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Important and Overlooked Stories on the Web

Economists' erroneous estimates of damages from climate change

Here we review the empirical work done by economists and show that it severely underestimates damages from climate change by committing several methodological errors, including neglecting tipping points, and assuming that economic sectors not exposed to the weather are insulated from climate change. Most fundamentally, the influential Integrated Assessment Model DICE is shown to be incapable of generating an economic collapse, regardless of the level of damages. Given these flaws, economists' empirical estimates of economic damages from global warming should be rejected as unscientific, and models that have been calibrated to them, such as DICE, should not be used to evaluate economic risks from climate change, or in the development of policy to attenuate damages.

U.S. boarding schools for Indians had a hidden agenda: Stealing land’

This is because the U.S. schools had a very specific purpose: They helped the government acquire Indian lands. Beginning with Carlisle in Pennsylvania in 1879 and ending with the Sherman Institute in California in 1903, the U.S. government operated 25 off-reservation boarding schools. (Some religious denominations also opened their own mission schools.) At the same time, a massive dispossession took place in the form of the General Allotment Act, which authorized the president to survey and divide Indian lands. Boarding schools, designed to reeducate Indian youth who would no longer have a tribal homeland, went hand in hand with this genocidal policy.

Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth’

Book Review Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford

Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos--Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels--scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over.

Too hot to work: the dire impact of extreme heat on outdoor US jobs’

Southern states will face the largest number of days when working outside is all but impossible. In Louisiana, for example, workers already lose about $1,000 in wages because of days when it’s too hot to work. That figure could increase to nearly $5,000 due to 34 days worth of lost work time annually.

IPCC climate report: Earth is warmer than it’s been in 125,000 years’

Modern society’s continued dependence on fossil fuels is warming the world at a pace that is unprecedented in the past 2,000 years — and its effects are already apparent as record droughts, wildfires and floods devastate communities worldwide — according to a landmark report from the United Nations on the state of climate science. The assessment from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says things are poised to get worse if greenhouse-gas emissions continue, but also makes it clear that the future of the planet depends in large part on the choices that humanity takes today.

Toyota is quietly pushing Congress to slow the shift to electric vehicles’

By Andrew J. Hawkins@andyjayhawk Jul 26, 2021 The Verge

The company came under fire recently after it was revealed that it was the largest corporate donor to Republican lawmakers who objected to the certification of the 2020 presidential election. A majority of those politicians also dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. Toyota initially defended the contributions, but then later said it would halt them. You know things are bad for the company when a Toyota spokesperson has to confirm to the Times that the automaker does indeed believe that climate change is real.

The Seas Are Rising. Could Oysters Help?’

By Eric Klinenberg August 2, 2021 The New Yorker

“A lot of coastal infrastructure lacks surface complexity,” Pippa Brashear, one of Orff’s colleagues at scape, told me. “It’s mostly hard walls.” The scape project will be the opposite. “If you put on a scuba suit and swim around Living Breakwaters, you’ll see something that looks like an oyster reef, with lots of nooks and crannies,” she said. “It’s designed to be messy, with lots of little critters, invertebrates like tunicates, really colorful sponges, young sea bass and striped bass and silversides darting around and finding places to hide. Then we’ll have the oysters, hopefully tons of them. It’ll be teeming with life.”

It could feed the world’: amaranth, a health trend 8,000 years old that survived colonization’

Cecilia Nowell in Albuquerque, New Mexico Aug 7th The Guardian

Indigenous women in North and Central America are coming together to share ancestral knowledge of amaranth, a plant booming in popularity as a health food.

Americas Bolivia's lake Poopo dries up and scientists fear refill unlikely’

Scientists say the one-time lake, which sprawls across Bolivia's sun-drenched, high-altitude altiplano, has fallen victim to decades of water diversion for regional irrigation needs. And a warmer, drier climate has made its recovery increasingly unlikely.

Environmental impact of bottled water ‘up to 3,500 times greater than tap water’

Research led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) found that if the city’s population were all to drink bottled water, this would result in a 3,500 times higher cost of resource extraction than if they all drank tap water, at $83.9m (£60.3m)a year.

For Billion-Dollar COVID Vaccines, Basic Government-Funded Science Laid the Groundwork

The idea of creating a vaccine with messenger RNA, or mRNA—the substance that converts DNA into proteins—goes back decades. Early efforts to create mRNA vaccines failed, however, because the raw RNA was destroyed before it could generate the desired response. Our innate immune systems evolved to kill RNA strands because that’s what many viruses are.

Why are so many babies dying of Covid-19 in Brazil?

