteur considers this repression and criminalization to constitute a major threat to democracy, human rights, the civic space, and to the exercise of the rights guaranteed under the Aarhus Convention, and therefore why he has made this issue a priority topic under his mandate. It sets out why the Special Rapporteur considers a profound change in how States respond to environmental protest to be urgently required and features five calls for action to States on how to do so. It also urges the human rights community to coordinate their efforts to support this call for action.
Climate crisis
The criminalisation and repression of climate and environmental protest is problematic for at least two main reasons. First, it focuses state policy on punishing dissent against inaction on climate and environmental change instead of taking adequate action on these issues. In criminalising and repressing climate and environmental activists, states depoliticise them. Second, they represent authoritarian moves that are not consistent with the ideals of vibrant civil societies in liberal democracies.
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Governments, legislatures, courts and police forces should operate with a general presumption against criminalising climate and environmental protests. Instead, climate and environmental protest should be regarded as a reasonable response to the urgent and existential nature of the climate crisis, and activists engaged as stakeholders in a process of just transition.
A new study was released in recent days that should have been newsworthy, but it escaped the media's attention in Australia.
It showed Australian police are world leaders at arresting climate and environmental protesters.
According to the study, more than 20 per cent of all climate and environment protests in Australia involve arrests, which is more than three times the global average (6.3 per cent).
Australia's arrest rate was the highest of 14 countries in the global study.
It's higher than policing efforts in the United Kingdom (17.2 per cent), Norway (14.5 per cent), and the United States (10 per cent).
The research makes it clear that Australia's political leaders have joined the "rapid escalation" of efforts to criminalise and repress climate and environmental protest, while sovereign states globally fail to meet their international agreements and emissions targets.
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When you read the Bristol University study alongside the special rapporteur's position paper and the EDO paper, you get a pretty good sense of how the clampdown on climate and environmental activism actually works, and why it's occurring.
Collectively, the reports discuss an issue that links political donations and pressure from fossil fuel companies, governments writing new laws and harsher penalties for climate and environmental activists, federal and state policing agencies being put to work to enforce the new laws, and legal systems and courts being used to bed them down.
And hanging over the entire political problem is the question of the "pricing mechanism" and the role it plays in a society like ours.
When you look at this issue dispassionately, you'll see that we're witnessing a nasty global battle over the attempt to have the negative externalities of fossil fuels properly reflected in the market prices of the products of fossil fuel companies.
In the first of many papers expected from the study, the researchers found that, a year after the ultra-low emissions zone took effect, 2 out of every 5 London students in the study had switched from “passive” to “active” ways of getting to school. So instead of being chauffeured to school by their parents, the students started walking, biking, scootering, or taking public transit. On the other hand, in Luton, which acted as a control group, 1 in 5 made the same switch to modes that got them up and active, but an equal proportion switched to passive travel. But in London’s ultra-low emissions zone, shifting to driving was rare.
The implications of getting kids active, even if it’s just for their pre-class commute, are intuitive but important.
“Walking and biking and scootering to school is better for the child, better for the family, and better for the environment,” said Alison Macpherson, an epidemiologist at York University in Toronto who researches ways to protect and promote the health and safety of children. (She was not involved in the London study.)
“It’s a great way for children to start their day,” she said. “You can imagine just being thrown in a car and thrown out of a car is not the most calming way.” Walking or biking to school, on the other hand, can be calming and conducive to concentration, Macpherson said, potentially even improving academic performance. But perhaps most importantly, at a time when an epidemic of childhood obesity is on the rise worldwide, walking or wheeling to and from school can get kids more active.
Credit guidance was used extensively in the post-war period. The policy helped states build up their industrial capacity, expand their welfare systems, and accelerate technological innovation in key sectors where rapid development was needed. It is a central pillar of any successful industrial policy framework. And with the ecological crisis, it is gaining renewed attention: A recent report produced by the University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose shows how credit guidance can be used to accelerate an effective green transition.
This approach can also be used to offset inflationary pressure. In a scenario where we need to increase public investment in necessary social projects—such as health care, housing, and transit—credit controls can be used to reduce commercial investments elsewhere in the economy (again, specifically in damaging and unnecessary industries that we need to scale down), thus regulating aggregate demand. This is a much more rational strategy for inflation control than using broad-brush interest-rate policy, which can have a devastating impact on people’s livelihoods and on socially important sectors.
There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia's Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That's 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that's 1,875 watts per GPU.
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Worse still, Huang said that in the future, he expects to see millions of these kinds of AI processors in use at data centers around the world.
