KATE YODER – Doing business today is harder for oil companies. Big Oil is becoming stigmatized as awareness grows that its environmentally-friendly messaging, full of beautiful landscapes and far-off promises to erase (some) of its emissions, doesn’t match its actions. This poses a hiring challenge for oil companies, with much of their current workforce getting closer to retirement. For years now, consulting firms have been warning the industry that it faces a “talent” gap and surveying young people to figure out how they might be convinced to take the open positions.
Category: October 2022
Will Greed and Dissociation from Nature Do Us In?
ROBERT KOEHLER – It’s fascinating how “interests” interfere with survival. We prepare for — and, of course, wage — war with an overwhelming percentage of our resources (to the benefit of the profiteers), but we plead poverty when it comes to helping people or, you know, saving the planet.It’s fascinating how “interests” interfere with survival. We prepare for — and, of course, wage — war with an overwhelming percentage of our resources (to the benefit of the profiteers), but we plead poverty when it comes to helping people or, you know, saving the planet.
The West Must Stop Blocking Negotiations Between Ukraine And Russia
VIJAY PRASHAD – Ukrainians have been paying a terrible price for the failure of ensuring sensible and reasonable negotiations from 2014 to February 2022. Negotiations could have prevented the invasion by Russia in the first place, and once the war started, could have led to the end of this war to February 2022.
Your Brain on Elections: Democracy Means Listening to the Other Side
BELINDA BURRELL – I’m afraid what Thanksgiving will be like, no matter how the election turns out,” a friend commented. She’s not wrong to be worried. Elections bring up all sorts of emotions and behaviors that create division. Understanding our “brains on elections” can help.
Do We Have the Moral Imagination to Preserve the DACA Program?
ANDREW MOSS – What John Lewis did by describing democracy as an act was to expand the discussion of democracy from issues concerning governmental institutions and political norms to questions of individual ethical choice. Democracy, he helped us understand, is choosing to see truthfully and humanely. It is choosing to act responsibly on the basis of that vision. And sometimes acting in this way will take great courage: to endure the blows of state troopers, as Lewis did in a 1965 march for voting rights; or, years later, to risk deportation and speak out as undocumented (or temporarily documented) individuals in order to claim full rights as human beings – and as fellow Americans.
Global Existence is Threatened as Long as Nuclear Weapons Exist
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER – It’s been a long time since the atomic bombings of August 1945, when people around the planet first realized that world civilization stood on the brink of doom. This apocalyptic ending to the Second World War revealed to all that, with the advent of nuclear weapons, violent conflict among nations had finally reached the stage where it could terminate life on earth. Addressing a CBS radio audience in early 1946, Robert Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago, summed up the new situation with a blunt warning: “War means atomic bombs. And atomic bombs mean suicide.”
How a Clean Energy Future is Colliding with Mining’s Dark Past
LYLLA YOUINES – “There are different types of sustainable mining, and one of those is the actual process of choosing where,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, a senior legislative representative at Earthjustice. “That is just as important as choosing how.”
Gun Store Closes to Avoid Assault Rifle Controversy in Portland, Oregon — Activists Claim Minor Victory
PETER BERGEL – “They didn’t sell any assault rifles today. That’s a start.”
The Future We Could Have Is Here Now
ROB HOPKINS – During my talks, I often invite people to time travel in their imagination to a 2030 that’s not utopia, or dystopia, but rather is the result of our having done everything we could possibly have done in those intervening years. We do it because, as Walidah Imarisha puts it, “we can’t build what we can’t imagine.”
The Fossil Free Research Movement is Taking Universities by Storm
NICK ENGELFRIED – A student-led effort to get fossil fuel money out of university research is building on the divestment movement’s biggest successes.
The Narrative That This War Was “Unprovoked” Prevents Peace
By Caitlin Johnstone Vladimir Putin has approved the annexation of four territories in eastern Ukraine, whose addition to the Russian Federation now await authorization from Russia’s other branches of government. The Zelensky government responded to the move by applying to…
Nukes Are Our Corporate Death Wish…the Sun is the People’s Cure
HARVEY WASSERMAN – Humankind’s ultimate extinction is now flowing through an atomic death spiral. A single errant shell at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia…a single seismic shock at California’s Diablo Canyon…can bury us all in apocalyptic radiation.