More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are now at their peak. But despite the overwhelming evidence that Covid-19 rarely kills young children, in Brazil 1,300 babies have died from the virus. One doctor refused to test Jessika Ricarte's one-year-old son for Covid, saying his symptoms did not fit the profile of the virus. Two months later he died of complications from the disease.

How the Supreme Court laid the path for Georgia's new election law

And at another time, before the Roberts Court enhanced state latitude in a series of rulings, legislators might have hedged before enacting policies from new voter identification requirements, to a prohibition on third-party collection of ballots to a rule against non-poll workers providing food or water to voters waiting in lines.

From Crisis to Reform: A Call to Strengthen America’s Battered Democracy

After experiencing a gradual decline in respect for political rights and civil liberties over the past decade, the United States is now facing an acute crisis for democracy.

New stars on the American flag? Fresh hope as Puerto Rico and DC push for statehood

But with the impetus of last summer’s protests against racial injustice, and the election of a Democratic president, one of those territories – Puerto Rico – is aiming to become the 51st state of the union. A parallel effort by Washington, District of Columbia (DC), is also closer than ever to its similar goal.

Two of India’s richest men face farmers’ ire over new laws

Two of India’s richest men have landed in an unlikely controversy over farming laws, becoming targets of protesters who allege the tycoons have benefited from their close links to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The new farm legislation, passed in September, will allow private companies to buy produce directly from farmers, moving from the decades-old system of state-run wholesale buyers and markets that guaranteed a minimum support price. India’s top court last week barred the implementation of the law until the court decides on the matter.

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

Major changes in the biosphere are directly linked to the growth of human systems (summarized in Figure 1). While the rapid loss of species and populations differs regionally in intensity (Ceballos et al., 2015, 2017, 2020; Díaz et al., 2019), and most species have not been adequately assessed for extinction risk (Webb and Mindel, 2015), certain global trends are obvious. Since the start of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, the biomass of terrestrial vegetation has been halved (Erb et al., 2018), with a corresponding loss of >20% of its original biodiversity (Díaz et al., 2019), together denoting that >70% of the Earth's land surface has been altered by Homo sapiens (IPBES, 2019). There have been >700 documented vertebrate (Díaz et al., 2019) and ~600 plant (Humphreys et al., 2019) species extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more species clearly having gone extinct unrecorded (Tedesco et al., 2014). Population sizes of vertebrate species that have been monitored across years have declined by an average of 68% over the last five decades (WWF, 2020), with certain population clusters in extreme decline (Leung et al., 2020), thus presaging the imminent extinction of their species

Bellingcat breaks stories that newsrooms envy — using methods newsrooms avoid

by Elahe Izadi and Paul Farhi Jan. 9, 2021

The investigative collaborative — which relies on both paid and volunteer researchers combing through “open-source” digital data available to anyone with the right searching skills — has been responsible for several eye-popping scoops: pinning the crash of a Malaysian airliner in Ukraine to a Russian missile, unmasking spies supposedly behind the poisoning of a Russian double agent in England and dissecting the racist motives of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque mass shooter.

These wild lands in California and the West may soon get federal protection

LA Times SAMMY ROTHSTAFF DEC. 10, 20206 AM

But that’s not the end of the story. There are still legions of activists working to get the bill across the finish line. They’ll keep at it when the next Congress is seated in January, with an eye toward protecting 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.

America's Vaccine Rollout Disaster

It’s happening all over again. For months, Americans who despaired about the country’s coronavirus-suppression efforts looked desperately to the arrival of a vaccine for a kind of pandemic deliverance. Now that it has arrived, miraculously fast, we are failing utterly to administer it with anything like the urgency the pace of dying requires — and, perhaps most maddeningly, failing in precisely the same way as we did earlier in the year. That is, out of apparent, near-total indifference.

A huge study of 50 years of tax cuts for the wealthy suggests 'trickle-down' economics makes inequality worse. <embed>https://www.businessinsider.com/tax-cuts-rich-trickle-down-income-inequality-study-2020-12?fbclid=IwAR1ppv6ngBVFRDNuNAeDpCrsezYPPt25Gaap_f0G_8f6fmTTu7vmCaCSaFY </embed>

"Our analysis finds strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment" in the short and long term, the researchers wrote.After major tax cuts for the rich were introduced, the top 1% share of pretax national income increased by almost 1 percentage point, they found.

America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy’ Is a Dangerous—And Wrong—Argument Senator Mike Lee of Utah have taken to reminding the public that “we’re not a democracy.” It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.

The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.