One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.
Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that's natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There's no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.
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In one segment of the keynote, Huang talked about the potential for Nvidia ACE to power 'digital humans' that companies can use to serve as customer service agents, be the face of an interior design project, and more. This makes absolute sense, since who are we kidding, Nvidia ACE for video games won't really make all that much money.
However, if a company wants to fire 90% of its customer service staff and replace it with an Nvidia ACE-powered avatar that never sleeps, never eats, never complains about low pay or poor working conditions, and can be licensed for a fee that is lower than the cost of the labor it is replacing, well, I don't have to tell you how that is going to go.
We once heard a story from a driver in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia who was annoyed that a cyclist was slowing him down. Do you know what he said? “You’re not saving the environment, buddy.” This was interesting. The assumption was that if you’re on a bike trying to get somewhere you must be doing it for environmental reasons, probably in an annoyingly self-righteous way. But what if it was just a convenient way to get to work without having to worry about parking? What if it was how he spends time with his kids? What if he just enjoys the fresh air and activity? What if he sold a car in order to save money for other priorities? What if he just finds driving unpleasant? None of this occurred to the driver. The assumption was that the cyclist was there on a bike slowing them down for environmental reasons, probably climate change in particular.
Young children, older adults and homeless people are especially at risk for contact burns, which can occur in seconds when skin touches a surface of 180 degrees Fahrenheit (82 C).
Since the beginning of June, 50 people have been hospitalized with such burns, and four have died at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix, which operates the Southwest’s largest burn center, serving patients from Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Southern California and Texas, according to its director, Dr. Kevin Foster. About 80% were injured in metro Phoenix.
Last year, the center admitted 136 patients for surface burns from June through August, up from 85 during the same period in 2022, Foster said. Fourteen died. One out of five were homeless.
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Thermal injuries were among the main or contributing causes of last year’s 645 heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix.
One victim was an 82-year-old woman with dementia and heart disease admitted to a suburban Phoenix hospital after being found on the scorching pavement on an August day that hit 106 degrees (41.1 C).
With a body temperature of 105 degrees (40.5 C) the woman was rushed to the hospital with second-degree burns on her back and right side, covering 8% of her body. She died three days later.
A multibillion-dollar slate of moderate climate-mitigation measures in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has been met so far with general public approval. But a broader reaction to the historic federal action underlies the discourse: What took you so long?
A survey-based study published on Tuesday suggests that a shared delusion among nearly all Americans could contribute to the long delay in significant federal climate policy. Despite polls showing widespread concern about climate change and majority support for policies to mitigate it, the new study shows that Americans almost universally underestimate the extent of climate concern among their compatriots. They also underestimate the extent of public support—at the state and national level alike—for policy measures to address the climate emergency.
Distorted beliefs about support for climate policy, and about concerns over climate change in general, are so commonly held among the more than 6,000 American adults in the researchers’ nationally representative sample that the study’s authors call these misperceptions a “false social reality.” Recent polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that 66 to 80 percent of people in the U.S. support major climate mitigation policies. But participants in the new study estimated that only between 37 and 43 percent do so. A range of 80 to 90 percent of those polled by the researchers underestimated the U.S. population’s climate concern and support for major climate mitigation policies.
Earlier versions of these new imported vapes, exemplified by Elf Bar, are beefier and more colorful than Juuls, and are usually single use, despite containing rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Wired describes a new generation of mostly disposable vapes that, in addition to being extremely cheap and wildly potent, let vapers play games on tiny touchscreens and track their vape’s location on devices that cost as little as $5 apiece. The devices are a grotesque example of electronic waste, viral marketing, and the easily exploitable idiosyncrasies of cross-border commerce in 2024.
But they’re also an example of a bigger trend that’s been gaining momentum for years. If you’ve spent much time on the internet’s burgeoning discount-retail platforms — Temu, TikTok Shop, and Wish, to name a few — disposable vapes with screens and logic boards sound almost reasonable. On Temu, for example, some of the top-selling items in the electronics category are Bluetooth earbuds with touchscreens built in to the case with interfaces of extremely dubious value that can be used to control playback, show screensavers, or just fidget, some of which cost less than $10. There are $4 USB cables with built-in screens to tell you how fast you’re charging; $7 cigarette lighters covered in LED lights and displays; USB hubs that double as external displays; $65 dressers with touchscreens; $48 toasters with software interfaces; $16 rechargeable neck coolers with LED readouts; hundred-dollar motorcycle backpacks with two LCD screens; $18 school backpacks with voice-activated flashing displays.